by Wendy Davis
I’d also made a good friend in middle school who shared those same deeply held religious beliefs. She was a flute player in our band; I started playing the clarinet. Her father was a high-school band director, and her family was devout. One Sunday while attending church with Donna and her family, I found Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. That experience opened me up in ways I could not have expected. My newfound faith would soon be severely tested, and in the years since has grown and matured.
In some of the notes I wrote for my mom, I told her that I’d found Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I tried to convince her to go down that path with me, too. But it wasn’t until some years later that her faith became a central part of who she is and continues to be. To this day she attends a Baptist church in her neighborhood—where believers receive eternal life through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as their Savior—that more appropriately reflects her religious perspective than the Episcopal church did, and her faith is an incredibly important part of her life.
But for me, the walls around which that type of religious observance had been built began to crumble. I became doubtful about some of the things I was seeing at Christ for the Nations’ services. And a particular incident at one such service planted those seeds of doubt and disillusionment in my mind. My maternal grandparents were with us as part of a brief visit to Fort Worth. During this particular service, my granddad sat beside me in his wheelchair on the aisle while the pastor was calling people up to the stage one by one to be healed. As I sat there, I prayed as hard as I could that my grandfather would be chosen. No matter how hard I prayed and no matter how hard I cried, my grandfather was passed by as church deacons left the stage and walked among the audience, deciding whom to select. Looking over at him, slouched in his wheelchair, his arm in its sling, I saw tears streaming down his face. I will never forget the disappointment and disillusionment that settled over me that day. Why had God chosen to heal those other people? Why had my grandfather been overlooked? My adult self can reflect on that question today with less of a sense of hurt and distrust than my young self felt all those years ago. But on that day, and for long afterward, my faith suffered a deep blow.
It was the first time I really began to question what I was being taught, and my sense that I was not being told the whole truth of God precipitated a slow but sure fading of that kind of religious observance from my life. And while I never really returned to that particular brand of faith that I’d found as a teenager, I credit it with being a refuge for me at a time when I needed it most. Today I belong to a Baptist church, but I mostly worship in a variety of denominational churches in the African-American community in the senate district that I represent, where the message is focused on the power of God in our lives for good instead of on damnation, and where the sermons are ones of aspiration and forgiveness. I tend to cry when I sing in those churches, during those services. The songs open a door I try to otherwise keep closed and force me to be in touch with my vulnerabilities and my understanding of how small I am in the construct of God’s power. My faith now is built upon a mixture of all I learned as a child and all I’ve experienced as an adult. I do believe. And I do believe that God has a hand in our lives, though not always in the way we would have asked for it. Even in my darkest moments, even when I could not see it, that connection to God that I found as a teenager has never left me. I’ve found that it’s impossible for me to look back over my life and not see his hand in all that brought me to where I am today, to see his grace in difficulties that became my greatest blessings.
—
After I put that phase behind me as a teenager, my life started to move in a whole new direction. School was still easy—I didn’t have to study very much to make good grades—but something in me had shifted. Part of it was a normal teenage desire for independence and freedom; another part was a sense of rebelliousness and frustration that was born out of the financial stress we were always under and dealing with collateral damage from my parents’ divorce. At some point my need for my mother’s approval and happiness fell away, and I stopped cleaning the house obsessively and leaving her notes to tell her how much I’d done to help her.
And that’s when my rebellious phase really started. From the fifth grade up until ninth grade, my best friend was Tracy, who lived what I thought was the most perfect life in the world. Tracy and her twin brother were both attractive, happy, popular kids who were really good students. They lived in Hurst, where most of the houses were newer and bigger and had modern layouts. Her parents were married, and her family, which included two younger siblings, had none of the soap-opera dynamics and drama that mine had had. Her mom didn’t work outside the home and was always well dressed, and her father, like most of the people who lived in that area, worked at Bell Helicopter.
I often spent the night at Tracy’s house, which I loved to do, and on many Fridays her mom would pick us up at school, looking amazing, with perfect hair and makeup, and always acting so warm and welcoming to me. We’d get in the back of their station wagon, the leather smell of which I’ll remember forever, and we’d sit in the rear facing the back of the car until we got to their house. Often, when we’d get to Tracy’s room, there would be a new outfit laid out on her bed that her mom had bought for her, which was such a foreign experience to me based on my own life. There was something so grounded and stable about their house and their family, and I loved being part of it. I really looked up to Tracy—because she was such a good student, she helped inspire in me a healthy sense of competition in school. Where my edges were rough, hers were smooth, and we had a wonderfully solid and stable friendship for several years.
In the last year of junior high school, though, when I was fourteen and so much was happening at home, I made a new best friend, Lori, and that’s when I stopped being that girl who was so perfect and well behaved. Lori also came from a great family—her father worked at Bell Helicopter, too, and they lived in the same neighborhood as Tracy—but despite her stable home life and family, Lori was a rebel, a bit of a wild child, and that fascinated me. I was mesmerized by her; she was beautiful, and, like Tracy—and me—she had wild, curly hair. Up until then I’d always tried desperately to tame mine, getting up at five-thirty in the morning to try to straighten it each day before school. I desperately wanted Marcia Brady hair. But with Lori, for the first time, I let my hair go natural, owning more of who I really was.
