Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (7 page)

O
ver time, Derek’s attention seemed to be gravitating my way. Now as I look back, his interest was obvious. But then, I was so nervous about getting my hopes up only to have them later squelched, I questioned every invitation and the motives behind them. I wanted to believe they were indicators that he was interested, but my fear took over and told me to protect my heart and not get excited. He asked me to go out for dinner after work, to go to coffee on our day off, to pick him up from the airport when he came home from a weekend of visiting mutual college friends. It’s obvious now, but my insecurities, my fear of eventual abandonment, told me then to protect.

Finally I got it. He was more forthright, and I was ready to hear. We were both in wonder that our lives were connecting. It was wonderful, full of wonder, that this handsome, strong, sensitive, Jesus-pursuing man would be taken with me in the same way I was with him. There was an understanding that this wasn’t a casual relationship, a “let’s just date and see what happens.” We were sure if this “worked,” it was for a lifetime.

And though it felt wonderful, it also felt terrifying. I didn’t want to do anything that would prompt him to leave. So I avoided tension. He decided on our dates, what we did, where we ate, how we progressed. I’m not really sure why he continued pursuing me. I was generally silent and wide-eyed, a pretty boring girlfriend. He now says it forced him to step up and initiate, but he agrees I was a mystery in many ways.

“I think we should do pre-engagement counseling,” Derek told me one day.

My heart stopped. What did that mean? Was engagement the direction he thought we were going? Was the counseling going to determine whether or not he proposed? If so, it sounded like a loaded activity. Loaded with potential affirmation or disaster. I stayed silent.

“Well, I’ve heard of other couples doing it,” he continued. “You know, once you’re engaged, you’ve kind of decided you’re getting married.”

This was sounding like an even worse idea.

“Besides, our health insurance will cover six sessions. We should do it before we leave.”

It was spring at the Dale House, and we had about five more months before we moved on. Not wanting to sound like I had anything to hide, I agreed. “Sure.”

Before our first session, we went to the counselor’s office and filled out a questionnaire.

“Sit apart, where you can’t see each other’s answers,” the counselor instructed us. I looked at Derek. He rolled his eyes. I tried not to laugh.

We used number two pencils to fill in bubbles to questions about extended family, finances, and hopes for life. Many of the topics seemed irrelevant, things I’d never thought of before. Did I consider myself a saver or a spender? I’d never had any money to determine one way or another. The topics that weren’t irrelevant
seemed obvious. I knew what I wanted: a traditional family, kids, division of labor, stability.

We turned in our computer answer sheets to the counselor. “You’ll get your results in two weeks when you have your first appointment,” she said as she took our papers. I didn’t think I could wait two weeks to find out if we were considered compatible.

The counseling sessions were rather uneventful. I went into each one hoping she would declare us a guaranteed success as a married couple. Instead she commented on how quiet I was. I did my best to answer questions with “whatever he said” without actually using those words.

At the end of our six sessions, she declared “no red flags.” Then she turned to me. “There is one thing that I think
you
need to explore.”

I felt the spotlight blaring down.

“I don’t think you’ve fully worked through your father’s absence.”

What does that have to do with anything?
I thought.
With my relationship with Derek?
Though there was a tiny part of me that knew it was true.

“I’m fine,” I answered, my defenses up. I tried to catch a glimpse of Derek out of the side of my eye to gauge his reaction.

“I would recommend you get some counseling on your own to come to some resolution there.”

She was calling me out, exposing me as damaged goods. Even though I’d tried to call as little attention to myself as possible during our six insurance-covered sessions, the needy, pathetic girl who was abandoned was still obvious. Who had daddy issues that any suitor should steer clear from. I was the problem getting in the way of us moving forward.

“Other than that, you seem pretty compatible on the big things.”

Other than that. Other than me and all my baggage, we should be fine.

Weeks later in Derek’s apartment, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I was done trying to hide, keeping my
wounds covered, living every moment afraid that he would see enough and decide I was too much of a basket case to go on. I let my sobs fall into his shoulder. I cried for the girl I was who desperately wanted her daddy’s attention and never got it. For the teenager who worked so hard to be perfect to prove her worth. For the scared young woman who had fallen in love and was terrified she wasn’t worth sticking around for.

“Trust me,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I tightened my grip around his waist and surrendered to trust.

T
he year that followed was filled with moving back to the Pacific Northwest, wedding plans, and conflict. We decided to move to Portland to try dating in the real world, away from the intensity of the Dale House, before getting engaged. Really, Derek came up with that plan and I went along with it. Two months of real-world dating was long enough, and the day after Thanksgiving, Derek was down on one knee asking me to share life with him until death do us part.

