by Scott Brown
Everything seemed far too expensive for our budget, except for one home, a wood-frame house, in an old Colonial style, sitting close up against the main road, East Street. Its location was a remnant from the days when settlers built their houses right next to whatever carriage or horse path ran nearby, so as not to miss a single passing traveler or to have to go too far to get out when the heavy snows billowed up against their doors, shutting them in. No one ever imagined paved roads and motorcars. The house we found was not a historic house, but it was still close to the main route into downtown. And it was several other things as well. It was on the market as part of a bankruptcy sale, the home of a plumber who had gone bust. The front looked all right, but the backyard was a dumping ground of broken toilets, old tires, rusty pipes, and other assorted plumbing debris. It was so covered with junk that it was hard to see more than a few patches of neglected grass. Amid all the trash, there was a pool, filled with murky, disgusting water and algae growing all along the sides. But it was what we could afford, and Gail and I said, “We’ll take it.”
I spent months hauling the junk out of the backyard and scraping off the peeling paint to prime it and repaint. I got into the pool with a toothbrush to clean the corroded sides, my legs sopping wet from the brackish water that collected in the concrete after each rain. It took over a year to reclaim the yard and begin to rehab the house, and almost as soon as I had finished, the opportunity to move came again.
Behind us, off East Street, was a beautiful residential neighborhood with two dead-end cul-de-sacs. I used to walk or run or ride my bike through it and think about how I would like to live there. One day, out of the blue, a guy who had a house on a nice block came up to me and said, “I’m getting divorced. Would you like to buy my house?” Gail was working, I was working, we were paying the bills, but we were still stretched to the limit, with no extra money. However, I loved that neighborhood and I said, “Sure.” I borrowed and scrimped to put together a down payment on the house. We put our other house on the market, but it was fall, school was starting, the market was slow, and it didn’t sell. Now I had two houses and one job, and I was thinking: What the hell am I going to do?
It was 1987, which happened to be the year of the National Football League players strike, and the New England Patriots, who played nearby, were bringing in replacement players for the season. The local paper ran an article about how the replacement players needed housing. I immediately called the stadium, tracked down one of the housing reps, and offered my new house, for three months, until we moved in. The players were paying $200 a night in local hotels. They were happy to have my house. I ended up with five players, a quarterback, and some receivers, all nice guys and very religious. To get the house ready, I raced around borrowing extra beds and furniture from friends. For over a month they paid me rent, and soon after they left, I was able to sell our house, and I even managed to refinance the mortgage on the new house—ultimately paying less for this new house than we had been paying for the old one.
We moved into our new home in the dead of winter, right after a big snowstorm, which fell heavy and icy, with a hard, frozen crust on top. For me, it was a blessing. Since we were literally moving around the corner, I saw no reason to spend the extra money to hire movers, especially since we had no extra money left over to spend. I had to move everything myself, including our washing machine and dryer. I began to push the machines out of our old basement, up the backyard hill, through the fence, and out onto the street. I ran them over the ice-crusted snow like a sled, sliding them a block and a half to our new home. Little did I know that one of our neighbors, Dante Scarnecchia, was watching me. He was, and still is, an assistant coach for the New England Patriots. It was cold—that crisp, clear cold that settles over Massachusetts after a snow—and to keep my body warm, I had put on my heaviest clothes, my army fatigues. Dante stared out his window as some guy in army camouflage pushed laundry equipment up the block, sweat beading on my forehead and breath coming out in giant, cold puffs, moving all of it right into the house next door to his. As he watched me arrive with a fresh load, push it inside, and then set off again, he grew concerned and began to wonder if his new next-door neighbor was some kind of survivalist nut. Because it didn’t end with the washer-dryer. After those, I slid the refrigerator and a whole bunch of boxes along the same route. Dante told me that it took him a couple of weeks to get over the sight of my do-it-myself moving operation and to realize that I was just a guy doing it all alone with no help.
