LOOKING BACK I see that a marriage that lasts for over forty years can fall into three distinct stages: The "first wife" stage surfaces early in the marriage. The "second wife" surfaces during the child rearing years. The "third wife" is the wife that reveals herself during the retirement years.

In our case, my "first wife" role consisted of a wholehearted catering to Jack, ironing his shirts, shorts, and tee shirts-if you can believe this-then telling him he was the greatest guy there was, and in many ways he was. He returned the favor by being very solicitous of me and what I needed. In fact, he was the soul of consideration. You might say he was "the first husband."

At this time I had taken a fourth grade teaching job in the small town where we rented a house in a bucolic setting near the city of Pittsfield. I got home two hours before Jack returned from his job at General Electric Co. I had some time to recover from the day and catch up on chores.

After a while, I could soon see that we had settled into a routine. We weren't "going out" anymore.Jack was more interested in mowing the lawn, or fixing the car, or making sure the cellar steps were safe. I cleaned house, made meals and kept the glass clean. This was all necessary but not exactly a turn-on. We had friends who worked in NYC who would stay with us on various weekends. Also there were GE functions to attend.

THEN CAME THE SMALL miracles we call babies. If you want a crash course in how to grow up, have a baby. You have to be a strong "second wife" to rise to the occasion. The long nine months, and even the agonies of delivering the first of four children beginning at age 31, was shock treatment enough. I soon found they were only the beginning of the real deal. After the baby comes, we unwittingly enter a new missionary role. I realized I had to be on call twenty-four hours a day- with no break.

I left teaching and stayed home and soon realized I had essentially retired from my chosen work--far before it was time. I had literally stepped out of the normal rhythm of life. As a child, we are programmed to a routine of school-home-vacation. Later it becomes work-home-vacation. Weekends were free time as well, but now, they were nostalgic dreams. For a stay-at-home mother, this natural rhythm stops abruptly. No more career. No more weekends. No vacations. It was home, home, and home, and not a single a day off in sight.

I BEGAN TO SEE why women continued to work even if, financially, they didn't have to. I didn't know how to do that. Women didn't work outside the home when I was growing up.I had not a single role model to go by. Besides I confess to being a nurturing creature (Moon in Cancer). The idea of leaving my new little daughter who the hospital nurses had named "the frosted cupcake" never crossed my mind. Still if there had been something I could have done parttime,it might have worked. But now this adorable baby required round-the-clock attention?

During most of the first half of the twentieth century, when ordinary women married and left home, they gave up their last names, as well as daily interchanges with their friends and families.They are essentially erased from the world unless they marry someone from their hometown and never leave. When children came, almost all women gave up their profession or work and stayed home. That was the way it was.

It was different for the man. Then and now, he keeps his last name, and continues at work as if he hardly skips a beat. Marriage tends to add to his life rather than subtract from it. He does have the onerous burden of added financial responsibilities, but he can still kid around at work with his male and female workers on the job. He has a life he can disappear into daily. He can come home at the end of the day to a new existence that enriches his life on an entirely new plane.

BEFORE MARRIAGE, I had also had male and female friends at work that I enjoyed enormously, but in my new parental wilderness I felt isolated from them. Friends became only those that both Jack and I shared. It wasn't always easy to find people with whom we both felt connected. There came a time when I felt I was in a benign prison of no escape. Vacations were just more of the same, only geography changed and we co-existed under starker conditions. Sometimes we got to vacation with friends and their families.

IF SOMEONE HAD OFFERED ME this stay-at-home job with no vacations and weekends, and if I had carefully read the job description, I would not have considered it even for a million dollars a year. This work can only be done out of love, and fortunately the children made it worthwhile. I was refreshed by their beauty and innocence. They lived entirely in the NOW. They were a healthy influence as well as an endearing one. They were my best little buddies. I knew the work I was doing was hugely important, but I also needed intellectual stimulation and discussion as if it were a thirst-slaking basic need.

Finally after three babies, born twenty months apart,after age thirty, something happened.It probably had to. At age thirty-seven I hit a psychological wall. I somehow broke through to a new level of consciousness. I went from the darkest dark to the lightest light and I never saw it coming. ...................................................................................................Take a pause and breathe.............................................


IT WAS A RAW, DARK DAY in late November. The angle of the sun had changed and not for the better. The snowbirds were leaving for the south. In the Berkshires we already had snow drifts that didn't leave until May. I had composed a piano piece that sounded like a Russian work that you'd think had been created on the Siberian tundra. At least it had the rhythm of a dance.

