Fall of 1965 to Summer 1966: I think I have the flu, go to the doctor, the one who had fitted me with a diaphragm as means of birth control. He diagnoses the flu and puts me on some kind of medication. He takes some urine?, I think, for a pregnancy test, just in case; calls me a few days later to say the pregnancy test is positive and I need to stop taking the medicine and go to an OB/gyne; he refers me to Dr. Pildes, on Michigan Ave. in Chicago. Ed and I go to Dr. Pildes who confirms the pregnancy, and Ed feels like a hero. I am delighted and also very nauseated. Ed asks the doctor if my feeling so sick is normal, especially because some of the stuff that induces the nausea seems so crazy, like the deep blue color of some towels we had, or the soot that comes in through our apartment window in Hyde Park. The doc says it's all completely normal; he asks if there is anything at all that I would want to eat....I can't keep anything down....I say, "persian melon"? He tells Ed to go find me some persian melon.
I am desperately nauseated for the first months of the pregnancy. At one point I lose 7 lbs. in a week, and the doc puts me on an anti-nausea drug (not one of the dangerous ones), in suppository format, and tells me to keep soda crackers at my bedside within easy reach so that when I first wake up I won't have to move anything but my arm to get the crackers and eat them, then lie still for some time before getting up. I'm to use the suppositories immediately after meals and go to bed and try to sleep. This regimen allows me to get through the first months, after which the nause tapers and is gone from the fifth month on.
April 9, 1966: Gregory Scott, Sharon's baby, is born in San Francisco. Prior to his birth, Sharon had thought she would adopt the baby out through Lutheran Services, but after he is born, she wants to keep the baby. Sharon is hospitalized at UCSF for schizophrenia. There is discussion between Sharon, the family, and doctors about what to do for the baby. For a while the baby is hospitalized with Sharon, but she proves unable to care for him.Helen takes the baby for a time, in foster care, until Sharon is stabilized and out of the hospital. Sharon tries to take care of Gregory on her own for a time but panics and calls Helen, who comes over and sees the baby with crib marks on his side, indicating he has not been picked up or turned in his crib for some time. Sharon is again willing to give the baby up for adoption, but the family, whoever that is at this point--I was not involved--does not want her to adopt the baby outside the family. Helen and Walt agree to take the baby, and eventually adopt him. Sharon is intermittently hospitalized, lives at home, I think, when not in the hospital.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Timeline
Oct.. 22, 2010
Here goes my second effort at just posting a timeline of events in my life, without commentary!
12/26/38 Birth, 7th in sibship of 8; Helen names me Marilyn Jean, but I'm always Jeanie at home unless someone's mad at me. Except Helen...she tries to keep Marilyn alive out of pride in her naming job.
1942-44: Sexual abuse by father
1944: father has left; we live in different houses in Denver
Summer 1945: Al, Jean, and Sharon sent to Long Beach on Greyhound with Betty; Betty doesn't stay; the three of us live with Helen & Karl Meyer, of whom we have no knowledge, and we're not told that this is the plan or when or if we'll return to the family. I'd completed first grade in Denver, started second grade in Long Beach. I'm officially Marilyn outside my family, from then on.
Christmas 1945: Betty and Helen suddenly show up at Meyers' house in Long Beach to take us 'home' to my brother Bill's 3-room apartment at 776 Oak Street in San Francisco. My eighth birthday, tears stream down my face, I have no awareness of 'crying' or of 'being sad.' Betty, Helen, Bill, Al, Sharon and I live in the apartment. Bill and Betty support us; Bill with his Veterans' Benefits and a job as an usher at the Haight Street movie theater, where he got free popcorn, Betty from working somewhere. I start 3rd grade at John Muir; Sharon starts kindergarten and is terrified; Bill walks her to her first day at school.
