Page 388 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
knew then that life had changed, that we were no longer single, no longer just married, no longer honeymooners, and no longer just two friends, lovers, or companions. But I don’t believe that the marriage had had time to gel.
Nowadays most middle-class people in New York City get married when they are much older than we were, often because each party is pursuing a career, and many have lived together for lengthy periods of time before solemnizing the relationship. Living together, given our upbringings, was unthinkable; we never discussed it, and I don’t recall that the idea of postponing marriage until I had had some real-life expe- riences ever entered my mind.
Neither did the idea of postponing having a family. As you will recall, the pregnancy that I learned of before I boarded the shuttle for D.C. was the second of our marriage, the first having ended with a mis- carriage in August 1969, about seven months after our wedding. At the time at which we had Danny, Phyllis was twenty-four; I had just turned twenty-six. We were very young—and had experienced only twenty months as being “just us.”
Our roles in the family were the traditional ones at that time. Phyl- lis was a stay-at-home wife and mom, with the exception of the short period in 1969 during which she taught school. (Phyllis ended her teach- ing career after having to endure catcalls and an acrimonious post-strike atmosphere because, feeling that her primary obligation was to the stu- dents, she crossed the picket lines during a strike by the United Federation of Teachers. One reason that we did not get into the Peace Corps after acing the entrance exams is that her former principal, moti- vated by Phyllis’s “strike-breaking” activity, wrote a very negative letter in which, among other things, he intimated that Phyllis, who was not a political person, was a communist.)
Phyllis did the shopping and cooking, participated in car pools, and was more active with the children than I was. (Part of that was due to my absence from the house, and part was due to my willingness, over-will- ingness, to let Phyllis take charge.) She also supervised the mother’s
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