anonymous post, Norman OK

"When I was going through a particularly difficult break-up recently my mother told me that sometimes, like it or not, we can fall in love with someone that is bad for us. After all of her experiences, all of the emotional and physical pain she went through with my father, I seriously doubt that anyone on this giant spinning ball of dirt and water could possibly know that more than her. Falling in love with someone that was bad for her was exactly what happened when my mother met my father, and as it stands there are no pictures of them on their wedding day.

My parents met at the same bar in Norman, Oklahoma where years later my twin first saw his wife. My mother was a college undergrad, my father a law student. Or so he said. He left everyday at the same time for class, books in hand, off to learn the law. He was a smooth talker and she an innocent farm girl who fell for him along with everything he told her hook, line and sinker. Soon, he was able to talk her into being his common law wife. My mother, ever the diligent student, researched the practice of common law marriage, filed the necessary paper work, and changed her last name. There was no wedding. There were no pictures. Soon however, there were twins. And there were lies, lots of them. Eventually, everything started to unravel.

Steve Edwards, 25-year-old law student, turned out to not be a law student, turned out to not be 25 years old, and turned out to not even be named Steve Edwards. Instead, he turned out to be a 35-year-old abusive alcoholic and habitual liar. My father began beating my mother black and blue and he did it often. Bumps, bruises, breaks, it wasn’t pretty. She suffered a broken back once. Another time, he tied her up and put her in the trunk of his car. She was missing for a week and no one had any idea where she was. Eventually, she had to drop out of school because of it. My mother filed for divorce but for some reason she still loved him. They got divorced and then got back together. Then they had another child. God love her, my dear sweet mother tried to make it work. My father would tell her he was sorry, that he would stop drinking, and of course because love can be as blinding as a hot poker to the eye, she believed him. As you might have guessed though, it didn’t stop. There were more lies. There was more drinking. There were more bruises, bumps, and broken bones. Finally the last straw came when he began hitting one of her children. She told him not to beat her child, so he stopped and began beating her.

The story does have a happy ending though. She left him after that day. Things were hard. A single mother of three on welfare at the age of 24, my mother went back to school full time and got her Master’s degree in a year. She remarried. And this time, there were pictures. Embarrassing pictures of a four-year-old me in a green plaid suit walking my mother down the isle, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she had found love and that he became a wonderful father to her three children and a fourth would soon join them. They went through ups and downs but now, where my old father would show her the back of his hand, my new father would show her love.

Someone once told me that my mother had been a bad mother for staying with my father and subjecting her children to that. I could agree with nothing in the world any less. I think my mother is the strongest woman I know for leaving even when it was hard. I think she’s the strongest woman in the world for realizing that she loved someone that was bad for her and for leaving. And as her reward, she found a super hero. And she finally got those wedding pictures."

-submitted by a reader in Oklahoma City, OK

Shrinivas S. and Jayanti S., Feb 1969

"It would be a disservice if I were to write about my parents’ wedding day and not mention the glorious twenty-eight years of matrimony that followed. I am shaped into the person that I am on the foundation of these twenty-eight years of companionship, mateship, support and love that my parents shared.

I am of Hindu heritage, and my parents grew up in post-independence, conservative India, sharing small stark quarters with a multitude of siblings, fathers barely eking out a living. They were cousins and my Pops had held my Mum as a baby, since she was twelve years younger than him. It may have turned out to be a marriage made in heaven for them but it was seriously opposed by my grandmum on the Pops side, since my Mum’s folks couldn’t afford any dowry. The courage of a man who dared defy his mother’s wish to be with a woman he loved, in that day and age in India, was not only unknown, but is also tremendously laudable. My grandmum’s superstitious fears about the unholy union were completely heightened when on the eve of the marriage, there happened drama aplenty. Rioting closed down Bombay, one of my Pops’ brothers thought it get him some attention if he attempted suicide, the priest was incommunicado and somesuch normal happenings. But amidst such events, my unruffled Pops placed the sacred necklace around Mum’s neck, put the vermillion on me Mum’s forehead in front of the ceremonial fire, walked seven times around it and took an oath of a lifetime for togetherness.

