An Incredible Journey: Chapter 11
New beginnings, new choices
Hello dear readers:
I have reached the point in the memoir where I must decide how next to proceed.
I must revise some sections to be more charitable and clarify the timeline. Some restructuring is needed. This is the peril of any author bold enough to write a story post by post without planning, or even with planning: they may write and discover it isn’t working. Or that the title isn’t working (blush). That is why there are second drafts.
The author may discover that certain sections must be revised, with new material added and bad material removed or edited. It’s good that I am not a perfectionist, and bad that I am often hasty.
I also need to make choices about what to include going forward. I need to be careful not to compromise family members’ privacy, but events involving them significantly impacted me. Ultimately, though, those parts of the story are not part of the story I want to tell. I will gloss over those family-related events unless the individual involved is willing to be included.
So as usual, I will charge ahead with the next part of the story.
A synopsis for those who may be finding the story is below. You can also find all the posts by clicking on memoir at the top of my home page.
I asked God for a husband, at age 19.
In my twenties, I got involved with a cult. I also heard from God (I think) that I will have to wait a total of 14 years for that husband I asked for.
At age 28 or 29 I escaped from the cult and then spent years trying to heal. What was that about?
At age 30 I asked to join a monastery and was told to get my PhD. Why was I still searching for community?
While in graduate school, I arrived at the 14-year mark, I gave God an ultimatum, and he delivered!
By age 36 I was married. I also had a post-doctoral position at Harvard.
By age 43 I had 3 children and quit science to stay home with them. What was the science about?
We were married! This is a singular event in our lives. Our relationship now changed. We shared and negotiated everything. This took some adjustment since we both had strong opinions and were used to living alone.
For example, finding a comforter cover became a significant argument. Pat wanted plain blue, and I wanted a floral print.
“No. I don’t want just plain blue. It’s for our marriage bed. I want it to be lovely.”
“I’m not keen on flowers.”
We looked at every cover we could find and ended up settling on a Chinese print pattern in blue. There were no flowers, no solids, and it was lovely. But it had to be custom-made.
The very first day of our honeymoon, we had a dispute about where and when to stop for the night. We flew into Munich. I was exhausted after our transatlantic flight, but Pat was ready to keep going. Soon there was the matter of finding a place to stay. Pat didn’t like to plan ahead, since we didn’t know how far we would want to go that first day, so we had no reservation.
“Pat, I’m tired! We need to find a place to stay.”
“Just a few more hours to the border. Let’s keep going!”
“No! Now! I can’t ride as far as you, plus I am jet-lagged. Please!”
Our goal was Salzburg but that was too far, and at that time Google did not exist.
Thus began the search. The first village we found had one farmer willing to provide a room with a bed. We went upstairs to check it out. It was stuffed with straw.
The second place, some distance away was the Gasthof Graf, a 19th-century inn with rooms and a restaurant in Steingaden. Much better. We survived the first marital crisis.
Leaving the rest of the honeymoon behind the veil, I move on to the first significant event in our married life.
We moved to Boston so I could be a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. That meant that Pat had to get a new job. This was a major sacrifice on his part, so he won my heart again and got brownie points from all my female friends. He simply said, “I told her to do what was best for her. I could have asked her to stay in Seattle, but I didn’t, so now I need to move.” On other occasions, he has been known to say, “If only I had gotten my act together earlier…”
We wanted to have children as soon as possible because I was already 36. In fact, it was not sure that we could have children. My spirits were low. I was afraid it was too late.
It was a long flight to Boston. We took a cab to our hotel and I went to soak in the tub, but my nausea wouldn't go away.
"Pat, would you please go to the drugstore for me? I need something."
"Oh? What?"
"A pregnancy test."
Half an hour later, Pat returned with the test. It was positive. I was pregnant. This was great news, but I was worried. I had already miscarried twice. It was also a rough time to get pregnant, at the start of my post-doc.
10 weeks later I found blood on my underwear. Frantically I combed through the Yellow Pages to find an obstetrician who would take on high-risk pregnancies. He saw me two days later. After taking my history, he said, "Any time a woman is over 35 we consider her pregnancy to be high-risk. That doesn't mean terrible things will happen, just that she needs extra attention, and perhaps--I say perhaps--additional care. I am going to give you an injection of progesterone. In older women sometimes that hormone is low and can cause miscarriage. We'll also draw some blood to check other things."
When I got home, I remember praying, “Dear Lord, let me keep this child. I will welcome whatever child you send, with special needs, or typical development, whatever, just let him or her live.” God takes me seriously at every word I pray. I should know that by now.
The pregnancy went well, except for gaining too much weight. The postdoctoral fellowship also went well at the beginning. I developed an assay that allowed me to clone the kinesin light chain gene from Drosophila. My advisor Larry Goldstein and I published a paper. I don’t remember but the paper probably came out after the baby was born. Kate was born at 37 weeks and weighed only 5.4 pounds. I was ecstatic, full of joy, but she was small. I spent all my time snuggling with her on my chest, or nursing her. I didn't want her out of my sight.
After three months of staying home, I had to put Kate into childcare and return to work. This was very painful. Fortunately, we found a daycare close by. It was a cooperative daycare where parents shared some of the duties. This reduced the cost but it was still barely affordable.
I was split between home and work and unable to do either well. We often fought over issues involving her care when she was sick or had a doctor’s visit—who would miss work? It was usually me. Fortunately, my mother moved in and cared for Kate for a while. However, she stopped when Kate was one year old, and we had to put her into daycare again.
About a year later after Kate was born I was pregnant again. I was 8 months pregnant when my mother had a heart attack in New York. She had insisted on going to an opera in New York featuring her favorite singer Placido Domingo, even though she was having angina and her doctor advised against it. We schlepped everyone down to be with her and then everyone back when she could travel. A little boy we named Peter was born a month later. Kate was two. So now we had two children in daycare, and my work wasn’t going well.
Not long after, we found out that one of the children was developmentally delayed. I had promised that the children would be my priority, so at the end of my three-year postdoctoral fellowship, I decided to stay home with them. It was the end of science for me, I thought. I still didn’t know why God had me studying science, but now I needed to stay home with my kids.
I had to get used to being known as Pat’s wife, a stay-at-home mom, rather than Ann, the graduate student. I had been single for 36 years, living on my own for 18 of them before marriage. I had been something of a feminist, and I still was a feminist in a restricted way. I thought that women should receive fair treatment and respect in the workplace. Not to stress the point too much, but they still don’t. But it’s better.
Slogans and placards don’t go with loving and educating children. Or husbands. No strikes or arbitration for wages and benefits. Stay-at-home moms don’t get “respect” at cocktail parties. If they have a loving husband, though, they get love and respect at home.
I still desired to serve God, but religious life wasn’t happening now. That was clear. I had given up my scientific career, a career I thought that God had directed me to undertake. Did this mean his plan and provision, an education at MIT, the University of Washington, and Harvard, would be wasted? Why did he have me study science if I was going to stay home and take care of my family?
Marriage was the one remaining thread in my life that I desired. Marriage to Pat had been my dream. Would it provide the friendship and intimacy I longed for?
I learn more each time, thank you.