# Mrs. Jerry Garcia, or "What Life is Like as Santa's Wife"



## Affaircare

Soooo...inspired by my good friend, Drerio, I'm going to also jump in and write about being married to my best fried. You know, it's funny because I have no idea what to write about or where this will go, but let me introduce myself and my Dear Hubby. 

First, I think most of you know me--I'm Affaircare. I am about the most whitebread, middle class person you can imagine. I mean seriously, I was born in the midwest to Lutheran parents who both went to college: Dad was an IRS agent and Mom was a social worker. I am the oldest in my family, and I have two younger sisters: my middle sister is about 1.5 years younger than I am, and the baby of the family was one of those "surprises" and she's nine years younger than I am. 









My childhood ... well I'll just say it was not a happy one. I mean, as a person I'm a cheerful sort--still am!--but my Dad was an alcoholic he refuses any treatment, and my Mom I believe has untreated bipolar and she refuses treatment because "she studied psychology in college and she'd know if she had mental issues." So they both denied their issues and it resulted in my Mom and Dad inviting friends over for dinner parties, getting drunk, and then after people left, they'd have physical fights and try to choke each other with the phone cord....that kind of thing. My sister and I used to hide under the table so we wouldn't get hit, or hide in our rooms, because usually after fighting with each other they'd find some reason to blame us for something and it would be on. 

This continued into my middle school days when they heard a preacher talking about the gospel and "got saved." Now that period of life was somewhat nice because they didn't physically fight or hit us, but in becoming church people, they once again had an excuse for not facing their issues (because they would pray and God could handle it), and really it never ended--it was just repressed for a while. We lived on a small farmette, about a mile from the closest little town of 89, so it was remote and rural, and well gradually there became screaming about the Devil doing this or Satan doing that and it got even more scary and delusional. Even as a kid, I knew that my job wasn't to try to fix this but rather just to survive it! I stayed out of the way as much as I could, and when I couldn't, I just took it--what else could I do? I did learn a bad "survival skill" if you will: dissociation. It's hard to describe, but when I was being hit, there's nothing else I could do but just be hit, so I'd concentrate on the pattern of the sofa so hard that I didn't feel the hurt of the beating. 

So that was my childhood--you can see why I was a bit of a mess. And Dear Hubby...man you should have seen him! He was the cutest kid ever! Imagine Opie Taylor from Mayberry, and you pretty much have Dear Hubby as a kid:








He was pretty lucky in that his Mom and Dad treated him well. They were poor and had four kids altogether (four boys), and Dear Hubby is the oldest brother. His Mom was close to her family and his Dad a little less close but still friendly, and they were regular christian folks who raised their boys going to Sunday School and Church and trying to teach them how to grow up. Dear Hubby's Mom was a little bit the kind of Mom who wants to control the children and wasn't very worldly--she'd sort of "guilt him" into doing stuff even after he was married--but in the end that wasn't the end of the world. 

So that's how we started! Kind of makes you wonder how in the world we found each other, doesn't it?


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