Lori would remain my best friend all through high school, and during that time she and I went down a path of cutting class, smoking cigarettes, and sneaking out of the house at night. It’s while we were hanging out and wandering around when we shouldn’t have been that I began my very first relationship with a boy, Steve, a nineteen-year-old. I was only fourteen and in middle school, and Steve had already graduated from high school. He had a Grand Prix, and one of his friends had an even newer Grand Prix, and Lori and I were totally impressed. They were older, they had cars, and they could take us to parties.
You may find it hard to believe that my mother let me go out with someone so much older—five years older—but a lot of the time I made sure she didn’t know what I was really up to. She had a deep sense of concern about what she saw happening with me and the way Lori and I behaved, but because she worked so many nights and didn’t know what to do, her way of dealing with my newfound rebelliousness was to try as hard as she could to contain me so I wouldn’t get into trouble. Of course, the more she tried to control me, the more I rebelled. I’d lash out at her and lie to her about where I was or who I was with, just wanting to break free.
—
Toward the end of my junior year in high school, I started dating Frank Underwood, who would become the father of my eldest daughter, Amber. Frank was two years older than me and had already graduated. He came from a much more traditional family than I did, and one with more earning power. They lived in the newly developing area of Northeast Tarrant County; his father was part owner of a manufactu
ring company, and his mom was a stay-at-home mom who had gone back to school to get a master’s degree. She was a thoughtful, smart, articulate person and one of those adults who could look you in the eye when you were only seventeen years old and talk to you with respect and treat you as though she was sincerely interested in what you had to say.
Frank was outgoing and funny and extremely good-looking—he had chocolate-brown eyes and a great smile like the one that Amber has now, plus a dimple like my brother Joey’s. He was the perfect kind of bad boy—a boy from a good family who also had a rebellious side, which I found very attractive. I don’t remember how we connected—in school he was popular with the football players and the cheerleaders, which certainly wasn’t my group—but I do remember our first date: we went to one of those driving ranges where you hit golf balls.
I had never in my life known anyone who played golf, and I thought to sit and watch someone who actually knew how to hit a golf ball was the most sophisticated thing in the world. That’s how he’d been raised—he even had his own golf clubs. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, who had their own golf clubs? I was captivated by him. He was very smart, but he was one of those kids who didn’t excel in school; his report cards were not a reflection of his intellect. He didn’t handle authority figures well at all, which perhaps explains why he went through several different jobs while we were together.
Lacking confidence in the academic side of his intelligence, Frank decided not to pursue college as his two older sisters had, even though his family would have provided for him if he’d wanted it. Instead he enjoyed working, particularly on or with anything that had a motor. When we were first dating, he had a job driving a forklift at a nearby plant, and he’d already begun to look for an apartment for himself. When he told me he was moving out of his parents’ house, he asked me if I wanted to move in with him. We would share the rent, and all would be good.
It was the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. And I said yes.
Like so many impulsive decisions young people make, mine to move in with Frank at the end of my junior year of high school was all about escape and rebellion. I’d become immune to my mother’s understandable attempts to control me. I’d reached my breaking point. I didn’t want all the responsibility of our home life anymore. I didn’t want to be the caretaker anymore. And I didn’t want my mom telling me what to do. I just wanted to be with my friends and have fun.
Understandably, my mother was very upset when I told her I was leaving, but after I moved out, I think it was a relief for her. She didn’t have to worry every minute about where I was and what I was doing: she could put it out of her mind somewhat.
“I placed you in God’s hands now,” she’d told me, completely resigned. “I trust that God will take care of you.”
It’s not so much that she felt she’d failed me, but that she couldn’t control me anymore. I was such a driven, determined person that even though she never doubted that I would always work hard, I’m sure she was also afraid of the danger I would put myself in now that I was living on my own. Mothers worry about their girls because they know the things that they’ve been vulnerable to—they worry about them in a way that’s different from the way their dads do. And, while my dad acted nonchalant when I told him the news, I remember that the first time he came to the apartment after Frank and I moved in together, he clearly felt awkward and uncomfortable. He might have been fine with it in the abstract, but when he had to be in the actual physical space where his unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter was living with a boy, he had exactly the kind of reaction most dads would have under the same circumstances. But for the most part, my dad, ever the optimist, always had trust that I was a smart, mature kid who was going to find a way to take care of myself.
The truth about me would lie somewhere in the middle.
NINE
Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.
—OPRAH WINFREY
FRANK AND I MOVED into a tiny apartment in Hurst in May of 1980, the cheapest one we could find. A grim, dingy place that’s since been torn down, it had a bedroom with a sliding glass door that opened directly onto the frontage road of Highway 183, a little galley kitchen, and ugly green shag carpeting. Frank had gone to pick out the apartment while I was at work one day and asked me whether I wanted brown or green carpeting—the apartments came with one or the other—and I’d said brown. On move-in day, though, when we got to the apartment with our meager belongings, I saw we had green carpeting and was surprised to learn the reason behind the apparent mistake: Frank was color-blind.
