Three Years

Happy anniversary to me and Hubby!! How can it be that it was three years ago that I married my best friend? A cliche? Yes, and one I scoffed at for years, but I'm lucky enough to see that it can be true.









I am so very grateful for second chances. After emerging from my first marriage a shell, confused and broken-spirited, I swore I'd never remarry. I'd lost all sense of what was normal in a relationship. All I knew was control, ridicule, anger, resentment. I realized I had to leave at the point when I found myself walking in the rain along the beach, cold to the bone, not knowing where to go and not wanting to go home. At that moment, I knew if I didn't leave, I'd slowly die inside.

Jon has renewed my belief in love, in goodness. He spoils me. Not in an overindulgent way, but in how he takes care of me: a selfless and loving devotion that I was not accustomed to. He allows me the freedom to be me, encourages me to find the best parts of myself; he supports me and pushes me to meet my goals.




We are a team, a partnership. We don't keep score; we work together to care for our children, our home, our relationship. We focus on communication and always try to maintain a loving connection. Do we argue and disagree? We do sometimes, but we always work together to resolve it.






This is what marriage should be. This is what I didn't believe existed. Today especially, I'm so very grateful for my life. For knowing a real love that does not judge, for seeing a softness, a tenderness in the eyes of my husband. For trusting in the longevity of this relationship and the journey we are on.








Today, with the help of our sweet girl, we celebrate the day of our very happy union!

Being Responsive

I've posted many times about divorce, and as much as I'd like to put all of it behind me and move on, I have two sweet boys who are and will always be impacted by the choices their father and I made. Divorce is cyclical; the three of us continually journey through varying phases, and I never find myself prepared for where their little hearts and minds will go.

The latest installment came the other night at the dinner table when out of the blue, Gage looked at me very seriously and said, "Mommy, I'm never going to get married."

I can never be sure where Gage will go next when he makes sudden announcements like this, so I asked why and waited for the rest. I never expected what came next; his mature thought process that lead to his profound statement left me breathless, heartbroken.

"Because I don't want to be like you and Daddy."

I might as well have been a puddle on the floor. My brain grasped for something to say, anything that could take away this knowing, this life experience that my little eight year old possessed. My feeble attempt to reassure him, to restore his faith in marriage fell pitifully short. He looked at me skeptically as I rambled about choosing the right person until thankfully, his attention was diverted by his brother.

I know it is clearly too early to predict doom for his future relationships due to commitment issues. But at the same time, I also realize that they will both be permanently impacted by our choices, even if they were only two and four. They are fortunate enough to see their father and I interact positively most of the time. They also see a loving and healthy marriage here at the Rock House.

Gage, at 2

Gage's comments have helped me to realize that in addition to modeling healthy relationships, I need to be talking with them about marriage and divorce more frequently and in a more complex way than I have been. I have to help them heal and understand the whys and hows of what happened, so they can learn and hopefully not repeat this experience later in their lives.

This has definitely had the potential to completely stress me out! Instead, with my momfulness practice and focus on presence, I'm learning to be less reactive and more responsive to their needs, to love all of the challenges and opportunities parenting them brings.

Conflicting

In one of my favorite movies, Look Who’s Talking (don’t judge), the main character makes this remark: “You don’t know how confusing it is when someone you love so much looks like someone you hate.” I remember thinking how hard that must be. But Gage is his father’s clone, and that doesn’t bother me too much because it’s just Gage and how he looks. What has been really, really hard to take, especially recently, is that both boys have been acting and sounding exactly like their dad in ways that drive me mad. In ways that drove me mad throughout our entire 8 year relationship and 6 year marriage. How on earth do you deal with that? When the sounds of the voices, the kinds of things they say were the same kinds of things and sounds of things that literally made me want to scream throughout my entire 20s. I don’t want to squelch their personalities, and I know they will embody their dad in different ways throughout their lives, but at the same time it makes my skin crawl, and I have to bite my tongue to keep myself from saying something scathingly harsh.

I’ve always tried to have no regrets. To be okay with the past and the paths I have taken. It has all led me to where I am. But sometimes the reality of it can be overwhelming, conflicting. The reality that they will always say things like their dad. They will always sound like him. He is part of them, and I know there is good that comes from that. Despite the parts that make me want to run screaming. I know this when I can see past the fog of anger that sometimes still descends. I know this when I drop them off, and they run across the lawn yelling his name, lunging for a hug. I know this when he carefully carries them out to the car still half asleep.

