Tag Archives: Divorce

The ‘L’ Word

20 Saturday Oct 2012

Posted by in Love, Midpoints, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage, Transitions

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morgueFile image/KConnors photograph

NOTE: KatieCouric.com published an edited version of this post as “Learning to Love Again” on Monday, Oct. 22, 2012.

As many magazine articles, advice columnists, and situation comedies will tell you, it’s tricky being the first person in a relationship to say, “I love you.” Remember George Costanza? George was left holding what Jerry Seinfeld called a “pretty big matzo ball” because he failed to receive the much coveted “I love you return.” But what’s funny on television is actually quite terrifying in real life. It takes a huge leap of faith and nerves of titanium to say the “L” word first.

Take that terror to the tenth power if you’re divorced.

I know whereof I speak. After 26 years of marriage, my first husband and I divorced. Fast-forward six years, and I meet him. You know, The One. But let’s digress a moment, because playing with these numbers has given me an epiphany.

When I met The One, I was one year shy of my seven-year cellular renewal cycle—you know, that “Aha! Moment” your body supposedly has when all of its cells slough away, leaving you with an almost brand-new self. In truth, as Nicholas Wade wrote in a New York Times science article seven years ago, some cells—“the neurons of the cerebral cortex, the inner lens cells of the eye and perhaps the muscle cells of the heart”— remain unchanged. Now that’s what I call something of great constancy. The cellular structures of the brain, the eye, and the heart—three essential components in registering romantic love, if you ask me—remain constant. The cells in the rest of our bodies hit the refresh key, as it were.

Interesting. But the brain, eye, and heart theory didn’t pass the constancy test in my first marriage, I’m sad to say.

Then again, you never know. I like the idea of considering, given multiples of seven, that perhaps anything is possible. Believe me, I have mapped this out. I was married at 21 and divorced at 47. (Okay, so I’m a year or two off.) But everything did seem possible when I met The One, skipping along as I was toward my next seven-year cycle of renewal. The One and I had a lot in common: we made each other laugh, we sang lyrics from the Great American Songbook while cleaning up the kitchen after cooking together, and the attraction we felt toward one another left us in awe.

And then, two-and-a-half months into the relationship, it happened.

I did it. I’m the one who said it. After a hesitant sigh, he replied, as gently as he could, “I’m sorry. I’m just not there yet.”

Talk about your matzo balls. I could have opened a deli.

“Forget it,” I countered hastily. “I shouldn’t have said it. I understand what you’re saying/feeling/thinking.” (I was trying to fill in as many blanks as I could to cover myself.) “It’s all right.”

I wanted to believe that his reaction stemmed from emotional baggage. Our arms were filled with it. His divorce, however, was more recent than mine. I had reached the point where my baggage, as Dr. Terri Orbuch (The Love Doctor) says, could fit in the overhead compartment. Him? Not so much. He needed a skycap.

Or maybe it was something else. Maybe (Heaven forefend!) it was a case of “he’s just not that into you.”

And so he left, leaving me to wonder if I’d blown it. How could I have misread the signals? Everything pointed to love. All of the signs were there: the caring, the fondness, the intimacy, the long, meaningful conversations, the seeming trust, the genuine enjoyment in just being together. If that’s not love, what is?

I decided I wasn’t going to let this get to me. I was happy, he was happy. (He was, wasn’t he?) We had a date for the following evening; in fact, we had several events lined up into the next month. I wasn’t about to bring it up again.

Until one day I did.

“I blank you.”

“What?”

“I said ‘I blank you.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It can mean whatever you’d like it to mean. Fill in the blank. For my part, I know what it means but I’m not telling you. More cake?”

He laughed, and that was that. We were back on an even keel. “I blank you” became a running joke between us. He even started saying it to me.

The weeks flew by. Before I knew it, October was here, the month containing the second most dreaded Hallmark holiday (after Valentine’s Day) for single people: Sweetest Day.

I remember the scene as though it were yesterday. I had cooked dinner, something from my collection of Barefoot Contessa cookbooks. I bought him a maroon hooded Oberlin sweatshirt, not because he went to Oberlin, but because I did. I still lived in that quaint college town, and he loved its cultural vibe as much as I did. I wrapped the gift and bought a card. I presented both to him with a flourish. Here’s the card:

© Marian Heath. Used with permission and slightly altered, as it was the day I gave it to The One. Where would we be without Post-It Notes?

After he finished laughing, he became quiet. He looked at me across the table and said, “Marci, I’m not saying this because it’s Sweetest Day. I don’t “blank” you anymore. That’s silly. I love you.”

There it was. Four months after meeting him on Match.com, he told me he loved me. The matzo ball dissolved.