Sometime between 1945 and 1948?, Mama comes out to join us in San Francisco, as do Paul and John. There are then 9 of us living in the 3 rooms. John attempts molestation of me and Sharon many times; Paul effects molestation with me; Bill makes a gesture in that direction. Helen and Al take care of us. There is a toilet in the apartment, but to take a bath we have to use a shared bathroom outside our front door, in the hall that connects the rooms at the front of the flat with our rooms at the back.
From 1948 or 1949 to 1953, I take care of Sharon and cook for the family; Sharon and I do the housekeeping, with Helen and Betty's help on weekends. Mama is working at Armour's Meat Packing in South San Francisco, has to leave the house at 5:00 a.m., can't remember what time she gets home. We go to the Methodist Church intermittently. I remember the German words inscribed on the altar cloth: "Ich bin das Brut des Lebens," I am the bread of life. I squirm around in the pew and Al and Helen say I'm crazy and don't want to sit with me. In Sunday School, an old guy plays a big bass drum as we sing, "Come to the church in the wild wood, oh come to the church in the dale." Church is a safe place, like school.
1953: I graduate ninth grade at Everett Junior High School. Bill and Betty (and Helen, I think) make enough money that, with Bill's GI Bill, they manage a down payment on a two bedroom house at 319 Faxon Avenue in the Ocean Avenue neighborhood of San Francisco, a middle-class residential neighborhood close to the street car line to downtown. Things are looking up! Our first decent house! Helen and I go over that summer and wax the hardwood floors on our hands and knees with Johnson paste wax. Somebody gets furniture on credit; our life has never been so good..
1953-1956: George Washington High School, at that time one of the best high schools in S.F. They'd take kids from out of the district, and Al went there. I entered just as he was graduating. Johnny Mathis sang Babalou in his old voice--a blues voice--at the last assembly Al was at, and I was there somehow. I graduated as 'Outstanding Girl.' I had one friend: Penny Pritchard, my second friend. My first was Riva Apte from John Muir; she found boys and went off the rails by the time we were at Everett Jr. High. As for me, I knew that my brothers wouldn't seriously mess with me anymore after I'd started my period because now I could have a baby, so I loved these years....I felt free of fear of invasion for the first time. I took two buses to get to the school. I got to know public transportation in San Francisco. It was great.
1956-1961: College is not in the cards; Bill got through SF State, and Al was going to City College, but for a girl to go to college was unheard of. Remember my high school teachers aghast that I wasn't going to college, but I felt virtuous, 'supporting my family.' My first job was in the steno pool at General Mills in San Francisco; ended up as receiptionist in Graduate Studies Office at the new HQ of SF State on Ocean Avenue. I'd read the college catalogs that came in.
1961-1964: U of Chicago on a loan, a scholarship, and parttime job. Start out premed and change to English literature. Stop using Marilyn, start using Jean as my first name.
March 1964: Meet Ed, go out with him, it's pretty serious by the time I leave for California, where I've been admitted to Berkeley in English lit. We kiss and make out before I leave, and I'm sexually aroused for the first time in many years. We promise to write. I write him in the car on the way home, as Helen drives in her new little Malibu.
September 1964: I start grad school at Berkeley, after summer months at home; I work thru the summer as an office temp. I have a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Berkeley, but I spend most of that money during the summer on my family. Sharon is clearly in some kind of trouble; she spends days at Stern's Grove, drinking coffee and walking in nature. She has not been able to keep a job since returning to San Francisco after a failed attempt at college at Concordia in River Forest.
The Woodrow Wilson people forgive me after I write them a letter explaining the difficult circumstances in which we've always lived. I must not have spent all of it, though, because I live in a room off campus and am admitted to classes. The problem is, I can't stop thinking of Ed. I consult a counselor there and explain that I'm on a scholarship and feel guilty for not doing the work b/c I'm obsessed with thoughts of Chicago boyfriend. She tries to ease my conscience.
December 1964: Ed comes out to visit me, we're both terribly sexually aroused and interested in each other. We decide I'll quit Berkeley and come back to Chicago, try to go to the U of C, where he's working on his thesis in physics..