Though the engagement did feel like the promise I’d been waiting for, the deepest insecurities were still there. As we chose flowers and guests, the short remarks came out under the guise of fighting over wedding details. When really it was me fighting against myself, my worries, that this dream could really be coming true—a man I adored was choosing me forever.

If I were to plan my wedding again, I wouldn’t have put so much energy into selecting bridesmaids’ dresses and invitations. I would have used those months to face my emotional junk head-on. I would have better handled my mom’s skepticism of my decision to get married young. Been more confident in the life decisions
I was making that were different from hers. Examined my fears that
husband
would be another word that could be defined as “one who abandons.” Instead I held it in, was stressed on my big day, and snapped at the photographer.

No surprise our first year of marriage was difficult. The leaving and cleaving process is painful for anyone. Facing the other person with their morning breath and stench-soaked socks loses the romance about the first time it happens.

I was fortunate that I was desperately in love with Derek. It helped when the predictable fights about sex, money, and in-laws went down. I didn’t question whether I’d married the right person. I just didn’t understand why everything felt like a song being played out of tune.

On our first anniversary we let the phone’s rings echo through our apartment until the answering machine picked up.

“Hi! You’ve reached Derek and Alex.” I could hear my own voice, recorded months earlier, filling the room. I’d been so excited to say those words, “Derek and Alex”—now one number, one unit. “We can’t come to the phone right now,” my voice continued.

I glared over at Derek sitting on my college futon that acted as the apartment’s central piece of furniture. I softly laughed, hoping that would break the tension. We couldn’t come to the phone right now, that was for sure; we weren’t in the mood to talk to anyone.

“Leave us a message,” my voice practically sang to the caller on the other line.
BEEEEP!

“Well, calling to wish you a happy anniversary.” My father-in-law’s voice rang through the apartment. “Since it’s your paper anniversary, you’re probably out spending lots of paper money.”

“Ha!” I said, looking at Derek. You would think—out celebrating our first year of marital bliss! But no, we were fighting. Fighting about my disappointment with his anniversary gift: a wooden drying rack for the dishes. Fighting about the fact that he hadn’t made plans for us to go out that night because he assumed eating
out the previous Saturday night counted as our celebration. Fighting about my generally critical attitude.

“Is this a joke?” I’d asked as I unwrapped the gift. I was almost speechless, but able to muster up that question.

“I thought you’d like it. I bought it at that kitchen store at Lloyd Center. You’ll use it every day,” he continued. His motives were probably thoughtful—splurging on something from a foodie store I liked but couldn’t afford to shop at—but his conclusions were dead wrong.

“You think
I’ll
use it every day? How about
you
using it every day?”

“Why do you always assume the worst of me? I thought you’d like it.”

It was the kind of fight where the drying rack started to represent his attitude about my role as the dishwasher in our relationship. And that morphed into his perception of my role as housekeeper in general. In his mind, my instant criticism of the gift characterized my general attitude about him. “You always” and “You never” started to fly around the room until we were sitting on opposite sides—him on the futon, me on the sheet-covered chair from my violet-decorated childhood bedroom—staring at each other in silence.

Our disappointments in the day were representing our disappointments in the last year. Like all newlyweds, we brought distinct expectations to the altar on our wedding day. Mine were based largely on Hallmark commercials and observations from the handful of lasting marriages I saw growing up. My senior year of high school, I’d lived in a newlywed home. My mom and Larry brought lifetimes of experiences and expectations to their relationship that offered unique challenges. So I didn’t see them as a realistic model for what marriage and its arguments looked like.

There was an upside to all the fighting. It indicated I was starting to feel safe enough to disagree. Derek had married me, and I
knew he intended it to be for life. So I could let my guard down a little. I could start having a voice. I think he was relieved I was starting to have opinions.

“You don’t pay enough attention to me,” I said when my father-in-law was done leaving his anniversary well-wishes.

Derek’s face was a combination of disbelief and frustration. It silently barked,
Are you kidding me?

I kept talking. “I don’t feel it. I don’t feel loved.”

I was starting to get desperate. Not sure really what I wanted to say, but we were so deep into the argument I was trying to claw myself out of the hole I’d created with my earlier words. To prove that he was at fault. For the situation. For my feelings.

“What do you want from me?” He was exasperated. How could he possibly meet all of my needs?

And that’s when I realized it. I really did expect him to meet all of my needs. I’d heard people say you can’t expect that from your spouse; you must turn to God to meet your needs. But that all sounded like a bunch of Christian noise. Besides, I was going to have a different kind of marriage, a “you complete me” kind of marriage. In the same instant that I realized my expectations, I saw how faulty they were. Two imperfect people cannot one healed woman make. Only Jesus could do that.

