My next stop was Tufts University, with a semester in London - both served somewhat as an antidote to attending a girls’ school in a very rural area (Rutland is a metropolis in comparison!).

 

I finished at Tufts a semester early, then headed back to Vermont to work at the Brattleboro Retreat before going to Wayne State University for a Ph.D program in clinical psychology. The program was rigorous and included a lot of clinical experience, but…Detroit. I had “interesting” experiences there, including living in a building teeming with cockroaches, having my (parked) car shot, and being robbed at gunpoint.

 

On a more positive note, I met my husband Larry during grad school - we were both in the same clinical class.

 

When it came time for full-time internships, our goal was to find two positions near each other on one of the coasts, which brought us to Connecticut. I ended up doing a three year internship/fellowship at Yale School of Medicine, Psychiatry/Waterbury Hospital. In the meantime, my parents had moved to Wethersfield, CT the year before, so there was the added benefit of having family in the area.

 

Larry and I ended up settling in eastern Connecticut. He was on a faster track with the Ph.D. than I and had a position at a community mental health center, while I finished my third year, then worked on completing the dissertation, plus having our first child, Lauren. Our son Nathaniel was born three years later, after we had moved into our first house in Brooklyn, CT.

 

I was able to be home with them full-time for a few years, then did some consulting, and, when Nate was two, took a half-time position at another site of the community mental health organization where Larry worked. Shortly after that, we moved to Mansfield Center (which, like Storrs, is a village within the town of Mansfield, where UConn is located) and have lived here ever since.

 

After a few years, I shifted to private practice, which gave me a bit more scheduling flexibility for kids’ needs and events. I gradually increased to full-time practice, and was also involved in a lot of school, church, and community volunteering, so those years were crammed pretty full.

 

Larry retired in 2017 and I followed a year later. I’ve continued to be involved in volunteer activities, but in general have been relishing a much slower pace and not having to live on the clock in the way I did during my working years. We’ve had a quiet life, since Covid arrived, with most of our excitement coming vicariously through our grown kids. I jokingly said to a friend once that we should have raised them to be more fearful.

 

Lauren has lived in Seoul since late 2010, with her New Zealand-born husband, both teaching English in a university and, their passion, doing theater. They hope to move to London later this year - we still won’t be on the same continent, but they will be much closer!

 

Our son Nate is in Texas working on an ethnomusicology Ph.D., with a specialty in West African drumming. He’s made numerous trips there and is spending three months in Accra, Ghana this summer, doing research for his dissertation. So we really appreciate how technology allows connections!

 

We have enjoyed traveling some in the last ten years, including trips to South Korea and to Ghana (where Nate was living for a year). No grandchildren so far and we are not holding our breath. We have one indoor cat, enjoy the birds at our feeders, try to garden (shrubs and flowers) despite the deer and shade, keep up with exercise, and enjoy attending theater performances (in person again - hooray!).

 

Looking back on people’s lives, the way they unfold often appears quite logical and inevitable, but we all know how much luck, random events, and critical choices have affected our paths.

 

I am looking forward to seeing former classmates and hoping there are name tags with LARGE FONTS to assist my aging eyes and memory!