Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice Read Online Free PDF Page A

serene as it seemed in their wedding pictures, and Mike’s wide grin hid his sense that he might have made a wrong choice. “Even as I walked down the aisle,” he remembered, “I realized I was making a mistake.”
    Any number of brides and grooms experience wedding jitters, but Mike felt more than that. As they made wedding plans, he had seen more of Debora’s moodiness and anger than ever before. She seemed to make no effort to fit into his family, and he knew his mother and sisters were worried by that. What he had first seen as Debora’s insecurity and shyness, Mike had come to recognize as self-absorption. Her needs came first—always.
    To his disappointment and frustration, Debora at first declined to make love with her new husband on their wedding night. “She wanted to read a book,” Mike said. “Then I knew for sure I’d made a mistake.” Although Debora finally gave in to Mike’s wish to consummate their marriage, she did so reluctantly and with little enthusiasm. And then she went back to her book.
    Mike tried to hope this was not a bad omen. “My parents had instilled in me that marriage was a commitment and you worked on it to make it right…. I really thought that over a period of time she would change.”
    Debora and Mike honeymooned in Tahiti for two weeks. It was Debora who paid the $5,000 that the trip cost; Mike had precious little income at that point. They had planned to stop in San Francisco on their way home, but they were stranded in Tahiti after a tragic air disaster. On May 25, 275 people had perished in the crash of a DC-10 taking off from O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. “They shut all the DC-10s down the morning we were to come home,” Mike remembered. “And Air New Zealand didn’t have any other planes. So we had an extra five days there.”
    The extension of their honeymoon didn’t thrill either newlywed. Theirs had not been a perfect honeymoon, or even a particularly happy one. If he had hoped that the atmosphere in Tahiti and the respite from their stressful careers would make his bride more responsive sexually, Mike was disappointed. Sex did not seem to matter to Debora one way or another. He wondered why she had married him. He was an impecunious intern; she was already in practice in emergency medicine. She didn’t seem to love him, and she didn’t like his family. She preferred reading novels to being intimate with him, and the vivacity that had first attracted him seemed to have disappeared completely.
    Debora didn’t even take Mike’s name; she decided to keep her first husband’s, for professional reasons. This seemed emblematic of the distance between her and Mike. Still, he kept hoping that somehow things would get better—if only with the passage of time.

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    I t was clear, early in their marriage, that Mike had a kind of self-control that Debora did not. This was probably because of his background. His father, William Farrar, was an inspector with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a colonel in the Air Force Reserves. Bill Farrar traveled two weeks out of every month. He figured that, over the years, he had been in every town in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, checking food-processing plants, feedlots, and drug companies. Although Bill didn’t enjoy his job much, the FDA willingly granted him time to fly for the Air Force Reserves, and he flew to the South Pacific, Guam, Midway, Panama, and Peru, among other exotic spots. It was Bill Farrar who imbued his son with a love of travel.
    Mike’s mother, Velma, a grade school teacher, was an attractive, patrician-looking woman who prided herself on her perfect figure. When it came to raising children, discipline was important to both Farrars. Duty and honor meant more than mere words, so Mike was not about to tell his parents that his marriage had turned out to be a huge disappointment. He could not imagine what they would say if he were to give up and seek a divorce so soon. He had hoped for a