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Posts Tagged ‘Marriage’

“Don’t Tie Me Down”

Posted in books, Country, Journaling, wedding, tagged , , , , , on February 17, 2015| 3 Comments »

“…cause I’ll never stay,” said Lesley Gore in her 1964 song, “You Don’t Own Me.” It was a feminist anthem long before its time and I was sad to hear of her passing this weekend at the young age of 68 from lung cancer. We lost a beautiful woman and a talented singer/songwriter while celebrating St Valentine and flocking to the latest bondage movie, “Fifty Shades of Gray.”

Fifty years later, women must still remind men that we cannot be owned, our bodies will not be legislated, and our minds are not built for submission, unless of course you like that sort of thing. I’ve been strolling down memory lane lately because a friend has reminded me that my 50th High School Reunion is fast approaching; the Dover High School Class of 1966 is gearing up to party like it’s, well 1966.

“Oh, I don’t tell you what to say
I don’t tell you what to do
So just let me be myself
That’s all I ask of you.”
— Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”

I met my husband our Freshman year in high school, by Junior year we were dating. It was a short-lived romance since, once in college, he went to Woodstock and I went to Westchester. But we never really lost touch, and who knew that 70% of couples who reunite with their first loves would find love again? At the ripe old age of thirty we married, and Bob is still playing the Nathan to my Adelaide.

Fifty years later, we were talking about the wind this weekend. And Bob recalled how he had been blown off Windsor mountain when the Bride was just a baby. His little white Honda was wheels up in a snowdrift on the side of the road, and he was hanging from his seat belt upside down, watching his coffee drip from the door frame.

Luckily he walked away and someone stopped on the road and picked him up. But what if he couldn’t unlock his seatbelt? What if no one came along? In his line of work, and with my history, we’re both aware of how your life can change in a split second. I couldn’t even imagine going through this life without him, without my son who was not yet born.

No, he doesn’t own me, but he signed a long term lease on my heart. Today I’m dreaming of warmer, tropical winds, and I’ll let him take the helm if the water gets choppy. Sao Mai CLR Sunset 0208

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Fair Weather Flyer (or)

Posted in an expository essay, tagged , , , , , on October 26, 2014| 2 Comments »

How to Evade Ebola by Flying Yourself!

A man for all seasons, Bob is also a private pilot. I haven’t flown with him in awhile, for many reasons. But mostly it’s because the weather has to be perfect, and I have to have a destination in mind. Like the Love Bug. You won’t find me flying over to Newport News for lunch. And also there’s this, I just don’t like flying! But yesterday, I squeezed myself into the plane.

Pre-flight Check

Pre-flight Check

Me:  The interior looks great! Ouch, oh yeah I forgot I’ve got to take my earrings off before I put the headset on. Thinking to myself – Let’s see where can I stow them? Can’t reach my bag in the back… wait, I’ll just clip them onto my necklace.

Bob:  What? Here you’ve got to have the mic right up to your mouth, like this, like you’re kissing it

Me:  OK, are we clear? What about those clouds?

Bob:  We’re clear to 9,000 ft. Those clouds are around 5

Me:  Good, so it’s smooth sailing?

And it was pretty smooth, the clouds underneath us looked like marshmallow fluff, until I noticed a little red button light up and Bob started fooling around, quickly, and he’s never quick in the cockpit, with the throttle and the landing gear

Me:  What’s up? (said meekly and like I didn’t know something was wrong). Thinking to myself – we are 9,000 ft in the air and the landing gear isn’t supposed to come down until we descend in another 200 miles or so

Bob:  We’re just going to slow down a little  

Me:  Straining to read the red button on Bob’s panel – WARNING GEAR UNSAFE!   

Warning Light

Warning Light

Bob:  The door’s probably not fully closing (the Piper Arrow has retractable wheels, and the doors to said wheels were just replaced in its annual)

Me:  Thinking to myself – So this is it, we’ll have to fly around the airport to burn off all the fuel and then land on foam, if Charlottesville even has foam to put down on the runway, and we’ll make the local news, there will be fire trucks…

Bob:  We’ve got three green (which means all three wheels have come down) so it’s not a problem.

For an emergency physician/pilot, nothing is a problem. These people are the epitome of cool under pressure. Remember the voice recording of Sully landing in the Hudson? That’s Bob, telling me there’s nothing to worry about.