The early years were probably the most miserable for my Mum since my father had to return to his job in England and make annual visits that were always fleeting, but with enough time to sire two children, my older sister and me. But as Mum tells me, it was worse for Pops since he terribly missed his family and was always homesick. So finally, after four years of an interrupted marriage, Pops finally took a job in Bahrain and whisked us all away to il paradiso.

Over time I saw the love blossom between my parents. She was his Jai, he was her Shri (something she never called him when in front of the family elders or outsiders), and their love, though never displayed outwardly, was witnessed by me, growing up. I also learnt parity between partners and respect for women from the way my Pops treated my Mum. She learnt to appreciate an alcoholic drink because my Pops wanted her to infuse acceptable Western practices in her traditional Hindu lifestyle. It was their weekend routine, Pops pouring out two equal doses of rum in the glasses while Mum would lovingly prepare a dinner that he (and us all) loved. I remember watching photos of my Mum’s first visit to US in 1973. Mum in a satin top and checked bell-bottoms and looking like she’d topple any moment in the platform heels. But the braided hair and the vermillion dot on her forehead, signifying her beloved Shri, remained. And my Pops with a mop of curly black hair and a handlebar moustache and belt buckle that covered half his midriff! Oh yes, they knew how to have a good time.

On their 25th anniversary, we threw them a surprise party. My adman mate Tintin even made this huge poster “Marriages are made in heaven but executed on Earth, you two are a proof of that…” I remember my conservative parents dancing all night to romantic songs like newly-weds. Theirs was a magic special to them.

Like all good things coming to an end, this lovely union ended in 1997, three days before their 28th anniversary. Yes, one of the things cancer can take away from you. After suffering with him for four years, one morning she finally prayed to God to end his pain and he rested in peace. But the marriage did not. Of course not, Shri and Jai are married forever, as they promised on that day, February 9, 1969.

I only wonder if I’d truly be able to experience their kind of love…"

-submitted by Shayne S

SYLVIA LINDELL S. and JAMES THOMAS S. – Autumn 1969

"My mother and father were married in a small church somewhere in Oklahoma City three months after they met in 1969. It was an autumn wedding. She was twenty-three; he was thirty. Their mutual friends Jan and Terrie Foss introduced them that summer. My mother sends a Christmas card to Terrie Foss every year; she doesn’t hold him or his former wife responsible for introducing her to the man who would co-create the darkest period of her life.

Her memory is generally creative in what it selects for recall, but I’ve no doubt what she says about that day is true. She cried as she walked down the aisle, not because of the jitters, but because she was afraid. She shook with terror. She tells me she knew in the core of her being that she was making a mistake. He changed after that, she says. Like night and day, he changed.

In one of the photos of my mom, she clasps her hands in a girlish gesture of nervousness. You can see this nervous handclasp in the photo of her with my dad, taken a couple years after their marriage. He’s not in any of the wedding photos so I’ve included this one to show what he looked like. My father says, had he paid careful attention and extrapolated certain behaviors present on their wedding day, he might have accurately guessed that my mother and her family harbored seriously negative feelings about and habits toward men.

Between my grandmother and her three sisters, there were fourteen marriages. (The other woman in the photos is my grandmother, Frances June, my namesake.) There was a deranged culture of meanness and jealousy among these sisters, whose lives set the precedent for those of their children’s. The voice of judgment that descended from her female elders told my mother that, being twenty-three and unmarried, she was a failed, worthless woman - an old maid. A man who looked like Al Pacino had proposed to her, but she didn’t like him for some reason and declined his offer. Instead, she chose my dad. She had waited twenty-three years and I guess that was long enough.

My mother uses her experience marrying my father as an example of what not to do in matters of the heart. Wait, she tells me. Wait for as long as it takes to be sure. Pay attention to his small affections - if he won’t hold your hand, don’t marry him.

KATHY S. and JAMES THOMAS S.– Summer 1984

I was six when my father remarried. He became sober the year before he and my mom divorced in 1981, and then disappeared for two years. When he returned, he started dating a woman he met in AA – actually, she was in Al-Anon. They got married at an AA clubhouse called “The Round Table,” located in a strip mall next to a strip club in Oklahoma City.

