Secrets,~]~ Chapter one

Diana worked two jobs in early years of their marriages and took less classes so Jacob did not have to work. They thought it was fair that Jacob would get his PhD. first since he was not far from finishing his studies. He was working real hard on his dissertation. A year later Victoria was born. Thanks to Diana's mother, who took care of the baby, so she did not have to quit her jobs and college. Jacob was thirty years old when he finished with his school and got his PhD, yet he always complained that he could have finished much earlier if he had started from the beginning with what he really liked not what his mother wanted him to do. The scenario of changing his last name and his fight with his mother had happened when he was only twenty two years old. He could have changed his major then instead of continuing two more years; but he had hoped that his mother would change her mind very soon. He thought by studying what his mother wanted he would make it easy for both of them to get back to a normal relationship. But it did not happen that way. Marie kept her word and never contacted him; and he lost two precious years. His wife had always calmed him with her soothing words when he was in these kinds of regretful moods.

Jacob was hired in UTD, the same university that he was a student, immediately as an assistant professor. Diana began taking more courses and she graduated in a year with a BA in Education. His parents and Jacob insisted that she need to continue her education for the master degree, so she did.

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Diana's real love, however was poetry. Throughout her life, she admired great poets and wrote this sensible form of art for expressing herself. Besides being a good wife, mother, and daughter, she was also a very good teacher. Since graduating from college, she was teaching in high school while taking some courses in the evenings and on Saturdays for her graduate study. Having born from a very stable family, and being the only child, she received love from all around her, and she turned out to be an ethical and trustworthy woman who tried very hard to give Jacob, her husband what he lacked in his life, a womanly love, something he had not had it from his mother. However, she really believed that Marie, her mother- in- law, whom she had never met, had some kind of emotional problem and the way she behaved was not her fault. Diana's parents loved and respected each other, therefore, without any hard work, Diana had learned from them to be a good everything. They approved of Diana's choice for husband and loved their son in law. Jacob considered himself a very lucky man. He worshipped the day he had come to Dallas from his home town and met Diana in the campus of UTD.

Diana, Jacob, and their daughter, Victoria, they called her Vickie, had a very friendly and normal relationship with Diana's parents. At the beginning of their marriage when Vickie was still very young, they used to have dinner every Sunday at Diana's parents. Five years into their marriage, they bought a house not very far from Bill and Mary, Diana's parents. Bill gave them the money for the down payment not as a loan but as a gift. Jacob always wondered about the goodness of Bill and Mary, and the craziness of his mother and the way his father accepted everything and even defended his wife and made every one's lives miserable.

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Jacob's first book, "MOTHER AND SON", which was sold less than only five hundred copies, was almost an autobiography. The mother character was portrayed in the book as the way his own mother was. What caused the failure of the book was his susceptible upheaval that came in the way to use his ability of writing a good book. He used so much anger to write the book. The story was fascinating, the plot was correct, but as his editor said it lacked blood and intensity; because the entire time he was writing that book he was thinking about his own mother and other mothers that he knew. Instead of using blood and intensity, he had used anger and frustration. The book was like a report of a man who was disappointed at his mother and her eccentric behavior.

When Jacob's mother was in the hospital because of a massive stroke, right before she died, Jacob put the hostility of almost three decades aside, bought an airplane ticket and went to visit her in the hospital. Diana wanted to go with him, for she was aware this reunion was a difficult one, but he said that this was something he needed to do it alone.

He had had, up to that moment, a painful, shattered illusion about all these, that one day everything would become right, that at least in the last moments of his mother's life and in the final analysis, she would recognize all her extreme wrong doing towards everyone particularly her children. But they were all illusion. What he saw in the hospital was an old, bitter woman, that even in death bed was mean, even in her unconsciousness was aware of what she had done and did not want to admit it. Even then she did not want to accept the obligation of what she had inflicted to her family, especially to Helena, Jacob's older sister. Even then, dying, she was not honest about who she truly was or was not.

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To Be Continued