November 20

We bought our first car that year, a Chevrolet Cavalier hatchback.  I loved that car!  It was very helpful for getting back and forth to Dallas Baptist that fall.  I also took turns driving the school bus and depositing the kids at the high school.  Unfortunately the buses were old and usually overcrowded.  One day I was unable to make a stop at a red light and I yelled at everyone to hang on and literally stood on the brake.  I was below ten mph when I hit the car in front of us so they weren’t injured but I got a nice ding on my driving record.

The job was not physically hard but it began to take a mental toll on us.  There were two phases to this during our time there.  In one phase we had some marital problems.  I don’t honestly remember the details of the problems (although it may have had to do with my own gaming addiction I don’t think porn was a big issue yet) but I do remember the manifestation.  My wife attempted to get my attention by pretending to be interested in one of the single male dorm parents.  One time she even called me from his apartment!  I’m pretty sure nothing happened there, but I couldn’t swear to it.  But it was definitely her modus operandi and wouldn’t be the last time she tried to get attention by acting out.

Eventually we started trying to have a baby and she had read a book about ovary cycles, etc. So there was a lot of sex based on schedule and temperature and not on spontaneity.  Finally she did get pregnant but a few months later had a miscarriage.  A few months after that she got pregnant again and as soon as the doctor confirmed it we decided that we should probably move on from this stressful job.  So we did.  When David was born in 1982 we were living in apartments in Benbrook.  DeeAnne was working at my dad’s church in the nursery and I was working at an insurance company doing plain data entry.

The insurance company was not large and was owned and run by a family.  Most of the relatives were employed.  My boss was, I think, married to one of these blood relatives.  Regardless, I was driving from one side of Fort Worth to the other every day and my time management skills have always been horrible, so it was really no surprise when I was late to the time clock on a fairly regular basis.  I was actually relieved when they finally fired me because I was so completely bored to tears by that job.

My next bold career move was to attempt to enter the sales field, so I started at the bottom by training to sell Kirby vacuum cleaners.  For probably six months I spent my days walking door to door attempting to generate leads.  We would walk neighborhoods and attempt to give away knife sets and free carpet cleanings in exchange for a vacuum cleaner demonstration.  Then in the afternoons, evenings and weekends I would go and DO the demonstrations.  I shampooed a LOT of carpets.  I sold a few vacuum cleaners, one of which was to my parents.  But it wasn’t enough.  Then I tried selling cancer and heart attack insurance policies.  That was also door to door, most often at businesses during the day, during business hours.  The results were similar.  I believe I also did some temp work during this time as a secretary/word processor but I’m a bit sketchy on the details.  Things were not looking good.

During our stay in Benbrook we attended a Baptist church there but never really got to know the people there very well.  We also visited my dad’s church now and then.  While we were still in Benbrook my video game habit kicked back in, usually at the nearby convenience store.  In addition I began some strange sexual fantasy habits.  It was basically just masturbation with a bit of exhibitionism thrown in.  No, I didn’t actually walk around with nothing but a rain coat on, but I did do a lot of standing in the dark looking out the window in an attempt to spy some nakedness in some neighboring apartment or house.  When I wasn’t doing that I was attempting to make out something naughty on the television, which wasn’t easy since we only had antennas and I was trying to pick up a porn channel bleeding over from a nearby cable feed.  And then there was always lingerie catalogs.  But the common denominator in all this was that it was an absolute secret from my wife.
Without going into too much detail, lust is considered a sin in most conservative Christian circles.  If you think your wife is hot, that’s OK but we call it love.  But if you have that same emotion toward some other woman then it is lust and it is bad!  Of course it is difficult to lust after your wife when she is pregnant or gaining weight, and besides – fantasies are just that, fantasies!  It is rare to fantasize about plump women with no makeup who require attention and romance.  But by taking a natural biological urge and assigning it to sin you create guilt, and guilt leads to concealment, and the next thing you know spouses are hiding parts of their lives from one another.  Take my word for it, this is not a good thing.

On top of struggling with basic urges and the tension created by religious guilt we were struggling with money and raising a child.  Even when Deeanne was working part time and I was working full time she would regularly wake me up in the middle of the night to tend to David.  I would groggily feed him and change his diaper and try to get him to go back to sleep.  I would often lose over an hour of sleep this way and not only did this cause me problems at work but it frustrated me in general.  It is difficult to reason with your wife in the middle of the night.  On several occasions I would take out my frustration on David.  While I have never considered myself capable of child abuse I can certainly empathize with those who have been guilty of ‘shaken baby syndrome.’  It really is not excusable, and yet I sometimes pushed my son’s head back into my shoulder rather forcibly when he obviously was not ready to sleep.  I remember walking him back and forth across his room while crying tears of frustration.  It is not a period of my life that I care to think about much.

In 1984 Deeanne’s mom convinced us that we might be better off living near her so she could help with the kids and perhaps I could find better work.  We rented a house in Georgetown and I did temporary work for the state agency that handled child protection.  Eventually I landed a full time job at an agency headed up by Ross Perot called Texans’ War On Drugs.  I was a secretary.

At first we attended the mainstream Baptist church where Deeanne had grown up and taught various classes and bible studies for youth and children.  But somewhere along the way we ran into some people going to an independent church that for some reason appealed to us and we joined them.  I eventually played drums and occasional piano for the worship team and Deeanne spent a lot of time with our son in the nursery.  She became pregnant again and was encouraged by a few of the women to do a more natural birth.  When the big day came she was given pitosin to help kick-start the contractions.  The doctor checked in and then went back across the parking lot to his office.  A nurse kept an eye on us.  At one point Deeanne felt like she had to go to the bathroom but nothing happened.  Then when she was on the way back to the bed she became a bit disoriented.  This got the nurse’s attention and we helped her back into bed.  The nurse checked her and found she was already dilated to four centimeters.  She put in a call to the doctor.  A few minutes later she checked again and she was dilated to seven centimeters.  She slapped the intercom on the wall and called any available doctor STAT and then proceeded to have me stand next to her while she delivered Jonathan.  I watched in awe, and then she laid him in my hands while she found a suction bulb, towels, etc.  Then other people came in and took over.  It was incredible.

Later I actually asked the doctor about a discount since he hadn’t actually performed the birth.  I don’t think he was amused, but I was serious.  No, we didn’t get any discount.

We moved to a rental house closer to the pastor and some other church members, the Harneys.  Robin and Pam were semi-sorta in charge of mentoring us spiritually.  I think they did actually pick up on some issues we might be having.  Actually, Pam did most of the discerning.  Robin was just there.  Robin was the absolute typical Jesus Freak hippie-era convert.  He tuned pianos and ran a business selling snow cones and ice cream from a truck for a living.  Pam…..well, as best I can tell Pam never worked.  It seems she always had one health problem or another keeping her down.  Her daughters did most of the housework.  At some point around this time there was another episode where Deeanne met Robin outside and later hinted that something might have happened.  It was just one more attempt at attention, which I was becoming rather immune to.  But by this time another pattern was setting up, the one where she would pitch a fit about something, we would argue, but then we showed up at church and pretended that nothing was wrong.  This was her way of dealing with things, but it wasn’t the way I was wired.  I was perfectly ready to go to church and grab someone and tell them we were arguing and needed help!  But no, the fact was that most of the yelling and craziness was coming from her so there was no reason to let other people know about this.  However, when the tables turned and she got worried about my occasional use of pornography that was a different matter.  The next thing I know we’re in the pastor’s office with two or three other people getting counseling.  Rather, I was getting counseling.  And being the confused naive twenty-four year old parent of two the contrast never dawned on me.