Tag: divorce

New Blog – When I grow up I want . . .

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From the time I was twelve-years-old I never planned to marry. I would live on an island with lots of animals and write my stories, because writers could live anywhere; right? At twenty-one I left my grandmother’s house to marry my first husband. I never owned my own apartment, never lived alone, and then suddenly I was part of a couple. It had been just my grandmother and me, and now it was just my husband and me. It seemed not that different, and yet entirely different. I think if I’d come from a bigger family that I might have had more trouble transitioning to this two person system, this couple, but two seemed familiar, seemed right. By the time we celebrated our first anniversary we had one Yellow-naped Amazon parrot, a hand fed luntino Cockatiel, and a canary that would come out of its cage and play on the parrot playground. I was writing and trying to sell my stories when I wasn’t working in corporate America. We’d moved to California, so I was at least by the ocean, I was part way to my island.

Fifteen years later we were living in St. Louis, Missouri, the middle of the country, and I’d almost forgotten that island dream. I was a best-selling novelist and I was separating from my soon-to-be ex-husband. I got my first apartment that was just mine. I was able to pick out a kitchen table and chairs without consulting anyone’s opinion but my own. It was GREAT! I reveled in the freedom of just me. Well, not just me, because one room of the apartment was for our daughter, Trinity. I let her pick the color and the decor. She was five-years-old and wanted a totally pink room. At her age, so had I, and she wanted a pink canopy bed, and so had I, so who was I to argue with her? Besides, I’d already told her she could pick everything, this would be a promise that I would never make to a child this young again. The pink paint was called Candy Pink, or something equally innocuous, but we, the painters, the people who delivered the furniture, all of us, dubbed the color Eye-Bleed Pink, because it was so bright it made us nauseous to be in the room too long. One of the men who delivered her pink and white canopy bed declared the color made him dizzy. But Trinity loved her room! The rest of the apartment was mine to decorate as I saw fit, and I loved being on my own. I was never going to marry again, it hadn’t worked for me, monogamy with the wrong person is a trap I never wanted to fall into again. My ex-husband got to keep our remaining parrot and I got the two dogs; we shared Trinity.

Six months later I would be engaged to a friend I’d known for eight years, Jonathon, and we’d be planning our wedding. My first husband swept me off my feet in a gentle, geeky kind of way. Jonathon and I snuck up on each other, just friends until the moment we realized we weren’t. I’d done the big wedding once, but he hadn’t, and what my sweetie wanted, I wanted to give him, so we did it up big. Trinity and her best friend were our flower girls and they got to ride in the horse drawn carriage at the end after we were pronounced husband and wife, because if you have a little girl and you have a horse drawn carriage they get to ride in it too, that’s just a rule somewhere, or should be.

Jonathon and I celebrate our thirteenth anniversary next Monday. We are happier now, more in love now, than when we started. Having been through a marriage where ten years in, that was not the case, I value this love and our life, all the more. Trinity is happy, healthy, and off to college. We have three dogs and about twenty koi in the pond. We still live in the middle of the country, so no closer to that island I wanted at age twelve, but I am now a #1 New York Times Bestselling novelist (my agent always insists I write it that way *waves at agent*) so part of my childhood dream is on track.

Four years ago, Jonathon and I were in love with another man. He was our third, and I’d hoped he might be a live-in third someday, but the situation was too complicated. No one’s fault, just not enough honest communication and grownup straight forwardness, I think. But our ex-third introduced us to a woman and her partner. The woman was Genevieve, and her partner doesn’t matter much to this story, because two years later he would be an ex for both of us. But Genevieve would be my first girlfriend ever, and she dated both Jonathon and me. Even more than our ex-third she loved us both, equally, and I hadn’t realized how much I, we, needed that until we had it. She was states away, and we settled into a long distance relationship, LDR, most of our polyamorous relationships have been LDR. She met another man. We knew all about Spike from the beginning, because poly has only one hard rule: that everyone is honest. Spike would talk to us for hours as he planned her engagement ring. Who knew her better than we did, after all we’d been dating her a year longer than he had. We were part of the party where he planned to surprise her with the proposal. I got to help distract Genevieve so that when I turned her around he was just down on one knee with the ring held up to her. It was wonderful and we’d worked as unit to pull it off.

