To interfere or not to interfere

Lately, there are a few 'tapes' that have been playing in my head. One has to do with three relationships that parents interfered in.

Interestingly, two involve people from France.

My daughter worked as an au pair for one year before beginning college. Her employer's mother was a diabetic who was in love as a young woman. Since care for diabetics wasn't that great in France during the early 1940s, her parents told her she should not marry as she will probably die soon. She sent her sweetheart away. After the war, she was still alive and another man appeared to court her. This time, she was old enough and tired enough of being single to circumvent her parents. She was fortunate enough to have had two healthy pregnancies and two daughters but the marriage wasn't that successful. I've forgotten whether she was widowed or divorced but, after her daughters were launched, she went back to her hometown to visit her sister. She wondered what had happened to her sweetheart and whether he was still alive. She looked him up in the phone book. He was there! She called and learned he had never married. The married and lived happily ever after.

The second story involves the brother of a friend. Their grandparents fled the Russian Revolution and their father was a very hard man because of it. His family his wife was a pathetic little thing that he married out of pity, but she worked to support him through his Ph.D. and then through her M.L.A., while she raised the kids. He became a tenured professor at a prominent college and a nation wide expert on marital counselling. While his kids were bright, they would have been better off at small, liberal arts college rather than at Dad's sprawling state university, but they went to his school at his insistence. The oldest boy wanted to go to medical school but the father was somehow able to stop that move -- motivated by his ego's fear that if his son became an MD, he would have higher status than his father. The son went into the Peace Corps to give himself space and distance and was posted to West Africa where he met a French woman. She had to return to France and her American boyfriend wrote to her. Unfortunately, her mother did not want her to marry an American and intercepted the letters until the boyfriend gave up.


Back in the US, he began graduate school in public health. He met and married a law student and they had one son. He ended up teaching at Johns Hopkins. His marriage was not particularly happy and he suspected his wife had affairs on the side. As luck would have it, he attended a conference in Paris. Stepping out of his hotel one morning, he saw the brother of the woman he had loved in Africa. As things turned out, she had been angry at her American for never writing and finally married another man. After two children, they separated. The French husband begged her to return and they decided since they had only had a civil ceremony, perhaps marrying again in the church would help things. They did and then had a third child.

You can imagine the rest. When these two rediscovered each other, an international affair began. Surprisingly, the American wife was relieved. She hated herself for sleeping around. A very up-tight, dressed for success career woman who wore her hair in a French twist, she bought her first pair of jeans since college and cut her hair.

As for the American husband, his father finally congratulated him for surpassing him professionally.

Will tell the third story, my own, later . . .