Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  After I started taking classes, Frank and I moved to a slightly nicer apartment and worked hard at starting a stable life together. I was still committed to my dream of becoming a pediatrician, as was my dad—he’d wanted it so much for me, in fact, that he’d scrimped and saved enough money to help me pay my first semester’s tuition. But soon after that, in November of my first semester, I got pregnant with Amber, and I did not return for a second one.

  It was a difficult decision and one that I never really forgave myself for, but there was no way around it: I wasn’t able to work full-time at the doctors’ office when I was in school, and Frank and I needed my full-time paycheck. I still remember what I earned working there—$960 a month, before taxes. My half-time amount—when I worked in the morning and had afternoon classes or worked in the afternoon and had classes in the morning—was significantly less. Even though I was still waiting tables, the instability of Frank’s work situation and the cost of going to school made it impossible for me to afford to continue. Especially now that we had a baby on the way. And honestly, the whole thing felt pretty overwhelming to me. It was difficult for me, as a first-generation college student, finding my footing in that first entrée into college.

  —

  Of course, I hadn’t planned on becoming a teenage mother.

  But one day that fall, while shopping with my mom in JCPenney, I suddenly got dizzy and had to hold on to a shelf in the store to gather myself. My mother immediately knew what I had not yet recognized for myself.

  “Oh, my gosh,” she said, looking at me. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  As it turned out, I was. I was eighteen. Still a child myself, and now presented with a level of responsibility I could not fully appreciate until I first held Amber in my arms and understood, as only a mother can, how very real, how very overwhelming, that responsibility would be.

  I know that my mom worried about my financial capacities and that Frank and I were in a relationship that likely couldn’t sustain the responsibilities of both marriage and parenthood, but at the same time, from the moment that I confirmed that I was pregnant, she was completely supportive and demonstrated that she was going to be there for me. The nurses at work did as well, comforting me with their advice and their warm support. I had a very real sense that, surrounded by people who I knew were going to help me do this hard thing, somehow it was all going to be okay.

  —

  Despite our financial circumstances and the fact that I was only eighteen, my emotions turned quickly from overwhelming fear to excitement. I was going to have a baby. And I determined to be grateful for the opportunity to become a mother. It took Frank a little longer to adjust to the idea, but once he did, he decided we should buy a mobile home so we wouldn’t keep throwing money away on rent. It was only after we picked one out and signed on the bottom line that we realized, too late, that we had to find a place to put it. Two kids, we hadn’t thought about the difficulty of finding a mobile-home park that we could afford. No one had mentioned this fact to us while we were in the process of buying it, probably because they assumed we were smart enough to know that for ourselves . . .

  There were no mobile-home parks in the area of Richland Hills and Hurst, where I had grown up and where Frank and I were currently living—and certainly none nearby that we could afford. In order to find an affordable one, we had to move quite a distance away—about a twenty- to twenty-five-minute drive from my mother’s house, off Loop 820, in southeast Fort Worth, where there were two mobile-home parks. One was the “nice” one that had a pond with ducks and parklike grassy areas and where people had potted plants on their decks and a little bit of a yard. And then there was Lakeview, with poorly done asphalt roads and older, smaller mobile homes that were much lower in quality. Lakeview was farther out of town than we would have liked, but it was all we could afford; we made arrangements to rent a spot there starting in late January. I still laugh when I recall the name of that trailer park. Lakeview? Ha. The only view from those trailers was of each other, families struggling to make ends meet. Good people who, like Frank and me, were doing the best they could.

  —

  On January 24, 1982, Frank and I got married at my father’s theater, while my mom sobbed audibly in the front row through the entire ceremony—and not because she was happy. My best friend, Lori, who was my maid of honor, had driven me there that afternoon, and on the way I remember telling her that I feared I wasn’t doing the right thing.

  “Then don’t do it!” she kept saying.

  But I didn’t know how not to do it.

  I didn’t know how to have a baby and not be married—in the world I’d grown up in, women didn’t choose to do it that way, have babies on their own. But if my present self could have advised my eighteen-year-old self, she would have told me this:

  Don’t do it.

  Just move back in with your mom and have your baby.

  Don’t go down this road.

  However, of course my present self couldn’t save my eighteen-year-old self from going down that road. And as I look back on my journey, I know that going down that road was an important part of shaping who I became. As we mature, most of us look back on things that we would have done differently, but if we’re lucky enough to be proud and happy with the person we’ve become, it’s hard to second-guess our decisions, no matter how ill-advised and unwise they appeared at the time. Yes, I would have told my younger self to do so many things differently, but I cherish the fact that it was those very decisions and challenges that made me the person—and the mother and the public servant—I eventually became.