I brought with me my clothes and my bed from home. Frank brought with him his clothes, a used sofa set that his parents gave him, and an assortment of some dishes, pots, and pans. Even though I was there because of the difficulty I’d left behind, I was excited: I was the only senior at school with my own place. It very quickly turned into party central—not surprising when two teenagers are on their own and away from their parents. Friends were always dropping in, and there wasn’t much time to sleep or be by myself, but I remember that first feeling of self-sufficiency, a strange combination of pride and bitterness. At seventeen I already had no illusions about the world. I knew there was no easy way through life, that it was a struggle, and that we all had to find our own joy and make our own success, even if success meant just managing to pay the rent.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that all I’d done by moving across town was to trade one set of problems for another.
Life had been hard for me before, but now in my senior year, while I was going to school and working two jobs, it had gotten even harder. I’d started waiting tables at my dad’s theater the previous year, after his sandwich shop became a preshow dinner service. It was tough, low-paying work—we worked for tips only, and there were some nights when I would make less than twenty dollars—but it came with the added benefit of getting to spend a lot of time with my dad again, seeing him become so many different people through the characters he played onstage, and watching him persevere and refuse to give up even when things were financially tough for the theater.
It also gave me the opportunity to connect with him in a way that I hadn’t been able to since my parents had separated and divorced; I have some very fond memories of that, including the fact that for a while I started calling him Jerry. I looked up to him and admired him for what he was doing with the theater, and now that I was working for him, I started calling him by his first name the way everyone else there did. For me, calling him by his first name meant a recognition that we now had a relationship that had moved beyond one of just father-daughter. During this time I saw him in a whole new light: I now understood that he was living his passion, and I had a newfound respect for his willingness to do without everything in the way of financial success in order to achieve that dream. Calling him Jerry was a recognition of that respect and a demonstration that I didn’t just see him in the role of my father. I saw him as the extraordinary human being that he was, working so hard, and with such dedication, and against so many odds, to bring this theater to life when it looked as if it wasn’t possible that it could continue to survive.
My siblings never really appreciated or understood my calling him by his first name, particularly my brother Chris, and it wasn’t long before I once again settled into calling him Dad. I don’t remember why, but perhaps it was that once again he became who I needed him to be to me—a parent—more than a singular human being to admire and marvel at from a distance.
I’d also started working as a receptionist for two pediatricians—it was part of my high school’s vocational-education program, because my dream was to become a doctor. This meant going to school during half days in the morning, then answering phones at the doctors’ office in the afternoon, then waiting tables at my dad’s theater at night. While I stayed at the doctors’ office on and off for a few years, Frank went through several jobs during th
e brief time we lived together—sometimes due to layoffs, sometimes due to a disagreement he had with a superior—either way, it added to the rockiness of our partnership from the get-go. Frank brought a unique cleverness to everything he took on, meaning that he had a hard time conforming to the way others thought he ought to do things. He was very particular in how he approached tasks and projects, and sometimes that didn’t match up with how his boss wanted things done. Almost always there would be some kind of confrontation, and he’d lose his job—he’d either quit or be fired—and then get started on finding another one.
Despite his employment issues, Frank always wanted to work. He was very smart and very hardworking, and it was his hope—which was certainly exhibited in his efforts—to provide partnered financial support for me. He typically drove heavy equipment, like forklifts in a warehouse setting or backhoes in a road-building capacity, which was very much in keeping with who he was and what he loved. He loved automobiles. Frank was the kind of person who could take something apart, figure out how it worked, and reassemble it, never needing to read a manual. I recall his mother telling me that he had been doing that since he was a little boy: taking his toys apart, figuring out how they worked, and reassembling them. Looking back, I wish he’d had the opportunity to find the right career to match his interests and his talents. But, at least for the time that we were together, that didn’t happen.
—
In May of 1981, a year after I’d moved in with Frank, I graduated from Richland High School. I was a member of the National Honor Society, but I don’t remember ever studying. I made it a point to go to school most days, hardly ever skipping class. That sense of obligation to follow through was driven deep into me by my parents and grandparents. And though they weren’t physically around to make sure I adhered to my duties, they were there in my conscience nonetheless. As had previously been the case, I did well academically even after I was living on my own. I was blessed with a very good short-term memory, for which I credit my dad, so I was one of those students who could just show up and take a test and do well, remembering whatever work we’d done in class well enough to regurgitate it on an exam. English was my main interest, born from the love of reading that my mother had passed along. But math was always one of my strengths, too, especially calculus and elementary analysis and trigonometry; by the time I was in eleventh grade, I’d exhausted every math class my high school offered. I credit my father’s constant problem-solving quizzes for shaping my analytic thinking. But though I was blessed with natural aptitudes and developed talents, I was lost when it came to understanding how to navigate my way into college when I graduated high school. I applied to only one—the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)—because it was one my dad and I agreed we could best afford. Part of the U.T. system, it had a sprawling urban campus and most of its students then were commuters. It was close enough for me to continue working part-time at the doctors’ office, but because I was running back and forth from work to classes, I wasn’t able to connect with the school community and feel socially rooted there.