Early 1965: I come to Chicago, we have intercourse for the first time in a pulldown bed in small apartment we've rented. I'm unimpressed with the intercourse, but the relationship has become serious. He proposes somehow and we tell his parents later that Spring that we're going to be married in June. They'd been planning a tour of the Norwegian fjords but give us that trip for our honeymoon as a wedding present.
June 26, 1965: Married at St. Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco; Al officiates. I wonder if I'm really married b/c my own brother was the minister. All three of my sisters are bridesmaids, Sharon the Maid of Honor. Bill walks me down the aisle. Sharon breaks down at the wedding reception, which Bill is paying for--by now he's married a wealthy older woman. She's hysterical and hangs onto me when I'm ready to go.
September 1965: I'm pregnant without knowing it. I become violently nauseated. Ed is at first outraged because we hadn't planned the pregnancy, then feels like a hero because his sperm got by all our precautions. His only problem is he wanted to have finished the PhD before we had a baby. We hear from San Francisco that Sharon had that summer gone off, just after our wedding, slept with a longshoreman in a sleazy hotel, gotten gonnorhea and was pregnant. She also had a psychotic break. Her baby was due in April 1966; mine in June.
Here goes my second effort at just posting a timeline of events in my life, without commentary!
12/26/38 Birth, 7th in sibship of 8; Helen names me Marilyn Jean, but I'm always Jeanie at home unless someone's mad at me. Except Helen...she tries to keep Marilyn alive out of pride in her naming job.
1942-44: Sexual abuse by father
1944: father has left; we live in different houses in Denver
Summer 1945: Al, Jean, and Sharon sent to Long Beach on Greyhound with Betty; Betty doesn't stay; the three of us live with Helen & Karl Meyer, of whom we have no knowledge, and we're not told that this is the plan or when or if we'll return to the family. I'd completed first grade in Denver, started second grade in Long Beach. I'm officially Marilyn outside my family, from then on.
Christmas 1945: Betty and Helen suddenly show up at Meyers' house in Long Beach to take us 'home' to my brother Bill's 3-room apartment at 776 Oak Street in San Francisco. My eighth birthday, tears stream down my face, I have no awareness of 'crying' or of 'being sad.' Betty, Helen, Bill, Al, Sharon and I live in the apartment. Bill and Betty support us; Bill with his Veterans' Benefits and a job as an usher at the Haight Street movie theater, where he got free popcorn, Betty from working somewhere. I start 3rd grade at John Muir; Sharon starts kindergarten and is terrified; Bill walks her to her first day at school.
Sometime between 1945 and 1948?, Mama comes out to join us in San Francisco, as do Paul and John. There are then 9 of us living in the 3 rooms. John attempts molestation of me and Sharon many times; Paul effects molestation with me; Bill makes a gesture in that direction. Helen and Al take care of us. There is a toilet in the apartment, but to take a bath we have to use a shared bathroom outside our front door, in the hall that connects the rooms at the front of the flat with our rooms at the back.
From 1948 or 1949 to 1953, I take care of Sharon and cook for the family; Sharon and I do the housekeeping, with Helen and Betty's help on weekends. Mama is working at Armour's Meat Packing in South San Francisco, has to leave the house at 5:00 a.m., can't remember what time she gets home. We go to the Methodist Church intermittently. I remember the German words inscribed on the altar cloth: "Ich bin das Brut des Lebens," I am the bread of life. I squirm around in the pew and Al and Helen say I'm crazy and don't want to sit with me. In Sunday School, an old guy plays a big bass drum as we sing, "Come to the church in the wild wood, oh come to the church in the dale." Church is a safe place, like school.
1953: I graduate ninth grade at Everett Junior High School. Bill and Betty (and Helen, I think) make enough money that, with Bill's GI Bill, they manage a down payment on a two bedroom house at 319 Faxon Avenue in the Ocean Avenue neighborhood of San Francisco, a middle-class residential neighborhood close to the street car line to downtown. Things are looking up! Our first decent house! Helen and I go over that summer and wax the hardwood floors on our hands and knees with Johnson paste wax. Somebody gets furniture on credit; our life has never been so good..