  —

  But that night, on the way to my wedding, even without the benefit of hindsight, I knew I was making a mistake. I knew that Frank and I weren’t long-term-marriage material. Though I loved him, I could already see clearly the hurdles that we would confront as a couple. I knew that we were different. I had dreams for myself, and I was driven to make them happen, and I could tell that he wasn’t going to go along on that journey with me. It wasn’t the journey he wanted to be on.

  When we first met, I was in high school and just as excited about having parties every night as he was, but now I was already growing past that. It was a phase for me, but Frank wasn’t ready to outgrow it. His frequent partying became a real source of conflict for us, and not just because he was spending money on something like that when we had a baby on the way and were always struggling to pay the bills.

  I knew that I wasn’t on the path I wanted to be on, but I didn’t have the fortitude to call a time-out in order to reconsider. So there, on the same stage where my father had played so many different roles and where he, too, had gotten married—to Suzi McLaughlin, who became my stepmom—we took our vows and drove to our new mobile home in Lakeview as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Underwood.

  —

  Lakeview Mobile Home Park had a rule that you must have a skirt around your mobile home, but we couldn’t afford a ready-made one. Instead ours was a skirt cobbled together from metal sheeting that Frank had bought at the hardware store and that covered only about the front quarter of the trailer. Thankfully, the management of the park didn’t press the issue because we couldn’t afford to address it. And so we began our marriage and tried our best to make a home to bring our baby into. We both worked during the day, and I worked many nights as well. And we settled into our pattern as a married couple. Frank’s real passion was working on cars, especially his beloved yellow-and-black Trans Am, so there was always an old car up on blocks beside our trailer, with its hood up and its motor parts strewn around on the ground. We would eat a dinner of either spaghetti, fried chicken, frozen pizza, or pork chops (the four things in my “cooking” repertoire). Frank would work on his car. On the evenings I was home, I would work obsessively on keeping our trailer clean. And we awaited the birth of our child.

  Living in Lakeview was a foreign experience for me
. Though we were only a twenty-minute drive from our previous home and from our parents, it felt as though we had moved into an entirely different life. I didn’t recognize myself in it and found a hopelessness settling in on me. At least when we’d lived in the apartment, I still felt part of the community I’d grown up in, but now we were out in a trailer park that was far removed from anywhere.

  That was certainly a difficult time. I’d left my community. I was in a marriage I didn’t think was going to work out. And we had a mortgage and all the other responsibilities that came along with “home ownership” even if that home was one on wheels. It required a whole new level of maturity for me that came at a time when I was already dealing with a lot: being pregnant and feeling the disappointment of college not working out after I’d completed just one semester.

  As always, there was the stressful distraction of having to earn a living. Chasing a job with a better opportunity for advancement, I left the pediatricians’ office and started at Dresser Industries, with the help of a former co-worker who had also gone to work there. Though the commute was long, the pay was slightly better, there was an opportunity to work my way up the ladder, and, most important, there were health-insurance benefits. Without them I wouldn’t have been able to afford maternity care. Frank and I were overwhelmed at the prospect of paying for any of that.

  Dresser Industries was a good company, one that supplied parts for drilling rigs, from the smallest of gaskets to some of the most complex machinery parts. I worked in the requisition department, and it was my job to take an order, bring it out to the floor, have it filled, and get it sent off to the customer.

  But getting to my new job presented another set of challenges. I commuted to Dallas and had a car-pool arrangement with my former co-worker, who’d encouraged me to apply for the job, and her husband. They lived in Arlington, east of where I lived and in between where I lived and Dallas. To be at work by seven or seven-thirty, I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning, leave my place at five-thirty, then pick up my friends and head on into work. We took turns driving from Arlington to Dallas and, at one point during that commuting period, when every precious penny counted for me, my car began experiencing serious engine problems, and Frank was unable to fix it properly. Unable to afford a solution, I continued to drive it for a few months after that. This terrified my friends when it was my day to be the driver, because I couldn’t get it to accelerate above fifty miles per hour, making things pretty precarious when I tried to enter a freeway ramp.

  Frank and I then decided to do something that in hindsight was extremely irresponsible. We bought a new car, the dealer’s model that had been test-driven quite a bit, so the price was lower, but it was still far more than our budget allowed us to afford. I cannot believe the dealership was willing to sell it to us. It’s likely that Frank’s parents had to co-sign for us, though I don’t recall that with any real clarity. It was a gold Pontiac Grand Prix with cloth interior, and it was only a matter of days before Frank burned a hole in the front seat with a cigarette. It was the first new thing I’d ever owned, and I was really proud to have it, but a car payment on top of our other obligations added an unbelievable burden to our already stressful financial situation.

