I. The McKennas Arrive in Salisbury, the Year is 1985
When my husband George and I first moved to Salisbury, Massachusetts in October of 1985, from the moment of arrival I felt we’d made a mistake. No, that’s not quite true. My doubts had already been growing during all the negotiations leading up to that day. The homeowners selling the house made the process impossibly unpleasant, and as there was no broker in between us, hence no voice of reason nor any way to blunt all their miserableness, we endured a steady barrage of sheer meanness right through the closing.
The skeptics among you are probably right now thinking, it takes two to tango. Fair point. The only thing that might have contributed to the sellers’ looniness was my husband’s plodding pace. George was a shrewd consumer, and no one, absolutely NO ONE, was going to rush his first home purchase.
Perhaps, too, you’re not getting the most honest assessment from me regarding their behavior. Were they really that unpleasant, really that mean? I’ll allow that, being in my final trimester of pregnancy with my second daughter, some of my actions weren’t characterized by reasonableness. And we were already running out the clock on our eviction. Ok, I realize that that last statement in no way casts a more favorable light on me (or us, because George was in that bucket with me). Disclaimer: the eviction was a planned one; the landlords were selling the house, and the new owners were doing a complete renovation. Hopefully, I’ve cleared that up so there are no lingering reservations.
As I began to say (and then proceeded to dig myself into a good-size hole), I was thinking that we’d made a mistake in moving to Salisbury. The day we moved in, George arrived in the rental truck with most of our possessions just ahead of me. I was following a couple minutes behind in our pick-up truck. We didn’t have a ton of stuff, primarily infant and toddler toys and accessories. When I pulled up the long serpentine driveway and put the truck in park, my older daughter, just four years old, leaped from the passenger side and began to run toward the truck. As she was running, I saw the rental truck’s back-up lights go on, and George began, inexplicably, to back the truck. I think I blared my horn. To this day I’m not even sure. I can’t hear it in my mind’s recollection of that terrifying moment. I have no trouble envisioning my tiny daughter right behind the truck, with raised arms; to each side of her, a frighteningly ominous round white glow. Was she suddenly aware that the truck was backing up and, therefore, trying to signal, STOP! Or had she raised her arms to be scooped up by her daddy? The truck bobbed as George put it back in park, and hopped out. He hadn’t heard or seen anything. He had simply changed his mind about backing up. The scene replayed in my head for months. I still get slightly nauseous thinking about that day and what if. So, yes, I was convinced we’d made a mistake moving to Salisbury.
II. A Blank, Asphalt-Surfaced Canvas
Neither of us had a point of reference for our new community. Salisbury, Massachusetts. I’d never so much as passed through the town. George had only a hazy recollection of having visited the beach in his early days as a student at North Shore Community College. It wasn’t even clear to us what or where the Merrimack Valley was. Whatever it was, it had to be better than the affordable neighborhoods we had been looking at for several months on the North Shore; who wants to live beside a river made toxic by a long history of tannery dumping? Or a house that sits simultaneously at the edge of a good neighborhood and the edge of a bad neighborhood with the highest robbery rate in the city? These were houses we could afford.
Based on a brief introduction to the house in Salisbury and the lot it sat on, we enthusiastically shook hands with the sellers, I’ll call them Cheswick and Betty Finch, and began a new chapter. And even though they were moving to a shiny new house (the second one that Cheswick had built) a couple of miles away, they radiated signs of unspoken regret. As we gradually came to know our house, I couldn’t help but feel that we had taken over their “dream” house, the house where early on they had constructed their dreams, and much later on dismantled them. Cheswick and Betty had moved into their new little ranch home at the same age as we were when we moved in. One difference, one that I often wondered about over the years, was: had they not wanted children; was that a choice? Of course, before my heart had had a chance to soften toward them, I thought, thank goodness they never had kids; can you imagine having them as parents? It was an unkind thought, I know.
