1993

It started out as a very good year. We were evolving into a family. If you saw one of us, you saw all of us. The boys were playing baseball, I was into my last year of my Master's degree and Melvin was taking care of home and all of us. I look back on those times and wonder how I did it. All wives and mothers know what I mean. I was raising a family, working, attending grad school and attending baseball practices and games. Yet there was one draw back, I was the common law wife and my pursuit was being the one on paper.
For years I endured the criticisms, stares, rolled eyes and speeches about the age difference between Melvin and I, his past, my past, blah, blah, blah. In the beginning his love and the children's acceptance was all I required. But in 1993, it all felt so right to me, it felt like the time for me to become Mrs. Mathews and all that came with the title. We discussed, no, I discussed it all the time. Melvin's past left him frigid on the subject and he would either avoid the conversation or hang out with Paul Masson and then relent to yesteryear in which my presence was a substitute for the villainous past, we'd argue, I would go to one room and he another. (Because of the events of the past we tried hard not to argue in front of the children so as not to upset them, they had endured enough).
Unwilling to jeopardize my blissful cohabitation, I'd let it go. And then, July 1993, summer time. The kids playing in the yard, windows raised inviting the summer breeze, I sit in my wing backed chair, in my two story home feeling like a princess. Melvin is softening on marriage. My birthday just past and I got two rings and a bracelet. Neither ring was an engagement ring, but I figured he was sizing me up for the big question. Our dining room is covered in my books and notes. Our abode is tranquil.

Thursday we all sleep late and wake up in time to get ready for baseball practice. We get to "The Ghost" and someone has cut the convertible top and busted the glass in the rear view mirror. Immediately I sense some shit in the game. "What's goin' on Melvin?" "I don't know Poo, it could be some n*#@er that likes you." Okay, I say to myself, things are going too well, we'll discuss this later. I broach the subject, nothing. A little later I say, "If we're to be married we must be a united front, show whoever it is they can't tear us apart. If you can't talk to me about it, we won't get past it and we won't make it." Reading this now, I know,to a man, this must have sounded like, "I'm gonna get him to confess an infidelity by acting understanding, then I got him, I got him." I was much too young and naive to play that game, I was sincere. He still didn't want to talk. By then I knew another woman was involved.

I found out later that he had been taking a previous girlfriend to work and back, her car was out of fix or something. He asked the boys if they would mind if he married me, one voted yes and the other two no(the day of the vote, they were angry with me about something and...) Anyway, he told the old girlfriend he was getting married and would not be able to help her out anymore... She got pissed and cut up the car.

But I didn't know this back then, so on Sunday morning when I heard him on the phone telling her how much she needed to pay him for the repairs, anger welled in me from the tip of my toes and traveled straight vertical. I held it in though, I was cool as a cucumber all day. My mother once told me that when you're angry with your man, that's when you really dot every I and cross every T.  I washed, cooked, was the perfect hostess to my mother and brother in law who came to visit, I even made dessert.
I saved that passion pissed for that night when we were one on one. No longer was I that little girl, she fell out on the steps listening to the phone call and the woman didn't pick her up, I stepped right over her. I had figured it out. "You been with her all the time, this ain't no love, I don sacrificed my youth and life to made a fool of, I don't think so..." I went on and on and didn't give Melvin a chance to breathe, let alone speak. When I got through, at 3 o'clock in the morning, I packed my bags and went to my mother's house and vowed I would never cross his thresh hold again. And for nine years, I didn't.
And to this day that is my one regret, I left my sons. We still co parented the boys, but from a distance. We still loved and remained friends, but my broken heart and pride would not free me from my vow.
Luckily for us, in 2001 an Angel intervened.


TOMORROW