October 21, 2008

I got married in September, 1967 in Waveland, Mississippi at St. Clare's Catholic Church (now leveled by Katrina). My Daddy promised my husband Terry O'Brien and me $10K and an impala convertible if I didn't get married at the Country Club (which cost a lot more). My sister had had a wedding for 1,000 people at the Country Club the year before. For years my mother had kept a file of wedding invitations--so she could send all the people she had sent gifts--invitations to my sister's wedding and get gifts.

I married because that's what you did after college and i wanted to Hollywood and be a movie star and the $10K plus a new impala would get me and my husband there. It was pouring down rain my wedding day and the nurse who had raised me wrapped me and my bridesmaids (Kathie Pearse, Mary Brent, Dale Nix, and Ann Preaus) in sheets to get us from the big house to the limousines out front without being soaked. We had to drive from my parents' house on the Gulf to the Church. Mama had called all over Mississippi to find limousines and finally got ones mostly used for funerals to take us to the Church.

The rain had made me want to cancel the wedding. It was an omen but I married Terry anyway. Should I cancel the wedding I worried and run off to Europe? Yes, my heart told me. But Terry would go with me to Los Angeles and I was afraid to go alone and he was so good-looking people already thought he was a star and that made me feel important and we had had everything but penetration for sex.

The doctors and lawyers that I dated all wanted me to be a Housewife--the word itself made me feel trapped. So Terry who was a dreamer would give me two gorgeous children and go with me anywhere because he really didn't plan to work. In California, friends said they saw him on the beach surfing.

I stayed with Terry seven years for better or worse, always embarrassed when people asked me what my husband did. He was "finding himself" that was the term he used. I came from a family of doctors and lawyers had never known a man who wasn't ambitious and direct so I believed Terry for seven years was looking for work, through a life in Hollywood to a PhD at UCLA. That was easier to nail than a lead role in a Hollywood film.

Then a daughter arrived, Rachelle. I was thrilled as my biggest fear as a southern woman was that I couldn't get pregnant. After we moved to Princeton, NJ and s after my son was born, I evicted Terry when Barret was 3 months old, got a Catholic annulment and started dating my neighbor across the street, another handsome charming Irishman Dick O'Neill.