My marriage got off to a bit of a rocky start. The more
J kept saying, "I can't believe I have a wife and a daughter" (he always insisted that he was joking when he said this, though it never felt that way to me), the more I felt like he thought he had made a huge mistake. He began talking to me about adopting my daughter, and while she was fine with it, she didn't want to change her last name to his. His response to that was, "Then what's the point?" And so it seemed to me that there wasn't one, and we dropped that discussion forever more. We were also trying to make it financially on adjuncting jobs and his campus ministry position. At one point we realized that we were driving one car to work in two different time zones and three different states! He was teaching introductory western civilization courses at colleges in both Ohio and Kentucky, and I was teaching Freshman composition in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Together we were juggling three part-time careers, our newly formed family, and our pathetically meager finances. (
My car had been repossessed some time ago, by the way.) There was a lot of tension besides, as he had finished his PhD coursework, and was taking dissertation hours and applying for full-time positions all over the place. That meant attending at least two conferences a year, presenting papers, and interviewing as much as possible. He often felt as if his two MA degrees from the seminary were a black spot against him whenever he applied to secular universities and colleges, and that his MA and PhD from the state university were virtually being ignored by Christian colleges affiliated with his own denomination. Plus there was the fact that he was still ABD (all but dissertation; he hadn't actually earned his PhD yet)), which was weighing on him too. The one bright spot in all of the career building he had been involved in, and the focus of his dissertation, was the archaeological work he had been doing in northern Jordan since 1984. He went every summer on even years, and 1994 would be no different. Our biggest obstacle would be money, but he was determined to take me, and I was determined to go.