Four years after that first sweetest day together, we’re still celebrating. We’ve been married for two years. At the risk of tempting fate, by our seventh wedding anniversary, I fully expect the constancy theory to hold—my heart, my head, and my eyes will see what I’m seeing right now: He’s The One.

© Marian Heath. Used with permission.

RELATED:

‘When they Fall, they Fly’

“Outliers of Outloving”

“Secrets Of A Successful Marriage: Marlo Thomas And Phil Donahue”

“Secrets to a Happy Relationship”

 

The Midlife Second Wife Joins “Katie” as a Featured Blogger on Monday, Oct. 22

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by in Love, Relationships and Family Life, Special Events, What's the Buzz?

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The elegant set of ‘Katie.’ The show is taped at ABC Studios in New York and syndicated across the United States.

(MONDAY, OCT. 22, 2012)—UPDATE: I learned late last night that the segment featuring Dr. Terri Orbuch has been postponed and will be rescheduled. When the producers announce a new air date I will let you know. Hope you can tune in to watch Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon speak with Katie Couric and see both women engage in a bit of competitive sport!

The call came on a Monday in August, about a week after I had returned home to Richmond following the BlogHer conference in New York City. On the line was Brittany Jones-Cooper, a producer of Katie, Katie Couric’s new syndicated daytime talk show.

She and Couric had been at the BlogHer conference—Couric was featured in one of several keynote interviews, engaging in a lively discussion with BlogHer cofounder Lisa Stone, and issuing a clarion call for bloggers to participate in her new show. The television legend certainly came to the right place!

And, it would seem, so did I.

Back to that phone call. Couric’s producer had seen my blog, liked what I wrote, and asked if I could be in ABC Studios in New York on Thursday for a taping. Couric has employed several ingenious methods of integrating social media into her program; one way is to have two bloggers in the audience for each show. The theme of this particular program would be divorce.

Now as we all know, I happen to know a little bit about that subject.

And so it was that three days later, my husband John, who grew up about 20 minutes outside of the city, drove me into Manhattan. A bonus of the trip? We’d take some time to explore all of the landmarks of his youth—something I’d wanted to do ever since meeting him.

What a whirlwind! Just arrived backstage at the ABC Studios, still wearing my traveling clothes. TMSW got dressed and made up in record time!

I’m in the cobalt blue jacket, wearing a necklace and an Apple MacBook Pro. At my right is blogger Deesha Philyaw, of ‘Co-Parenting 101.’

You’re reading about all of this now because the program I was invited to attend airs on Monday, Oct. 22, at 3 p.m. on NBC12 in the Richmond market. You’ll want to visit the Katie website to check your local listings; in some markets the program airs at 2 p.m.

Katie Couric chats with the audience before the taping. Check out her gorgeous shoes!

The featured guest? One of my favorite actresses—the smart, sultry, simply ageless Susan Sarandon—as admired for her social activism as she is for her award-winning performances. Single after a long-term partnership with actor Tim Robbins, she turned 66 earlier this month; she shares her thoughts about commitment, relationships, and what it’s like to be an older—albeit steadily working—actress in Hollwood. Also on the show is Dr. Terri Orbuch, aka ‘the love doctor,’ offering useful marital advice—from a surprising source.

After the taping, Sarandon and her two dogs, Rigby and Penny, posed for pictures with Katie. Remind me to tell you a cute story about Rigby!

The colorfully-garbed audience of ‘Katie’

I’ll be tweeting LIVE during the broadcast beginning at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’re not already following me on Twitter, please hop over to the next window and click “follow.”

The producer also asked me to write an essay for the program’s website about finding love after divorce. (I happen to know a little something about that, too.) KatieCouric.com published “Learning to Love Again” on Oct. 22, 2012. The post appears as “The ‘L’ Word” on this blog.

I hope you’ll have a chance to tune in or follow my LIVE tweets during the broadcast. Enjoy! And as always, thanks for reading!

Of Unadorned Turkeys and Giving Thanks: To Family & Friends, WordPress & Readers

22 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by in Relationships and Family Life, The Writing Life, What's the Buzz?

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The turkey was not ready for his close-up. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that the humble bird from our early Christmas with my husband’s sons would, a year later, appear on thousands of computer screens around the world. How’d this happen? Yesterday, the WordPress editor (aka “story wrangler”) plucked this little blog out of obscurity and plopped it onto the site’s “Freshly Pressed” portal—where all good bloggers go to log in. In roughly 27 hours, more than 4,000 people visited The Midlife Second Wife, and 42 new subscribers signed up. The post that generated all of the activity, “Where’s Home for the Holidays When You’re Divorced or Remarried?” attracted 83 comments and 109 “likes” from bloggers.  Gosh. I really wish I’d garnished that turkey.