  And then, out of the clear blue sky, I was facing the prospect of losing my job. I was about six months pregnant, and Dresser began downsizing in response to a decline in the oil and gas industry. Because I was so newly employed, I was caught in the first wave of layoffs. But one of my co-workers, a young woman with two children and a husband who had a steady job, gave me her position and took the layoff so I could keep my job and, more important at that juncture, my health benefits. She wanted to take the opportunity to be home with her very young children, and she also wanted to help me—it was an incredible act of kindness that moved me to tears. She was an angel in every sense of the word, and I will never forget the sacrifice she made to help me. Sadly, though, even her sacrifice didn’t save me from the next round of layoffs. Within another month, her job—which had become my job—got cut. My immediate supervisor understood very clearly what this layoff would mean to me and my pregnancy. In what was the pre-COBRA era, he knew that I would lose my insurance. I’m not sure how he convinced the higher-ups to allow me to keep my insurance, but somehow he did. In exchange I had to agree to give up the two weeks’ severance pay that I otherwise would have received. The decision was a no-brainer for me. How Frank and I would pull off the feat of paying our bills during that period was unimaginable, but keeping my doctor and my ability to deliver Amber under his care was my priority.

  And then, at seven months pregnant, I applied for and began receiving unemployment. In order to qualify for the unemployment benefits, I had to demonstrate that I was putting in a legitimate effort to find a new job. And though I got a fair amount of interviews, one look at my ever-expanding belly meant a polite “We’ll be in touch,” a follow-up that didn’t occur. To say that things became unsustainable financially for Frank and me during that time would be an understatement. We rationed gas. We rationed food. We rationed electricity—no easy feat for someone in her final trimester of pregnancy during the hottest Texas summer months.

  I will never forget the unexpected blessing that arrived right after Amber was born. Though my boss at Dresser had brokered a deal with me to give up severance in favor of insurance, he continued to press my case, unbeknownst to me. And the fruits of his efforts appeared not long after Amber Nicole Underwood came into the world. I remember that day so vividly, my palms sweaty as I stood beside our mailbox, holding a check in the amount of two weeks’ pay from Dresser. That letter had been preceded by an electricity cutoff notice. A bill we could now pay. Another answered prayer from God. Another angel to my rescue. With tears streaming down my face, I fell to my knees right then and there and said a prayer of gratitude.

  And so it was that I was able to deliver Amber with the doctor of my choice at the hospital of my choice and to bring her home to a place where cool air could chill her room from a small window A/C unit that we’d bought used. We were surviving. If only for the short term, I knew how great my blessings were.

  Amber was born that August, by cesarean section. She was healthy, six pounds, thirteen ounces, with beautiful dark skin and dark hair and dark eyes. Both Frank’s family and my family were there, and my dad instantly and proudly pronounced Amber the most beautiful baby in the nursery. She was born into a world where she had grandparents and parents who were excited to greet her and to do our best to try to provide a good life for her.

  We were excited about our baby, and I was lucky enough to regain my job at the pediatricians’ office so we could have free pediatric care for Amber and as many free samples of medicine and formula as I needed. It got us through another rough financial spot, but even that couldn’t save my relationship with Frank. More from financial pressures than anything else, Frank and I struggled to maintain some semblance of cohesion. Eventually the tensions grew to a degree where we couldn’t look at each other without harboring unspoken resentment for the circumstances we were now in. We were young, overwhelmed kids in a situation that neither of us should have been in, and we weren’t handling it very well.

  We were broke. We were just always broke.

  During that period, Frank and I ceased living together. He was working out of town—I don’t even remember where now. I think he wanted to be free of me, of our fights grown out of the tensions we blamed each other for. For my part, I felt the same. It’s hard when people are that young—or even when they’re older—to cope with the burden of financial challenges, and rather than being able to find within each other an escape from that difficult storm, we instead thought, Had I not met you, I wouldn’t be suffering with this.

  I withdrew from him completely during that time, and we no longer had anything in the way of a physical relationship. I think he was happy for the opportunity to go to work far away and to be living separately. I know he al
ways loved Amber, but I believe he came to feel that she honestly might be better off not being exposed to the difficulties we were facing as a couple.

  For a very brief time we attempted to make it work again. We celebrated Amber’s first birthday together at his parents’ home, but we couldn’t fix what was broken.

  One day not long after that, on our way to my mom’s house, Frank and I got into a terrible fight in the car. When we pulled over, we were screaming at each other, and we became explosive—it reached the point where we were physically fighting, each of us taking out our frustrations on the other. For me, that was the absolute end. That’s when I knew there was no way we could possibly create a healthy relationship in which to raise our child.