It wasn’t like flying around the Jersey Shore this time of year, with its kaleidoscope of pink and red cranberry bogs. But it was autumn in the Shenandoah Valley and beautiful just the same. It is also Homecoming weekend for UVA, so yesterday we landed amid the Big Jets with all their private pilots in uniform hanging around talking about who was getting enough sleep.

There wasn’t another plane in the sky all the way from Nashville, but three hours later and finally on the ground – all three green down – our little four-seater Piper was the poor relative to the top 1% of the 1% of alums flying in to see the Hoos play the Heels.

Me:  Perfect landing. Thanks honey, that beats 9 hours in the car!

Bob:  Smiling, thinking to himself – I’m gonna call that mechanic first thing Monday morning.  IMG_1478

 

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The Joints

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , on July 31, 2014| Leave a Comment »

After our sudden trip North to Sue’s funeral, followed by our planned trip North for Ada’s birthday party, followed by a week of the Bride and Bug visiting, Bob and I were supposed to have a few days mid-summer to ourselves. He might get to mow the lawn, I might actually get to finish doing laundry. Maybe we’d go out to dinner? But no, the Joints have arrived!

The Joint Commission http://www.jointcommission.org/accreditation/hospitals.aspx is the national agency that wanders into your hospital without warning for a few days of fun and relaxing oversight. I remember when I was teaching and was told the Principal would have to evaluate my performance, but I’d get a few days notice and would I mind sending him my plans for the week? Brand new to the profession, I thought well that’s kinda like cheating. If someone really wants to evaluate you, why not just walk in one day? Well, the teacher’s union would have none of that.

And a few years ago, the Joints felt the same way – unannounced visits are now de rigeur.

You never know when they might arrive to evaluate your system. If standards are not met, a hospital might lose its accreditation, ie funding, ie money. A residency may have to shut down, which happened recently at Berkshire Medical Center, where I delivered my children. Surgical residents in the Berkshires are now scrambling for another hospital to accept them. So as you can see, it’s a very BIG deal when they show up, and poor Bob is one of three hospital board members not on vacation.

People have always assumed that because we have so many doctors in our family, that I would know about such things. In fact, I don’t. I cannot tell if a baby is dehydrated, or if a cut needs sutures.  I can’t tell heartburn from a heart attack. And I certainly can’t distinguish between a bug bite and shingles…or psoriasis. I knew very little about the Joints until Bob told me about them this week.

But if you live in VA and want to know what it feels like to go to medical school, you can sign up for UVA’s Mini-Med School in the Fall! http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/community-service/more/minimed/about-mini-med.html

During the 7 week program enthusiastic UVa faculty members, with assistance from current medical students, will lead the group in exploration of a wide range of topics in medical education. Participants will experience such integral parts of medical school as match day, research labs, patient interviews, and more. Mini-Med will provide a behind the scenes look at the training of those we entrust with our health, a greater sense of health literacy, and forge new connections between the health system and our community. Mini-Med will also feature entertainment provided by our talented medical students. There is no cost to participate and while participants will not leave Mini-Med School with a medical degree they will leave with knowledge, resources, and a certificate of attendance.”

For me, well I think I’ll pass. Unless they have a really good jazz singer this year. I’m happy giving kisses to the Love Bug when she gets an “ouchy,” and for now, that and some well placed Disney band-aids always do the trick!

PopBob entertaining the troops in Dover

PopBob entertaining the troops in Dover

 

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Overwhelmed

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on March 12, 2014| 4 Comments »

This getting back to normal business can be frustrating. Obviously it’s difficult waking up and not having a toddler waltz into your room to escort you to breakfast; or should I say the feast of fresh fruits and juices and any other breakfast food imaginable no longer awaits you on a breezy terrace with the ocean looking on. No, it’s back to making my own coffee and cutting up my own banana in yogurt looking at the mountains, all the while waiting for a single crocus to bloom…really, shouldn’t that have happened already?

So I did what any red-blooded American woman would do after finally getting over my flu-like illness. I went to the gym – I figured if I kept waiting for spring it would never come. Like the proverbial boiling pot. And on my way home just now, I  listened to an author on NPR about feeling time crunched because she was a working mom. Way to put my problems into perspective! My daughter was returning to her everyday life which included the usual; grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry and also a sick toddler and a job that was anything but 9 to 5. It was more like 11pm to 7am, then she’d get some sleep and wake up to write her charts while the Love Bug napped.