1953-1956: George Washington High School, at that time one of the best high schools in S.F. They'd take kids from out of the district, and Al went there. I entered just as he was graduating. Johnny Mathis sang Babalou in his old voice--a blues voice--at the last assembly Al was at, and I was there somehow. I graduated as 'Outstanding Girl.' I had one friend: Penny Pritchard, my second friend. My first was Riva Apte from John Muir; she found boys and went off the rails by the time we were at Everett Jr. High. As for me, I knew that my brothers wouldn't seriously mess with me anymore after I'd started my period because now I could have a baby, so I loved these years....I felt free of fear of invasion for the first time. I took two buses to get to the school. I got to know public transportation in San Francisco. It was great.
1956-1961: College is not in the cards; Bill got through SF State, and Al was going to City College, but for a girl to go to college was unheard of. Remember my high school teachers aghast that I wasn't going to college, but I felt virtuous, 'supporting my family.' My first job was in the steno pool at General Mills in San Francisco; ended up as receiptionist in Graduate Studies Office at the new HQ of SF State on Ocean Avenue. I'd read the college catalogs that came in.
1961-1964: U of Chicago on a loan, a scholarship, and parttime job. Start out premed and change to English literature. Stop using Marilyn, start using Jean as my first name.
March 1964: Meet Ed, go out with him, it's pretty serious by the time I leave for California, where I've been admitted to Berkeley in English lit. We kiss and make out before I leave, and I'm sexually aroused for the first time in many years. We promise to write. I write him in the car on the way home, as Helen drives in her new little Malibu.
September 1964: I start grad school at Berkeley, after summer months at home; I work thru the summer as an office temp. I have a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship to Berkeley, but I spend most of that money during the summer on my family. Sharon is clearly in some kind of trouble; she spends days at Stern's Grove, drinking coffee and walking in nature. She has not been able to keep a job since returning to San Francisco after a failed attempt at college at Concordia in River Forest.
The Woodrow Wilson people forgive me after I write them a letter explaining the difficult circumstances in which we've always lived. I must not have spent all of it, though, because I live in a room off campus and am admitted to classes. The problem is, I can't stop thinking of Ed. I consult a counselor there and explain that I'm on a scholarship and feel guilty for not doing the work b/c I'm obsessed with thoughts of Chicago boyfriend. She tries to ease my conscience.
December 1964: Ed comes out to visit me, we're both terribly sexually aroused and interested in each other. We decide I'll quit Berkeley and come back to Chicago, try to go to the U of C, where he's working on his thesis in physics..
Early 1965: I come to Chicago, we have intercourse for the first time in a pulldown bed in small apartment we've rented. I'm unimpressed with the intercourse, but the relationship has become serious. He proposes somehow and we tell his parents later that Spring that we're going to be married in June. They'd been planning a tour of the Norwegian fjords but give us that trip for our honeymoon as a wedding present.
June 26, 1965: Married at St. Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco; Al officiates. I wonder if I'm really married b/c my own brother was the minister. All three of my sisters are bridesmaids, Sharon the Maid of Honor. Bill walks me down the aisle. Sharon breaks down at the wedding reception, which Bill is paying for--by now he's married a wealthy older woman. She's hysterical and hangs onto me when I'm ready to go.
September 1965: I'm pregnant without knowing it. I become violently nauseated. Ed is at first outraged because we hadn't planned the pregnancy, then feels like a hero because his sperm got by all our precautions. His only problem is he wanted to have finished the PhD before we had a baby. We hear from San Francisco that Sharon had that summer gone off, just after our wedding, slept with a longshoreman in a sleazy hotel, gotten gonnorhea and was pregnant. She also had a psychotic break. Her baby was due in April 1966; mine in June.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)