Before we moved in, Gail had gotten pregnant. The television station in Providence had no maternity policy. It was trying to force her to take just two weeks of vacation after the birth and then return to work. The station wouldn’t even grant her unpaid leave. That did not seem right to us. I ended up representing my wife and getting her eight weeks of vacation to cover her maternity leave once Ayla was born. After that, the station instituted a policy for pregnant employees.
The pregnancy was relatively easy, but the birth was very difficult. Ayla was breech, with the cord wrapped around her neck and in fetal distress; her heart was stopping as the cord pressed down ever tighter on her neck, which had also happened to me when I was born. Gail had to be cut open with an episiotomy and Ayla was pulled out, bruised and cut, with forceps. She came into the world on July 28, 1988, wailing, as if she were saying, “Damn, get me out of here.” We chose her name from the book Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel; Ayla was the main character, a woman who was a battler and a fighter, and Ayla has followed her namesake from day one.
The drama didn’t end there. Gail’s stitches got infected and she developed a blood clot under her arm that landed her back in the hospital for a week and a half and left me home with a newborn. Thankfully, we had a bit of help from Gail’s mom and some neighbors, but mostly we were on our own and totally overwhelmed. I remember a blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon in August when Gail had finally come home from the hospital. I was mowing the lawn and she was sitting in the little breezeway at the front of the house with Ayla. And over the noise of the motor, I heard sounds. It sounded like crying and yelling; something seemed to be wrong. I let go of the lawn mower and bolted to the breezeway to find both Ayla and Gail crying and Gail trying to feed her, breast milk spraying everywhere across the six-foot porch, including into Ayla’s eyes and face. Gail was sobbing, saying, “I can’t do this. I don’t know what to do. I’m a terrible mother.” It was a sea of tears, milk, sweat, and snot, and I—after all those years in the National Guard and playing basketball—did what any new dad confronted by two hysterical females, one very small and one not as small, would do. I took Ayla’s head in the palm of my hand and wedged it right against Gail’s breast until she finally latched on and began to nurse. And then I told Gail that she was a great mother and made a really bad joke, as I still like to do. My really bad jokes and some of Gail’s have been the balm for many of the trying days in our marriage.
Like many couples with a newborn, we were now trying to juggle not only our lives, but a new baby, a new house, and our jobs. We had to find good babysitters, which was a constant struggle. Some of our first few were terrible, and at least one mistreated Ayla. We didn’t know much about finding good care. We worried about Ayla, and we worried about being home, about paying the bills, about how we would do it all and keep it all together. I was twenty-nine years old and I wished that I had someone I could call on for help. Gail and I would constantly say: Where are our parents? Can’t our parents come and help for a while? Most of our friends who were new parents had help from their families. We really needed it, and we barely had any. Over time, some of our wonderful neighbors, especially Tom and Sandi Gamelin and Joe and Gerri Pavao, stepped in, but in those first years, we were just muddling through.
Looking back, I’m amazed at our resilience and Gail’s composure. Here was a woman who was taking care of a baby with no outside help around the house, and still working at a grueling job in television
news. In fact, her work got harder after Ayla’s birth. Gail was offered a spot at a bigger station in a bigger media market. But the job was in Hartford, Connecticut. It meant a promotion, but it also meant driving a 218-mile round-trip each day from Wrentham. Gail has never been handed anything; she has worked for every opportunity, every position. She is an incredibly diligent and dedicated journalist. For a year, she drove back and forth to Hartford, filed her stories, and met her deadlines. I tried to pick up the slack at home. I did laundry; I changed diapers; I read and sang to Ayla. I learned to know almost before she did when she was hungry or tired or just needed to be picked up and cuddled.