Next week, just after Jon and I celebrate thirteen years of wedded bliss, Genevieve and Spike are moving in with us. They are bringing their two dogs, and yes we have introduced our packs with the help of a local “Dog Whisperer”. Genevieve will also be bringing her fifty-five gallon aquarium of fish. She and I have already talked about a possible lizard, and more fish. Both Spike and I are terribly allergic to cats, and that is a blow to her, but she loves us both, even enough to risk never owning a cat again. I am getting shots, and hope to find a way, someday, for her to have her beloved felines again. She has also asked about parrots, but I am allergic to feathers, which was one reason I had to give up the parrot to my ex-husband. I miss having birds, very much, and hope to find one type I am not allergic to. I’m the writer I dreamed about being, and we will soon have as many dogs as I envisioned as a child, and I hope, nearly pray, that we may add more animals as time goes on, now all we need is that island. Some place tropical, Genevieve?

Why not take the High Road?

I have been talking about my sister, Chica, and the fact that she is getting married this year to her new partner Majorgirlfriend. Many fans have asked questions about it on FaceBook, and with my sister’s permission I’ll try to answer them. First, yes, Chica and Majorgirlfriend are nicknames. Neither of them is “famous”, so I try to leave my friends and loved ones their anonymity if so requested. It’s also one of the reason that I don’t talk about my daughter, Trinity, very often. I want her to have her own life and privacy and I just can’t decide how much of me sharing will interfere with that, so I choose caution. Second question asked, Chica has been “divorced” from her partner of thirteen years for two years now, so no, she’s not rushing into things with the new person. Third question, yes her ex is/was Meerkatfeinated, who has gone on to another job and a new girlfriend of her own. I hope that Meerkatfeinated is as happy with her new relationship as my sister is with hers, but as our friendship did not survive I do not know for certain. Before someone asks, yes I do miss the friendship when it worked, but I do not miss the parts that did not work between us, and that would eventually make it impossible for the friendship to survive. I believe that Meerkatfeinated would probably say the same of me.
Several people on FaceBook have given me brownie points for taking the high road about the divorce and the break up of the friendship, as if they expect me to be mean about it. I wasn’t mean about my divorce from my own ex-husband over a decade ago, why would I be horrible now, about this? Let me say, that there were negative moments on all sides, and hurt feelings, and anger, we are all human after all, but that doesn’t mean we have to be petty, or cruel. For my own first marriage, my ex and I agreed never to bad mouth each other in front of our daughter, and we haven’t. Trinity didn’t get the divorce, we did, so as much as possible we have tried to make it not her problem. I saw too much of people using the children badly in divorces as I grew up to ever want to inflict that on my own child.
I know there was pain for both my sister and her ex partner. It’s normal and just part of the process. I sincerely wish Meerkatfeinated well in her new life, just as I wished my own ex-husband well. He’s been remarried for over a decade himself now, I think, or close to, and I can only hope he is half as happy as I am.
I guess I can understand being horrible if the ex is abusive, or truly monstrous, but I genuinely have never understood how you can go from loving someone to hating them so quickly. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Hate, or anger, means you still have issues to work.
I believe that the energy you put out into the world is what comes back to you, so if you are bitter about a divorce and wish bad things for your ex, then that’s what you’ll get from the universe. I don’t see the point to that. I would rather try to let go of any ill-feelings and truly move forward to a better and more positive place. I’m not saying it’s easy, or there aren’t moments when old feelings rise, or issues are hit, but if I hadn’t cared for everyone involved it wouldn’t have mattered, and it did matter, so there is pain, but when the choices are right the pain eases and you truly do get better, do better, and find out happiness not only is possible, but there may be more of it out there waiting for you all to find it. It’s just that sometimes you can’t find it together, but separately your dreams, your future, is waiting for both of you.