Although I adored our three babies I wasn't skilled at running a house and keeping it perfect. I didn't even think it should be perfect. Kids don't seem to thrive within the sterility of perfection. There were times when I would have to sit on the living room carpet to make sure they were safe as they played and explored. One of my pleasures was to watch these toddlers study their world on tiptoe, with expectation and a little sense of mischief. I reveled in the beauty of their curiosity and play.

My problem was that I missed the intellectual stimulation of adults. When Jack came home from work, he didn't like to talk about his day. He lived totally in the present and gave his full attention to the family and responsibilities when he came home. I admired this but it also magnified more of what I had been doing all day.

I read everything I could get my hands on when I could. That cold November I kept a copy of Einstein's Out of My later Years on the dining room table. It was a book of his essays that I could grab and read a page or two amidst the endless chores.

One of Einstein's insights stuck with me. It was part of his essay entitled Science and Civilization. He said,"Mankind...is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton."

He talked about the "conforming conventional mask" we wear and how our real personality"is as if it were "wrapped in cotton wool" He talked about how only in the "lightning flashes of our tempestuous times do we reveal our aims, powers and weaknesses, and also our passions....routine becomes of no avail under the swift change of conditions; conventions fall away like dry husks." Wow.

Einstein helped me realize that unless we have some threat or challenge, we are likely to self-gratify ourselves into the grave. Here I had children dependent upon me for their safety and survival. There wasn't even the freedom to be sick. I could be deliriously ill, high fever, but still had to render help to the helpless. In other words there was no sick leave. Who had time to self-gratify?

My biggest challenge was having to face myself for the first time because there was no place to escape. It seems that we humans will do anything except face ourselves. We eat, drink, we party, we entertain, we talk, we sedate, we run and race, we read ourselves blind, or work obsessively to fill every inch of day.

I remember reading a piece about Rose Kennedy, mother of President JFK. She had nine children and finally told her husband, Joe Kennedy that she needed to get away by herself, take a break, take a vacation from the family. Her husband casually dismissed this fancy by saying it wouldn't do her any good. She would "still have to come back to the same problems she had left behind". So why bother?

I nearly gagged at that statement even though it was true. It certainly isn't illegal to want to have a pause, a break, a breather from the daily routine and come back refreshed. Even prisoners get a break once in a while. My husband was the most considerate human being I have ever known, but I remember he almost choked on his dinner when I broached the idea of taking three days off by myself on Cape Cod, to recharge my burnt out batteries.

Rose Kennedy lived to be 104. She survived her husband and six children plus a litany of unthinkable tragedies. In other words she climbed Everest. I had to wait until it was the 2000's to climb mine. It was at that time I became the third wife.

But now I was about to become the second. One day that gray November in '67, something occurred that was life altering. All three children were upstairs, sick, while I was in the cellar washing sick diapers, retching at times, but trying to keep up with the supply. This was the era before throwaway diapers. I suddenly broke, I couldn't go on, couldn't do it anymore. The 24-hour mothering without any breaks had caught up with me.

Feeling, dizzy, helpless and hopeless, I dropped to the cold basement floor and began pounding my fists into the cement, screaming," I can't do this anymore. I don't know how to do it. I'm not up to it. God, tell me what to do. I'm surrendering. I'm giving you my life. In Jesus' name, help me!"

In this relinquishing mode, my whole body went totally limp and a part of me died right there on the basement floor. Something rose from the ashes of my former self as if a new part of me were bring born and delivered. Like a mythical phoenix I was consumed by the flames of my own frustration and helplessness and became reborn- out of the ashes of my former self, face down on the lowest floor level of my mountain home.

There was no ecstatic, joyous oceanic experience that so many others have described in this kind of surrender and breakthrough of consciousness. What I did have was an overwhelming deep, profound, and penetrating peace come over me. It moved over me like a warm blanket of light. I saw everything in a new way.

I became aware that we lived in a universe which is a vast ocean of love and caring intelligence. I could see that life and death were one, that life was a continuous journey whether we wanted it to be or not. It was at this time, I felt a semi-connection with that extraordinary loving light I had felt in the months following my birth.

I silently offered my heart, my soul, my mind, my hands, and whatever small talents I possessed to be used by the Creator, trusting utterly in that guidance, I felt like a tuning fork aligning with Divine Sound.

This couldn't have happened had I not hit bottom and felt I had nothing to lose by offering all to the Universe, or whatever you choose to call the All. It was not a big sacrifice. I had nothing to lose. It wasn't hard to give it all away completely and trust the Higher Intelligence. I was at the end of my rope anyway. What did I have to lose?