Seated on the couch in the photo are Jenny, five; me, six; my brother John, eight; and my other brother Jim, ten. I remember feeling very uncomfortable during the event, like I didn’t belong there. I was always a little ill-at-ease in the various AA clubhouses that my father dragged us to. We all were. This one in particular was dingy and wreaked strongly of stale coffee and ground-in cigarette ash. High, curtained windows and fluorescent lights. Broad wood paneling. A million sprung couches. Normally, we were there at night; being there for a wedding in the middle of the day with nice clothes and our hair tended to lent an air of anachronism.

I discovered these photos after my grandfather died in 2001. I was at a [S..] family reunion in New Mexico when a distant cousin gave me a box of stuff collected from my Papa’s trailer. There was a steep, dusty hill that lead up from the lake and I stood there looking through the box. The first photo knocked me clean out of myself. I hadn’t seen Kathy’s face since I was ten. I’d forgotten what she looked like. Forgotten what Jenny looked like. I do remember that I was wearing brand new jelly sandals at the wedding. And I remember thinking how odd it was that when the ceremony was over and everybody stood around eating cake, it felt like just another AA meeting.

Like the first, there is no photographic record of my father at his second wedding.

ROSE S. and JAMES THOMAS S. – Summer 1991

Kathy drained their joint bank account and divorced my dad in the summer of 1988. He’d been at some Olympic ceremonies performance where he and my brothers sat close to the stage and watched as Ray Charles sputtled and whirred in a drunken stupor. When my dad got home that night, his key didn’t work.

He started dating Rose not long after that. They met through AA again – like Kathy, she was Al-Anon. He moved in to her suburban home and lived there for two years before they married. My brothers and I didn’t make much of an effort with Rose, assuming that to be the safest position to take after our first experience with stepmothers. My oldest brother drank all the syrup out of Rose’s maraschino cherries jar one weekend and caused a spur in our relations with her that lasted several visitations.

My brothers were gone at summer camp when my dad and Rose tied the knot at a small Methodist church on Meridian Avenue in Oklahoma City. My mother dropped me off at the curb and I walked sullenly across the long, dead, sloping lawn up to the sanctuary. It was incredibly hot. I wore a bright pink shirt and a plaid skirt and sat next to Ashley, my new step-sister’s husband’s daughter. She was thirteen and I was twelve. By our calculations, I was her step-aunt-once-removed. She thought it was funny to be older than her aunt. She rode horses and had smooth, thick dishwater blond hair cut in a bob with a flower burst for bangs. She listened to Garth Brooks and contemporary country music. I liked her.

There was a reception at Rose’s home after the wedding. She chose enormous, tasteful flower arrangements and people brought food to share. Rose made her trademark German chocolate cake. I called my mother and she came to pick me up. How was it? she asked. I dunno, I shrugged. She was curious, but didn’t say anything more except that she thought it was too bad the boys couldn’t be there. They were happy they didn’t have to go, though. And I was jealous they got out of it.

I don’t have any photos of this last and final wedding ceremony, but I can say that my father’s nuptial habits prove the adage: the third time’s a charm. After sixteen years of marriage, he and Rose are stuck like glue. They like each other, and they laugh easily – two characteristics of a solid relationship, near as I can tell. They have framed photographs from their wedding hanging in two rooms of their house."

-submitted by Jennifer June

Teresa Young and Daniel Pruitt, parents of Gracelynn Pruitt

My mother, Teresa Young was 18 years old and a senior in high school when she met my father, Daniel Pruitt, 25. She had been shuffled around as a child from family member to family member after her father remarried and mother left. My father came from a farm life and worked his way to get to OU and was almost done with his degree in architecture. He worked three jobs to pay for his tuition. My father told me that his mother came up to visit him at work one day at a movie theatre in Norman. He introduced her to my mother just weeks after they met and told my grandmother, "This is the woman I'm going to marry."