True Love is Hard Work

It’s been very interesting reading the comments on my FaceBook page about love, and the flowers that Jon, my husband, gave me. There seems to be this idea that men are barbarians and women are the civilizing influences, so we train them up to be what we need, or want. Or that there are only a few perfect men out there, and I’ve lucked out and found one. Both those thoughts are based on incomplete logic, and in fact I haven’t found either to be true.
First, it’s insulting to men to cast them in the role of hapless, even stupid, until the right woman comes along and trains them up. A couple trains and teaches each other. You both learn and grow together if the relationship is to be a happy and fulfilling one.
Second, this idea that I found the perfect man and there is just a few of them out there, and if a woman could find the “right one”, then she’d be as happy as I am discounts all the time and effort that Jon and I have put into our relationship. There is no perfect man, or woman, out there. The idea that the right person will make everything in your life work effortlessly is just not true, but a lot of people believe it. I think that one of the reasons for the high divorce rate is this fallacy that if you fall in love with the right person that it will all be easy, and that if it isn’t easy then you’ve obviously chosen badly and you need to find someone else. Sometimes you do choose badly, and a divorce is the only cure. My first marriage ended in divorce after sixteen years. We were college sweethearts, and we went virgin to our honeymoon after a big church wedding. Nearly twenty years later I was a different person than the one he married, and we grew apart rather than together, until there were so many differences we could no longer thrive as a couple. I left when I realized I would rather be alone the rest of my life than be in a marriage that made me miserable. I planned to never marry again. Six months later I was engaged to Jon.
I did everything differently the second time. I insisted we live together first, because I had learned that you never really know someone until you wake up beside them, see them sick, after a hard day’s work, happy, sad, whatever. Anyone can pretend while they date, but sharing a home . . . you learn the real them, and the real you as a couple. Again, dating is all about the special, but marriage is all about the ordinary. A lot of men that are great on special occasions and will sweep you off your feet in that romantic way, suck at the every day. No, really, they do, just like some women that hit that same romantic note may totally suck at being a permanent partner. You can’t live on little black dresses and roses, because someday’s the toilet over flows and somebody has to wait for the plumber to show up. Was that unromantic? Good, because real life cannot be all flowers and pretty, real life is messy and you want someone who is willing to get down in the trenches with you, even if it means getting mud on their Gucci loafers.
Being married to my first husband didn’t help me be married to Jon, they were too different, and I was too different from the girl who married the first time. What I needed in a partner had changed almost completely. I was nearly twenty years older, so that made sense, but it was weird to realize that I had to throw away most of my preconceptions of marriage to make the second one work. I think a lot of people that marry over and over again, try to treat people like cookie cutters and fit different spouses into the same shape of marriage, and then they’re surprised why it doesn’t fit. They have a new shape of cookie, a new relationship and it needs to be treated like something brand new, and special in it’s own right.
One thing I did learn from my first marriage was that you had to make everyday special. You couldn’t wait for holidays, or anniversaries, because there weren’t enough of them, not for me. I’m the kind of person that needs anniversary sex daily, and flowers for no reason more often mean more to me than a big, expensive bouquet on my birthday. Now, I know I said earlier that dating is all about the special, and marriage is all about the every day, but successful marriage for me is about making every day special. Now, you can’t do it literally every single day, because there are days when the child is sick, the work deadline is crushing you, and by the end of the day you and your spouse are so tired you just want to fall into bed and sleep. It happens, the point is to make sure it doesn’t happen too often. That takes conscious effort on both your parts to understand that being married to the other person is a privilege, not a right. You earn privileges, rights are given to you like the Constitution gives rights. You must always remember that marriage is about earning the privilege to continue to be happily married, and it’s up to each person, each couple, each family, to figure out what that means for them.
Here’s the other thing I learned from my first marriage that helped me make a happier one the second time around. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. That means that how you show love isn’t the same, and what makes you feel loved isn’t the same. That sounds logical, right? You just have to find out what makes the other person feel loved and do those things, but what if they are mutually exclusive things?
To one person doing the dishes makes them feel loved, but to the other person being made to do dishes feels like punishment, maybe it was a punishment as a child so to have their spouse complain about them not doing the dishes throws them back into unhappy childhood memories. But the dishes still have to be done, and the other half of the couple will not think it’s fair to do them all the time. It is the job of the couple to find out why dishes are such a hot button for them. Figure that out, and the half that was punished with dish washing can offer to cook more often, or vacuum more often, or take some task that their spouse hates more than dishes.
