HOME AGAIN, BECKY HAINES:
The Pregnant Teen Comes Home a Chrome Diva
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I wanted my presence to say,
‘Hey, I may have gotten pregnant,
but I am still around, and I am a good person.’”
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When I finally reach Becky by phone in San Diego, we have put off this interview twice tonight while she tended to business for her upcoming move back to Florida. Actually, we have had to put this interview off for weeks, due to our time zones and work and travel schedules, so when she finally answers with, “Hello, Diane,” and I answer, “Contact!,” we are both laughing. Though I have known Becky since sixth grade at Watson Elementary, we have never spoken by phone before that I can recall, not even in junior high, when we all seemed to talk more on the phone than in person. No problem: we are both talkers in any medium, and Facebook and email have kept us in touch for the past year.
“So why move back to Florida?” I ask, after we have ascertained that San Diego weather is muchbetter than Florida weather (IMHO, any weather is better than Florida’s).
“I have a home there, and my daughter is there,” she says.
“But then why did you ever moved out to California three years ago?” I ask.
“A relationship that broke up seven months after I moved here,” she laughs ruefully.
“Oh yes,” I rejoin, “The old ‘I-need-more-space.’”
“And I was working four days a week and my partner was on the road three days a week, so how much more alone time can you get than that?” she asks.
And we both laugh. Ruefully, too, because Becky has had several difficult relationships, each one of which caused some setback in life. But none of them has kept her from becoming who she is today: a terrific Labor and Delivery Nurse, a proud mother of two adult children, and one hot member of the Chrome Divas, a women’s motorcycle-riding group.
But that is now. For the backstory, I return to spring 1967, when we
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| The 1967 Clock |
last saw her in the halls of PHS. Becky, who sat in front of me in Spanish III, just disappeared from her desk one day, as far as I was concerned. Mr. Perez kept asking after her, and then someone said she wasn‘t coming back, and Mr. Perez stopped asking. Apparently, Omar and I were the only two who hadn’t realized weeks previously that she was pregnant. Becky had realized but was trying not to think about it till her sister took her off in February to a doctor, who pronounced her most definitely pregnant.
Back then pregnant teens had few options for finishing school, but Becky had one option: her very good grades. (Think about it: no one got into Omar’s Spanish III class with “C’s.”) She attended classes as long as she could, then sat out the last six weeks of the school year gestating, receiving “F’s,” for that period, which averaged with her first semester grades to enable her to pass junior year. “If I had quit, I would have had to repeat,” she says today, “And I couldn’t stand that.”
She continued to gestate until September 1967 when her son Billy was born. “And back then,” she notes, “You had to stay in the hospital five days after giving birth, which was so stupid, and five days later, on a Saturday, as they were wheeling me out with my baby in my arms, in limped three members of the Perry football team who had been injured at the game the night before.”
So as life limped on as usual for the PHS football team and other students, Becky’s life sped by suddenly as she joined her husband, who was stationed in Panama with the military. And while Becky missed Spanish IV at PHS, she was speaking Spanish often on the streets of Panama City where they weren’t as picky about pronunciation or the Spanish Academy rules of grammar as Omar. She found herself getting more fluent in the language which she would eventually use on the job in her future career. And in the following fall of 1968, her daughter Brenda was born in Panama. Becky in labor heard gunfire all around her as the car sped her to the hospital. “I remember looking up and seeing a billboard that said, “Ponga un tigre en su tanque,” she laughs today. (Put a tiger in your tank.)
“I didn’t have a name picked out for my daughter,” she recalls, “So at the last minute, I named her after ‘Brenda Starr.’” I remind her that in sixth grade at Watson, many of us girls considered Brenda Starr our heroine: beautiful with red hair, an exciting career in journalism, and a boyfriend who was incredibly handsome and gone a lot. Perfect. Sue Riley used to buy all the Brenda Starr comic books and pass them around.
“A great name!” I say approvingly.
However, Becky’s relationship with her husband worsened when they were transferred to Ft. Hood. Soon they drifted apart and separated. In the meantime, she had met another Ft. Hood soldier whom she was married to for 14 years before the domestic abuse in their home escalated. A family member stopped her husband once from choking Becky, and after that time, he kept to verbal and emotional abuse, but once when he went after one of her children, her mother instincts kicked in, and she got herself and the children out. For awhile, she had to leave them with a grandparent, which was very hard.
“But I had been a stay-at-home-Mom for the first six years and didn’t have the kind of job that enables you to support a family,” she says. She acknowledges that she had been drinking too much as the domestic violence in her home had escalated, and so she quit drinking and set out to out to find employment and a new life in Florida.
