Listening To Bill DeFoore's Marriage Recording

by Anna

I sat in the car next to my husband as we were driving down the busy road to the military base that we do our monthly grocery shopping. All around us I noticed all of the other couples in their cars driving parallel or opposite us, stopping at red lights and going on again when the lights turned green. I felt an old familiar commonality between us and them. I related to them in that universal kind of way when it feels as if there are others going in the same direction as I am even if it is just for a short while. We are married and so are they. We were all in the marriage group together in a collective of souls trying desperately to make sense of the commitment we had all taken. We had all dared to reach out with that one other person, walk hand in hand through life and say, "I do" each and every day for the rest of our lives.

I watched as some of the other cars with couples in them turned off left or right to side streets that led to their own little worlds where a two story house, two children, and a dog or cat awaited their return. I noticed that the majority of the other couples driving with us on that two lane highway were not talking. They were not even looking at each other. On any other day I may not have noticed as much, but on that day I was especially aware of it.

Out of the two speakers in the back of our car Bill DeFoore's voice spoke to us about expectations in marriage in his warm and very human style. He was talking about how we really need to look at our childhoods and pasts and share our memories with our spouse. I looked at my husband and thought, "If I am doing marriage the same way my parents' did, we are in big trouble. Then, I started to tell my husband about my parents' marriage.

When I was a child I was not allowed to hang our dirty laundry up where the neighbors could see. They were not aware of how tattered and worn my parents' sheets and blankets were with the generations of marriage hardship that had been handed down throughout the years. They didn't know that my father would not kiss my mother goodbye before stepping out to go to work. They didn't know that my mother considered my father to be a stranger when he came home from work. To the outside world, they were the model couple. They smiled at each other when other people were looking. They would briefly hold hands while out in public and then when no-one was looking, they would sharply pull their hands away.

Below I will write down some of the things that I remember about my parents' marriage.

On quite a few ocassions my father had caught a green garden snake in the back yard. Then he would come into the house as my mother was cooking dinner and throw the snake at her. Since one of my mother's biggest fears was snakes, she would start running around screaming, desperately trying to get the snake off of her. While this was happening my father would laugh and say, "Come on honey, you don't want to go scaring that poor thing like that". I can actually feel the anger of my mother after she had gotten the snake off of her and one of my brothers was chasing it down to put it outside. It's almost as if I took on her anger and now I am having to feel it.

My father was a captain for a large commercial airlines. He used to go off for days on trips. I can still remember my mother's voice shaking and her holding back the tears as she would talk to him on the phone. She would say, "Are you sure the doctor said that you are going to live?" Then she would temporarily lower her hand with the phone and close her eyes. She would then put the phone back to her ear and say, "I can't believe you're laughing. Do you know what these pranks do to me? Don't ever do this again!"

Each time my father would call my mother from a trip, he would tell her another horrible thing that had happened to him or that was happening to him. It got to the point where he had cried wolf so much that my mother just shrugged off anything he would say to her on the phone. One time my father said that the hotel he was in caught on fire and he barely got out with his life. My mother said, "Oh well, these things happen. Just get another hotel." Later we found out that the hotel he was in really did catch on fire and him and some of the other pilots barely got out. We learned this from a newspaper clipping that one of the other pilots had kept from the incident. What was even scarier was that my Aunt Theresa had told him before he went on this trip that she had seen a vision of him being in a burning building. She begged him not to go on this trip, but he said that it was his job and he had to go. My Aunt Theresa was always warning people about these kind of things and I used to wonder why people just didn't listen to her. All of her premonitions seemed to come true.

One time my father had come home early from a trip. His flight had been canceled due to a storm. Because he did not want to wake us, he came through the basement door. Trying very hard not to make too much noise he walked up the long steps from the basement to the door that led to the kitchen. When he got to the top of the steps and opened the door my mother was standing there pointing one of his big hunting rifles at him. Three of us children were huddled behind her. My father immediately started screaming, "Don't kill me, I'm your husband". My mother kept the rifle pointed at him for a few more moments, then she slowly lowered it. She turned around and told all of us children to go back to bed. I can still see the look of terror on her face.

My older brother answered the phone one day and found himself talking to a very distressed stewardess. The stewardess was asking my brother to tell our father that he should divorce our mother and marry her. Later we found out that my father had told the stewardess that he couldn't marry her because he had the responsibility of us children. The stewardess called again over and over until my father broke up with her. My mother acted like it was a secret between only her and my father. At night all of us children could hear her screaming at my father because he was having an affair, but in the morning, all of us children were not supposed to know about it.

There were other stewardesses that my father had affairs with, but the one who kept calling on the phone was the one that I remember the most.

My mother and father fought every time they were together. I can't remember everything they fought about. I just remember the fury in their voices and some of the horrible things that they said to each other. My mother used to follow him around from room to room screaming at him. I used to stay awake at night listening to them fighting. I tried to put a pillow over my ears, but eventually I would just give up. My older sister and I slept in the room right next to theirs. It was especially hard to listen when my father would complain about having all of us children. He said that it ruined his life.

When I was a teenager my mother and father decided to get a divorce. They gathered all of us children and asked us all to decide who we wanted to live with, our mother or our father. All of us children just stood there and didn't say a word. My mother said, "Well, we'll just figure that out later. This happened right after my older sister Laura was put into a mental hospital. I remember thinking that I didn't want to live with either one of them.

My parents reconsidered and went to a marriage retreat instead. At the marriage retreat they were told to write to each other in notebooks. They were not allowed to talk out loud. My mother would write in a notebook and then give it to my father. Then my father would write in his notebook and give that to my mother. The people at the retreat said that they did this with couples because it allowed each person to have their say without being interrupted. When they came home from the marriage retreat they both had mounds of notebooks. They put the notebooks on the floor in their bedroom. They continued to write in the notebooks to each other for quite a few years. I'm not sure if they continued with this after I left home. I never asked them about it. Now, they get along a lot better. They are older and when I go to visit them I don't hear them fighting anymore.

I stopped talking about my parents' marriage when we got to the commissary. We got out of the car. We walked up to the store, grabbed a grocery cart and started to walk down the isles. I kept looking at all of the other couples who were shopping together. I kept looking at my husband who was quietly and slowly putting items into the cart. I looked at my grocery list. I tried very hard to stop my hand from shaking so that I could read it.

On the way home from the commissary we played Bill DeFoore's marriage recording again and I listened as my husband told me about his parents' marriage. His mother had been married three times so he had stories about his biological father and two step-fathers. It started to rain. I found myself studying the raindrops streaming down the windshield. I felt the old fears rising again. They were the hidden fears that I had grown up with.

Days later I called Bill DeFoore's wife Cindy and set up a phone counseling appointment for me and my husband. I wanted our marriage to be stronger and we had some childhood and past issues that we also needed help with.

I don't want our marriage to be just a repeat of what our parents' marriages were when we were growing up.