I thought she must be feeling overwhelmed about now. So I made a mental note to tell her about this book since its author was heartbreakingly good on the radio. Brigid Schulte, a Washington Post columnist, wrote Overwhelmed; Work Love and Play When No One Has the Time. She talked about her generation and how they didn’t want to have a traditional marriage, the kind their parents had where the woman was in charge of the home, even if she had a full or part-time job. She wanted a more equitable distribution of work – like one always loads the dishwasher at night and one will always empty in the morning.

Last one out of bed makes the bed, and even if he forgets to put the pillows back on the bed you don’t do it…you leave them on the floor. I don’t think men understand just how hard that is for us, not picking up pillows.

Eventually Schulte and her husband did get to that place of marital housework justice, but it was a shock to see how far they had slipped into a more traditional model. She had to rewrite her to-do list, which is surprisingly the cover art of her book. Because after writing down every single thing she was trying to cram into her days, she realized that if she didn’t plan for her own recreational time, it would not happen.

I was just with my father who’s had a stroke, and sitting in a hospital room really makes you remember: … We don’t have that much time; what do you want to make of your life here on this Earth? And so, my to-do list is really: What are my priorities? What is most important to me? And then everything else, everything my to-do list used to be, I call the other 5 percent — it shouldn’t take more than 5 percent of my time or energy. There’s a lot of stuff that I used to do that I don’t do anymore. http://www.npr.org/2014/03/11/288596888/not-enough-hours-in-the-day-we-all-feel-a-little-overwhelmed

In many ways the Bride is lucky. Her Groom does his fair share around the house and truly shares child care when he is at home. Maybe my SIL could use this book? In Mexico she said she never gets any down time. To which I foolishly replied, but doesn’t your daughter go to school every day? Because she said, “Yes, but I go to work.”

If I were a list maker, this would be my list for today: 1) make bed, 2) pick up tickets for Book Festival, 3) search for a purple crocus. And I only make the bed because Nell said even if that’s all you do in a day, at least you did something!

Breakfast Anyone?

Breakfast Anyone?

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A Patchwork Essay

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 24, 2014| 2 Comments »

Bob was driving yesterday when we happened to catch the last half of Ann Patchett’s interview on NPR with Terri Gross. She was talking about how her life changed when she moved back home to Nashville, because it was her husband’s home too. Most of us do dream of leaving home and making our way in the bigger world, and she certainly did that. I thought about how our lives can pivot at times, we think we’re going one way and suddenly we find ourselves in a different place entirely. And we wake up, look around, and decide to embrace this new place…

You just roll up your sleeves and you do the job that’s in front of you and that’s what people do. And you know what? It’s easy for me to say this now that I’m years on the other side of it, but it’s a privilege to see someone through that time in their life. And the trick of it is to love them for who they are that day…”http://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265228054/patchett-in-bad-relationships-there-comes-a-day-when-you-gotta-go

Patchett was talking about taking care of her grandmother as she was dying. It was supposed to be her sister who stayed at home, in Nashville, and would be the family’s caretaker. But instead, tables turned and her sister moved away just as Patchett agreed, after an eleven year courtship, to marry her boyfriend Karl. She was still smarting after a brief early marriage. That essay too is included in her new book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I’ve yet to read her new book of essays, but after listening to her interview, I’ll have to wait until I return to the Love Bug so I can purchase her book in her bookstore, Parnassus. And no, she wasn’t pushing her bookstore with Terri Gross, but she was extolling about her love of independent bookstores. And I found myself agreeing with her.

I thought about meeting my husband again, after many years apart. I too had been burned by a bad first marriage at nineteen. The kind you know never should have happened, the kind you are second guessing while you’re saying “I Do,” and thinking “What If.” Young feminists at the time called these “starter marriages.” I sometimes think in discovering our own strength, the strength to leave, we started a revolution. I knew it was over when he told my sister Kay he could never be vulnerable. And I think we raised boys who were not afraid of vulnerability. https://medium.com/religion-spirituality-and-philosophy/838b400fe2a5

I had returned home and was keeping watch at my foster father’s dying bedside when my MIL Ada found me and pulled me into Bob’s hospital room. He was recovering from some minor surgery and thought he was hallucinating. His vulnerability matched mine. We met at fourteen, and married at thirty. And so our story resumed, the he.went.to.woodstock  (meets) she.went.to.westchester story.

I’m glad Ada kept most of my newspaper articles, faded yellow paper over the years. There was no Cloud to store and collate all my writing, but my MIL who will be 90 this year, became my biggest fan and super star archivist over the years. I may have to scan all those essays for posterity. They are like all the pictures stored away in boxes, waiting to be digitized on some rainy day. But first I’ll catch up on all things Nashville on Parnassus’ new blog  http://parnassusmusing.net it’s for anyone who loves to read – period!

