“Goes in swings and roundabouts”
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8aFR, 8b, 8c & 8d
The previous post on social mobility reminded me how, in my start-up exactly 36 years ago, I had travelled up&down the social ladder: owning class thru then wife’s family wealth, raised middle class and working class as my business depended solely on my handiwork; but it also killed my first marriage...
This mini-series continues here & the series here. Added more links at the bottom.
What I really want to talk about is my years leading up to marrying my first wife exactly 40½ years ago. She and I met in Calgary — my home of 20 years starting w my emigration to Canada exactly 45 years go — 2 years prior, and we moved in PDQ (wiktionary) but my parents and hers had diametrically opposed views on their brood’s engagement.
Her parents were expats in Indonesia — me, my Dad and hers all worked in the oil patch then — so she had free rein on their house and car with no interference from them: the her parents were conservative Christians, he was an Elder at the local United Church (wikipedia) and she ran a small investment firm bankrolled by oil revenue from her grand-parents’ homestead nearby— that allowed her to be very generous w trouble mortgages especially thru the late 70’s, when interest rates sky-rocketed thru oil embargo and global recession… just like today! — so they were shocked when they returned to find us together. That in fact prompted her to move out and join me for grad school in Kingston, Ontario as her parents couldn’t countenance our togetherness before marriage.
My parents were expats in Calgary then, they were happy to have me home after I joined them from France to go to uni: my Dad in fact helped me not only to enroll at uni. — he fatefully introduced me to a prof. who encouraged me to take computer science when geologists “just didn’t do that “, which lead to my second career in computer mapping — but also find my rough necking summer jobs that set me up financially in my new hometown. They were happy I met a local lass — although my Dad did try to match me up with French expats’ daughters — and didn’t seem to mind our living arrangements, as they were what I call nominal Catholics — they did it for the sake of their children and went to Mass, but Dad knew exactly how late we could arrive and how soon we could leave for it to count(!) — that left such a poor impression that I dropped Catholicism as a teen, among other reasons I won’t go into now.
So there was a 3 month window mid-’82 when her parents returned from Indonesia, we returned from Ontario after I graduated — in fact my Mum and she graduated together in Calgary, long story — and my family returned to France ending their 6 year Canadian expat tenure. Behind the merriment however lurked turbulent waters: her parents were happy to have us marry, in their church in fact, as that normalised our relationship… plus we got along well and they loved me to bits! Imagine the horror of my parents, when they realised I wasn’t returning home with them! It turns out that my Dad had my career planned for me: go to the French Petroleum Institute as post-grad and join the French National Oil Co. he’d spent his career in, and find a nice French daughter of one of his colleagues — remember his attempts at match-making … my first girlfriend was one of them in fact, and Dad saw her as a perfect match as he himself married Mum his first girlfriend too, but said GF returned to France sans moi— it was so bad in fact that Dad got it backwards: I married a local lass because I had decided beforehand to settle there. He saw me staying in Calgary because of her: she became persona non grata, in fact, and I basically didn’t talk to my parents until I left her 7 years later. The divorce was civil & you can see her in the banner photo.
So that is my story of “swings and roundabouts”, a British term meaning things go back & forth and round & round, as my marriages went in a cross-Atlantic setting. If you want more about my travels, check out my video mapping 192 locations I’d been to in my life growing up on the expat circuit — see my original life and work stories— then continuing as an adult and planning to end in Colorado (story here):
If you want more about this first marriage, go to my old website — the orignal hand-written HTML where I practised hyper-linking along top index, and a bottom menu mimicking my pre-web HTTP page — and select 1980 onward atop. For more about my second marriage following this story, go to the next post here.