As cliché as it felt, I was expecting Derek to be my Savior. Expecting him to fill the burning hole my father had left. To love me so intensely I would know my worth. When I say it now, it sounds foolishly unrealistic, but I’d lived so long thinking,
When I’m married, then . . .

I’ll feel loved.

I’ll be happy.

I’ll be secure.

Realizing all of this, I was angry. Angry at him and at God. I knew my expectations were the root of the conflict, but I’d been
working the last hour to prove how right I was and how wrong Derek was. It was hard to suddenly flip and admit my own blaring fault in the issue. I wanted to stay mad at him. Why couldn’t he be more than he was humanly intended to be? I knew it was ridiculous, but that’s what I wanted.

And I was mad at God. I didn’t want him to be the one I had to turn to—that sounded lonely. I wanted someone tangible. A man who would hug me and kiss me and tell me he loved me in an audible voice. Who would buy me romantic gifts that would be perfect in every way: beautiful AND practical and not over budget. For him to be perfect in every way.

Derek got up and walked down the hall to our bedroom. As he walked by, I wanted him to stop. To apologize. But he kept walking, and I sat staring at the carpet. Left to pray, “God, help me.”

A
few months later, Derek and I took the subway from the Paris airport to our hotel, blocks away from the Eiffel Tower. The straps from the camping backpack cut into my shoulders from the excessive weight bearing down. As we stood holding on to the subway car’s poles, I looked at Derek with his equally huge backpack and felt ridiculous. The Parisians seated around us stared at us, the obvious tourists who’d overpacked, their faces blank slates. Oh why did we think we needed so much? We were playing the role of the ugly Americans with our Costco packing mentalities. My mother trained me better.

My father was living in France with my sister and her mother, a native Frenchwoman. I hadn’t invited them to our wedding a year earlier in the off chance they might actually show up. There was no question I wanted Larry to walk me down the aisle, and the thought of the potential tension was enough to make me want to hide. So there was one thing I needed to happen for Derek to understand my complexities: I needed him to meet my father. And I wanted him to see the places of my childhood, Barcelona and Terni, to better understand this wide-eyed girl he’d married.
He’d never been to Europe before, and I wanted him to see, smell, hear, and feel the places that shaped me.

Plane tickets weren’t cheap for a one-income couple who took the calculator to the grocery store. Derek was in the throes of full-time graduate school, and I was working for Catholic Charities, translating for migrant parents and students at a rural high school. Every penny was precious. But Derek’s grandparents, Mama and Papa, gave us some money for a wedding gift. They wanted us to buy life insurance; we wanted to go on a European vacation. Derek had the summer off, so we packed our backpacks for a five-week trek.

Paris was our first stop and one of the only places on our itinerary I hadn’t been. So Rick Steves’s books told us where to stay and what to see in the iconic city. It was August, and Paris was deserted. Shops had metal gates pulled shut for the month. The only Parisians left seemed to be those who catered to the tourists, so we walked from site to site as if it was Disneyland and we were hitting all the major rides without the lines. We shared a baguette and cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I laughed when we kissed.

Before we took the train to see my father and his growing family, we wanted to make one small detour. To see the beaches at Normandy where Derek’s grandfather, Papa, had landed on D-Day many years earlier. A World War II battle scene would never have been on my travel schedule in the past, but this was our trip and this spot was the one thing Derek wanted to see. It was only a few hours by train off our route, so how could I disagree?

“Here, take this with you.” Months earlier, Papa had handed Derek a patch with an Indian head inside a star. Papa sat in his recliner in the living room of the assisted living facility in rural Colorado where he lived with his wife of sixty years, Eva. A retired physician, he’d served as a medic in the war. “It was from our infantry.”

Derek looked down at the patch and wrote down a few numbers as Papa talked. The infantry division, platoon number, regiment—it all breezed through my brain, but Derek wanted to have his homework done when we got there. Papa was in his nineties, and though usually slow getting out of his recliner, he was mentally sharp, as able to make jokes about the current president as he was to recall the details of waiting in the boat to go up the beach.

“I was one of the oldest ones,” he told us—already married, a trained physician when he’d enlisted. “Some of those boys lied about their age so they could go fight.” His eyes watered. “We were all so seasick. We were delayed a day out there on the water because of the weather. Boys were throwing up over the sides.” As he hunched over in his chair, I saw history alive in front of me.

A few years after that, my father-in-law would stand at the top of a ramp at Union Station in downtown Denver. He would point to it and tell me that was where he met Papa as a two-year-old boy. Where he met his daddy for the first time as he returned on the train from war. I imagined a young, handsome Papa walking up the ramp in his uniform, taking his boy in his arms. And a young Mama so relieved her doctor husband was home.

