Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Getting Married



My parents raised me to be an independent thinker. I am also not afraid of hard work although I would rather sit back with a good book and a cup of tea. I never developed a taste for coffee so tea it is.

When my husband and I decided to marry I did not tell my family. There were several reasons. One was that independence. I was used to doing things my own way... within the limits of house rules of course. Also my family had very little money and could not afford a wedding.

The main reason was that my parents did not approve of my boyfriend. Now that I am a mother I understand that no one would have been good enough for me but at the time my rebellious nature took hold. I have to tell you now that my parents came to love him very much and he loved them as much.

I met my husband on a Saturday night. That was the night all the kids "hung out" downtown. He was driving around with a couple of his friends and I was with my sister and a couple of my friends. It was shortly after Christmas. We made a date for New Years Eve. The guys would pick us up at my house.

In the meantime my sister and I were out past curfew and my parents grounded us. When the guys came to pick us up we had to go down and tell them that we could not go with them. They wanted us to just get in the car and go. My girlfriend said she was not grounded and she was going. My sister and I decided to go too. So we jumped in the car and took off. I saw my father running after the car and yelling.

We rode around for a while. That was what kids did then unless the drive-in theater was open. We had a good time. Except for wondering what was going to happen when we got home that is.

My parents were furious. My father actually spanked us. With a belt! He did not hurt us. It was one of those times that he needed to do something and a spanking seemed to be in order. We were re-grounded with a much longer sentence.

Eventually my soon-to-be boyfriend got brave enough to come around again. My parents gave us permission to go out but it was not happily.

So we dated and eventually decided to get married. I was out of high school and working at the hospital. He worked for a farmer that lived less than a mile from the farm my family had moved to.

But we still wanted to pay for the wedding ourselves so we made arrangements to stack bales of hay for a neighbor of his parents. That was when I learned to drive a truck.

To gather the bales of hay for stacking we had an old farm truck with a flatbed trailer behind it. Attached to the truck was a machine that, if correctly positioned while the truck was moving, would act as an elevator and deposit the bales on the flatbed. The person on the flatbed had to retrieve them and place them in order on the trailer.

Bales of hay are deceptive. One might weigh 50 pounds while the next might be 75 pounds. You never knew what you were going to get until you tried to lift it. So my husband decided that I should drive the truck and he would arrange the bales on the truck.

When the trailer was full we would drive to the spot to stack the bales. Then the bales were lifted from the flatbed to the stack and put in place so they would be secure.

I was doing quite well at centering the bales so the elevator would pick them up. I was driving right along until there was a knock on the door of the truck. I had turned too fast on a little hill and dumped my boyfriend and several bales off the truck. I was a bit more careful after that and we had no more accidents.

My boyfriend's father came to see how we were doing. I was up on the stack of bales arranging them and my boyfriend went over to talk to his father. His father was furious. He told his son to get up there and not let me do all that hard work.

His father and I both worked at the hospital. Soon after that he was going around telling anybody who would listen that I was going to be his daughter-in-law. I guess he liked my gumption.

So we had the money for everything. The problem was that in our state he was too young to marry without parental consent. He went to his mother to get her to sign the paper. I went with him.

She refused at first. Finally she relented and signed. She told us not to "tell Dad" that she had signed. She had no idea that he approved.

So we went to get the license.We had the blood test results and the permission slip. Unfortunately we had not known that the state laws were slightly stricter than we thought.

At the desk the woman told us that even with parental consent he could not marry unless I was pregnant. Was that the case? He quickly nodded and said, "Yes." I turned many shades of red. Of course I was not pregnant. And she required proof from a doctor. No license that day.

We finally found that across the border the state would marry us if he was as old as I was. He made a slight change on the consent form and we got our license there.

We were married by a retired clergyman there. He and his wife were so nice. The ceremony was conducted in their home.

We were going to live in a farm house owned by the farmer my husband worked for. It was common for farmers to buy other farms and rent out the houses on them. Sometimes they became part of the wage package. We spent our first night there.

The plan was to get up first thing in the morning and go tell my parents. Instead we woke up to my father standing over our bed. He told me to get dressed and he took me home.

My brother was there too. He was letting the air out of my husband's car tires.I have no idea how he finally managed to reach someone to help him air them.

I spent my first full married day at my parent's house crying my eyes out. My mother insisted the marriage would be annulled. My husband would drive by or stop in the middle of the road and try to get me to go with him.

The problem was that I had been their daughter a lot longer than I had been his wife. I could not go.

That night Daddy began to soften. He could see how miserable I was. That night he told me he would see if he could get Mom to bend a little too.

The next morning when I got up my mother-in-law was there with my husband. She sensibly explained that we were married. Maybe they should let us be married.  I went home with my husband.

When I tell my children this story they are amazed. It is very hard to explain how we were raised to obey our parents. Even though I was grown (and now married) I was still their daughter.

It took very little time for everyone to make up. Soon we were a big happy family again.

