14. The Eighties

Note: I hope these photos are old enough and obscure enough – the one of my kids is the cutest one ever of the two of them and besides I made that dress. Brother is now 31 and sister 25, and they love each other very much.

There was more to the eighties than big hair and ugly jeans, right?

It is difficult to reflect on my life during that decade because for most of it, my second husband and I were consumed with parenting and career achievement. The family was our focus outside of work and there was precious little time for solitude or self care or work on the self. We gave up ourselves.

We built this house in a suburb of Albany, New York. It still breaks my heart when I remember the trees. The property had been full of trees when we first selected the lot with the builder. We didn’t know it was necessary to tag the trees we didn’t want to cut. Construction vehicles needed access to the rest of the development and our property was in the best location to cut through, so the trees were all lost. There was just one row left in the front along the street. What would have been a wooded property became a huge front lawn and a back lawn so large you could land an airplane there.

It was poorly graded and we had no money for landscaping so we planted the lawn ourselves, forever doomed to mowing over uneven terrain.

This was the Jewish period and so there was a lot of time spent celebrating holidays with family and friends and attending synagogue. This picture of my kids was taken just before attending synagogue for Rosh Hashanah.

The piano photo is of my father and son. We tended to take family photos when there was some kind of family gathering. Not so much otherwise.

My in-laws owned a house on Cape Cod — in the town of Wellfleet — and this was a wonderful place to go with the kids for a Summer vacation.

I have two especially warm memories from those vacations. One was when my daughter must have been about three years old and she wanted one of those large lollipops with the colorful swirls. We got one, unwrapped it and handed it to her sitting in her stroller. She was just about to take a lick when my brother, who was visiting with us there, asked her for a bite. She broke off a piece but it was very small, much smaller than the remaining lollipop so she looked at the pieces for a moment and then handed him the larger one. Lovey pie.

The other memory is of going to a restaurant that was known for lobster. My son, who was about seven, ordered a whole lobster and as my daughter, still about three (might have been the same Summer), watched him crack it open and eat the flesh her eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger in amazement that someone would actually eat something like that.

There are a lot of warm memories from this period though I was not a happy person. The experiences of premature independence followed by marriage, motherhood and divorce by 22, and then remarriage and a second child at 27 were a lot to process and I had not processed any of it. I was the proverbial pot waiting to boil over.

I had no idea who I was as a person or why I felt so horrible, but I knew how to work hard and did. Career success was paramount. We wanted opportunities for our kids and saved aggressively, putting away up to 25% of earnings, such that by the time the nineties economic recovery rolled around we’d already built up significant equity.

This last photo is of my in-laws’ house in Albany, when they were still alive. I’ve included it because although the living room has been rearranged to accommodate holiday table dining, it still shows some of the details I admired, like the nine-foot glass bookcases that held their collection of Judaica, the green leather couch and brown leather wing back, the cool mid-century lamp right off the set of Mad Men.

I adored my mother-in-law. She was brilliant and talented – had a PhD in Public Administration and managed the New York Prison libraries. She had five children she doted on, was an accomplished artist and a fabulously creative cook. She read extensively on wide-ranging topics and was an excellent conversationalist. Everything interested her. Her home was beautifully decorated, each piece of furniture or work of art carefully considered and beautifully placed.

Sadly, she didn’t like me back and criticized my husband for marrying me. I understood why she didn’t like me. I was completely clueless at this point in my life. I had no sense of culture or personal style, was not a conversationalist, had not accomplished anything that would merit her praise. I was not good enough for her son and she let me know this in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. It was incredibly destructive.

And it was a shame because I wanted to learn from her and was a willing student. She is the first person I came into an intimate relationship with that I truly wanted to emulate. I tried winning her love, but my admiration made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want to be admired by me. And so I grew to admire her less, to challenge her, thus setting in motion one of a myriad of marital stresses that would ultimately lead to the undoing of our marriage. The divorce was not my mother-in-law’s fault – it had to do with incompatibility and the marriage being overwhelmed with other stresses – but this family dynamic with the in-laws didn’t help at all.

My former husband and I are on good terms. He is the man both of my children consider to be their father, and is a wonderful father. We are both now living with the loves of our lives and are grateful for the family we created.