Remembering this in the moments they become him, those moments that are too familiar, will always be the challenge.

One Pizza, One Pool, One Family

Alternatively titled-- Blending Families for Dummies (a book that we obviously need)

Last week I blogged about the challenges that a blended family faces, and one of the issues that we have come up against in the past is spending time together-- just the five of us-- doing something that we can all enjoy.  It may sound simple, but really it isn't.  Trust me.  Here's why:

1.  The age gap between the boy-os and the princess is just enough so that they have absolutely nothing in common.  Unavoidable.
2. I share joint custody of the boy-os with their father, so they are only here roughly half the time.  Unavoidable.
3. The princess is a teenager.  That equals friends, a boyfriend, a job, a team sport, and lots of time in her bedroom.  Understandable.
4. The princess periodically spends time at her mom's house.  Unavoidable.
5. Asian husband and I can sometimes be selfish with our time together-- being newly married and all.  Understandable, but can probably be adjusted.

That is not a recipe for easy family bonding.  It is actually the exact recipe for an authentic surface family feel.  Co-existing in the same house, but not really bonding.  We didn't have the luxury of years of baby and toddlerhood to spend together and work through the kinks of children.  We have been thrown into the mix late in the game, after each of us had spent several years of raising our kids on our own.  We are a bit rusty with the kind of work it takes to be a family.  And by that I mean a for-real family, not just a group of people living under one roof.  I used to scoff at the number of failed second marriages that involved two sets of children, but now that I've experienced the reality, I understand it and have a great respect for it.  Because it is a crap ton of work.  A. Crap. Ton. Of. Work. And if you don't pay attention, it can easily crumble right before your eyes.

Luckily, Asian husband and I instituted a plan of action to assist us in this family bonding endeavor.  I call it the "do whatever we can whenever we can" plan or DWWCWWC.  It can be pronounced dee-wick-wick, which makes it fun to say and by extension fun to execute.  This very intricate and detailed plan requires a lot of forethought and careful organizing to ensure everything goes well.  You should take notes.

1. Target a time when all of the family has intentions of being home and available.
2. Make plans.

You can see why it has taken us about two years to come up with it. I will pause while you recover from great awe.

This weekend we had ice cream at the local fro-yo place (which I guess would be frozen yogurt, not ice cream, but whatever), had lunch at the local pizzeria, and crashed a relative's community pool with an extra pool pass.  (I was convinced that the Russian lifeguards were on to the fact that we were impostors, but for the sake of the dee-wick-wick plan, I was willing to take the chance.)

They all smiled. At the same time. And no one had a finger up his nose (Gage) or in his mouth (Pacey). 

Natural Consequences

Just when I think that the past is really behind me, that I've moved on, grown, made strides, and learned something (any other cliches?), I realize that rather than growth and healing being a straight-lined journey, it is more cyclical, revisited periodically.  Coming on the heels of Father's Day, this current bout of understanding and reflection concerning the past has been fairly poignant.  I'm realizing that the process of blending a family is more complicated, more difficult, and frankly more work than I had been prepared for.  Given a variety of personalities, cultures, and family backgrounds, I liken it to throwing three different jigsaw puzzles on the ground and trying to come up with one coherent picture.  Not impossible, but also not easy.  We continue to work at it, diligently, but now with the knowledge that this work is true work, and it needs to be tackled each day with an awareness of the importance it holds.


It just so happened that for the past week, I have been converting old home videos to a digital format, which means that I have spent quite a bit of time immersed in my and the boys' pasts.  From the birth of Pacey to the time Gage was 3, their dad and I separated three times and finally divorced.  I went through several hairstyles (some good, some very, very bad).  I lived in four different homes.  Much of this was invisible to the camera's eye, but as I watched, I relived the backchannel story.  The anger and grief, the hopelessness and despair.  But I also saw our love for the boys despite the situation.  We laughed at them and with them, and it rejuvenated my soul to experience our relationships as a third party.  It made me glad that one day, when the boys are older and see the videos, they will see many happy moments that included all four of us.