25 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. True stories are usually the best. And I got four beautiful children out of the deal.

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  2. I loved your story of true love, Emma. Not only the love of your sweetheart/husband...

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  3. WOW!!!
    love brings the miracle into happens so you guys made it and i am so glad for you because my soul feel a soothing peace when ever i hear or read about tow people who love and choose each other forever and stay loyal and caring for each other till their last breath .
    love makes the world beautiful and lovers are the PRECIOUS SOULS

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    1. Unfortunately the ending of the story is not as happy as you think. We were divorced after 20 years of marriage. He was not a bad person and I was not a bad person. It just worked out that way. But our children were the gift that still gives.

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  4. That is a very interesting story, Emma - amazing that your parents wanted you to stay in their house though you were married (maybe they didn't believe it in the first moment, only when his parents came?) To marry so young has advantages and drawbacks, I think - but you all managed well, raised your children, so it was good, even if you split up after 20 years, or?

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    1. They knew I was married but I think they were hoping to change that. Sometimes a marriage will just die and that is what happened to us. We tried to make it better but in the end it was over. My parents thought the world of my husband and he thought the world of them. Even after the divorce he would visit my mother. My father was no longer with us. My husband and I were fortunate because we each had good parents-in-law.

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  5. Beautiful story Emma. Jilda and I waited until I was out of the Army before we married so we were both old enough that we didn't need co-signers :)
    I love hearing how people met their spouses.
    r

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    1. Each person's story is different. They are all interesting.

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  6. Great stories! Thanks for sharing them. It was a different time, that's for sure. My husband and I had a similar problem getting married in that he wasn't 21 yet and the age of consent where we got married was 18 for girls and 21 or men. That caused all sorts of problems because his mother was in Indiana (his father had passed) and we were in NYS trying to get married.

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    1. Sometimes real stories seem unreal. I take it that you were finally successful in getting married. At the time I was married most people did not "just live together" like they do now. And I am sure my parents would have disliked that idea even more than the real situation.

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    2. We did finally manage it. 45 short years ago.

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    3. It must have been worth the trouble. 45 Years is a long time.

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  7. Glad that the marriage finally was allowed to continue by your parents, Emma, and that your husband and parents put aside their differences.

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    1. That is the way a family should operate. I used to say that my husband married me not my family but he became an important part of our family. I was also lucky because I became an important part of his family.

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  8. I loved learning your story, Emma. I'm a bit younger than Mrs. RWP too but somehow I have always acted like the older one. When our marriage license info appeared in the Legal Notices section of the Orlando newspaper, someone at the newspaper must have thought it was obviously an error and added ten years to my age. So we didn't get any questions or strange looks from friends and neighbors, Lol! Now it's 53 years later and I am 75 and she just turned 81. More good times than bad times and more ups than downs. Your story would make a good book!

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    1. My children often tell me I should write a book. I have tried a couple of times but it is so hard to get it organized. This blog is the perfect place to write my memories and the family stories. I want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to know about their family. I am glad you enjoyed the story.

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  9. "I saw my father running after the car and yelling."

    I started to, and it is my habit to, have my mind theater playing.

    :-)
    :-)

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    1. I remember my father spanking me 3 times. One time was not deserved because there was a misunderstanding in what I said and what my parents understood. This spanking was deserved.

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  10. "When I tell my children this story they are amazed. It is very hard to explain how we were raised to obey our parents."

    I think that this is to their shame. How odd it is that children think they know so much more than their parents, however fallible those parents be.

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    1. My children all have independent personalities like their parents. They have always treated us with the utmost respect but it is sometimes difficult for them to understand a different time. We deferred to our parents when my children would be more likely to inform us.

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    2. My dear, I so enjoy you.

      “We deferred to our parents when my children would be more likely to inform us.”

      That’s why I say it is to the shame of any young person who thinks that he knows as much and is in better position to make sound judgments than those who have lived two or three times as long and seen a thousand times more of life. Of course, this is simply part of youth. I remember feeling sorry for older adults because they seemed so ignorant and oblivious to what, in my mind, was important. Now I look back and blush at how asinine I was to think that, in my short and sheltered life—and due to the fact that I smoked pot, drank heavily, read Alan Watts, had a few girlfriends, and listened to rock music—I had learned as much about life as people who had survived WWII, the Great Depression, the deaths of parents and sometimes spouses, held many jobs, lived in many places, had many lovers (in my father’s case), and so forth. The independence of the young is seldom anything more than a swapped dependence from the older and wiser to the current fads of thought, dress, and behavior. The young are quite often a walking illustration of the fact that we either learn from history or we’re doomed to repeat it.

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    3. You make some good points. My children are all grown now. None of them smoke or do drugs. One has an occasional alcoholic drink but it is not a regular thing. The rest do not drink at all. They had rules and followed them. But I encouraged them to be open with me and asked the same from them. All teenagers think they know everything. It is up to us parents to continue to guide them when they absolutely know we are ignorant.

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