The Wild Designer and Her Romantic Poet
The Very Best in Show
It’s the one image that always inspires me: my wife Mary Jane hobbling across the pathway with her metal walker, struggling to attend Pattern Drafting just after surgery.
Meanwhile, I’m carrying her book bag, fabric samples, and a heavy, black portfolio. Is she slightly nuts? We had just driven forty-five miles to Burlington County College in New Jersey.
“I’m forty years old,” she said, “and I’m in class with girls with blue hair and lip rings. Am I crazy?”
“Well, what’s the cost of not pursuing your dream?”
A year before cancer, before melanoma had metastasized to her lymph nodes, Mary Jane had been pursuing this delayed girlhood desire, a dream far beyond sterile hospital rooms where she had labored in obscurity for twenty years as a dietitian. She had graduated from Penn State with a BS degree in Applied Nutrition, worked at two internships, Bloomsburg and Johnston, PA, and worked for several major city hospitals in the Philadelphia area.
When I met Mary Jane in 1994, she was working at Temple. We were married in 1995.
Once our daughter Madeline was born in 1997, Mary Jane worked part-time, twice a week during the week, and then every other weekend. I loved those weekends as “Dad Solo.”
No longer content with a “sensible” career
Then Nancy arrived in 2001. My wife decided to stay home with both girls, and she placed more “poppin’” than Mary Poppins ever could; art projects hung on the walls, computer hutch, and chandelier; books scattered the floors; Nancy often buried in books like a child in the sand; Madeline often filming a stop-action film while working on animation on the new MAC computer; it was a ten-ring “designers” studio, and coming home from a day of teaching English, I never knew what I would find: a new poem, a drawing of me, or a new Thomas the Tank Engine track design that I immediately dove into to play the evil “Diesel” engine.
Once Nancy started preschool, Mary Jane started back with dietetics part-time, but that career was always wrong for her; like many jobs, the job required more forms than people; more documents to document; more computer time than human time.
So she pursued an Associates’ Degree in Fashion. It was, after being an actress, a life-long passion and a talent that remained dormant (like those cicadas).
Like many, Mary Jane was persuaded to pick a “sensible career,” a career that could, perhaps, pay the bills because “you can’t depend on a man.” But the pay barely kept in line with the rate of inflation. The career — this job — felt more like a grind. In order to rise in the ranks, Mary Jane needed to move into management, and leave what she loved: helping people.
Is this the irony of many professions? Like teaching?
Who dreams of life straight from Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and the “factory scene”?
The inner child working in her apartment kitchen
For our wedding in 1995, she embarked on her biggest fashion project. She was 30. She designed her own wedding dress. When I would come over, the dress form was covered. She was channeling that same enthusiasm and energy, harnessing willpower.
Tickled to play with textiles, Mary Jane was back in school for fashion, creating her Romantic Poets collection, full of Turkish delight, color, and turbans.
Perhaps I encouraged this. During our honeymoon, we visited the ruins of Tintern Abbey during our honeymoon in Wales and read Wordsworth. That story can be found here.
And for my wedding night gift, she wrote in The Love Poems of Lord Byron: “I know that I am blessed with a rare and beautiful love. Although Byron was a great romantic poet, I hope you know that you are my favorite.”
Our two passions entwined.
Nothing is gonna stop me now
But they seemed to unravel with the melanoma diagnosis. The longest and loneliest hour was the hour on the Jersey Turnpike after finding the melanoma had spread to her lymph nodes. We gazed ahead in silence, awaiting some wisdom from the asphalt, listening in irony to Aberfeldy, an upbeat Scottish band.
She lowered the volume.
“I don’t want to miss class,” she said. “I have my collection to finish.”
That’s what she was thinking?
As I looked back with potential sorrow, she saw a future of promise
I was selfishly picturing raising two young girls, Madeline and Nancy, by myself, along with wondering how I could never replace such a woman. I was looking backward, cowering in my own ruins, traipsing over our old haunts, reading the poems and the letters, crying over happy photos, gazing at her as if she was already fading from the passenger’s seat.