For a while she was a secretary at Florida State.
“Is that the one in Tallahassee?” I ask. Becky, surprised at my ignorance, practically shouts into the phone: “No! Ugh! Those are the Seminoles! We are the Gators!”
She remembers distinctly the moment there when she got a 20 cent raise, which back then, made a difference, and she decided to go for a nursing degree. She obtained her degree in nursing in 1993 and worked as a nurse at North Florida Regional Medical Center till 2010, when she moved to California and worked at Palomar Hospital. Labor and Delivery is clearly an area she loves, and she will be working in Labor and Delivery at North Florida Regional by the time we see her in October, a total of 22 years as a nurse in the field now.
Speaking of now, I decide we’ve spent enough time in the past, and I want to know about the present, specifically about her children and her life as a Chrome Diva.
“You post often on Facebook how proud you are of your kids,” I begin, and I don’t need to say any more: off she goes.
“Yes, my daughter is a terrific nurse,” she says, “so right now, her hospital is paying for her to get her Master’s degree in nursing. And my son, who lives in Arizona, is sohard-working. He is holding down two jobs right now, one working in the cell phone business. And I have a grandson!” she adds without stopping for a breath.
Of course: grandchildren. I had forgotten, that’s usually the first thing you are supposed to ask PHS ’68 classmates about. But Becky is on a roll, and I don’t have to ask, as she continues, “Brenda’s son is 22 years old and studying in the College of Agriculture at University of Florida. I am so proud of him too.”
Okay, so now that we have covered some of the current family details, I ask her to tell me about the Chrome Divas—and what kind of bike she rides.
“A 1600 cc Yamaha Road Star painted turquoise with flames down the side. It’s really beautiful.
I was going to ride it to the last class reunion [the 40th, in 2008], but since the event was a Friday night, I couldn’t get it up there in time.”
“And how about this year?” I ask.
“Oh no, not Ohio in October,” she says. “I don’t so much like cold weather anymore.”
“Maybe the 50th?”
The question hangs in the air.
I learn from Becky that the “Chrome Divas” is a national organization of women who ride their motorcycles to raise money for women’s issues. (http://www.chromedivas.com/) Started in Tallahassee, the club is now national. Each member is required to ride in at least one fund raiser benefitting women a year. Becky’s favorite benefit, due to her personal history with domestic violence, is Peaceful Paths, a domestic abuse network (http://www.peacefulpaths.org/). She is glad to be back riding for them now that she is returning to Gainesville. I ask her to please send a photo of her riding her bike to accompany this essay, and we do the technology wrestle—how to get it from her phone to my email. Cell phones and email, images and jpg's. Remember how technology was going to make everything so easy? Oh yea.
Before we hang up, I ask her about the first reunion she ever came home to, our 20th, back in 1988. Nearly two years previously, at Thanksgiving of 1986, she had divorced for the second time so was living alone for the first time in her life. (We laugh now at the irony of the fact that I had gotten married for the first time that same weekend and was living with someone for the first time in my life.) She had called me to ask if she would be allowed to come. Of course she could!
Today I ask her what she would say to the classmates who are coming to their first reunion this year.
“One person has said on Facebook that she is a little intimidated,” I explain. “She says she was gone to so long, and she was so shy then. How did you feel in 1988 getting ready to come back? Why did you want to come back?”
“I was terrified,” she said. “I was afraid no one would talk to me and everyone would make comments about how I got pregnant in high school. But I wanted my presence to say, ‘Hey, I may have gotten pregnant, but I am still around, and I am a good person.’”
I recall meeting her that 20th PHS ’68 Reunion at the Friday night TGIF, wearing her Florida tan and skinny jeans. She played pool with my husband, who was glad to have someone to play pool with (because “No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe.” I don’t do pool.) We laughed a lot then, too. To know Becky is to remember her laugh, that head-back, enjoying-life raspy cackle.
Thinking back to that weekend, I ask her now on the phone, “And how was that reunion, for you, what would you tell the people about coming to the 45th reunion? How did your fears pan out?” I ask her finally.
“It was great. Nobody was mean at all. What I remember are the hugs,” she laughed. “Everybody hugged me. Hugging.”
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That’s our class! Love them, those huggers! The prodigals and the perfect! The wannabe’s and the been-there-and-done-that's, the successful by their own account, and all, all those like Becky, who are good people. Here’s to lots of hugging on the October 19, 2013 weekend, and as long as we all shall reunite!
