Description

Mary grew up and attended college in Montgomery County, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the great-granddaughter of Henry Gane and Anna Randolph, who had 10 children and owned a grocery store called Gane & Snyder in Bryn Mawr on the Main Line. In her diary entries, she describes experiences and adventures from age 17 through graduate school. Mary realized in the summer before college began that marrying young and having a lot of children was important, which didn’t seem to be supported by many educational institutions in the 1990s. Mary did get married the summer after her high school graduation at age 18 prior to beginning college in a secret ceremony. This diary is her reflections on “traditional” college and graduate school experiences that occur in a culture which expects students to prolong marriage and fertility in favor of educational degrees. Also, this diary is written with the knowledge that her stalkers were reading her every word and watching her on secret cameras, especially the one that likes to call himself a mythical God of Death, so there is much to be known beyond these pages as the complete story is yet to be told. While she found the intellectualism in her courses to be very stimulating, the cultural cocktail of higher education ran heavy on perfectionism, love addiction, and substance abuse. Although her husband had good intentions in wanting Mary to have a traditional college experience, he was not aware of how dramatic the college culture had changed since his own experiences even though he was a college instructor at the time himself. It seemed to Mary that since her husband had been to college and graduate school there appeared to be increasing violence toward women due to continuous access to pornography and date rape drugs. Mary spent most of her time begging her husband to stay at home with him and her two sons that she secretly gave birth to while in college. She knew she was already not like her peers because of her secret family situation but tried to blend into the hedonism and emotional detachment of the college culture, which just resulted in her getting more stalkers. There was a guy she met the first week of college that became so obsessed with her that he started following her to free swim at the college pool and convinced himself he was married to Mary for almost 20 years after college. She clearly stated to the free swim stalker repeatedly that the drunken “marriage” in Atlantic City when she was age 20 was just a joke, as him and his friends would not leave her alone and they even befriended Mary’s overly controlling father and other family members to try and be part of her “royal bloodline” family. She would even have to pretend that she was married at age 20 because this particular stalker was so psychotic and violent that she was fearful of what he would do if he later learned they were never married. Mary joined a sorority and played two sports in college to get the most out of living on campus, however, the extreme substance abuse led her to create many friendships based on alcoholism. These friendships did not last when she no longer drank alcohol after her mid-20s leaving her to feel that the friendships were rather meaningless in reflection because there was no real support for her true self. When she secretly married her real husband, a Romanoff, in the summer after graduating high school she had never had alcohol and he was dealing with many adversaries at the time in a harsh political climate so he wanted to keep his young Randolph bride safe and tucked away at college, which he believed would provide a safe and secure environment. Her husband was stern in her attending college and university in a traditional way so Mary is thankful to be an accomplished intellectual, albeit a culture that favors men and inherently traumatizes women and prejudices women into what she would consider as masculine interests while they try to become educated.

Author: Gane Ph D, Dr Mary Ellen

Topic: Self-Help
Media: Book
ISBN: 1500986992
Language: English
Pages: 156