B4B #8 Entry

The Blogging for Books theme for February is a time when you took a risk in your life on someone or something - a new romance, a new career, a new home, etc. Were you successful beyond your wildest dreams - or did you crash and burn? This is my entry:

Risk a Life

A shower of papers rains out of one of the folders and flutters to the floor. I stuff the folders into a moving box and bend to gather the litter. One finger slides open a folded packet of legalese, tangible evidence of a broken marriage, a quarter-century life that ended more than a decade in the past.

"In the matter of ... ", I read. Immediately I'm back in the courtroom, full of gawking strangers, as the judge intones, "This marriage is dissolved!" I startle at the ear-splitting crack of the gavel, eyes smarting with sudden tears.

The choices I made, repeatedly, haunt my senior years. I crumple the decree, ball it up with both hands and aim for the grocery bag I use for a trash can. And stop. Wait.

"Shit!"

I can't toss it. Social Security. One more year and I'll need it to prove the marriage lasted long enough to qualify me for a half-benefit based on his account. I'd love to let go of this painful reminder of those many decisions:

An impulsive kiss, a tentative engagement, wearing my grandmother's ring for a year and a half. If I were engaged, like most women graduating from Northwestern in 1965, I'd get an invitation to the Tri-Delt's Pansy Brunch. It was almost like I was "normal". My virginity was a secret holiday gift to him six months before I reluctantly married him so he could support us on military pay. He'd insisted. Neither would our parents have cottoned to my Bohemian idea of "just living together". It was hard enough to be the Lutheran that took my mother-in-law's son away from her Catholic church, although we'd already decided to become Unitarians. And my mother--you'd think marrying a Catholic was worse than unwed motherhood!

"No wife of mine is ever going to work!" he declared when I wanted to fill the boring, lonely hours with a job. I spent a lot of time at the library and wrote poems. He wanted to be a father. I wanted to please him. We had a child. After nearly six years, he grew to hate the service. I faked suicide. He got out.

After four more years of coping with his dead-end job, I gave up and got a do-it-yourself divorce. He didn't care if I moved away with his child, but I couldn't find work and care for the kid alone. I crawled right back and finally persuaded him to remarry three years later. I couldn't stand the feeling that we were "living in sin".

When he decided to move a thousand miles away, I sold his house, packed everything up and followed. We'd actually lived in the same town for five whole years. I finally had some friends, a place in "society", but still I thought the best father for a child was its natural one. Of course a child needs a father! We moved again and again. He roughed me up a few times, and I finally threatened to call the sheriff, but I didn't leave. The kid was still in school. One of the cats was pregnant. I had no where to go.

Another job evaporated, and he left to work elsewhere while I sold another home and got the kid out of high school. His new position was supposed to shift to the west coast, so I went ahead and found a house. He never came and after 18 months, tired of being a married women with no husband, I packed up the cats and moved them across the country again. We lived together one more year in yet another God-forsaken armpit of the nation (because of his work). By then he wanted me to get a job, but unemployment was already high in the rural outback. He lost that job and told me he didn't want to be married any longer, that I could always work at MacDonald's.

I smooth out the divorce papers and blot off a tear with a tissue before the ink runs. I sigh, wondering if I regret what I did, or what I didn't. I did exactly what I'd been told to do by my almighty Mother, society, the church. Marriage is a holy institution. Marriage is forever.

"It's just a piece of paper!" he declared, slamming the door behind himself as he walked out of my life.

I choke back the sobs and tell myself the same. It's just a piece of paper that I cram back into the file folder marked "Important". It was just my life.