In those early years, my big outside vice was basketball. Some women’s husbands make up excuses to go to bars; I made up excuses to sneak out and play hoop in a couple of local leagues. One of the first things I did at our new house was put up a basketball hoop with a glass backboard in our driveway. For years, I had dreamed of having that pro hoop, and now it was finally mine. I used to wear my basketball uniform under my clothes or stuff it inside my briefcase. I remember one time telling Gail that I had to get to a meeting. She asked me where my wallet was and I said, “I think it’s in my briefcase.” She popped the bag open and there were my high-top sneakers, shorts, and team uniform shirt. But when we played our games outside in the parks in the summer, she would often come with Ayla, and once Ayla got bigger, I would drag her to my practices myself. I would strap her in her little wheeled bouncy seat or, later, her stroller, and she would scurry back and forth along the gym floor or outdoor court, trying to keep up with us as we ran from one end of the court to the other.
One of our league championship matches was on the actual day of Ayla’s christening, and Ayla’s godfather, Dave Cornoyer, was one of my teammates. I had met Dave at the North Attleboro YMCA after a day of Guard training, when I came in wearing my fatigues, looking for a pickup game. He saw me standing alone, came over, and started talking. We’ve never stopped; he’s a grandpa now, and I call him, with great affection, gramps and geezer. He’s six foot five and still a very good hoop player.
When we learned that the game and the christening were both set for 11 a.m., I got the christening ceremony moved up an hour. Dave and I both wore our basketball clothes under our suits. Once the ceremony was over and everyone was moving on to the party, we made some excuse and ducked out. By the time we arrived at the game, our team was down 15 points.
We both played like men possessed, brought the team back, and ended up winning in the end, and Dave and I went back to the party carrying the massive trophy, which we plunked down right next to the very pretty sugar-frosted white christening cake. I think at that point Gail knew how much I loved basketball and that it was a preordained conclusion that Ayla and any of our future children would play basketball as well.
But Dave went one better. September 12 is my birthday, and it also happened to be the date of another one of our league finals, this one set for six o’clock that night. The team was tough, it had several former Celtic draft picks, and without Dave, we were sure to lose.
Back then, next to nothing stopped us from playing. Early in the afternoon that day, Dave’s very pregnant wife, Ellen, started having contractions. And Dave and I kept calling each other. At first, he said, “I think she’s OK. She’s going to wait until tomorrow.” Everything was on for the game until about three o’clock, when Dave called to say that he had to go in to the hospital. He went into the delivery room wearing a hospital gown with his basketball stuff underneath. The birth was very quick; Emily arrived around 5:15. All of the family was very happy, the baby was in Ellen’s arms, everyone was smiling, and Dave was pacing back and forth. The hospital was twenty minutes away from the gym. Finally Ellen said, “All right, go. Go.” Dave gave her a kiss and bolted from the hospital. He arrived at the game with a stack of candy cigars about two minutes before start time. Our team won the game and the trophy, which I think we let him take back to his wife.
As the years went by, Dave and I continued to play basketball, and it’s a tradition we’ve handed down to our children. Our daughters, Ayla and Emily, played together for a while on the same AAU basketball team, and both girls eventually earned college scholarships for basketball, Ayla to Boston College and Emily to Providence College.
Gail had such a difficult time recovering from Ayla’s birth that we weren’t sure we would have more children. We were struggling with our jobs and with her commute, and trying to manage without much help from either of our families. It seemed that we were at capacity, until we spent a night watching Ayla’s baby videos and, with tears in her eyes, Gail said, “Let’s have another baby.” A lot of emotions went into the decision, but we decided to give Ayla a brother or a sister.
