Diary of a Native Floridian: Deserving

It's okay to let other people speak. Sometimes their eloquence is all you need.

To wit:

(the following entry is from this journal: http://journals.aol.com/peppypioneer/JustMeMusin/ )

Just Me Musin"

Friday, January 14, 2005
3:38:00 AM EST
Feeling Quiet
Hearing house is quiet My Mums Marriage

The year was 1949. I was seven years old and living with my maternal grandparents when my Mother and Jackie were married in a small ceremony in a church in San Francisco, Ca. Both had been married before and both brought a child into this union, a dughter of 7 by my mom and a son of 20 by Jackie.

After their union Betty and Jackie hitched an old travel trailer onto the back of an older car and set off to "see the country", stopping when the whim took them or they needed to work for a few months to replenish a dwindling bank account. For three years they criss-crossed the United States, staying for extended periods in Florida, Arizona, and California and settling finally in the fledgling town of Las Vegas, Nevada.

Betty worked as a waitress both while they were "on the road" and also once they set down roots in the Nevada desert. Jackie was a cook and easily found employment at one "greasy spoon" or another. While traveling both Betty and Jackie stayed in close contact with "their" children, visiting when possible and sending many letters and phone calls along the way.

In High School I went to Nevada to live with my mother and Jackie in Las Vegas. Life was rather routine, with work, school, chores, a little tv and an occasional forway to Lake Meade to fish or sun and swim. Fred and his wife came often to visit, bringing their daughter with them.

Mother and Jackie did everything they could do legally in their 34 years together to make the "passing" of one or the other easier, including pre-paying funeral expenses and buying adjoining plots.

At the end of their 33rd year together Jackie fell and broke a hip. This was the first time in my life experience with Mother and Jackie that I felt the sting of societies intolerence and rejection. Because mother and Jackie could not be "legally" married, both my mother and I were barred from sitting with Jackie while she lay dying in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, UNLESS WE LIED and said we were "relatives". Jackie's son could not leave LA at the time and stayed in touch by phone, but he did not make it over before his mother passed on.

Adding insult to injury, when my mother and I went to the funeral parlor where she and Jackie had purchased plans and plots, my mother was not allowed to pick a casket or arrange for the funeral until after Fred showed up and gave it his rubber stamp of approval. In addition, the local newspaper would not list my mother, who had been Jackie's life mate for 34 years, in the obituary. For many friends, Jackie's passing would go unnoticed because her obituary carried her "given" name, not the one she had used for fifty years, and my mother wasn't listed by name to help with "recognition".

Betty and Jackie worked hard their entire lives. They raised children who became heterosexual, functional and moral adults. They paid taxes and contributed to the charities of their choice. They never got to reap the benefits of a "marriage tax break" or any other. They lived in a time when each had to provide their own health insuance, or do without. Did they think this was fair? No, of course not,, but their complaints were few and mostly had to do with being "accepted" as worthwhile human beings, not "sinners" or "perverts".

I wish that many "Christians" I know could have the benefit of knowing these two loving and caring people as I did. It is hard to see "sin" in the face of love, compassion and normalcy. Both my mother and Jackie had made an attempt to be other than who/what they were by marrying and bearing children. My father left for good when I was less than a year old. Jackie stayed in her marriage until she was widowed at an early age. Both were miserable in their roles as "wife" and both thrived in their relationship with one another. I can only believe that God smiled on their union because only good things came from it. Peace

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