What Were They Thinking?
Part I—Marilyn Frost’s Story
1 Mosquito Road
HAYDEN AND I were farm kids. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, that meant entertainment—as in dating—was limited to what we could do on the farm or what we could do at school and church. Hayden didn’t get his driver’s license until we were seniors and we still couldn’t do too much unless his father allowed him to use the car. We had our fun, but we were good kids and I wouldn’t let things go too far. It would have been so easy to just slip off into the woods and let nature take its course but I was desperately afraid of becoming pregnant. In 1966, birth control was all but unknown to us. We didn’t even have easy access to condoms.
I guess everything changed when Darnell got drafted.
If you visit the Viet Nam memorial in Washington, DC, you’ll find over fifty-five thousand names. Over half of the deaths were kids under twenty-one years old. Darnell was one. One summer when Betts was at horse camp and Brian was at science camp, we took a trip to the nation’s capital. I watched as Hayden searched the wall for the name of his best high school friend. When he found it, he sat in front of the wall and cried for nearly an hour.
The news that Darnell wasn’t coming home changed Hayden. Darnell was his best friend, a kind soul. He’d been drafted but went into the medical corps. It was so unfair that he was out there trying to save lives when his was taken. Hayden didn’t get drafted because he was a farm boy and was classified as II-C, an agricultural worker. It wasn’t a false claim. His father had depended on him since he was old enough to drive a tractor. Most days—at least during spring to fall—he worked on the farm from sunrise till sundown. Those were long days during the summer. I managed to get a job at the nearby Methodist Church as a secretary. It was only part-time, but I saved every penny I could. When Hayden asked me to marry him, I asked, “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting since we graduated.”
He said, “I didn’t want us to have to live in the basement at Mom and Dad’s.”
“What changed?”
He held out a piece of paper that looked like a contract of some sort, signed by him and his father. I didn’t get it at first. I’d never seen a contract for deed. Harlan had agreed to sell his son a parcel of twenty acres right across Mosquito Road from us. We were in debt to the tune of four thousand dollars. As soon as I said, “yes,” it seemed that Hayden went straight to work getting us a place to live. We were married six months later. It was the most difficult six months of our lives but I was a virgin on my wedding night.
Hurricane Betts arrived exactly nine months later.
Elizabeth Ann Frost was a handful from her first gulp of air. Hayden and I realized that we didn’t know the first thing about raising children. We were twenty years old. We wanted to go to bed and have sex. Instead, we went to bed and got up with the baby. Hayden worked the farm, taking over more and more of Harlan’s work load. His folks were older than mine because Harlan had been too busy farming for a wife and children. He married Naomi, who was fifteen years younger than him and popped out Hayden immediately. Harlan was stoic when he found out Naomi would have no other children, but he wept openly when she died in ’77. He said he didn’t want to live another twenty-five years without her. But what we want doesn’t always matter.
My mother showed me how to change diapers and fill a bottle with milk. She showed me how to squirt it on my wrist to make sure it was the right temperature and then shove it in the baby’s mouth. It never occurred to us that Betts was so fussy and unhappy because she didn’t get along with cow’s milk. It might have affected her temperament right through her teens because we’d been taught that milk builds strong healthy bones and made sure she drank three glasses a day until she left home.
When Brian came along, Hayden and I had had sex so infrequently that we considered the pregnancy a miracle. But by that time, we knew enough to feed him with the new liquid formula that was out. It’s funny that I had absolutely no concept that I had milk to feed my children growing on my chest! That was considered something gross and primitive that African tribes did, not Americans. Of course, by the time Brian was ten, the trend had started the other way as the big manufacturers were exposed for their marketing to third world countries and decreasing the nutrient value being received by infants using formula in comparison to breast milk. In so many ways, we were so stupid.
On the other hand, Brian was a peaceful baby compared to Betts. Hayden and I renewed our sex life and I thought for sure that we’d be having more children, but for some reason I didn’t catch again. That probably made us careless about sex education and teaching about birth control. I’m sure it contributed to later events.
One of the most significant things that occurred soon after Brian was born was that Hayden sold an acre of land next door. Harlan was furious. He’d just sold three ten-acre plots to the north, but he wasn’t happy that we subdivided what he’d sold us. The thing is that selling that acre to Ford and Ellen Barnes might have been the start of everything that followed after. With Ford and Ellen came their two children, Jessica and Drew. At last, our children would have playmates. Apparently, Ellen hadn’t had difficulty having sex soon after Jessica was born and Drew was only eleven months younger—what some people called “Irish Twins”. They were right between our children and we thought sure they would be a playmate for each.
How wrong we were.
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