“Let go of who you think you should be, and become who you are.”

another reason to call Nashville

another reason to call Nashville

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Cohabitation

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2014| 2 Comments »

Birds do it, bees do it. But apparently if you happen to be the next single woman to serve as a university president in some parts of these Southern United States, you won’t be allowed to do it – that is, live with a partner in the usually big, beautiful, university-provided campus president’s house.

Dr. Gwendolyn Boyd, is leaving Johns Hopkins, and is slated to become the first Black female president of her alma mater, Alabama State University in Montgomery, next month.

“Her contract requires the 58-year-old engineer to move into the president’s home…(one) clause states ‘for so long as Dr. Boyd is President and a single person, she shall not be allowed to cohabitate in the President’s residence with any person with whom she has a romantic relation.'” http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/17/263484808/no-cohabitation-for-alabama-states-first-female-president

She seems to have no problem with this clause, after all she signed the contract. Still, it makes me smile to think about the “scandal” happening in France right now. President Hollande jets around at night on his scooter, disguised in his helmet to visit his lover, a film actress. He is only discovered by the fashionable French press because of his shoes! It’s all over the papers, but knowing some French people as I do, and listening to the interviews on the streets of Paris, his citizens could care less! Alors, Les Liasons Romantique!

Fidelity is over rated in France. “When it comes to extra-marital affairs, the French are the most forgiving nation in the world, according to a recent study. The U.S., however, is still as unforgiving as ever, ranking 27th on the list, right between Brazil and Ghana.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/16/infidelity-study_n_4611674.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

What I didn’t know until I read the above article, is that President Hollande is simply cohabiting with his First Lady, Valerie Trierweiler, who was his previous mistress. Yes sirree folks, they are NOT married, but have been together since 2007. I am trying to imagine this arrangement in the USA. My brain just cannot do it, sorry. But let’s try…it would be like Bill living cohabiting on Pennsylvania Avenue with Gennifer Flowers, and then seeing an intern on the side. You can see how the first part just wouldn’t work!

If there’s one thing I learned from moving South, it’s that things move a lot slower down here. We talk to strangers, we help each other in airports, we drive slowly in the left lane. In fact, I’m pretty sure our Governor would never close any lanes in a grudge match, after all we can snarl traffic just fine by stopping to talk to a neighbor on the road. And no Virginian would think of honking their horn!

So maybe this cohabitation clause wouldn’t work at NYU, and it certainly wouldn’t be considered at any French university. I doubt that the clause would have appeared on a male president’s contract. But I’ve got a feeling that Dr Boyd has bigger fish to fry. Might I suggest she give our single female UVA President Teresa Sullivan a call? After all, somebody always gets hurt when all those glass ceilings shatter. http://www.virginia.edu/presidentsreport/

Here is the Bride with Great Grandmother Mamie and some of her great grandchildren after a lunch at the MSU President’s gorgeous historic home that honored my brother and sister-in-law last year. And The Love Bug with her cousin, Frankie.IMG_1554IMG_1558

 

 

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You Say I Do

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 19, 2013| 4 Comments »

And I say “Hell no!” My indignation this morning has nothing to do with the five, count ’em, 5 weddings we’ve been invited to this year. I’m actually glad our friend’s children and our children’s friends have decided to tie the knot. I’m equally ecstatic that my niece in MN is finally allowed to marry her partner.

What gets my Irish up is our Republican candidate for Governor – Ken Cuccinelli. If you think our current ultrasound Governor, who will hopefully be indicted soon for accepting boatloads of gifts from a political donor who presumably expected payback https://mountainmornings.net/2013/08/04/a-gift-horse/, was bad, you won’t believe what kind of religious zealot Cuccinelli is; he would like to take us back to the past, long before “irreconcilable differences” became grounds for a divorce .

His record as AG and Senator is indicative of his extreme ideology; he would like to regulate ” who you marry, what kind of contraception you use, and when you can end a bad marriage.”                email20130918.jpg

Luckily, most polls show that his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, is ahead. Not surprisingly, we women really like Terry; “Cuccinelli has a 7-point lead among men, while McAuliffe has a 14-point lead among women in the poll.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/ken-cuccinelli-terry-mcauliffe-virginia-governor-2013-poll-96976.html#ixzz2fLhhOlAS So get out there ladies, we’ve got just a few weeks left, October will be here and gone before you know it!

