Ok—now I am engaged.
I didn’t realize then, only later, that he never actually asked me to marry him. He offered me jewelry, which I accepted, but he never said the words, Will you marry me? We did not discuss wedding plans for a year or so. For his third year of residency, Ben chose a hospital in Rochester, New York. As a woman engaged to a doctor, I finally felt comfortable telling my parents that this time when we moved, we would be living together. My father vowed to cease speaking to me on religious grounds, and while my mother continued to take my phone calls, they were short, one-sided conversations.
“He’ll never marry you,” she’d say. Or, “He’s using you,” and “You’re living in sin and he’s Jewish. When he gets what he wants from you, he will dump you for a Jewish girl.”
This was a stressful and painful period for me. For the first time in my life, my father was not just a phone call away, the one consistent, constant in my life—distant perhaps, but certainly constant. He literally would not speak to me as long as I was living with Ben. My mother almost always ended our conversations by beating me down, telling me I was a fool. She never believed he would marry me.
After two years with no wedding plans on the horizon, I played the only card I had left to play. Over dinner in downtown Rochester, I laid out an ultimatum.
“Either we set a date or I’m out of here,” I told him.
“Then, we’ll set a date,” he said casually, between bites of his steak. “How is May or June?”
“Too far away. How’s November?” I asked. “We can have the ceremony the day before Thanksgiving and then everyone can just stay for dinner the following day.”
“Fine, sounds good,” he said.
Even with minimal wedding plans, there was still disappointment. That was the year Boston got socked in two days before Thanksgiving with a huge snow storm, stranding some of my family and friends. That left only Ben’s creepy friends from Ocean City, his and my immediate families, and one of his doctor friends who served as his best man. At this point, I had this feeling of just wanting to get this wedding over with.
After a quick ceremony in the lobby of the Strathallan Hotel in Rochester, New York, by a justice of the peace who wore cowboy boots under his robe, we were officially and legally married. A month later, I was pregnant with Ella, and a month after that we had a quasi-honeymoon where we went skiing for a week in Aspen, Colorado. Ben, for some reason, invited his father along. Absurd is the only word I can think of to describe that trip. I had morning sickness all day long and the hotel room had just one bed. Ben’s father slept on a pullout sofa bed in the same room. I had no privacy.
We packed what belongings we’d amassed together in Rochester and moved to the coast of South Carolina to start our family. This was July of 1984. My parents were pleased that the globetrotting had stopped and we were settling down and having children.
Ben joined a busy medical practice on the south end of the beach and I jumped in to setting up our first house and caring for our baby daughter. We had four children over the next six years which became my full time occupation, and happily so. Ben eventually opened his own practice and brought in his first associate. His practice took off like wildfire, taking away our financial worries and allowing us a few luxuries. We would eventually hire a live-in nanny, a weekly housekeeper, and a landscaper, and we owned three cars.
I ran the books, and over the period of several successful years it became clear that we could afford something I have always dreamed of: a house on the beach. Although Ben is well known in town as being a successful physician, on the beach it is another story. There he is best known for his long swims—a mile a day—when the water is warm enough.
“You going to start swimming soon, Doc?” the locals regularly ask him in the latter months of spring. Even the bank tellers at the drive-thru window ask, “Hey Maurita, is your husband in the water yet?” He swam directly in front of our house, near the Surfside Pier, to a restaurant on the beach called the Conch Café, and then ran back on the sand. To some in town, when they see Ben swimming, it is a sign that summer has officially started. His patients seem to like the fact that their doctor practices what he preaches—exercising and taking good care of his body.
After a couple of months of looking at properties up and down the coast, our realtor showed us a faded white box on stilts, just a thousand square feet, nestled into the beach background. It was already furnished with an eclectic array of castoff furniture, comfortable and welcoming.
I loved this little beach house and moved the family over for weekends and off season months any chance we could get. We rented it out for the summer months as we needed the rental income. I always felt a sigh of relief and peace as I drove up into that little driveway. Even though our main home was just five minutes away, the minute I walked up the grey, weather-beaten staircase, I felt that we were away on vacation. The beach house, the little slice of sand dunes, and the magnificent, unobstructed view of the ocean was a tremendous gift, one that I never took for granted. I felt as though I had become a part of this house, and it had become a part of me. Together, we faced the ocean from the same vantage point, and we victoriously weathered the storms.
Unfortunately, our financial success had come at a price. Ben’s work and on-call schedule left him no real time for his growing family and me. At times, I felt like a single mother. I had been given the gift of financial security, but I had no one to share it with. We were both so busy living our lives we never invested any time to maintain and develop our emotional connections or respond to each other on an intimate level. I thought our sex life was good, considering the demands on the both of us. When I was even eight and a half months pregnant, he was all over me. Some women complained that their husbands won’t touch them during pregnancy. Not mine. That’s one of the reasons I never suspected his involvement with other women.
Still, during the times we did spend together, I sometimes felt that something was not quite right. I felt in my gut that he was running from something. Ben was the type of person for whom professional success wasn’t enough. He had to always push himself further than his friends were willing to push. He had to run further, row harder, bungee jump higher (or backwards!)—anything to prove himself or be the center of attention.
The summer of 1997 was when everything crashed in one cataclysmic moment, changing the reality I knew. The integral pieces of our lives shattered, and we spent the next ten years trying to mend our hearts and our marriage.
It began to unravel during a family trip to La Jolla, California, where Ben’s cousin, Jeff, was getting married on the beach. Ben was an usher, and our youngest daughter, Olivia, was flower girl. What should have been a nice family vacation instead started the downward spiral of our marriage.
The wedding was straight out of a fairy tale. Jeff and his bride were married on the beautiful cliff at Pillbox Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of La Jolla. They pledged their lives to one another and everyone clapped and celebrated with them. It was a beautiful, joyful scene.
Ben looked handsome in his tuxedo, but he always looks handsome when he’s dressed up. As the wife of a physician, I’d been to my share of black-tie fundraisers and cocktail parties. I have spent some of those evenings in a gown, on the arm of my attractive husband in his striking tuxedo.
But I was not on his arm at the ceremony, because I was not in the wedding party. Instead, Ben escorted a buxom, long-legged brunette. He seemed to be very pleased to be partnered with a pretty, young woman. She was, in fact, married and had three young children and a nice, good-looking husband. I didn’t give her much thought as she had a beautiful family of her own. Plus, she wore way too much make-up—something
