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Money
When I asked the McBrides how money was managed, and whether financial decisions tended to be a source of tension, Carl was the one to answer. Money had been a huge source of tension throughout the seventeen years they were in North Carolina, he said. “I had a pretty good academic job, but I was teaching at a state university; and I was stuck, not making a great salary. And I didn’t have that much leverage. And so Lynn had to work. All through those North Carolina years, she had her church jobs — playing accompaniment on the piano, leading the choir. And for a while she had a half-time job in the business school.”
I turned to Lynn. “Yet money was a source of tension between the two of you?”
“Oh, hugely,” she assented, repeating the word her husband had used.
I asked her to give me the outlines of what the money tensions had been about. Lynn shrugged, said that she had always been the one who was looser with money and Carl had always been the tighter one. She thought this had to do with their different backgrounds and their different points of view.
“My dad was a Methodist minister, and while he didn’t make a lot of money, it was a stable income. Also, he had a master’s degree and was respected as a professional in the community. My mother was a college graduate, too, and a professional, as well. And so, while we had to be careful about money, we didn’t experience —”
“Your dad handled money extremely well,” Carl said.
“My dad handled money pretty well,” Lynn agreed. Money had not been a source of anxiety in her family of origin.
I asked Carl to tell me a little more about his own background.
“My family was very different from hers. There was much more of a working-class feel to it, and less of a professional feel. Both my parents grew up on farms and went through the difficult times of the Depression. My dad had this medium-size printing business in a small Oklahoma town, and it was our only source of income as my brother and I were growing up. So we didn’t have the gentilities that Lynn’s family had. Her dad was this Methodist minister, and her mom had grown up in Georgia — she was a sophisticated southern girl who knew the way the world worked .... My dad knew what you learn growing up on a farm .... His own parents were separated when he was a baby.”
“Did you say your grandparents separated when your dad was a baby?” I asked. That addendum seemed to have come out of nowhere.
“Right,” Carl said. His father had been fatherless; he’d been raised by his mother alone, and by various aunts and uncles as well. “He got bounced around a lot,” Carl said. I had the fleeting thought that his father might have been an illegitimate child.
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“Your dad not only got bounced around, but it sounds as if he came from a desperately poor background,” I said. “So it’s possible that all that anxiety about money was something you inherited from the family’s past?” My sentence ended as a question. 
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“Oh yes,” Carl said. Then he frowned and said that the problem often wasn’t his father’s inability to show a profit in his printing business; it was also his way of making very, very bad decisions about money. “He would hire questionable people and give them a lot of responsibility. The rest of us could see immediately that that was a bad judgment, and eventually, he would lose a lot of money. Or later, he would invest in mutual funds and be taken in by some fast talker.”
In short, I thought, unlike Lynn’s father, Carl’s father had handled money badly.
Is money a source of tension now?
When it came to handling money and interacting with his wife about the ways she was spending it, Carl’s level of anxiety had clearly been very high. It was not the only source of tension between them, he said, but it had surely been one of the more dramatic ones — “a real sore spot” — for many, many years.
“Does money continue to be a source of tension now?” I asked them.
Lynn shook her head. “Not so much, no.”
“Somewhat?” I was responding to a note of uncertainty in her voice.
“It’s not for me,” Carl said. And Lynn followed by saying that it was not a source of tension between the two of them. “The reason I might have sounded equivocal,” she told me, “is that we’re still paying off tuition loans for our kids’ education. Because we couldn’t afford it as they went through.”
“Well, we’ve paid some off, but we borrowed a lot,” Carl said. “And we’re dealing with that debt right now. But I don’t think we have much tension about money, for a number of reasons. Both of us have grown a lot, emotionally. And it doesn’t hurt to be teaching at a first-rate university and making a pretty good salary,” he added, with a smile.
“And fortunately, what I’m making at my new job is going to help pay off the tuition,” Lynn said. “So that’s a good feeling for me.”
I looked from one to the other. “Then I gather that you’re both on the same page about handling money, at this point. Money is not a source of quarrels — is that right?”
