When my husband, Don, and I got married, I made it clear that I did not want kids.
“I don’t feel like I’d be a good mom,” I told Don.
Don, who was nine years older and already had two children from a previous marriage, didn’t mind. He understood where I was coming from. Though the family I grew up in had many wonderful qualities, strong marriages weren’t our forte. That’s how it looked to me as a child anyway.
It was especially obvious at Christmas. Sometimes my sisters and I spent the holiday at the pink trailer where Grandma Eva and Grandpa Floyd lived. They had divorced three times, each time because Eva thought she could do better with someone else, then changed her mind. Later, we discovered Eva had been experiencing symptoms of undiagnosed early-onset Alzheimer’s.
My own parents had a rocky relationship. Mom had inherited Grandma Eva’s Alzheimer’s, and she was paranoid. As far back as I