Located in the Plains section of Salisbury, the northern "uplands" sector of the town, our house was amusingly referred to as “The Backwards House”, which we knew before we signed, and while that particular didn’t concern us – in fact, we ourselves found it quite humorous and endearing – the sellers were indignant about the moniker. The Finches had finished construction of the 4-room ranch house in 1950, right before crews for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works leaned into their shovels in the final construction project of the “Relocated Route 1”, (a 21-mile stretch of expressway, later renamed Route I-95 to better align with the naming conventions for the entire eastern continental network). It would result in the taking of the homeowners’ front yard for Massachusetts’ last exit ramps onto and off of the Northeast Expressway, just shy of the connection with the New Hampshire Turnpike. As George and I saw it, the prickliness that we observed throughout the real estate negotiations must have had its beginnings when they were forced to hand over their front yard. (Think about it, not an insignificant back corner of their 1+ acre lot, but their front yard). They mentioned this detail more than once. The forced taking of land was not the only source of their discontent. . . as we would soon learn.
George and I happily set about making the little ranch our home. We weren’t guilty of too many first-home ownership mistakes, but we did go a little nuts with paint and wallpaper. We didn’t, however, throw up a line of trees or a fence to make clear to everyone where our boundaries were, as people sometimes do, as if their new proprietary role were in some way a tenuous one, and they need defining lines to announce, here to here; that’s the McKennas’ property. There were enough trees already sprinkled about the lot, with denser vegetation at the borders, and well-established shrubbery and flowers. Both my city-boy husband and I were satisfied with the country feel of the place.
Where our lot lines began and ended was of significance at the outset. George and I quickly learned that a couple who owned property further down the street had discovered that they had no access to some of their acreage. Roy and Alice Cheney had used the courts to adjudicate the matter, but lost, even after appeal. This had all happened before we came on the scene.
With neither delay nor a welcoming floral arrangement in hand, Roy and Alice approached us about deeding them a right-of-way. Politely we refused. We were happy with our new property, and a bit skeptical of this brusque, bossy couple. It was with a few misgivings, then, that George agreed to have a sit-down with them in our kitchen; I was at work, and, anyway, had no interest in listening to their carefully scripted argument as to why we should part with a small segment of our lot. Let me just say – yes, even overstate – that I WASN’T THERE while my husband recorded the meeting; I cannot be held responsible for violating the two-party consent law. And this is what you need to appreciate: two very large human beings entered our miniscule “dining room” (which is what the Finches had called the 5’ x 5’ corner of our kitchen when they had defended their ad for a “5-room ranch-style home” that was no more than a 4-room ranch-style home), and laid out their reasons why we should grant them – thuggish bullies used to getting their way – a right of way, one that would give us a modest clutch of tens and twenties, and virtually nothing else. How I knew – innocently – about the proceedings is because. . . I called in the middle of them. At this point George was in a sweat because it had occurred to him that his camcorder, a device no smaller than a dairy cow – it was, after all, 1986 – hidden in a house plant, which also would have been massive in size to adequately camouflage the dairy cow, would soon begin emitting a beep-beep-beep to signal a dying battery. At this point you might be wondering to what end were we recording a discovery-type conversation, to which I can only say we were naïve real estate newbies and, as such, uncertain about our homeowner status.
George held his ground; he was, after all, a man with an unparalleled sense of reason. And while we dodged something early on that will always remain a little bit undefined, what we quickly came to understand within the walls of the backwards house was that the Cheneys and the Finches were locked in a bitter, never-ending feud. For our part, we simply wanted to prune the rhododendrons, plant new things like azaleas (and then transplant when we realized that placing them underneath a basketball hoop was ill-advised), and re-surface – together – the only asphalt-surfaced driveway in the neighborhood.
The hard-surface driveway was our means to meet all the kids in the neighborhood. There’s always heightened curiosity when someone new moves into the neighborhood. Do they have kids? Are they friendly? Will they let us use their driveway to skateboard on or ride our bikes on? The Finches had never allowed anyone on their driveway – especially if you were a human being under the age of, say, 21. Josh was the first kid we met on our street; he was cheerful, adept at handling adults, and very direct; he wanted to know, would we be okay if kids used our driveway. (Why wouldn’t we be?) And, that, of course, altered the course of history. Within hours, our driveway became the nexus of all manner of kid-centered activities. You have no idea how imaginative a brigade of 10-year olds (or so) can be in the context of an asphalt-surfaced driveway, on a dirt road, no less. Of a sudden, our driveway thrummed with bicycles, big-wheels, jump-ropes, skip-its, pogo-balls, and colored chalk.
And I smiled. This is exactly the kind of dream I had imagined.