I can still see my body, face down on the concrete floor, wearing the jeans and faded shirt of my rebel days.Where am I now that I can look down and see me, feeling no pain for what was left behind. It's still there, my body, like an old worn cocoon that had waited long for me to stir, and break through the shell of pain. I don't miss you my body, but who am I now? Then I realized I had only just begun.

THE WORST DAY

IT IS STILL HARD to write or think about this particular day in my life. Much of that entire year's memories has been wiped out. I don't even know how old I was or when it all happened. I know it was winter and I think I was probably around ten years old. I could have been eleven.

IT WAS A SATURDAY MORNING. MY mother had fixed my hair into the two long braids, a ritual that continued until I was in the eighth grade. My father was sitting in the little den off the dining room, reading the paper and listening to the news on the radio. My sister was at a friend's house. Everything was normal but something didn't feel right. My mother noticed I had goose bumps on my arms. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It could been a reaction to the braiding.

Mother asked me to walk down to the post office, get the mail and buy a yeast cake at the store. She wanted to make rolls to go with the baked pea beans we were having for supper. Rolls were a change from the usual brown bread. She warned me not to eat the yeast cake on the way home, which I had often done when I was younger.

AFTER GETTING THE YEAST CAKE and checking the post office box for mail I turned to head home. George Nicholson, called to me from across the street by the train station. He lived a few houses down from us and was one of the younger children in a family of nine. Georgie had many sisters but only two older brothers. He was about two years younger than I,feisty and pesky. Word went around that he was always in trouble with his father.

With his skates slung over his shoulder, he crossed the street and came over to me,'Hey, Ellie, go get your skates.I'm going to skate the river. I'll wait for you down by the bridge.' I called back, 'Georgie, my father says the ice isn't safe.The boys on Clark Brook are only playing hockey on the back end. Besides, I'm not allowed to skate the river.' He persisted, 'You don't have to tell anyone where you're going. You can just tell them you're skating on the ice in Brucie's backyard.' I pulled away. 'We can't skate the river, it's just not safe.'

Two hours later, back home upstairs in my room, I heard the front door slam and my sister's voice, high pitched, strangled, and hysterical.I came to the top of the stairs and heard her gasp and blurt out, "Mom...Dad, George, Georgie Nicholson. He, he, he, drowned in the river!" A collective silence of disbelief fell on all of us.

She went on to tell how onlookers from River Street tried to throw him a rope, but it was so heavy it jumped out of their hands. They just couldnÕt get it to him in time, They had called the Andover Fire Dept but the men were busy out on other urgent calls.

In response to this big torrent of news, I fell to the floor on the top step of the stairs. It had felt to me as if a chunk of the ceiling had come down on top of my head, crushing me. I looked up at the ceiling, puzzled that it was intact as if nothing had happened, and it was hard to believe there was no blood all over me. My head hurt.

My parents heard the thud when I fell and came rushing up the stairs to see what had happened. I was told later that I only spoke the words,'No, no,no' over and over in a low moan. I was barely conscious.

Later I remember noticing that everything around me had lost color. My red sweater was a muddy looking green. The china in the dining room cupboard had lost its blues and golds. Now it looked dull and dark. My motherÕs colorful apron still had the flowers on in but no more pinks and greens. The colors appeared to be as light and dark tones of gray.

I hardly remember eating anything.I refused to let go of a freshly baked roll. I held it in my left hand and noon seemed able to take it away from me. No one spoke. But later I could hear my mother and father whispering quietly to each other.

Later, after supper, my father took me by the hand, led me to the front hall, and helped me into my winter coat, then tied my knit hat under my chin. I felt we were moving in slow motion as he walked me down the hill to the train station. I felt again, like a very small child, incapable of normal functioning, I never asked where we were going or what we were going to do, We just waited silently for the train.

We got off at the Andover depot and walked to the nearby movie theater.We went in to see a Bud Abbot and Lou Costello movie.I think the movie had something to do with the navy or sailors. In the past, the usual hilarity and crazy antics of these two would set me laughing and howling. But all the action and silliness now seem remote and flat.

I was glad my father never tried to make small talk or ask me anything. I just sat there feeling surrounded by his deep concern.His warm silent understanding helped far more than the movie. He knew how deep my sensitivities were to normal events, never mind to something like this.

After the movie, waiting for the train home, we spotted Virginia, another neighbor, ready to board. I spoke my first words since the accident and called, 'Did you hear about Georgie?' When I saw her questioning look as if she had no idea what had happenned, something primal rose out of me, something almost cruel. I watched her face fall and collapse as I spilled out the devastating news.

