Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 14, 1991 TAG: 9102140327
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DONNA ALVIS NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Boy meets girl. They fall in love. They get married. They have a lovely church wedding.
They share the joys, the sorrows, the struggles of life. They have four children. Five, 10, 15 years pass.
They grow up. They grow apart, and it's a distance they can't explain.
In real life, it just happens.
They decide it's too hard to live together. So they separate. They divorce. Two years later, they remarry.
It happened to Paul and Glenda Hubbard, but here's the twist: They married each other - both times.
"I never divorced him," Glenda Hubbard said. "It was only on paper."
Hubbard tells her story from the living room of her home on Horseshoe Lane in Blacksburg. The petite 38-year-old woman sits serenely on the sofa, sipping decaffeinated coffee to wind down from a long day at work.
A photo of husband Paul, wearing a brown leather bomber jacket with wings across the left breast, is illuminated under the lamp on a nearby table. Paul won't be coming home tonight. He may not be coming home for many more nights.
A lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he's aboard the aircraft carrier USS America in the Red Sea. As the catapult officer on the flight deck, his job is to signal the launching of bombers heading for Saudi Arabia.
As Hubbard sips her coffee, her children move in and out of the room, attending to their chores and snatching bits and pieces of their mother's story. There's Amy, 17, a senior at Blacksburg High School, and her brother Ben, a 16-year-old sophomore.
Nathan, 12, and Wesley, 11, complete the Hubbard clan. Oh, and there's "Prissy," the 2-year-old mixed Lhasa Apso-peekapoo dog.
The Hubbards' story starts in 1971 in Memphis, Tenn. He was in the Navy, she was in nursing school.
"We met in the Belview Baptist Church," Hubbard said. "We knew right away that we were made for each other. He asked me to marry him two weeks after we met."
Hubbard said it was in that same church that Paul popped the question. "I asked him what took him so long."
A year later, the Hubbards were married. A week after the wedding, they moved to Rota, Spain, where Paul was stationed.
"We started a family right away," Hubbard said. "Both Amy and Ben were born in Rota, Spain. We came back to the States and lived in Virginia Beach for six or seven years. It was then Paul decided he was going to make a career of the Navy. That was in 1983."
In the summer of 1986, Paul got orders with the Navy ROTC at Virginia Tech, so the family moved. In Blacksburg, they have lived through the best - and the worst - of times.
"It was Christmas 1987 when we split up. Is that the word?" Hubbard said.
"Lost each other, that's the word," Wesley, the youngest son, piped up from a corner of the room.
Explaining why she and her husband lost each other is difficult. Like a quilter patiently at work, Hubbard pieces the past together.
"I think we had grown so far apart that we just couldn't connect. It got to the point where we weren't communicating at all. We weren't meeting each others' needs. When you don't communicate, you can't meet each others' needs. There's a void there."
She said her husband was going through more turmoil than she was when he decided to leave. His father had recently died. He had some tough career choices to make.
"He was having a kind of midlife crisis, I guess. He couldn't talk about it. A lot of men won't accept that they have a problem," Hubbard said.
"Not that I blame him for all the problems," she quickly added. "I had my share, too. I was willing to stick it out, however. I wanted to go to counseling, but he didn't."
Specifically, the couple's problems centered on religion. Glenda, a Baptist, had trouble accepting Paul's preference for the Episcopal Church.
"We're both religious. We both have faith. Neither of us believed in divorce," Hubbard said. "For him to change in the middle like that was hard for me. Basically, we were being stubborn. We weren't willing to see each other's point of view."
So Paul and Glenda Hubbard lost each other. They were separated a year. Their divorce was final in March 1989.
At least, that's when Glenda thinks it was final.
"I never opened the envelope. I never have looked at the divorce papers. I never thought the marriage was over. I prayed for miracles," she said. "Everybody thought I was rather foolish."
After her husband left, Hubbard made some changes in her own life. She enrolled in National Business College and graduated with a 3.9 grade point average. For the first time since her marriage, she went to work outside the home.
When Paul was transferred to Norfolk Naval Base, Glenda and the children remained in Blacksburg. It looked as if the couple had made a clean break.
"I didn't think they would ever get back together," said daughter Amy.
But when Glenda Hubbard learned that her husband was in Portsmouth Naval Hospital for sinus surgery, she had to call him.
"It was hard to call, but I knew there wasn't going to be anyone there for him," she said.
"When I called, he was so happy. He said he was alone and was glad I had called. We got to talking about forgiveness and he said he knew I wouldn't be able to forgive him for what he had done. I told him there was nothing I couldn't forgive him for," she said.
"Later he told me he was hoping I wouldn't say that," Hubbard said. "He was at a loss. He didn't know how to respond. He didn't know how to come back. I had opened the door for him and it forced him to rethink. At that point, he knew he had just blown it."
When he left the hospital, Paul drove straight to Blacksburg.
"He was ready to talk. We talked all weekend. We discussed reconciliation. Then he got cold feet," Hubbard said.
"He went back to Norfolk Sunday and called Monday, saying he couldn't go through this again. He said he didn't want to be disappointed again."
Hubbard, a paragon of patience, admits that she felt some annoyance.
"I wanted to rip the phone off the wall, tie it around his throat and scream, `You idiot!' " She didn't.
She felt like crying.
"I was at my lowest," she said. "I thought I had been kidding myself like everyone had been telling me for over a year. I went through a miserable week."
After that week passed, Paul called and said, "I've had a miserable week. I can't get any peace of mind. Can I see you again?"
For the next two months, Paul spent his weekends traveling from Norfolk to Blacksburg. On May 6 - Glenda's birthday - he asked her to marry him again.
They were married June 30 at Christ Episcopal Church.
"I had decided we would go where he wanted to go to church," Hubbard said. "The place you practice your religion doesn't matter."
Looking back, Glenda Hubbard has no regrets.
"I had a great peace that came from letting him go. That was something I had never done before. If we had stayed together, we would still have the same problems. They were hard lessons, but they were good lessons."
Hubbard laughs when she looks at her new wedding bands. Hubbard gave her first set of wedding rings back to Paul when they separated in 1987.
"He said he didn't want to hock them, he couldn't throw them away, so he finally decided to bury them under a tree," she said.
After Paul proposed the second time, they went looking for the rings near the house in Shawsville where Paul had lived.
"You should have seen us digging under those trees," Hubbard said with a chuckle. "We never found the rings."
This Valentine's Day, Hubbard says she will be thinking about her sweetheart.
"Knowing Paul, he'll make me a homemade Valentine," she said. "He's very romantic."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB