Barbara Rogers - Chapter 5

 The 70s and me

Changes all over the place..the 70s!

We moved to Florida in  October of 1969 with our two sons. Would a geographic change solve our marital difficulties? (Shhh, you know the answer, but we didn't!)

So we purchased a nice house after living in an apartment about a year, and tried to get involved with different groups of people. There were those who worked with Doug at his office. I later on went to the Unitarian Fellowship.

Our parents would come visit, because of course Florida had a certain attractiveness to those living in either Hartford CT or St. Louis Mo.

My father has his back to camera, while skinny me is lying there. Mom in far background has sunglasses on while Marty is reaching across table, and Russ is on the other side.

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 Somehow Doug and I became interested in visiting a nudist camp, where we didn't take the kids, of course. Tampa has good enough weather that a long standing nudist camp can exist with various members...guests as well as people who live there year round. We met an artist and his wife that lived there in a mobile home. We tried some marijuana. Doug didn't like it, but I did.

Yes that was the beginning of the 70s for our shaky relationship. We separated after about a year, and I filed for divorce after learning there was now "no-fault divorce." I think we were the first couple to use it. It was hard on the kids...and we both tried to make their transition as positive as possible. That meant that Doug became the Santa Claus/Disneyworld father, which he'd basically been all along, letting me do all the disciplining of the boys. So I was the strict mom...but I tried to keep our little family in the best way I knew how, while also exploring my own budding feminist freedom. I tried a semester of art school, but didn't find it that interesting since all the other students were about 10 years younger than myself. I did make a few female friends though. And I started dating again (no art students though!)

I was working as a secretary (yay to that typing course one summer in high school!) various temporary jobs at architect offices, and dated a man whose name was also Doug, which of course was strange.

I then found out I could also do the drafting that was being done in these offices, so I applied to do electrical drafting in an architect and engineering firm, then switched to another A&E firm where I did architectural drafting. 

I probably started dating another man by then. It was the time of my life where I was dating and working and trying to be a single mom, but of course it was a strain at times and also a lot of fun some of the time. 

I also found as a newly liberated female that I could purchase a camper-van which was worth about a year's salary, with a loan over 5 years to pay it off. I did eventually do so.

In the meantime, I'd sold the house, gave some of the proceeds to Doug, and I returned the money that our folks had loaned us to buy the house, since I had improved it by painting it nicely and putting in an above ground pool.

We lived in a mobile home for a few years, with my aim to have lower demands on my housekeeping. I was working full time. Then in 1975 I sold the mobile home to a friend and put my furniture in storage and took off in the van with my 2 boys to see the USA. Seriously, that summer we put 10,000miles on the van, and some parts under the hood probably. I had gas credit cards as well as a bank credit card, so I just made a nice big debt that I would pay off after our adventure was over.  (Named the Roving Toad.) I drove it as my primary means of transportation for 12 years.

That trip was an adventure that only a woman in the 70s could have done with her children, traveling all over the US. We never were afraid of anyone bothering us. We camped out in national and state and even county parks, and sometime KOA where the kids liked to play games in the club house, and swim in the pool, and I liked the hot showers and laundry facilities. We carried Marty's bike on a rack on the front of the van, so he had a way to ride around in campgrounds...not very exciting probably. He was 11 that year. Russ was just 7 going on 8, and had a scientific interest already in the various things out in the woods.

We also visited some family members as well as some sites like the Natural History Museum in Chicago. I carried a portable typewriter with me and wrote a journal about the trip, at least for a while. We went to many sites in the west, and traveled to Wisconsin then to Arizona and New Mexico.

When it was time for the boys to return to school in September, I considered moving to San Antonio TX. But talking with Doug on the phone, he asked me to please move somewhere closer to him so he could see the boys. So I settled on Tallahassee FL.

Again I was able to quickly get a temporary administrative assistant job, this time in the Florida State Department. We lived in a little apartment near Lafayette Park where the kids liked to bike and take part in various games. I joined a group of people who chanted from different religions weekly, and sometimes held rituals on the top of a nearby Native American mound.

My next opportunity was to become a potter, and manage a co-op craft store with a new boyfriend. That was a lot of fun, and I went to various arts and crafts fairs, decorated Charlie's pottery, and got to know new people in Tallahassee. Since it's a college town as well as the capital of Florida, I enjoyed getting involved with what is now termed the alternative culture. I wonder if it we called it that then. We were hippies I guess.

But I was also still a single mom, and when I moved into a cooperative group house it didn't work very well for the boys. After less than a year they asked to move back with their dad.

That was stunning to me, and I felt like a failure as a mom. I worked it out with Doug, who was then living with a woman that taught special ed. kids, and I liked her also. They married, then later divorced, while the boys stayed with Doug. But suddenly I was no longer a mom and I hurt. My relationship at that time was partially to find a shoulder to cry on.

So I lived about 6 months in another cooperative house, and then it broke apart so the guys could go to another area to find work. I found out I was expecting a baby about then. Geese. I was so sad about my failure as a mother, and here was a chance to be a good mother...but my boyfriend didn't want to be a father. So he left. And I had my third son alone, with friends to support me of course.

Tai was born by a C-section, and we lived only 4 months in Tallahassee when I decided to move to a cooperative living situation near Orlando in an orange grove. The coop followed a spiritual leader's teaching, and I'd read literature by that leader for several years. So I began the 80's for a few months at least, with a little child and only another couple who decided to create the coop. One woman also joined in visiting while I traded my cooking and cleaning (basically the housekeeper) for my rent of one bedroom in their house. 

I next lived in a couple of coops in Gainesville FL. For about a year I was with two other women who were very interested in the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, the founder of the Waldorf schools. So later on Tai did spend a year in a Waldorf school while the 2 women went to study to become Waldorf teachers.

And I decided to return to college to finish my art degree.

I ended up living in an apartment for a while, then got a married student's apartment on campus in "Corry Village." I could bicycle to classes on campus, and Tai was in the Baby Gator nursery for a while. Then he went to the Waldorf school then public schools. 

When I graduated in 1986 with a BFA in ceramics and an Ed.S. and M.Ed. in counselor education, I hoped to become an art therapist. Some dreams aren't meant to be fulfilled, I found out.

Back to working as a secretary, begrudging that I'd put in all that time to have those degrees! But eventually I did find counselor jobs, and even did a few years helping put curriculums (curriculae is actually correct plural I think) in schools to prevent alcohol and drug addictions. Basically just building social skills and self esteem in students K-12.