I May Be Dumb . . .

Mark's Story

I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid. So when a member of the Swedish Women's Ski Team sat down next to me the first day of classes, I immediately engaged her in conversation.

She wasn't really a member of the Swedish Ski Team, she just looked like it: tall, blonde, long legs and a great figure. And, as I was to learn, she really was Swedish, or at least her great-great grandparents were.

But although Julia Swenson had the look of a model/athlete, she was no dumb blonde; in fact, she was smart as a whip. She told me that she had been the valedictorian of her class at the University of North Carolina. Now she, like I, was pursuing an MBA at Emory University's Goizueta School of Business in Atlanta.

If I had thought much about it, I would have been thoroughly intimidated by her. Here was a highly intelligent woman who could just as easily have been posing for a swimsuit catalog as sitting in a classroom. She was clearly out of my league.

But I was just out of a failed marriage to my high school sweetheart and eager to return to the world of dating, so I pushed my insecurities to the background and struck up a conversation. To my delight, she was willing to talk to me.

During more after-class conversations and several stops for coffee, I learned that Julia too was coming off a failed marriage. She was still in that period when she wanted to talk about her divorce, and I was able to share my own experiences and insights with her. Soon we were studying together, then dining, and then dating.

I was ecstatic: I was going out with the hottest woman in the grad school, maybe in the entire university. Moreover, our personalities seemed to mesh well. During long walks around Lake Lanier, we talked about our likes and dislikes, taste in movies and literature, goals and aspirations. We seemed well matched in many ways. And the sex was incredible. The first time she agreed to go to sleep with me, we made love three times. Actually getting to bed a woman that beautiful was like the fulfillment of a schoolboy's wet dream.

By the second year of grad school we were living together in an apartment near the university, and we got engaged at the start of the second semester. It was a storybook romance -- until the plot took an unexpected twist.

One night after dinner, Julia sat down across from me at the table in the kitchen and spoke those four words every man dreads to hear: "We need to talk." I immediately tried to think of any possible scenario that could have provoked the need for a serious discussion, but I would never have guessed the next words she spoke.

"I need to go back to Robert!"

Robert, I already knew, was her ex-husband. He and Julia were both from Raleigh and had gone to college together at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They, like I, had married right after graduation, but their marriage hadn't lasted two years. After their break-up, he had stayed in the Research Triangle area, working for a major pharmaceutical company, while she went off to Emory.

Julia had never volunteered any details about their short marriage, and I never particularly wanted to know. As far as I was concerned, all that was in the past. All that mattered to me was their marriage was over, no children were involved, and she was now with me -- or so I thought.

The proper response for me to make to her pronouncement, of course, was "What the fuck?" But I was so stunned by this unforeseen development that I couldn't make any response at all. I simply stared at her as though she had begun speaking in tongues.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I have to go back to Robert and see if I did the right thing in leaving him."

"But we're engaged! How can you go back to Robert? Don't you love me anymore?"

"Of course I love you," she said sadly, "but I just feel like I have unfinished business with Robert. I can't marry you unless I get that resolved."

"But what If you find you still have feelings for him?" I asked. "Does that mean you'll go back to him to stay?"

"I don't know," she said sadly.

We talked for another hour, but I didn't learn anything more about what had precipitated this decision, and I could say nothing to change her mind. It was clear to me that she now felt a lot of guilt about having left Robert, and until she saw him again, there was no way she could resolve those feelings.

I could see that she was miserable; I got no sense of any sort of excitement on her part about seeing Robert again. Instead, she acted like some tragic character in an ancient Greek play, destined to meet her fate. But there was no changing her mind -- she was flying back to Raleigh and Robert that weekend.

I was devastated. The dream I was living that seemed so tangible only a few hours ago had gone up in smoke. Instead of a happy family life with a beautiful and talented woman whom I truly loved, my life now seemed headed toward to a bleak, loveless future alone.

I felt a childish impulse to refuse to take her to the airport, but honestly, what good would that have done me? The last thing I wanted to do was to build another wall between us. So Friday afternoon I loaded her bags into my old Volvo and headed for the airport.