But this post isn’t about our turkey’s less than glamorous visage, and it’s only tangentially about the blog’s 15-minutes of fame. No, this post is about gratitude. The past 27 hours have been wonderfully overwhelming and deeply humbling. So I hope that you won’t mind if I use this essay to express some well-deserved thanks.

  1. To my son, who e-mailed me before all of the hubbub began, to tell me that he loved the post. Matthew, I’m sorry, but I’m about to have an “I’m going to embarrass you moment.” I love and admire you more than words can say.
  2. To my husband, who was the first to comment, who gives me room and space to write, who champions everything that I do, and who—to quote Paul Child, Julia’s husband—”is the butter to my bread and the breath to my life.” John, I love you.
  3. To my stepsons, whom I love more than they might realize, given the brief time we’ve been flung together and the distance that separates us.
  4. To the editors at WordPress for incredible support of a late-blooming blogger.
  5. To all of my friends and family who signed on at the beginning. You are amazing and I love you.
  6. To every new reader of the blog—all of you who subscribed, felt moved enough by the post to give it your much-appreciated thumbs-up, and decided to follow me on Twitter.
  7. To everyone who posted their comments in response to the blog’s message. You have no idea how you have warmed my heart. Many of you wrote to express your own painful experiences about the way divorce has torn your family asunder; many described your own ways of dealing with the holidays; one reminded me—and I hope everyone reading—that it’s not only divorce or remarriage that can shunt holiday traditions sidewise. The wars in which our country has been embroiled have done their own damage—in countless cases irreparable—to the family gathering at the dinner table. One of you wrote to express your poignant wish that you had the right to marry, too. So do I.

To each of you who took the time to post a comment, I promise to reply. It will take me some time to do so, but it’s important to me. You have done me a great honor by your response to my writing.

To all of you reading this, I promise to make every effort to be interesting, honest, and useful in what I post here. Your time is valuable; I don’t want you to feel you are wasting it by reading me.

Finally, there’s just one more thing I want to say before I leave you today.

I’ve yet to share on this blog my love of French films. I bring this up now because there’s a wonderful line in one of my favorites—Red, part of Krzysztof Kieslowski‘s trilogy Three Colors. The character portrayed by Irene Jacob says:

Je me sens quelque chose d’important se passe autour de moi. (Don’t be impressed; I had to look this up on Google Translate.)

“I feel something important is happening around me.”

For the past several weeks, I have felt as though something important were happening around me. (I’ve felt this way before, when John and I fell in love … when my child was first placed in my arms.) It’s an incredibly potent feeling—a feeling of great positivity and light. My Thanksgiving wish for each and every one of you is this: that you experience this feeling at least once in your lives.

Happy Thanksgiving. And thank you.

Where’s Home for the Holidays When You’re Divorced?

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Food for Thought, Relationships and Family Life

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The turkey I prepared in 2010, when my stepsons celebrated an early Christmas with us.

When my first marriage ended, the day before Thanksgiving in 2003, I took a deep breath upon returning from court and began meal preparations for my first major holiday on my own. I set myself (and my raw nerves) to the comforting task of marinating pears for a compote, then started on the bread-sage stuffing. Why? Because for as long as I can recall, I’ve cooked elaborate dinners for the holidays.

During my first marriage, our family shared hosting duties for the holidays, but the times when it wasn’t my turn didn’t mean I was off the hook. I contributed side dishes and desserts to the groaning board so the burden of cooking an entire meal wasn’t borne by the host. That, however, was all in the past. My son would join me, and my cousin, for my first post-divorce Thanksgiving. That was it. Taking the smallest turkey I’d ever roasted out of the oven, I marveled at its lightness. And cried.

One month later, at Christmas, I said goodbye to all that and performed a variation on the theme. My cousin brought her nephew, my son came with his girlfriend at the time, and I rounded out the rest of the table with a young violinist from the Ukraine, who was studying at the conservatory where I worked. She brought her mother along. And, for the first time in my entire life, turkey was not featured on the table. Instead I prepared a standing rib roast from one of Ina Garten‘s Barefoot Contessa cookbooks.

This was my new family dynamic, and the start of a new tradition.

It can’t have been easy for my son, who at the time was in his early 20s. He was now required to divide all of his holidays in two; the first half of the day was spent with his father, the latter half with me. Those mornings and early afternoons dragged on so! It seemed strange to be alone in the house on a holiday. I probably hugged him far too long and far too tightly when he arrived. But so it went, each year, until the year I remarried.

My new husband had taken a job in Virginia, and I was now living nearly 500 miles from where I grew up and lived my entire life—and 500 miles from my son. Whereas holidays had presented a mere logistical inconvenience, now the geographical stakes were raised to challenging heights. Would I be able to spend at least one holiday with him? And what of my husband’s sons? How and when would we see them? The oldest is in graduate school in Illinois; the youngest had just started college in Ohio.