Lynn and Carl turned to each other, exchanged a questioning glance, then turned back and nodded confidently to me.
A time of despair
There are some questions that I usually reserve for the latter part of the interview. Questions such as How have you been able to forgive each other’s failings and betrayals (if there have been any)? can on occasion elicit a flood of highly sensitive, emotional material. I had expected nothing of the sort to happen when I asked the McBrides about their relations with their adult children. Their earlier reports about their children had sounded as if things were going well.
But Carl said, “The critical thing — the question about the kids brings it up — ” He stopped.
I shook my head as if to say I didn’t understand.
Then he explained that in the months preceding their move from North Carolina he had been unable to decide whether he wanted to remain where he was or take the new, more prestigious and better-paying job in the North. “I went back and forth, back and forth, in making that decision, and it was a terribly tense time for all of us. Lynn and I were fighting a lot; she and the kids wanted to go ... and eventually we did leave North Carolina. But as soon as we arrived, I had a huge reaction, and I got severely depressed.”
There was a silence, which I ended by asking quietly, “A kind of buyer’s remorse?”
He nodded. “A buyer’s remorse for this house, which was in terrible shape when we moved in.” Carl paused, looked contentedly around the sunny, pretty living room, with its white-painted walls and carved ceiling moldings. “But remorse mostly for the job. I spent three years dying to go back — so much so that I got three offers in a row to go back to essentially the same job.”
It was clear that he’d been desperately homesick. But Lynn and the children were staunchly opposed to going back.
“So somehow I was able to hold on and stay here,” Carl continued.
“Which in retrospect was the better thing to do. It was right. We’re all in much better shape than we would have been if I’d either stayed in North Carolina in the first place or especially if we had gone back.
There was no way of going backward ... we couldn’t ...”
Something in his tone made me ask: “So you people were on the edge of separating ... or divorcing ... ?”
“Yes,” Lynn said, shortly.
“Yes,” Carl echoed.
“And this went on over a three-year period?” I asked.
Carl shook his head, said that it had actually been a five-year period, during which his depression became so severe that he spent a month in the university’s inpatient psychiatric unit. This suggested to me that he must have been actively suicidal for a period of time. When I asked him if that had been the case, he nodded. “Before the hospital time I was — that’s why I went in.”
I put my pencil down on my sketchbook, looked from Carl to Lynn and then back to Carl. He had a calm expression on his face, and looked well-muscled — as if he were physically fit and in no way drained of vigor. “You seem to be in great shape now,” I said. “It’s amazing to hear of this.”
“I am in great shape,” Carl said. “But back then, the torment — my own personal torment — was unbearable. Somehow I managed to do my job — to teach well — but it was a struggle to even gather the energy and momentum to even drive back and forth to my classes.
Later, after I got out of the hospital, I didn’t feel suicidal anymore. But I was so worn down, so depleted.”
Had any of the medications that are now available been of any help to him? I asked.
“He is very resistant to medications,” Lynn said evenly.
Carl nodded, but said he suspected that his current antidepressant — one of the older ones called nortriptyline — might be helping him somewhat. He wasn’t sure. “Still, the upshot of all this was that one day, about three years ago come November, I woke up and — just like that — I felt like myself. And I haven’t felt depressed since that time.” He smiled at me, looking almost jubilant, an expression that brought a look of pleasure to his wife’s face.
I smiled back, reminded him that this whole discussion had arisen when I’d asked them about the children. “So tell me about the kids,” I prompted.
“Okay, you’re right,” Carl said. “And the reason that your question about the kids brought this up was that through all of this, they have been absolutely wonderful. I think we have basically no complaints. We feel very fortunate that they are as happy as they are, and that they’re doing so well, and things are working out so well for them .... Because obviously, as they were growing up, there were a lot of tensions in the family around various things.”
Money had been one of them, that was clear to me. Where the family lived had also been an issue. I wondered what the other concerns had been, and what had cast this husband, father and respected professional into so profound and prolonged a depressive state.
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