We made the long drive to Hartsfield Airport in almost total silence. She was deep in her own thoughts; I had exhausted every argument I could think of.

When we got to the departure level, I helped her with her bags and then stood there helplessly on the curb. I didn't know whether to kiss her goodbye or drive off in a rage. Finally, I grabbed her hand and voiced my one unspoken fear: "Please don't sleep with him."

She looked at me inscrutably and said, "I understand." Then she turned and wheeled her bag into the terminal as I drove away, wondering what that meant.

Not surprisingly, that weekend was one of the worst of my life. I felt like a doctor had found a tumor in my chest and I was waiting to hear if it was malignant.

When I got home, the fear that had been building in me ever since our fateful conversation was now rampant. I knew I had lost Julia; in reaction, I began trying to steel myself for the misery to come. I got myself something to eat but I had no appetite. I opened a bottle of wine in an attempt to anesthetize myself, but multiple glasses mixed with the acid that had already built up in my stomach caused the whole mess to come up in several gut-wrenching explosions.

On Saturday I went into the office and tried to lose myself in work, but I found myself constantly checking my email and cellphone, hoping in vain to hear from Julia. That evening I went out with some buddies to a local sports bar, but I had no interest in whatever game was up on the flat screen. The beer I tried to drink further irritated my already raw stomach. When one of my friends politely asked me if anything was wrong, I bent his ear for an hour pouring out the whole sordid story. When he told me he couldn't believe it, I wondered what he meant. Did he mean he couldn't believe what Julia had done to me, or that I was such a pathetic wimp?

When Sunday morning finally came, I woke up exhausted, feeling like a condemned man on execution day. I fluctuated between praying for the clock to speed up so it would all finally be over and hoping for time to slow down so my sentence would be delayed. Finally, when it was almost time for Julia's flight to arrive, I resigned myself to my fate and drove to the airport.

No sooner had I pulled up to the arrival gate than Julia was striding through the sliding glass doors toward the car. When I got out of the car to help her with her bag, she threw her arms around me, kissed me fiercely and said, "Now we can get married."

I couldn't believe it: a miracle had occurred! When I got her into the car, she didn't speak, but simply slid across the seat as close as she could get to me and clung to me as though I were a life preserver. I put my arm around her and stroked her back the entire trip home.

She told me some of what happened after we got home. "I had dinner with him on Friday," she related. "On Saturday, he and I drove around to see some of the old sights. Then that evening, Robert took me out with some people he knows."

"He must have wanted to show her off to his friends," I guessed to myself. I probably would have done the same if I'd been in his shoes.

That really wasn't what I wanted to hear. My fears had not completely died away, and I found myself blurting out, "But what happened between the two of you? What made you decide not to go back to him?"

"When I arrived in Raleigh and saw him again, I remembered all the reasons why I married him in the first place," she said. She paused, and I held my breath waiting for her to go on. "But the more time I spent with Robert, the more I kept seeing reminders of all the reasons I left him in the first place. By Sunday, I knew I had made the right decision to end it."

I never asked her if she had slept with him -- I was afraid to. If she had, that would eat away at me, so I decided I just didn't want to know. Besides, she had chosen me; that was the only thing that mattered anyway. Now we could go forward like we planned, and I wanted no doubts nagging at me. My weekend had been terrible, but now I felt it was a small price to pay to get the woman I loved.

We were married in a small church shortly after we graduated, and everything else in our lives seemed to come together at the same time. Before I went to grad school, I had been working for a major electronics manufacturer and had taken educational leave in hopes of improving my prospects. My company had paid my tuition, and they definitely wanted me back once I had graduated. So I had a good job waiting for me from day one. With no tuition loans to repay, a better position and a nice bump in my pay, I was sitting pretty.

Likewise, Julia had landed a position with the Georgia Public Service Commission analyzing telecommunications rates and policy. With her background in mathematics and economics, she was able to slip seamlessly into her new role.

