My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me A Memoi- Jason B. Rosenthal Page 0,1

part of our story together could help someone else through their own personal darkness.

Not all love stories end the way you want them to, but often, that’s what makes them worth telling.

Part I

The Nest

1

A Love Story

So, darling, be home soon

I couldn’t bear to wait an extra minute if you dawdled

My darling, be home soon

It’s not just these few hours, but I’ve been waiting since I toddled

For the great relief of having you to talk to.

—John Sebastian

I’m a Chicago guy, born and raised. And in order to understand where Amy and I began, it helps to understand where I began.

Family has always been the center of who I am. My parents divorced when I was two years old. For the next eight years, until my mom, Jo, remarried, it was just Mom; my older sister, Michel; and me. The way my mom raised me on her own established the core of the man I’ve become. She struggled and did her best, and she went back to grad school and got her master’s degree in social work by the time I was five. (She’s still practicing.) She was super liberal, always encouraging me to be independent and do my own thing, as long as “my own thing” wasn’t stupid enough to throw my life out of order. I pushed the limits a little every once in a while, but I always respected her too much to make her wonder where I was or what I was doing.

My dad, Arnie, was a complicated man. He was definitely around on occasional weekdays and weekend sleepovers, and this was one cool, fun dude in my formative years. He was handsome, with a full head of hair, so no surprise that he always had a girlfriend. He was into sports and music, an idiot savant when it came to jazz. He was a beautiful artist who could draw anything, and an art historian who could spend hours in a museum.

Dad was obsessively devoted to his mother, my grandma Sara, and he routinely took my sister and me to visit her in Skokie, Illinois, a hub of the Jewish community that settled there after World War II. Her community, just outside of the Chicago city limits, was also the focus of a court battle brought by the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America to have the right to march in this neighborhood where many Holocaust survivors lived. Grandma Sara was a widow. She lived in a small apartment filled with furniture that was covered entirely in plastic—God forbid an unsanitary tush should make actual contact with the upholstery. No matter what restaurant we went to, particularly if it had bread service, Grandma Sara would inevitably walk out with a purse full of freebies. I’m pretty sure I even saw salt and pepper shakers in there a time or two. Sundays at her place were mostly spent watching the Chicago Bears on TV while my sister entertained herself doing anything else.

For most of my childhood Dad was in the advertising business, which I thought was a very sexy job. He was a highly intelligent man, but unfortunately, he wasn’t the best at business. When I was in high school, he opened a commercial film studio in Lincoln Park. It seemed to be the culmination of Arnie’s dream. It was also the perfect storm of his self-image as an “artist” and his earnest attempt at being a successful businessman, which is to say it didn’t last as long as he’d hoped. But I have fond memories of working for him one summer in high school. I was, among other things, a production assistant—or, more accurately, an assistant to an assistant, driving a massively large van, picking up directors from the airport, and doing whatever grunt work no one else wanted to do. The hours were long, with plenty of all-nighters, but I was excited to have a closer look at what my dad was up to, and I learned a lot about the value of hard work and making money.

I was ten years old when Mom married my stepdad, Todd. They’re still married today. Todd taught me how to balance a checkbook and how to put together model cars and airplanes, and he encouraged me to study science and read more. Todd brought my mom love and stability. He brought an intellectual curiosity, a sharp sense of humor, and a paternal voice to me and Michel.

Looking back at Amy’s and my marriage, it would be tempting to surmise that