III. I Quit!
It hadn’t been part of the plan that George and I would move to a new home, fill all the rooms with our old, featureless furniture, and then begin negotiations. Life wasn’t getting simpler (does it ever?), now that we had a new home, new baby, and a more challenging commute. (The commute wasn’t really all that more challenging). Imagine the couple who sinks all their savings into a down payment for their first home purchase, and then the wife says, “Honey, I’m quitting my job.” But here’s the thing: with the birth of each of my girls, it was obvious - to me and everyone I worked closely with - that I had in both cases returned to work way too soon. My older daughter had been 8 weeks old when I began the daily hand-off; not ideal, but not too impossible; my second daughter was 4 weeks old, and that nearly put me around the bend. In neither case did I have daycare that met my expectations. Even now, when one or the other of my girls exhibits anything but the most well-adjusted behavior, I secretly attribute it to an imagined trauma inflicted by a care provider that we should have vetted more carefully. Is anyone really good enough for that job? Nope, not unless it’s the child’s own parent, right? Thus, within weeks of the move, I would give my notice at the insurance company where I worked in Salem.
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For parents of young children, the 1980’s were, in some ways, “in-between” years; according to the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, by 1980 the percentage of families with both parents working had tipped into the majority, yet the constructs and support systems that young families were desperate for in order to sustain that type of lifestyle were still years away from being fixed or reliable features of family life. Without any dependable mechanisms designed specifically to alleviate the stresses that accompanied the dual roles of parenting and full-time work, it’s no wonder, then, that at that same point in time more women were choosing to delay pregnancy, even repudiate the whole thing. For our generation, the two words “working” and “mother” were conjoined, and that became the norm. Regrettably, it was left to these babes in the wood to figure out how to make it all work.
Forty years later, our country still lags in accommodating young families. For example, as of 2021, we’re the only industrialized nation that has no permanent paid family leave policy. Having navigated those troublesome waters long ago, I still would maintain that it is a pretty sizable omission. We do have an unpaid family leave policy, one that provides an out for companies with fewer than 50 employees. It is at least somewhat heartening to know, however, that of late, businesses have been relaxing their oppositional stance; an overwhelming majority now are in favor of a government leave plan. It has perhaps taken a pandemic for employers to concede that, apart from ethical reasons, offering paid family leave makes practical business sense.
* * *
It may be that under more forgiving circumstances, I would have stayed on at the insurance company. As it was, however, I was performing a menial job with rigid work hours and low pay, and I had yet to make any meaningful and lasting connections with any of the people with whom I was working (even after six years). (What that in itself says about me is a topic best covered in sessions with a therapist, which I currently don’t have, so I can’t say “my therapist”). While it was easy for me to walk away from my claims rep job, the decision to become a stay-at-home mom was one that George and I arrived at together, of course.
It must be said that from the moment we met, George and I enjoyed great conversations. It was really the first time that I was in a relationship with someone who cared what I thought and believed, who (like my mother, but unlike me) thought I was smart and could do anything I set my mind to. Moreover, my guy was refreshingly “in touch with his own feelings”. We had such deep conversations. It was intoxicating. This city boy, whose ambitions far exceeded the expectations of a father who dropped out of school in the tenth grade and a mother who regularly - and happily - kept us in the loop about her marriages by means of informally scrawled postcards, had fierce survival instincts. Be that as it may, inner doubts sometimes kept him silent.
For my part, in the early years I wasn’t an empowered, confident woman; I very much took my cues from George. And while I’d like to think that I simply presented the most compelling reasons as to why I should quit my job, there very well could have been an undisclosed variable, a secret reason why George was open to my impassioned appeal. (If so, it was just one among many private thoughts that he would take to the grave with him.) Thus, I broke ranks with my generation, an entire cohort that was eschewing the traditional family dynamic. Put another way, at the very moment in history when the traditional family became a minority class, when even the term “traditional family” became obsolete, I was re-creating that construct for my own little family. I reveled in my new role as stay-at-home mom; it scarcely mattered - at least at first - that I lived in a working-class neighborhood where nearly every adult worked full time. In my compact world life was simple and tidy. I’ve never been one who thrives on complexity and fast-paced activity; I’m not even a quick thinker. Viewed now from a distance of 35 years and a lifetime of gathering experience and wisdom, I can confidently say that I was my happiest version in the four years (between 1985 and 1989) that I orchestrated and led the McKenna Family Experiment.