As it turned out, I wasn’t able to see my son at all that first year after our move. His work schedule simply didn’t allow him enough time off to make the trip. I cannot tell you how that rocked me. Things fared a bit better with the other boys; they drove to Virginia the second week of December to have an early Christmas with us. But again, what orbits they had to navigate! The eldest and his girlfriend drove from Illinois to Ohio to spend time with his mother and brother. Then, with his brother in tow, he drove from Ohio to Virginia. Then it was back around and up to Ohio to drop his brother off, and westward to St. Louis, so his girlfriend could see her family. And back to Illinois. It was like a 1930s movie, where a map of the United States with moving, dotted arrows illustrated a character’s travel progression from Point A to Point Whatever. The mind reels.

Last year, John and I decided that it was our turn to give the kids a break and do the driving. We left for Ohio early in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. Once there, we stayed with my son and his girlfriend. John’s sons joined us the next day, and we all enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner together in a suburb of Cleveland. In a restaurant. For Thanksgiving.

That took some getting used to. Never in my life had I set foot in a restaurant on a major holiday; it went against every cooking and baking gene in my body. I had always felt nothing but sadness for Ralphie and his family in A Christmas Story, forced to eat Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant after the Bumpus hounds devoured their turkey.

The meal was traditional enough and tasty enough, I suppose. But that was hardly the point. The goal was to be together: one scattered family gathered for a few brief hours around a table laden with food that might (or might not) allow us (allow me?) to pretend we were in the old homestead, however new that homestead might be.

It was more than enough that we were together and healthy.

It’s true, as the old song says, that there’s no place like home for the holidays. But when you create a new family, and circumstances toss your family hither and yon with no viable base of operations, it helps to remember another song—one that can serve to brighten your thoughts with a clarity that allows comfort and joy to shine through:

Home is where the heart is.

Outliers of Out-Loving

06 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Midpoints, Relationships and Family Life, Remarriage

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The other day I posted an essay about the secrets to a happy marriage, sharing insights gleaned from a Marlo Thomas/Phil Donahue interview on the actress’ Huffington Post site.

Although John and I are nowhere near the 30-year partnership shared by Thomas and Donahue, it occurs to me that I nevertheless learned a fundamental secret to a happy marriage—or relationship—soon after meeting John. I keep these words close to my heart and even closer to my consciousness, because they map an objective I want to reach every day:

I want to out-love him.

John and I both divorced after long first marriages. We know that the statistics for successful second marriages aren’t great. But we are determined that ours be a union that will not only survive, but thrive. The notion of out-loving one another comes from John. He sets the standard. I just try to catch up.

He learned about out-loving from a premarital counseling class he took, ironically, prior to his first marriage. An older couple, married for decades, was advising the neophytes. The man was asked the secret to a happy marriage. He replied:

I can’t and won’t speak for my wife, but I can tell you my secret to a happy marriage: I just try to out-love her.

Wow. Who was this man? And is it too late to harvest his DNA?

Given the grim statistics of divorce in the U.S., it is apparent that not too many partners are trying to out-love their mates. But John shared this anecdote with me soon after we started dating. And boy, does he live up to it.

I call him an outlier of out-loving, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s term. An outlier is one who possesses characteristics outside the norm of the majority. The ability to out-love another can seem as rare as a pink diamond.

I sometimes have to remind myself that this is not a competition. Love—and the gestures, kindnesses, and consideration that stem from love—should come naturally, no? And it does, but to a point, and that point is usually when one partner is over-tired, over-worked, or over-stressed. It is human nature for patience to run ragged. It is human nature to become preoccupied and distracted. It is human nature to sometimes lack mindfulness.

It takes mindfulness to out-love one’s partner. Mindfulness of the bond that holds you close, mindfulness of the trust each of you places in the other, mindfulness of the fragility of life.

My objective in finding my soul-mate was to find the one man whose face was the last thing I want to see before taking my last breath. I’m one of the lucky ones; I found him. At our wedding, my friend, the wonderful poet Lynn Powell, read Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage.” Here is an excerpt:

…                              We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.

More than any pink diamond, the gift of John’s love is more precious to me than any possession. I have no idea how many years we will have together, and so I want each day to count. This is especially true, I think, for couples who marry later in life. We are more aware, I think, of our mortality. I therefore want to spend what time we have together out-loving him. Every precious day.

Welcome!

24 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Transitions

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Welcome to The Midlife Second Wife! For my inaugural post, I would like to share with you an essay that I wrote for the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the numerous changes that occurred in my life as a result of my remarriage. What about you? Has remarriage changed your life? Please feel free to share your comments here, as well as your ideas for future topics. And if you know someone who might find this blog of interest, please share it.

Thanks for visiting!