One true love

It seems to me that there is an instigating moment or an inciting incident that propelled my great-grandmother Leta into her unsettled much-married life. On one of my favorite television shows, Criminal Minds, the FBI agents call this a “trigger.” Although I believe she had a propensity toward her own sexual enthusiasm, I also believe that the social mores of the time and her own sturdy personal strength and understanding would have enabled her to both fulfill her needs and live a “respectable” life had she not been triggered.

Of course, this is all surmising. After all, she was pregnant in 1913 when she married the first time. But surmising is what I can do, and here goes.

Her second husband, Albert Mohr, is her one true love. She obviously met and became infatuated with him while she was still married to her first husband Ralph Chetister, since they married only three weeks after the divorce in 1922. Or she may have meet Albert after the separation, since that was official in February, and they married in November.

While she and Albert were only married only three and a half years, I consider that there was some strength to it. During that time, Leta’s mother died, and visitation occurred at their home. Her ex-husband Ralph petitioned for custody of their children Vivian and Dale, but withdrew his petition only two weeks later. Plus, I learned that Dale called Albert “Daddy.”

So she married for love, and whether or not that love would have waned and dissolved, like her nine-year marriage to Ralph did, I will never know for sure. What I do know, however, is that the marriage, the relationship, the family—the love—was cut short when Albert was killed by an old enemy on a summer evening in June…after only four and a half years of marriage.

This upset, I believe, sent Leta into a tailspin. Her life became one of desperately seeking a deep, mutually respectful love. Here are the facts: 1) she married two men right after the other within a period of three years, both of which ended in divorce; 2) she sent her children to live with their father Ralph; 3) she moved in for a time with her older brother Aaron to become a barfly and woman who went with a lot of different men; 4) while her fifth (or sixth) marriage seemed to be stable, her husband died unexpectedly; and 5) her seventh marriage was a disaster.

I believe that throughout her life Leta was desperately seeking the kind of intense love, feeling, fun and joy that she felt toward with second husband Albert, and this “one true love” mentality, combined with her own personality propelled her into a life she lived as best as she could. After all, who could live up to a man with whom she had never grown disenchanted in any way, whose life was abruptly ripped from hers, whose sudden absence pushed her into the necessity of taking care of her children the only way she knew how—by being married?

Life is simply reckless with some people.