The Lived Legacy Diaries

Tales from the Treehouse

“I'm Going to Marry That Man."

It was February 1985, I was looking out a window at work, watching David walk across the parking lot toward his car, when a thought came over me:

“I'm going to marry that man.”

Now, at twenty-nine, my 30th birthday was in May and I was still living at home.

I didn't have a boyfriend.

Whenever I complained that I was never going to find a husband, my mother would give me a little smile and say,

“Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. ”Marriage looked like something that happened to somebody else.

So I walked away from that window thinking, Glynis, that's just wishful thinking.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting at work when I could feel somebody looking at me. I looked up over the cubicle wall, and there was David.

“Oh, hi," I said to him.  He responded; “Did anyone ever tell you that you have the most beautiful blue eyes?”

I rolled my eyes and replied "yes as a matter of fact they have...but that's a really good line. I'll have to remember that!”

And that was the beginning...

We were married in August of 1986 at 31 years old.

I can honestly say my thirties were the best decade of my life! The happiest. I went from being single and

wondering whether I would ever marry to being a wife  at 31 and the mother of two daughters, Mary Catherine at 33 years old  and Annie at 36.

All in one decade.

But there was sadness in those years, too.

After Mary Catherine was born, I lost my mother. There I was, a new mother, with a 14 month old infant, needing my own mother so much.

I would see other women my age walking with their babies and their mothers. And here I was, pushing a baby carriage by myself,

praying my mom was with me.

I'm seventy-one now. That feeling has never left me. After a difficult birth and then losing my mother, I said I wasn't going to have another child. Getting pregnant hadn't been easy either, so I thought Mary Catherine would be our only child.

Then one morning I woke up feeling very sick. Something wasn't right. I can't possibly be pregnant?  Sure enough, I was pregnant. I panicked. How was I going to do this without my mother?

But when Annie was born, and I lay in that hospital bed holding her, all bundled up, looking at her beautiful little face, I said:

“You are my special angel.” A gift from above that I would like to believe my Mom in Heaven had something to do with this gift.

I've told Annie that story her whole life. I truly believe my mother had something to do with Annie coming into my life. To me, it was her way of saying, I'm here with you.

There is something else from those years that is still here with us: a Kennedy rocker. I special ordered it from Nantucket as David's wedding present.

He gave me a Claddagh ring, engraved with our wedding date.

At the time, I was buying my husband the Rocker, I had no idea how much of our life together would happen in it. David sat in it watching football. I sat in it talking on the phone.

Then he sat in it reading bedtime books to our little girls.

Years later, he was reading to our grandchildren in that same rocker.

And Mary Catherine gave her husband a Kennedy rocker as a wedding gift. What is he doing in his? The same thing David has done in his for all these years.

When I ordered that wedding gift, could I have imagined any of this?

One day that rocker will be empty. I hope that day is a long way off. But I want my family to know what happened in that chair, and what it meant to me.

That thought came to me recently, in the shower one early morning, where apparently hot water gets all the memories going.

It's why I want to write these Lived Legacy Diaries. I want my daughters and grandchildren to know who I was before they knew me.

What Grammy did. What I thought my life would be, and what actually happened.

There is so much about my parents' and grandparents' lives that I never knew. I don't want my family to have to piece mine together from whatever they happen to remember hearing.

I want to tell it myself, while I'm here and I can remember. The good, the bad, the funny, the things that still make me cry.

So let's keep chatting in the Treehouse. There are plenty more years to talk about.

What decade of your life do you remember most?

And what memories have you carried with you into all the years since?