Both of my parents were extremely poor and just trying to make ends meet. So when they set a date to marry two months after my mother graduated from high school in August of 1973, they couldn't even afford new clothes for the ceremony. My mother invited some of her girlfriends from high school. She also invited her family but only her aunt and grandmother showed up. My father invited his brother and his new wife. They went to a small chapel in Moore and tied the knot. My mother said it was very simple and quick. All the wedding pictures were taken with a cheap camera by one of my mother's friends and most of them are blurry. Kinda like the time that has gone by since that day, so my mother says. They have been married for 34 years now.

--
Gracelynn Pruitt

Linda and Tim Osborne, parents of Sara Eddleman, married March 15, 2001 (Ides of March, totally on purpose)

(pretend this area is a blank polaroid)













My mother never married my father; he married another woman just a few weeks after he met her and I was inadvertently brought about, and it was another twenty-one years before she would be a bride. The ceremony, as such, was held in a most godawful Methodist church somewhere in the boondocks near Chardon, OH, scratchy green indoor-outdoor carpet underneath our feet in the chapel. The hairlipped preacher had a penchant for transposing his gendered nouns - "Do you, Tim, take Linda to be your husband... um... er..." The bride wore an iridescent purple suit (much prettier than it sounds), and the groom one of the standard black suits that he normally dons to organize and bury the dead (less creepy than it sounds).

The first celebratory meal was held, due in large part to a persnickety and rather unpleasant (though pleasantly now-ex) boyfriend, at the local Wendy's. "Bring It On" might have been watched the night after - their story holds that it was but this writer maintains (perhaps to save face, but she thinks she has the facts straight) that this happened on another, more appropriate, evening. The daughter's wedding present of a lucky and heavy elephant-and-marble-ball posed problems at the airport, but the happy couple returned to Oklahoma with few other setbacks. There would be pictures of all of these blessed moments, but perhaps aptly, every single photo came out white, shiny and blank.

Don and Jeannie Oliver, Parents of Iantha, Jocelyn, and Zebediah Allton and Dionne Fike, Married in OKC, OK October 1st, 1989

Here is what my mother wrote about that day…

We had talked about marrying for quite some time, but between the demands of work and family, I just couldn’t make time to put together a wedding. I finally took a two-week vacation and planned as much as I could manage in that time. One of Don’s bachelor-friends offered his deck as the site, I crafted some invitations at Kinko’s, and the party was on.

We married on Saturday, October 1, 1989. The ceremony was scheduled at 4:00 p.m. We awoke that morning to heavy rain. Expecting to move our ceremony indoors, we rushed to the house to clean up and rearrange the furniture. There were a few tense moments when we got there and realized that Don’s “friend” had done nothing whatsoever to prepare for our special day. But we all pitched in to run the vacuum, empty trash cans and pick up clutter—bride and groom, kids and a handful of friends who had volunteered to help set up.

But then about 3:00 o’clock the rain stopped and the clouds lifted. The sudden sun shined so bright that the rain-soaked deck seemed to sparkle. There were pots of geraniums, marigolds and purple petunias. Someone tied red balloons to the rail and brought out folding chairs. The wedding proceeded as planned at 4:30.

The wedding party, including the children, wore red, black and white. The bride wore a red pig skin suede suit, a purple silk camisole and purple snakeskin stilettos. It was, after all, the ‘80s and I had half a can of hairspray in that “big hair” to survive that humid day.

We had a chocolate sheet cake, a 6-foot sub, a keg of beer, plenty of sparkling wine and (thanks to Don’s mom and brother) Braum’s tropical fruit punch spiked with Everclear. We partied until the sun came up on Sunday morning. And then on Monday I went back to work.

Anonymous Native American couple

"for as long as i can remember, all i knew about my dad was that he went to prison soon after i was born and the picture of him and my mom on their wedding day. i only knew him through that picture. i didnt see him very much through out my life. but i held on to that only photo that i knew of him. what i see in that picture is the two people that made me. they are on an indian reservation, smiling, with hope in mind. they were go getters in the the 70s for native rights. they used to protest and speak out about the treatment towards native people. they are my parents standing tall and proud in their long braids with a wish to make the world a better place for me! this is the ONLY picture i have of both of my parents together. the union may not have lasted but their ideals live in me. i hope one day, too, to help my fellow native peoples."