Besides the GOP stand or “war on women,” as adjuncts to men, you know made out of a piece of rib or something, my dander is severely raised when they try to deny science. Because this too is personal. Over the past year, three cousins and a friend have been diagnosed with cancer. They are fighting the good fight, with surgery, chemo and radiation, and I’d like to believe that our legislators will continue to fund evidence-based research at our esteemed public universities. My love and a casserole or a prayer shawl are with them all.  And my vote, for Terry.

I’d like to believe that every marriage will last forever, that every child will have two loving parents of any gender that can afford the time and money to raise them, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/can-smart-economics-turn-us-into-better-parents/279695/ and that cancer will be eradicated in my lifetime. I’d like to believe that love is all you need.

 

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Collector

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2013| 2 Comments »

I have a theory. There are two kinds of people in a marriage – the collector (or clutterer, depending on your inclination) and the minimalist (the one who throws everything away). Go ahead, look around, admit it. Somebody has to be in charge of the memories, and somebody always has to clean them up. It’s inevitable, and after knowing me for just 300+ posts I’m pretty sure you know which side I’m on.

Here is the tiny tidbit of news that sparked my theory. There is a very historic Apple I computer that’s going up for sale at an auction shortly….it was bought for $600+ and it’s estimated it will sell for at least a quarter of a million! I’d say that’s a pretty good return for your money.

“An early Apple computer dating from 1976 has been put up for auction by a retired school psychologist in America. Ted Perry had kept the Apple 1 in his attic in a cardboard box, in his home outside Sacramento, California.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23047462

Our dirty little family secret is that Bob would always take the opportunity to clear out our family room whenever I’d take the kids to NJ for a visit with Grandma Ada. His theory was that they had too many toys and we wouldn’t miss them. Except when I did. The Bride’s Aunt Becky had bequeathed to her a beautiful Barbie doll in her original pink carrying case with lots of clothes and shoes. Now Becky is in her early 50’s, so I’m assuming this was a pretty early Barbie. I’m also hoping Becky doesn’t read my blog.

My feminist side didn’t particularly like the doll; remember this was the early 80s so Barbie wasn’t retro, or vintage yet. But since we had just found out that the baby Bride was allergic to mites, which meant no stuffed dolls or animals, I embraced as best I could the pointy, plastic Barbie.

Then one day she was gone! Disappeared into thin air, and I started to think we had been robbed. That’s when Bob confessed rather than listen to my conspiracy theories for years. And now, when we watch Antiques Road Show, especially when they do the reruns and compare the valuation of a piece from maybe a decade ago, I look over at Bob. And it’s one of those moments where words are never needed, because he knows what I’m thinking without saying a word… B A R B I E

Here are the kiddos in my mid 80s barn wood-sided family room, on the edge of a bird sanctuary in the Berkshire Mountains. The TV is right next to the woodstove. Notice their playthings – my old sandal, a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, and some rawhide dog bones. Poor babies.

photo

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Still Crazy

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , on June 2, 2013| 3 Comments »

Well folks, 34 years ago tomorrow I was busily sweeping up around the swimming pool and hoping the sky would clear up for my wedding day. Bob was trying to find the rabbi, in an age before cell phones, and got lost in Livingston.

We did everything wrong. We were not only co-habiting before the wedding, we bought a house, got pregnant and moved all in that same year – the trifecta of stress inducing change. Oh, and Bob started his first job as an Assistant Director of an ER; it was 1979.

The Deer Hunter won an Academy Award; Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” won the Grammy’s Record of the Year; the Iranian Hostage Crisis happened while Carter was in the White House; Mother Theresa won the Nobel Peace prize for her work in India, and in PA, a nuclear reactor had a meltdown on Three Mile Island.

We, surprisingly, survived after all these years. Through shoulder and back surgeries, through deaths of parents and our siblings, through 3 miscarriages, through 2 more monumental moves. One back to NJ from the Berkshires, and this last (I hope) to the Blue Ridge Mountains. What, you may ask, are we doing right?

Well for one thing, we talk A LOT. We can easily be quiet together, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always something that needs discussing. I will say, “Did you hear that author speak about her book “Gulp” on NPR?” He will say, “Yeah she was fascinating.” Then I’ll ask him why my shoulder still hurts, and he will say, “Your problem is ‘ballistic movement’ with your AC joint.” I will say “What?” And usually this will lead to a long explanation, so I will interject, “What should we do for dinner?” And usually we end up with, “Don’t get me started on health care in this country…” Full disclosure, we both think Obamacare didn’t go far enough to effect real change.

