Available on Amazon.
Introduction
While Juliana feels that she’s handling everything just fine, her body responds to the many months of stress with increasing discomfort, malfunctioning, and debilitating pain in her head, neck, and shoulders, climaxing in a migraine that puts her in the hospital. She spends the rest of the summer in physical therapy.
She experiences an unexplained vertigo at work and ends up spending a day in the Emergency Room at Irving Hospital. In quick succession, Adam and Ashley also have personal crises which Juliana has to deal with. Juliana goes back to visit her old church in Southgate to be confronted with the double-tongued rhetoric, thinly disguising the vicious bigotry from people whom she once considered close friends.
Juliana’s mind is affected by her physical condition and she retreats into emotional seclusion and begins living as her pseudonymic character Jewel Stone, created during her early modem experiences. Neither Lina nor Ann can help Juliana get well.
Somehow, she survives her year of working at Microsoft and gets ready to take Ashley and move to California to live with Lina. She and Ann share a tearful goodbye after three weeks of “living together” in Ann’s apartment, and Juliana drives her car—alone—from Texas to California.
Will she ever find her “new” home in Alameda where Lina and Ashley are waiting?
Chapters
- Summer Begins
- The Chrysalis
- Living In a Fog
- Jewel, Ann, and Lina
- Trip to California Again
- Late Summertime
- Another School Year Begins
- Ashley at High School
- Breakpoints
- Trip to Tulsa
- The Rest of September
- More Crises
- Another Birthday
- Keeping Up with KinNet and Kids
- News, Trips, and Visits
- Thanksgiving Vacation
- Holiday Adventures
- Juliana’s Journal 1995
- Packing It Up
- Last Month in Texas
The Back Cover
November 14 was my one-year anniversary of working at Microsoft Dallas. For most of our Publisher team, it was just another day. For John Michaels, it was his last day as a “variable.” Tomorrow he would wear the coveted Blue Badge, showing he was a full-time employee for Microsoft.
When I told Ann I needed to write a chapter in Suburban Married Lady about Ashley’s recent “counseling” session at Weston Hills High School, she commented, “I still say Suburban Married Lady is going to end up being a whole series of books—like the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, only much more interesting!”