We carried our backpacks through the cobbled streets of Normandy to the youth hostel we’d emailed weeks earlier. Flags from around the world hung from the second stories of stone buildings. Later, as we walked to the center of town to book a tour for the next day, signs greeted us in windows. In English they read, “Veterans welcome here.” Tours were based on language and country of interest. Those standing in line to purchase the German tours shifted their weight from side to side. We splurged and signed up for a small-group semiprivate tour for Americans.

“Do any of you have a personal connection?” the Frenchwoman driving the van called over her shoulder as she turned down the
road that would take us toward the Normandy beaches. Her dark hair and obvious French accent reminded me of my father’s girlfriend.

The three middle-aged couples who shared our van shook their heads. Based on their ages and collared dress shirts, I suspected they fit the profile of the typical tourists in this history-saturated town.

“My grandfather was here on D-Day,” Derek spoke up. The attention in the van shifted toward us as the other couples stared at him, a little bit in awe.

“Oh! Did he come back for the anniversary?” Our tour guide talked to her rearview mirror as she drove. “I got to host a group of veterans for the week. It was
fantastíque
!”

“No. He came back. But not for the anniversary.”

“Oh.” She lowered her voice. “Well, tell your grandfather ‘thank you’ from us. We owe him our freedom. Do you know what regiment he was in?” The pep was back in her voice. “I could take you to where he landed.”

My cynical side guessed her friendly nature was her attempt at a bigger tip at the end of the hour. But her enthusiasm didn’t seem contrived. Maybe some French could tolerate Americans.

Pulling the piece of paper from months earlier out of his pocket, Derek started throwing out numbers. Our tour guide shook her head, saying, “
Non
,
non
.” I could tell Derek was frustrated, disappointed. He thought he’d written the numbers down just as Papa had said, but the tour guide insisted, “There was no regiment with that number.”

Then Derek pulled the patch out of his pocket and handed it to her over the seat. “I have this.”

She pulled the van to the side of the road and stopped, took the patch in her hand, and turned it over to reveal the Indian head symbol.

“Oohhh!” No need for translation, this universal exclamation said there was meaning behind what she held. The entire group
was now looking at her with eyebrows raised, leaning in with expectation.

“This is for the 2nd Division. I know right where they landed.”

I expected everyone in the van to start giving each other high fives. Papa was no longer just Derek’s grandfather; within minutes he had moved into the position of van hero.

“Shall we go there?” she asked our group. There was no question as everyone nodded furiously. The tour had quickly changed to a personal interest story that we all wanted to claim as our own. Our tour guide did a U-turn, and we headed south along the rocky coastline.

In a way, Derek’s story was becoming mine. And mine his. Our lives were not just crossing, they were melding, creating a new legacy built from both our histories. This trip was evidence of that. Unlike the other passengers in the van, I had a special claim on Papa’s story. He was part of Derek, so in a two-lives-becoming-one kind of way, he was part of me.

Pulling halfway up a slope, our new French friend stopped the van and put the parking brake on. Turning around in her seat, she looked Derek directly in the eye.

“Here we are.” She motioned to the van door with her hand. “They walked from the beach up this hill.”

We looked out the window to see a small stone marker with the now familiar Indian head symbol on it. We climbed out of the van one at a time, and the wind wrapped around us and snapped of men who had died climbing on their bellies up the hill. Derek stretched his long legs out of the van and stopped. He looked down at the ocean below with its gray water and churning waves. He turned and looked up the hill with the grass blowing sideways. Tears began sliding down his cheeks, and he looked down at me. I smiled back between my tears.

The other members of our group stepped aside to clear a path between us and the stone mini-monument. Derek faced it with
the ocean in the background, picturing his grandfather waiting an extra day past the breakers in the choppy water, scared for his life. He looked up the hill, imagining Papa crawling between downed soldiers to see if he could help.

It was a moment where history of country, family, and self came together and created a sacred place. I watched Derek’s face and heard the rhythmic crashing of the waves in the distance.

There is a reason we say they stormed the beaches at Normandy. They didn’t simply run or meander or stroll. They charged with a passion for country and freedom, knowing their lives would likely be sacrificed for a greater good. Standing on that hillside, I saw part of the legacy my future children would be born into.

Neither one of us wanted to get back in the van, but we were shivering from the wind. Our van mates were patiently waiting in the vehicle, watching us through the windows. A few of them wiped tears from their cheeks.

As we drove away, one of the other passengers, a rotund Midwestern kind of man, broke the silence. “Tell your grandfather ‘thank you’ from us too.”

As I looked up at my husband, I thought I might explode from pride.