do you have children
my children are thirty three twenty nine and twenty five
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and i uh am spending more time with my twenty five year old because at this point he happens to be single and always has been single and living at home uh while he's trying to uh
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find a nice girl and get married they're little right right they're a little hard to come by so anyway he's still here uh
that's a hard process isn't it
the only thing i can say about the raising of these little things is that my sons-in-law seem to be so much more involved than my husband ever was or the husbands of our age group
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uh-huh i'm kind of at the other extreme i have a nine month old and one that will be born in October
oh how wonderful we had uh an October baby on the fifteenth May
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oh really
yeah that's when my nephew's birthday is and he goes well you should have it on the fifteenth so we'll see
yeah well my husband's is on the fourteenth so we did miss that one day by a few hours there but we didn't care at that point so
yeah at it's that close
so do you find your husband more involved than your father was with you
yeah
i he definitely i had an unusual situation with in my home my father was was alcoholic but uh and very withdrawn at that and so my husband is ten times more involved and we have more of a
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uh i guess a Christian based home and so we try to make the family as important as we can
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and uh
uh and i guess you don't have to have a Christian based home to to feel that way but that's just part of our priorities that's right it certainly gives you some some specific specific goals to work towards but uh
Christianity doesn't hurt us any does it
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he helps a lot with her he helps feeding her changing her and playing with her and
and i think he has to be conscious of of uh needing to spend time with her if not then he gets wrapped up in the TV and the newspaper and whatever else and he says oh i didn't spend time with Emily
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but if he forgets i try to to help him remember
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i think so
uh-huh uh how do you find uh with an alcoholic father how do you find how what effect do you think that has on your life as an adult
i think uh i've been reading a lot lately about the alcohol children of alcoholics syndrome i don't know if you've heard of that or not
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but uh trying to relate that to me and i think because i had a strong Christian background personally it affected me differently than it affected my sisters and i see myself uh with some of those qualities but with not quite as much anger
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as i see them towards him or towards my mother with certain things and uh
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as far as me personally i think
it made me appreciate my husband more because he doesn't do certain things that my dad did so i
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uh-huh the reason i'm asking is because i have a dear dear friend whose father was alcoholic
and at fifty she and she was an only child
at fifty she's still still having a lot of difficulty in her relationship with her husband that she feels stems from how she was treated by her father
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and how she feels that she has to control everything and from her readings she feels that that comes from the fact that her father was alcoholic over which of course she had no control
uh-huh i think that's that's how i feel too i feel a need to dominate certain things and i try real hard not to be to too domineering with with Emily
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because i don't want to my mother was also a domineering type of personality because she had to take over the things that my dad fell short in
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and i find you know i think okay i want Emily to be this way and this is what i'm going to do to make her be that way and then i think no you can't do that
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she has to develop her own personality and so sometimes i i have to step back and say okay we want to encourage her we want to influence her but we don't want to control her
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and so far it hasn't been too hard but she hasn't been making a whole lot of decisions on her own yet and so you know i guess i'm i'm just going to have to be real conscious of that as i as she gets older and does start making decisions
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and be conscious that i need to give her options but not make the decisions for her
uh-huh and you don't feel that your relationship with your father has unduly uh influenced your relationship with your husband then
um i i look at myself and i have three sisters there's four daughters in the family i look at myself compared to my sisters' families
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and see that one of them married an abusive husband one of them married an alcoholic uh the other one married into a pretty stable relationship
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and mine is pretty stable or much more stable i think probably than any of them but now i waited until i was thirty to get married and they all married at eighteen but uh
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you didn't need to get away from home then
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well my dad in his alcoholism he was kind of irritating and it there were a few times he was violent towards my mother but it was almost he like
if he had any opinions to give he would tell my mother and she would tell us and so we had almost no direct relationship with him i mean he was there and and we you know did little things together as a family but on the whole there was no
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no direct communication no show of affection no even no show of anger unless it he was you know really really drunk
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my father my husband was like that but that was because he was working all the time establishing a business and running it certainly he i mean he got off work and he came home
oh
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and he ate dinner and his work was outside and in the winter time by the time he was warm he was asleep so it wasn't that he was
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neglectful of his children by choice there just was no time and energy left for them by the time he put in his workday which started like at five thirty and ended at six thirty uh
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you know alcoholism wasn't a problem resentment whatever was was not a problem at all because each one of our children was planned and he seemed to be the one who initiated having children so certainly he wanted the m
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he just didn't have the energy to deal with them and of course now uh he's very excited he's retired and he's spending time with his grandchildren which shows how much he wished that he could have with his own
uh-huh yeah i see my father relating much better to the grandchildren than he did to us
so he has overcome alcoholism at this point
not completely no he he still has a problem with it and he goes in stages
oh
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but he still you know he will pick up my one of my granddaughters and say you know give her a hug and say i love you and the first time he said i love you to me was when i had been away from home for almost a year and a half
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but he said it
yeah it i said i love you dad i miss you and then he said was able to say it back and and i was twenty four and that's the first time i'd heard him say anything you know similar to that
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yeah
the first time i heard my older daughter tell and she is our most expressive tell my husband that she loved him he said well i certainly hope so
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so he but then he came from a background where he is so much more open with his children than his father was with him
his father was just a very quiet withdrawn person and i assume very shy as is my husband
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uh he shows his feelings but he cannot express it and i think that's kind of sad in a way i see other fathers put their arms around their daughters or their sons and
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we have two daughters and a son and uh he just can't do that and i i know that he would if he could and i i kind of feel sorry for him because i think he misses a lot and
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as i say our our sons-in-law are so open and caring and giving to their children and i wonder if it's because they're there when they delivered they're delivered if that
they went through that entire process yeah
right if that maybe starts in the delivery room with a chain that my generation missed out on
uh-huh i think too that with us as women being out of the home where i'm not working now i didn't work until about from about the time Emily about four months before she was born
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and but so many women are having children and returning to the work field that the the dads
you know have to to follow through or a third person has to come in and follow through with with the the care and the dads are are doing more
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and that bond is starting you know like you said right at the beginning and then developing it's not breaking at any point
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at least it shouldn't and and and and in a good family it isn't unfortunately there's so many families where there isn't a father in the home it's just yeah that's right yeah
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yeah so
it's certainly not a good situation but i'm sure it's not one that the the the families chose i mean i'm sure they felt they had no choice at our stage in life we've seen
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a lot of our friends go through divorces uh you know we've been married thirty five years and so that's how old our friends are
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and they're on their second marriage and they've got his kids and her kids and i think my gosh all the pain they've caused themselves and their children i just
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you know of course everything wasn't always rosy for us but you know we stayed together and at this point our children are saying gosh i'm glad you did that
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so i think it makes for a more solid basis for them or i hope so at least
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yeah they see you go through the problems and still come out okay working together
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yes yeah well that sounds good my background is in sociology and so i see a lot of unwed mothers
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