Normally,I tended to be overly sympathetic to people and almost feel their pain when they hurt. Now I almost needed Virginia to suffer the way I was suffering. I needed someone to share my agony. This was my first lesson in human behavior. People must be hurting very badly to want to have others hurt too. So strange, but that seems to be the case.

Many days later, our family went down to the Nicholson home to pay our last respects. Wakes or services were usually held in the hom at that time. Mr. Nicholson's light brown hair seemed to have turned grayish white almost overnight. George was not George at all. He looked like a mannequin, his skin, bluish. I realized it was not him anymore. No one knew what to say because there was nothing they could say. They all looked the way I was feeling, in a numbed state of shock.

Suddenly, I felt a presence in back of me. I turned around and I saw no one but sensed George right there in the room, over by the door, near a piece of furniture. I knew exactly where he was. There must have been an article of his clothing around too, because I could catch his particular boy smell. More than that, I could pick up on his agitation. He seemed annoyed and insulted that no one was paying attention to him no matter how hard he called out. He became irritated with me becase he knew I was aware of this presence but wasnÕt telling anyone.

I had to put my hand over my mouth to suppress a giggle. It seemed so natural having George there, thoroughly annoyed by the situaiton. It was as if we shared a forbidden secret. I went home feeling almost joyful. I was so elated that George was alive and well. There was also profound relief that he wasnÕt blaming me for not talking him out of skating the river. He had died never realizing that years later, in 1947, his oldest brother would be killed in the infamous Texas City Disaster when a ship exploded in Galveston Bay taking almost six hundred lives.

For months after the loss of George, I plagued my parents with questions. How can you care about the rugs and draperies at a time like this? Why did George have to die so young? Where do we go when we die?ÕWhy are we here in he fist place. My mother didnÕt know what to do with me? I couldnÕt believe people didnÕt talk about these things or debate them or wonder about them.

The pat answers of the various world religions failed somehow to satisfy. I wondered what good all the libraries, universities, houses of worship, bilblical interpretations, and medical beakthroughs were if no answers could address these life-and-death questions.

I thought, 'What does it mean to be able to anwer all the who, what where, when and how of life, if no one can answer the'why'.

It was Aristotle that supposedly came up with the term, metaphysics, a study that deals with unanswerable questions- a study that speculates and infers a truth. It tends to 'perhaps' around a subject as Robert Frost said he once liked to do.

The loss of George stopped me dead in my tracks and made me live in a black and white, no-color world for nearly two years. The paralysis, this deep well I was in gave me a secret plan for life. Like a detective, I decided to make it my life agenda to find answers to the unanswerable. I had to do this for my own satisfaction and thirst for meaning. I could later share any findings with anyone who might be interested.

According to the Holmes Rahe Readjustment Scale, loss of a spouse ranks as number one in the list of the forty-four most difficult life adjustments. Divorce is second on the list, Marriages comes in at seventh and retirement at number 10.

Loss of a close friend is number 17. Yet here was George, not even a close friend, just a neighbor I knew well and saw all the time. Yet his death literally changed my life.

If you haven't read the chapter Memories and Flashbacks, see below

THE EXCERPT BELOW is from the chapter entitled: Memories and Flashbacks.I had not told anyone about this incident before, even though I had written about the trip in my weekly column for the Berkshire Eagle.

In the 1970's, my husband and I took our first trip out of the country. We decided to go to England first so language would not be a barrier. Neither of us was prepared for what was to happen there. My mother had told me I was of English ancestry, but I had never thought of myself as English.

One day, our guide had yet another tour planned for us. Our bus stopped for a time in Henley-in-Arden, an ancient town eight miles from Stratford on Avon.The town seemed friendly and busy despite the old medieval shops, pubs, and bustling marketplace that had sustained since the Middle Ages.

Suddenly the bus had to stop for quite awhile in traffic on the outskirts of town, as if there were a problem up ahead. We sat for a while, when suddenly I spotted my house, the house in which I had once lived and died, many centuries ago. READ ON even if you find this difficult to believe.

I SAT TRANSFIXED, studying with guarded affection the left side of the house where I could still see the little stream where I had spent countless hours as a child, playing with small smooth stones on the bed of it. There had been posts on either side of the entryway where there still looked to be similar black metal sculptured animal creatures with wings near the stoop. As a child I would talk to these post pets as if they were real and were my friends.

I remembered that as you entered the house, there was a slightly curved staircase on the left of the front hall. There was a dark carved wooden banister. I remembered I regularly read and played at the foot of those stairs by the tall paned windows that were so tall they seemed to reach from floor to ceiling.

