SUZ IN SANDUSKY
Susan Stecher Austin was born on September 1st, 1959. She grew up in a small town on Lake Erie called Sandusky, Ohio and was the youngest child of four, with two older brothers and one older sister. Her family was well off, although their financial stability was largely dependent on the success of the family business, Douthit Communications Incorporated. Her childhood was filled with trips to Europe and across the U.S. for family visits to art museums, plays, and other educational excursions. A typical family dinner involved her intellectual father rousing a game of 20 questions, a game that he lost only once to my brilliant Uncle Evan. My grandparents gave a “very positive” impression of marriage to my mother. “They were from two different backgrounds,” she explained, with my grandfather growing up on a farm in Nebraska, and my grandmother a mansion in the Midwest. Suz further noted that they “stayed married until my dad passed away, so 64 years of marriage.” My mom is still very nostalgic about her upbringing, and worked towards both recreating and avoiding various aspects of her childhood when raising a family of her own. She discarded the academic focus of her parents, but kept the loving image of marriage that my grandparents provided. This led to annual family trips to visit my grandparents in Arizona, to develop a relationship with them from a young age.
D IN CLEVELAND
Darrell Wayne Austin was born on October 9th, 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana. His family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, the city where he was raised and would in turn raise his kids, when he was 2 years old. They moved due to his father’s job. “My mother was a homemaker, my dad worked,” he explained, “It was a pretty normal dynamic I would think of that era.” With his dad playing the gendered role of the bread winner, his mother played the primary role in childrearing. D noted during his interview that, “because my dad was in sales, he was gone a fair amount. Although he wasn’t out of town too much. Our interaction with him was a little less.” His parents got divorced when he was in Junior High, and while his relationship with his biological father deteriorated after his dad moved out of their house, my father got along very well with his stepfather, “Grandpa Stan”.
This falls in line with what William Marsiglio described in his theory of paternal claiming: the idea that stepfathers can embrace stepchildren as their own, which is often heightened when the biological father is absent. Although Stan's job as a dentist earned a higher salary than my biological grandfather, my father grew up primarily in a lower-middle/middle class family in the suburbs. He shared that from a young age, “I had paper routes and things where I earned my own money, so I was very used to fending for myself to have spending money.” He appreciated the financial savvy that he developed growing up on limited means, and has aimed to instill this frugality into my brother and my upbringing. Furthermore, although he was unable to avoid divorce in his first marriage, perhaps due to the selection bias of growing up in a broken home, he aligned with my mother’s desire to show his children a loving marriage. This led to his avid support of building a relationship with my maternal grandparents, in part to familiarize my brother and I with a long-lasting, stable, and loving relationship.