The Baby, the Cruise, and How to Stay Married
She’s gorgeous and the best moment was my beloved son saying, “Mom, you can watch a YouTube video on how to hold a baby.” I, being a perfect mother did not respond with sarcasm or guilt inducing lists of all the labor (sic) involved giving birth to him (seventy-two hours of back labor). I smiled and said, “Thank you darling, maybe I will.” They are new parents with their Ming vase. My role is a wonderful mystery. How to be a grandmother is a manual I could use. I love her from a place I have yet to understand.
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Blame the Girl
In 1980, the country was in a recession, and a recent graduate with a history degree and no practical skills, like typing, was not a viable candidate for most jobs. Until the consent decree that opened up higher-paying outside jobs to women, the Bell system largely employed women as operators at a much lower pay scale. I was hired to be trained as a telephone installer, then placed as a manager in an installation garage. After I graduated from pole climbing, I was told to report to work the following day. I would meet my gang of employees and start my job as a Resident Installation Foreman for New Jersey Bell Telephone.
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Why I Started Writing My Story
I started writing my story because of silence, because of shouting and the sound of broken glass, and my mother’s face in the morning, sometimes marked by the night before, sometimes turned away to show how truly hurt she was. Because of the empty bottles on the dining room table, the glasses half-filled, the sense that whatever had happened was terrible, a threat to happiness. That happiness was the talk at dinner with my parents telling stories, their laughter, and their devotion to the creative work that seemed the only choice in a world marked by greed and war, in a world that watched the Vietnam War rage on, in a world where men in suits, a certain suit, decided, napalm or more dead soldiers? I started writing my stories out of love, fear, and anger. Someone needed to tell the truth, to illuminate the dim corners of the past, my father’s broken childhood, my mother’s ambition thwarted by those who believed a woman with three children and a husband had no business designing houses.
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