Between the savings I'd been able to preserve and two good salaries, we had no trouble securing a mortgage sufficient to buy a nice home in Alpharetta, a suburb north of Atlanta. Because my office was located on the I-285 beltway, my commute wasn't bad at all, but Julia's was longer because the GPSC offices were located downtown.

Over the next eighteen months, our lives were good. We explored the parks and trails around us as well as the nightlife in "Hotlanta." We decorated our home and landscaped our yard, got together with our friends from school and made new friends in the neighborhood. Most of all, we explored each other; I think we made love in every room of our house.

The only irritant in this otherwise idyllic scene was Julia's job. The problem was the red tape, office politics and glacially slow pace that seem to characterize most government agencies. Julia had no difficulty with the analyses she was asked to do, but once her work left her hands, nothing ever seemed to happen. The commute she had to endure just added insult to injury. Anyone who has ever experienced rush hour traffic in Atlanta knows how long and exhausting that process can be.

So I wasn't particularly surprised when Julia told me one night that she wanted to leave her job. But she didn't want to quit outright because she felt that would look bad on her resume. And she wasn't interested in starting a job search. Instead, she had another solution that caught me by surprise: she wanted to get pregnant!

I might not have been expecting it, but this was wonderful news as far as I was concerned. I wanted to have children but had thought we would have to wait while Julia launched her career. The fact that she was ready to start now was fine with me.

As I sat there thinking about this new direction our lives were about to take, I realized that Julia was watching me closely, waiting for my reaction. Putting a solemn expression on my face, I said, "In a situation like this, I think there's only one logical course of action." I paused. "Let's go upstairs and get started right now!"

As realization came, Julia squealed and threw her arms around me. I picked her up and carried her up the stairs to our bedroom to start a frenzied session of love-making. We knew it wasn't likely to have the desired result since she hadn't even gone off the pill yet, but that was irrelevant. We were ready to become parents, and I couldn't have loved her any more than I did at that moment.

I guess what we were doing worked because Julia became pregnant shortly after she went off the pill. Over the next nine months, we turned into stereotypical first-time parents. We repainted the bedroom that was to be the nursery, bought a crib and changing table, began attending Lamaze classes and started reading baby books. We were as ready as we could be.

When Julia felt contractions begin in earnest one Sunday evening, I grabbed the bag she had already packed and we drove carefully to the hospital. She was in labor almost eight hours, and I stayed with her the whole way, bringing her ice for her dry mouth, rubbing her back and coaching her with her breathing as the contractions became more frequent. When it finally was time, I went with her to the delivery room and held her hand in anxious helplessness as our new son came crying into the world.

I had wanted to be a father and I wanted this baby. Even so, when I first got to hold this tiny bundle of life that was my son Joshua, a wave of emotions rolled over me so powerfully that I had to sit down. I felt an overwhelming sense of awe, fear and love. I vowed that I would dedicate my life to taking care of this miracle I held.

The weeks and months that followed brought all the trials typical to new parents: sleep deprivation, endless walks around the room trying to comfort a crying baby, and a severely restricted lifestyle. But I never resented the disruption; that sense of dedication I felt when I first held Joshua never dissipated. I loved him absolutely, I loved his mother, and I loved the fact that we had become a family in full.

I recall a party we had a year after Josh was born. We had a houseful of friends and family over to celebrate his first birthday, and we asked them to stay for an open house afterward because we were eager for the stimulation of some adult company. Yet even as people ate and drank and circulated, I found myself sneaking into Josh's room to make sure he was OK. When I found him awake and crying, I closed the door to his room, picked him up and began to walk and sing to him to lull him back to sleep. I didn't care that I was missing the party; nothing mattered more to me than my new son.

Josh was healthy and growing. He had begun sleeping through the night after only two months, and after six months Julia had weaned him so that breast-feeding him was no longer a drain on her energy. We had survived the stress of caring for a newborn; by comparison, caring for a toddler was a lot less exhausting.

