When I think back on my late teens and early twenties–I met my now husband when I was seventeen years old–I am amazed that I married, that he wanted me and that we have remained together for thirty-two years. We’ve known each other thirty-six.
I tried committing suicide, my second attempt, three months after meeting my husband, then boyfriend. We met in August of 1978, my first week as a college freshman. He was a junior, practically 4.0 student, majoring in Chemistry and with aspirations of attending medical school.
A month, to the day, later he took me out on a date and asked me to go steady, to be his girlfriend. I became eighteen, a legal adult, in October.
Fear of failing my freshman Algebra class, something I, a here-to-fore, straight-A student had never done, drove me to the brink of wanting to die. I took a bottle of Valium.
I dropped the Freshman Algebra class, and made an “A” in freshman English, something almost complete unheard of at the university we were attending. My first semester GPA was a 3.3, which, would prove to be an all-time high. Spring semester it fell to a 2.7, and I into a major depression.
Achieving good grades had been my solace, my saving grace during childhood. It was the one way I could be a good daughter, kept me in good relations, as much as anything could, with my mother. Stellar grades also made me feel good about myself, formed the foundation upon which I tried loving myself.
When they were no longer there, I could no long achieve them, that foundation served as the pillar for my breakdown hastened on by the fact that my husband, would graduate college Phi Beta Kappa, with 4.0 GPA in his major and attend Harvard Medical School.
Despite all the craziness during the first semester of my freshman year, my husband proposed in February of the following, the spring semester of my freshman year.
We married three years later when I barely graduated college. By then I had transferred to another university, and entered a program for studies in Allied Health.
I had held hopes of attending medical school before meeting my husband and when entering college.
I can now, three decades and nearly four years later say, “I am glad life took a different turn and put me on another path.”