In the midst of my personal reflection (and despite the fact that the boys didn't know I was watching the videos), Pacey intuitively told me that he wished that all four of us could still live together, so that way he could see me and his dad all the time.  In that moment, I realized that I owe so much to my little boy-os.  When making the choice to leave (time after time), I struggled with the impact it would have on them, and I finally found peace with the notion that if I had stayed, I would have continued to be unhappy and that would have impacted them in a much more detrimental way.  What struck me was that though I have moved on, and we have a new life with a new family, we will always be impacted by that choice.  The boys have ultimately lost something and will experience that loss daily-- when they wish to be with both parents all the time, despite the fact that they were so little that they don't remember us all living together.  I looked down at his head in my lap and saw a strength in him that I hadn't noticed before, and I realized the irony of divorce.  That in some way, in order for me (and by extension them) to be happy, I had to make a choice that would always make them sad.  And me too, a little, if I am being completely honest with myself.

I have no regrets for the choices I made that brought us here.  I know that I am much happier, much more fulfilled and much more myself in this marriage to an incredible man.  And that all translates to me being a better mom, which brings me back to the blending family issue.  Through all of this reflection and revisiting of the past, I have realized that I need to create a new definition of family for myself.  I have naively believed that simply by the merit of us all living under the same roof, we would immediately feel and function like a single, biological family.  I have wished that all of the kids would just be ours, and that it would feel like what I had only glimpses of in my previous life.  But through that wishing, I have ignored the reality of what blending a family and step-parenting means-- we are not a biological unit, and it is completely natural to feel that loss, but it is also equally important to know that the boys and I and the husband and the princess are a part of so much more as long as we are open to finding it.  We are a blended family, and though the journey that comes with creating and maintaining this kind of family is more intentional, less haphazard, and littered with remnants of our pasts that require careful navigation, I know we will be up for the trip.

Compromise and Craziness

I was skimming through my RSS feeds the other day, and I found this article about divorce, marriage, and health. It reports on the findings of a study that attempts to correlate poor health with divorce and/or unhappy marriages. While it doesn't seem that much a surprise to me-- duh, when you are miserable or going through stress, your health suffers? Shocking!-- it got me thinking about all of the phases in my life, especially after just battling (and winning, which is unusual) the boy-os dad for a school change for them and even more so since it was four years ago this month that the boys and I made new lives for ourselves in the little yellow house by the beach. (Picture above, Spring 2006.)

I have always tried to look at this as a journey with no regrets, and when I look at who I was ten years ago when I was first married to the boy-os father, and I compare it to who I am now, I see that the differences are amazing. Sometimes I wonder if I would ever exchange the growth and learning for a lack of the struggle and strife that were a part of the last four years? While I like to laugh about how many times we went back and forth from being together to being separated, it makes me sad, too. Because I know that was out of a fierce desire to create something out of nothing, no matter the cost. It wasn't until I honestly felt like I was dying, until the day I found myself walking in the cold rain at the beach alone that I had to make the choice for me and the boys.

And now, four years later, I know without question it was the best decision I ever made. Even though while I was a single mom, I was often frustrated by the state of my life. By not living the dream of a family I always wanted. By being alone and doing it on my own. But all of that was needed, was an integral part in all of our journeys to become who we are today. And because of it, I know I value my life in the Rock House so much more than I could have otherwise.

I have had to learn to share, and while there are days that I wish their dad would "disappear," I know we are lucky to have him want to be involved so much. The boys will benefit from that in some way, even though his modes and methods may be questionable sometimes. It forces me to compromise, to communicate, and to understand. Whether we can do that between the two of us or in mediation, is another story. Sometimes I rage and hate that I have to share, that I can't just call the shots and that I can't have my kids all the time. It frustrates me that they are only here half of the time. That on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other weekend, their beds are empty and the house is quiet. That I have had to learn to not feel guilty because I sometimes enjoy myself and the quiet house. That I had to go to mediation to make a change that is really in the boys' best interest. But in quieter moments, I can accept that this is the way life is and be grateful for all that we are learning because of it. And it is in these quiet moments, that I can understand Shirley Maclaine's line from the movie Rumor Has It: "If the marriage implodes, divorce. You haven't lived till you've been through one of those."