OUR FIRST SEPARATION

In the early nineties, shortly after I went back to work full time and Andrew was in late grade school, he came to us and said he did not want to go to school. He told us that a classmate was threatening to beat him up. We asked him who and he named a child who was half his size. Andrew was already bigger that most of his classmates and the child he named was quite a bit smaller. We tried the rational approach, comparing their relative sizes and assuring Andrew that he would be fine, eventually convincing him to go back to school and try to work it out with his friend. He was clearly scared.  We would not learn how traumatic this event was for Andrew until he was writing his college applications and used this incident to describe a difficult situation that he had dealt with successfully.

My return to work was a big deal for the whole family. I had been home with the kids since Lou was on the way in 1979. This was the first time I had not been readily available for the kids since my brief stint working after Marnie was born. Before that, I was working as nursing faculty in Baltimore.

I quit this job when Marnie was born to stay home with her. When she was about 5 months old, John got a job offer in Philadelphia in March of 1977.He left immediately and was living in an efficiency apartment in a neat old building right downtown on Locust Street. The room is fuzzy in my memory except for the wonderful Murphy bed.  This began a period of geographic separation for John and me, which would last for seven months, until August 1977.

This was new to us. We had been a couple since 1968 and married since 1972.

After John moved to Philadelphia, he spent his free time looking for houses for us. We did not know Philadelphia or anyone who lived there. The closest we came was that my parents had lived there when they were first married in 1946 and my oldest brother Dave was born there. We had no recent knowledge of neighborhoods --so John was looking everywhere. This move would be the beginning of a very rough period for us emotionally.  I did not realize it at the time but of course, we were beginning the separation from our parents and our childhoods that would be painful in ways that we did not be anticipate. It would not be simple, quick or easy and would never be complete.