And for another thing, we still LAUGH. We can still kid around together, we can call each other out on things, maybe because that time when we went to the Prom together feels like yesterday. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/19/us/20110519_PROM_USERGEN-5.html I forgave him for going to Woodstock without me, and he forgave me for setting up housekeeping in Westchester first. We’re on the same side in this game they call marriage, and that’s maybe one of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn.

The truth is, we made a pact to renegotiate the marriage contract every 5 years. Here’s a news alert for newlyweds, gay and straight:

It’s never equal you know, never a 50/50 split. Some days it’s 70/30 and others it’s 51/49.

I wanted to be closer to family once the Rocker arrived, he wanted to open an Urgent Care. Every anniversary we’d celebrate at a fine French restaurant, but this year L’Etoile is closed on Monday. Mon Dieu, what to do? Maybe we’ll just use the Maps App to find a new favorite restaurant. Man, look at those bat sleeves Robin!

Wedding Cake 1979 20130602

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A Daughter by Choice

Posted in Books, Journaling, Wedding, Country, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2013| 2 Comments »

Happy Mother’s Day! Mothers everywhere are waking up to breakfast in bed, or so we’re supposed to believe. I made myself some coffee in my new tiny, one cup Keurig since Bob left before dawn for the hospital. And the new mom, our daughter the Bride, is working at her hospital today too. But her Groom, “God bless him” as my Mother-inLaw Ada would say, did remember to send her flowers.

photo copy 4

Ada has been my MIL now longer than Nell Mahon was my foster mother. In fact, she went to Nell’s funeral with me. I can’t think of how many funerals we’ve been to together, and there’s nobody better to take to a funeral, or a wedding for that matter. I met Ada when Bob and I started dating in high school, and she was the one who found me in the hospital while I was visiting my foster father much later. Daddy Jim was dying then, just when Ada ushered me into Bob’s room to rekindle our friendship. Bob went into the hospital for a little minor surgery, and walked out with his future wife…thanks in large part to Ada.

Oh and one more funereal thought – Ada bought me my very own burial plot right after we married. To this day, we both think that was pretty funny! But she did purchase a whole space in the local cemetery for her family, her three sons, and their wives…

She always said she was on my side. That if Bob and I ever broke up, she’d take my side, “All the way baby!” You see, Ada was from Brooklyn. There was no pretense, no argument, what she said always happened. She had gone back to school while we were in high school, to get her degree in Marriage and Family Counseling, and in the late 60s until now, has always practiced in her home. She was going through her own divorce when Bob and I met up again near Daddy Jim’s hospital bed.

The youngest of three sisters, Ada had led a privileged life. Like many Jewish immigrants, her father was a tailor who came from Russia with nothing, and eventually owned a coat company in NY. She had a private car that would take her to school. She was expected to live at home until she married, this was before Betty Friedan. And she married a physician, like one of her older sisters. Unlike her sisters, she promptly moved out to the country, to the wilds of NJ, and had three boys.

Four Bridges was the bungalow colony her father started near their home in Chester, NJ. It was his retirement project, but also a way to keep the sisters coming back together every summer with their cousins and friends. I once gave Ada a painting, it was a picture of a house that had her name on it as a B&B, because she never met a stranger. Every time I would visit her, with the baby Rocker and young Bride in tow, she would have a house full of people, coming and going.

Ada is like Dolly Levi and Ruth Westheimer combined!

Well actually, she doesn’t have that Russian accent, it’s more Bedford Sty. She did get a doctoral degree and a certificate in sex therapy. I can imagine that went a long way when my teenagers told their friends their grandmother was a Sex Therapist. Here she is with the Bride at the Bug’s baby shower.

484544_10100552698045496_1877514379_n

This is the kind of joy she inflicts on everyone everywhere she goes! She is still living and working in the same house with my wonderful Father-in-Law, Baptist preacher turned therapist, turned woodcarver Hudson, who was the Officiant at the wedding. You know, that wedding in 2010 that started me blogging. Between them both, they now have 7 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren. At 88, she is still as effervescent and full of life as ever. They just got back from a cruise to Spain. An amazing woman, I am so proud to call her Mother.

I’ve always said I married Bob to get this woman as my Mother-inLaw. Thank you Ada, for always being on my side. And I’ll always have your back too. Now if only someone could fix our knees.

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