I remembered that at a certain time of day, the sun would shine through them and set up long beams of light and dust particles. The trees outside created moving shadows on the wall. They jumped around wildly in a storm, and on other days looked like faces or wagons or even horses. My stepfather patiently taught me to use my own hands to fashion shadow creatures against the wall. I would spend hours creating them.

I remember dying in this house at about the age of nine or ten and I can't believe I am writing about it. It had not been a happy life, but certain vivid events somehow explained a little of why I'm the way I am today.

More of excerpt:

I knew, or at least felt, that my mother resented me in some way. She liked to hide me behind her skirts when we went anywhere. By mistake, I learned that I was the result of a love tryst my mother had had with one of the most prosperous and respected men in the village. When she learned she was going to have a child, a former gentleman friend came to her rescue and agreed to marry her. He became my beloved stepfather.

My mother might have gotten away with this clandestine plan except for one glaring fact. I was the spitting image of my real father and my half sister and brother. The resemblance was so obvious that it must have been painfully humiliating for her to be seen with me.

She would often stare at me when she didn't think I knew it. She told me I had an air about me, a way of walking and talking that reminded her of the man that sent me packages from time to time. She was talking about my real father but never said so. This biological father was generous and every few months or as seasons changed, he would send me fine clothes. Once he sent me an indigo velvety cloak with a bonnet that took my breath away. I felt like a shy princess in it. Seldom would I wear it out of the house. It attracted too much attention.

My stepfather was kind and patient with me. He almost made up for my mother's coldness. He understood her pain and detachment but made sure I was well cared for by patiently teaching me little things, and helping me when I was struggling. He had a formal kind of warmth about him-if warmth can be formal. Even if he didn't say much, I was aware of his unflagging affection.

One sunny day in spring, I was walking home from somewhere with my parents. We may have been coming from church. I had wanted to wear my indigo cloak. Without warning, suddenly and furiously, it began to rain.

Some of the rougher boys in town were nearby and threw mud at me along with some pebbles. The mud got on my hair and cloak. A stone hit my head, threw me off balance, and knocked me down. The boys chanted something at me like, " We know where you get your fine clothes, we know where, we know where."

When we got home, my mother went upstairs and didn't come down again. My stepfather consoled me by saying my clothes would clean up, and a mud fight was just something town boys do. He would look at me with an aching compassion as if he could feel my pain. He knew there was nothing he could do for me or for my mother, but he was a good man and was the only bright light in my lonely isolated life.

That day the rain had soaked me through and I couldn't stop shivering. A hot bath didn't help. I became frail and sickly. I wasn't allowed outdoors anymore.I was glad. A weariness and a dark sadness fell upon my shoulders like a heavy weight that I couldn't seem to lift off.I missed playing by the stream and talking to my post pets, but I could atleast look out the door at them.

A few months later I died of a respiratory illness. I remember it well. I had secretly wanted so much to die that I prayed God would let me go, and at times I lost my breath. I didn't even care. I sensed that a wonderful freedom was coming; I was going to leave this bleak existence and escape from my mother's icy rejection.

One day, I felt suddenly very good. I became almost alert, and my stepfather thought I was rallying. He said my eyes looked strange and bright as if I were looking somewhere else. I felt an alert anticipation as if something exciting and wonderful was going to happen, then abruptly collapsed to the floor and died, and from wherever I was, I could see my parents rush to my body in horror.

I knew what was happening. I was loosening from my body as if it had been fastened to it by special ropes. As each cord or rope snapped loose, I felt airborne and exhilarated.I suddenly remembered having gone through this process many times before and I could hardly wait. I was going back to my elders and people and friends I had known before. Yes they were waiting for me. I could see them. Memories gushed back to me. Oh, you can't imagine the fun and joy. Oh thank you, God, for letting me go."

Suddenly the bus lurched forward and Jack and I were continuing the tour, but the flashback of memory was so vivid I couldn't shake it. It explained so much. In New England, in the 30's and 40's, illegitimate births were a major taboo. They didn't happen very often, or perhaps it was so hushed up we didn't learn of them.

But when it did happen, and I would hear about how a family had ostracized the mother-to-be, and she had to marry to give the baby a name,I felt a fathomless compassion for the baby that was born of it. I wanted to take care of the baby and give it extra love and affection. This was not exactly the standard way for a twelve or thirteen-year old girl of my age. But I would brood over such cases and hope the mother would not resent the baby too much for cutting short the freedom of her young life.
This is one of several unusual experiences and far-memory incidents recalled in the chapters entitled "No Warning" and "Memories and Flashbacks", pages 143-154.