Gail got pregnant again immediately, but because she had developed blood clotting issues, she was considered high-risk and had to be constantly monitored. After a few months, it was clear that she had to take a leave of absence from her job in Hartford. I gave her the ritual three-times-daily Heparin shots and kept commuting to my practice in Boston. At the six-month mark, everything seemed fine. Then while I was at work, I got a call that her water had broken. She had nearly three months to go before our second baby was to be born. She was sent to Providence, because it was marginally closer to our house and had an OB-GYN department for high-risk births at its Women and Infants hospital. I rushed down to the hospital, driving almost one hundred miles per hour, and I remember walking through the bright, fluorescent, sterile preemie ward, looking at all the babies behind the nursery glass, babies no bigger than my hand, and being presented with a stack of bewildering legal consent forms to sign. The doctor told me that if it were a low rupture, the baby would have to be delivered, over eleven weeks early. But it was a high rupture. The doctors kept Gail in the hospital for about a week and gave her some powerful drugs to stop the contractions, and somehow the ruptured membranes resealed. She was sent home and put on bed rest, no work, nothing, but she made it to term. As with Ayla, I cut the cord when Arianna was born. We settled on the name Arianna in an almost dreamlike state—Ann was a name that our mothers shared. We also like the name Ariel. I kept playing with the sounds of the two names, and came up with Arianna.
In that moment, everything seemed perfect.
Within a few weeks, though, things seemed to be off-kilter. I could see that Gail was not herself, that she had changed. She was constantly upset with me, upset with the world. The slightest little thing would set her off. I couldn’t do anything right, and one day, she took off with both girls for her sister’s house. But that didn’t make things any better. She appeared lost, no longer the same strong, capable woman that I had married. I watched her despair, and I thought that she might feel desperate enough to possibly hurt herself. After I talked and talked with her in the most patient way that I could, she finally recognized that things were different and that she needed help, although neither of us knew what was going on or what type of help she needed. We got her to a hospital, and in the ER, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. I didn’t know anything about it, and the obstetrician had never mentioned it, even though pregnancy complications are a major risk factor for postpartum depression. Gail had been under tremendous stress with her work, the rupture, and the forced bed rest before Arianna was born.
In retrospect, all I can say is that thank God Gail had the intelligence and courage to say, “You know what, this isn’t me,” even in her horrible situation. Gail was admitted for treatment, and I stayed home by myself, with an infant and a two-year-old. As word got out, thankfully, our neighbors rallied to help however they could.
Like many new dads and husbands, I now found myself in uncharted territory. I went to see her in the hospital, and my outgoing, hardworking, no-nonsense wife was struggling to return to her old self. I prayed all the time for help and for guidance for both of us. I remember walking out of the hospital, past people in wheelchairs, their eyes glazed over
from medications, and wondering, Is this what my life is going to be like? Two kids and my wife in the hospital? Will I get back the woman I married? Or is she going to be lost forever, this woman I fell in love with, the mother of my children? Is she going to be gone? Would I have to find a new and different way to try to reach the woman I love?
Even when Gail returned home a short while later, there were still trying and difficult moments, and continual ups and downs. I wanted to make sure she had every support with the kids, to try to lessen any of the burdens she had around the house and her anxieties about returning to work, and as a husband and a father, I knew that I needed to be very, very patient. Gail’s mom tried to help, along with our friends, including our dear friends Dave and Ellen, who dropped by to act as intermediaries when things seemed overwhelming. There were days that were so difficult they were ready to take bets that our marriage wouldn’t make it to seven years. But Gail and I would not give up. Here, having witnessed some of the worst of divorce was both a blessing and a curse. When we married, neither of us had a good model of marriage in our own families to draw upon. Divorce to us meant not simply a breaking apart, but abandonment, uncertainty, and for our children, a loss that is impossible to quantify. It was not as if we spent our days thinking about the failures of the past, but neither of us wanted to repeat the devastation of having a broken family. We did not want that for ourselves or for our young daughters. In part, the experiences of our parents made us both stronger, as individuals and as a unit. We were determined to fight for our marriage, for our family, for the love we had for each other. We took nothing for granted, and we were determined to succeed.
Together, we had to learn how to be patient, even how to argue, how to forgive the small transgressions and the stupid stuff. After those early years, with real persistence, our lives finally settled down. Gail got better; we found good care for the girls in the neighborhood and got back into a routine. Our main disagreements were either “Why did you spend that amount of money on this frivolous stuff that we don’t need or can’t afford?” or “How come you are late?” It was usually silly logistical crap. And we haven’t quite grown out of it yet.