Guest Blogger – Whipperwill: Devotion Came on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown

(This post is part of an awesome series of awesome 25swf guest bloggers- read about them here!)

Back when I was 25 and very much single, I worked for a dot-com company owned by a large family.  The family was close and very open.  They had no qualms with adopting strays.  A wayward stray was I, with my family south of the Oklahoma border, they took me in.  What never went unnoticed by me was how Grandpa doted on Grandma.  Her every whim and notion he anticipated without fail.

One late night at the office, Grandma and I sat talking about love and relationships.  I told her how I was decidedly single, and how I admired her strong relationship with Grandpa.  As I was just gushing about how Grandpa was so attentive and about how sweet he was in his affections – Grandma stopped me.  She told me a tale of how all that devotion came on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

In their whippersnapper days, Grandpa had put Grandma through hell with countless infidelities.  She told me a story that of which I had only heard of in movies.  One where, Grandpa involved in a near fatal car accident with his mistress, who’d been mistaken as his wife at the hospital, was the ultimate heartbreak.  Grandma had a nervous breakdown and had to be institutionalized.  Upon her release, she was pleased to find that Grandpa had got some act right and curbed his philandering ways.

To this day, Grandma still isn’t sure what enticed her husband to fly straight.  Was it her fragile mental state due to him being ever so careless with her heart?  Or was it the near fatal car accident? One can never be too sure.  Everything comes at a price…

I sat there, an ironed jawed Whipperwill, as Grandpa fell from his ivory tower.  “I will never marry.  I shall remain single,” I vowed. Heated to the third degree, I continued, “who needs that shit?!  I have otherworldly heartaches vying for my sanity.”  Grandma then said something I would not soon forget and would later come to challenge.  She said, “marry a man who loves you more, that way he has more to lose…”

At 25, that statement was the nectar in my hot tea, bittersweet.

At 32, vow still in tact, it feels like a smart move, albeit a lonely one.

Everything comes at a price…

Expensively Nobody’s,
^^ Whipperwill ^^


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