Oops! Thursday

In light of my "gird your loins and speak up" tale earlier this week, my Oops! today is a tale of sitting back and waiting, rather than doing the smart thing.

This tale goes back 14 years to marriage number three. I met him at work at IBM; we were in the same lunch bunch. I met him about six weeks after his wife died of a stroke at age 46, leaving a 17-year-old vibrant, vivacious daughter and a 15-year-old learning disabled son, who functioned at about a second grade level.

When we married, he made it clear—being the good Mormon boy he was—that he was in charge of everything outside the house, leaving the inside of the house for me. Cooking, cleaning, washing, housekeeping—they were all mine. I had just lost my job when we married, and six months later IBM offered him an early retirement. He took the "bridge", as it was called, and decided to sell real estate to tide him over until his retirement kicked in after three years. He was a good ol' boy, but he just wasn't pulling in an income selling real estate. I think he may have had four closings that first year.

We lived in Western Loudoun County, Virginia, and I taught piano in Leesburg for six months or so, along with teaching many of the children who attended my husband's church. I would travel to their homes in the evenings, and loved and was loved by them all. After six months or so of no real estate income, my husband told me I wasn't pulling in enough income. (What? Him go get a full-time job, as all his IBM colleagues had done? No way!) I was able to find a position in a big law firm in downtown D.C., as manager of database systems.

I drove two hours each way every day, or rode the commuter train or bus. I would leave the house at 5:30 a.m., getting back to Loudoun County around 7:00 p.m. Then I would go to the homes of my piano students and teach, finally arriving home at 9;30. My husband and his son (the daughter was now in college at BYU) would be sitting on their butts in front of the television. The sink would be stacked a two feet high with dirty dishes, which I would dutifully wash before falling into bed at 10:00, to rise again at 4:30 the next morning.

Both children had been very upset when their father told them he was marrying me, so my path in this marriage had never been easy. And the son was a complete slob. The dirty clothes would stack up in his room until the pile was three feet high and the room stank to high heavens. One day, after his dad and I had been married about 21 months, I told him he needed to take his pile of dirty laundry and wash it. He looked right at me and said, "If you ever talk to me like that again, I'll shoot you."

I quickly left his room and went to tell his father what had transpired. His father said I was taking him too seriously. They were both hunters, and there were several guns and lots of ammunition in the house. I begged my husband to lock up the guns and ammo. He simply opened the attic access in our closet and put them up there. Two days later, his son pulled them down again.

From that point forward, I feared for my life every night when I went to bed. I worried that I would not be alive the next morning. And yet my husband took no action—no correction for the son, no therapy, no bringing the police in for a little chat. Nothing.

A few months later we went to my mother's mountain cottage for Christmas. My mother pulled me aside and asked if the two children were as lazy at home as they were in her house, and I had to admit that they were completely spoiled and lazy. I then told her about the incident with my stepson. To her eternal credit, she looked at me and said, "You'd better get out of there while you still can."

And to my eternal credit, I listened to my mother for, maybe, the first time in my life.

Three months later, while my husband and his son were visiting the daughter at BYU, I moved all my things out of the house. And lived to tell about it.

And what was the Oops! lesson learned from that life experience? You can bet your life that the next time someone threatens to shoot me, I will move out of that house within the following 24 hours. I will not wait five months until I can get everything lined up. I will get the hell out, pronto!

Better yet, I'm never getting involved again with any man who has teenagers still at home. That's the simpler solution!