But while I was dressing for death, she was self-fashioning her life, with a renewed tenacity that shouldn’t have surprised me. Does anything surprise me with Mary Jane? Before me, never had anyone been in her corner for support, care, and encouragement.
How does one breathe without oxygen? How does one channel such energy with no foundation of a Power Plant? How does one survive in the wild through sheer will and determination with no models or a Global Positioning System?
Yes, she had the three of us, her family, and her foundation. But more importantly, she had faith in her abilities to fashion a life of her own choosing.
A full-time student at FIT travels from South Jersey
A week later, while waiting and worrying at Robert Wood Johnson Cancer Center during her second surgery, I promised I would do anything for her. But desperate moment declarations are easy; the difficulty began when she wanted to attend The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
The drive from Southern Jersey to the Hamilton NJ Transit line was over an hour’s drive. The train ride into New York Penn Station was another hour, and then a walk of just a few blocks to FIT. She was a full-time student, and some of her younger colleagues were late to class and they were on campus. Talk about grit and determination.
When I meant “anything” I secretly and selfishly meant anything that didn’t greatly disturb my universe. After all, I loved her being home with the girls, as well as working part-time as a dietitian, while I taught. I appreciated the roasting turkey and the clean clothes. Also, I had time to tinker with the novel I had been writing for seven years.
But how could I object when I saw her so focused and happy, orchestrating a vibrant line of clothes? She was her own mad Ludwig Van Beethoven, creating the masterpiece, critical of every flaw, and instead of pounding away at the piano, deaf and determined, Mary Jane was hunched over her Baby Loc machine, pins in mouth, eyes trained on the seem, her fingers a centimeter from the thrusting needle, the grinding of gears her 5th Symphony, full of Romantic bravado: “I am still here, listen to me.”
It was impossible to resist when she won Best in Show and Critics’ Choice at the college fashion show.
During her time at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, in pursuit of a Textile Development and Marketing degree, she was up at four in the morning; I would drive Nancy early, once or twice a week, while still dark, to the school that happened before school.
And somehow, she still managed to be a full-time mom, a caring wife, and a crazy fashion student. She says those times commuting and being so busy were thrilling; I just felt exhausted for her. Where did she find the strength?
It takes, faith, a ton of support, and love
It wasn’t easy. Sometimes I felt resentful. Did I ask for this? After all, I took the kids to dance class, cooked dinner on many nights, and largely did the grocery shopping. After teaching, I would help with homework, applaud the piano practice, and sweep the floor. Meanwhile, the girls have helped out tremendously with the laundry and the cleaning, creating sort-of self-reliance.
Looking back, it made me more connected to my daughters and to the home, and to my overall “awe” of my wife. And somehow, that novel of mine was finished, and a few of my short stories published.
Could we both pursue our dreams and have time for each other and our family? Yes. It just takes more than faith. It takes, as Mary Jane famously announced in her wedding vows, and I now proudly repeat here, “coordinating our approaches.”
And when the stress at home built up, we would talk around the dinner table — where we always ate together. That table was always our epicenter: always every meal we ate together as a family for talk and laughs.
“You know, I can always stop,” Mary Jane said.
That’s when I shook my head. It’s the last thing we wanted her to do. Wasn’t she a role model for our daughters? Wasn’t she, my role model? New York, after all, has all those publishers. And what’s a writer without a publisher? Why stop now with only one year left? Aren’t the days of one career per life over? Why don’t we all consider the dare to change? Do we think we have as many lives as the smasher of barrels in Donkey Kong? No, that Great Ape will eventually smite us, willy-nilly, suddenly, it’s Game Over, right?
Mary Jane graduated from FIT with a 3.96 GPA.
Why do you look so happy?
I recall one event, when she was still at Burlington County Community College, after the surgery, and now safe from the clutches of cancer, my wife was buying gas on the New Jersey Turnpike. The attendant noticed her smile. “Lady, whatever you’re doing, keep doing,” he said, “because you look so happy.”
I’m just glad someone else noticed as well.
Listen to this story here.
What happens next in the life and times of my wife, Mary Jane, in her pursuit of life after being a dietitian? Find out in my next story.
Thank you for reading. If you want to read more of my writings, you may read the following articles published in The Masterpiece.