“You were punished by being made to mow the lawn, I’ll do that, if you’ll do the dishes, because it makes me feel punished to do them.” Is that fair? Only if both halves of the couple feel it’s fair. That’s just one small example of the kind of dynamics that go into a long term relationship.
Here’s another example of the confusion that can happen if love means different things to people. I sent flowers to my first husband’s work once. I loved him and wanted him to have a happy reminder of that at his job. He came home and told me, “Never do that it again.” It had embarrassed him for his wife to send him flowers, and the other guys had given him shit about it. I had meant it to be romantic and tender, to make him as happy to get the flowers as it had made me to pick them out and send them, but it had made him unhappy and far from making him feel special, or loved, it had made him feel just the opposite. I must admit that his reaction to my flowers made me feel very unloved, too, so lesson learned. I never sent him flowers again.
Go forward about twenty years and I’m seriously dating Jon now. I was out on one of the last big book tours I would do by myself without Jon. I was gone for weeks and it was the longest we had been apart since we got serious. I sent him roses to his job with the first stanza from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “How Do I love Thee, Let me count the ways . . . ”
Now I was taking a chance here since a similar gesture had blown up in my face with my first husband, but I had been dating Jon for nearly six months, living together most of that time, and we had been friends for eight years before that. I had sent him flowers to congratulate him for getting his first big job out of college and he had liked them. I’d done other romantic gestures for him, so I thought it was worth a try. But not only had I arranged for this bouquet, but I had arranged for a different color of rose and the next stanza of the poem on the card to be sent to his work every day for a week.
He got the same ribbing that my first husband had gotten from male coworkers for the first flowers, but Jon was able to proudly say, “She loves me, and she wants me to know that.” To him the flowers and the poem meant he was loved, just like it meant to me that I loved him. We matched up in our love expectations and actions. Yay!
The women at work thought it was very romantic, the first day. By day three the women were getting hostile to him, and the men at work were having two reactions. One, what sexual secret did Jon know to make a woman send him this many flowers!? Jon’s answer of, “She loves me, and I love her,” did not make the men stop trying to wheedle this bedroom secret from him. Two, that he was making them look bad in front of the women they were dating. He actually had one boyfriend who didn’t even work with him come over and talk to him, because the flowers were making the boyfriend’s girlfriend who worked with Jon complain to the boyfriend. Why didn’t she get flowers from him?”
The boyfriend said, “You’re making me look bad. Tell your girlfriend to stop sending you flowers to work.”
Jon’s reply, “I don’t make her do anything, and I like getting the flowers. You can get a five dollar bouquet of flowers from the grocery store across the street and give them to your girlfriend.”
I have dated other men besides Jon where the big gesture wasn’t as appreciated. It didn’t fall as flat as it did with my first husband, but it made the men uncomfortable. Part of the lack of comfort came from the fact that I was dating men ten years, or more younger than myself the second time round, and I had more money and resources to do the big gesture than men in their twenties. ( I did try dating men in my own decade, but I had many of the same issues with them that I’d had with my first husband. Ten years, or more younger and we got a long better. Jon is twelve years my junior.) I apparently made some men feel less manly, because I wanted to do the big romantic gesture and I did it better, or more expensively than they could. Again, go back to the whole idea of love means different things to different people, you have to respect that and figure it out. I knew I wanted to date a man that enjoyed getting flowers from me, so I did. I wanted to be rewarded for my romantic inclinations, my generous impulses, not feel punished for them. That goes back to the whole who washes the dishes question, well, who feels punished and more emotionally attached to the dishes? What do flowers at work mean to a man? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing? Find out, and respect their feelings. That’s really the key talk, communicate, and find ways to make you both feel happy and loved.
Strangely, Jon no longer likes getting flowers at work. This made me very sad, but the reason is that he works out of the house just like I do now. Flowers at work where he couldn’t see me and touch me were reminders that he was loved and got to go home to me. Flowers at home/work seem useless to him, because I can just find him and hug and love on him in person. Why send flowers when we’re together during the day anyway? Once we talked it out it made sense, but it still made me sad that he no longer enjoys getting flowers. On the the other hand I love when he gets me flowers, so he does, because for me as I write alone in my office they are a reminder that I am loved. This is just one example of how things that made us both feel loved when we were dating have changed. You have to honor the changes in each other, as well as the things that stay the same.