So I was more than a little surprised a couple of months later when Julia sat me down to tell me she was ready to have another baby. When I voiced some hesitation, she became insistent, almost desperate. "Our lives are only just now returning to some degree of normalcy," I thought. "Why does she want to go through all of that all over again so soon?" But it was clear that her mind was made up, and I wrote off her almost desperate desire to hormones or the maternal instinct. Besides, we had always talked about having two children. If she was ready now, why wait?

So it was almost exactly two years after Josh's birth that Julia delivered our second child, another son whom we named Jacob. I had loved Josh so much when he was born that I wondered how I would feel about another child. I needn't have worried. When I held little Jake for the first time, I felt my heart expand with love until it doubled in size. I could not believe how happy I was.

Once again we resumed the role of parents of a newborn. At least this time we knew what to expect and weren't quite so stressed out. The result was that time seemed to pass more quickly, and before we knew it we found ourselves celebrating Jake's first birthday.

After we'd put Josh and Jake to bed, and sat down to rest, Julia once again intoned those dreaded words, "We need to talk."

"What now?" I wondered.

The answer was soon forthcoming: Julia was ready to go back to work.

I had mixed emotions, to say the least. On the one hand, I could readily understand how someone as intelligent and capable as Julia would find the routine of housewife and stay-at-home mom unfulfilling. On the other hand I had read numerous articles that enumerated the benefits to the child of having full-time mothering.

But when I suggested the possibility of delaying her return until the boys were a little older, Julia's voice took on the same desperate, insistent tone I'd heard when she wanted to have another baby. "Lots of couples we know have their kids in some kind of daycare arrangement and it hasn't hurt them," she pointed out.

I knew that daycare was a reasonable choice, and many parents took it because both husband and wife needed to work. But we did have the option; we had already proved we could get by on my salary alone. Julia, however, was not to be deterred.

I raised other concerns. "Where would we find someone we could trust to care of Josh and Jake all day?" I objected.

"I've been talking with some of my friends," she told me, "and I've already found a woman who would keep them in her home. She has a daughter about their age, and they could play with each other."

"Well, there's no need to rush into anything," I countered. "It's going to take quite a while to find a good job in today's market."

"That's the beauty of it," she crowed, "I've already found a great job! Do you remember Dr. Spencer back in grad school? Well, he's left Emory to start a consulting business, and he wants me to come work for him."

Faced with a fait accompli, I felt I had no choice but to agree. I didn't want to be like some reactionary, old-school husband who wants to keep his wife barefoot and pregnant. If our roles had been reversed, I knew I would be eager to get back into the workforce. How could I be such a hypocrite?

I wasn't altogether happy, but I didn't really believe Jake and Josh would suffer, and I knew that Julia would be a lot happier. Isn't there an old saying that a happy wife makes for a happy family?

So I began taking Josh and Jake to the nanny's house every morning, and Julia began her new job. Although they cried the first few times I left them, the nanny had a little girl a year older than Josh, and there were lots of toys to play with, and soon our sons began to look forward to their new situation.

As for Julia, returning to work transformed her. She was overjoyed to be able to apply her education and experience to real-world problems. She loved hearing the conversation of adults rather than puppets and cartoon characters. Most of all, she was thrilled to be able to get out of the house.

It soon became clear that this job opportunity was a perfect fit for Julia. Her educational background in economics and mathematics gave her the tools she needed to evaluate econometric models. Her experience with the Public Service Commission proved invaluable in dealing with the Federal Communications Commission. She took to it like a duck to water.

At the same time, she fit in well with her new colleagues at work. In fact, she already knew several of her them because they too had graduated from Emory's business school. Most were near her in age and several also had young families.

Overseeing this young tiger team was the charismatic figure of Dr. Allen Spencer. Dr. Spencer had been marked as destined for success when he became one of the youngest full professors at a major business school anywhere in the country. At a time when voice and data networks were merging and morphing into new and unforeseen configurations and applications, he produced paper after paper identifying the underlying forces at work on the market, accurately forecasting the direction the industry would take and outlining the policies that would be needed to direct and protect this new national and global resource.