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The Midlife Second Wife ™

~ The Real and True Adventures of Remarriage at Life's Midpoint

The Midlife Second Wife ™

Tag Archives: Family

May Light Find and Follow You This Holiday Season

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Special Events

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Christmas and holiday season, Family, friendship, Hanukah, Holidays, Joy, Love, Peace

Christmas2014To all of my readers, fellow bloggers, family and friends—

Just because I’ve been writing a book and blogging less frequently doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten about you. As the days have grown shorter and darker, I’m reminded of all the places where I’ve found light and warmth over the past few years. One of those places is right here, on this blog, writing for you, and sharing with you. The Midlife Second Wife is where I’ve made some lasting friendships, met more wonderful people than any WordPress statistic could reveal, and where I’ve encountered extraordinary opportunities. This is never more evident to me than when I’m caught up in preparations for the holiday season. Why is this so? I think it’s because this is such a mindful time of year—a time when we move through our days with particular intention, when we think of the people we love who are no longer here, and the ones we cannot wait to greet with open arms.

I wish you and your loved ones all the illumination and warmth of the holiday season—whether generated by a menorah, by the light from a mosque, by the moon and stars, or, as at our home, by the twinkling candles of a Christmas tree. May the light find you and shine upon you gently, and may peace, love, and happiness be yours, now and throughout the New Year.

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Dancing with my Father

13 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Relationships and Family Life, Special Events, The Cultured Life

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Cleveland, dancing, Family, Father's Day, Fathers, Lebanese-American Culture, Weddings

DancingwithDad“We only ever danced at weddings …” That’s a line from a poem I wrote nearly 25 years ago about my father. I was a 33-year-old creative writing student at Oberlin College then, still working through the 20-year-old grief of losing my father soon after I turned 13. In the 1960s, my father and I had several opportunities to dance together—three of my cousins were married in elaborate celebrations of love, with opulent receptions in Cleveland hotel ballrooms. The remnants of these memories reveal snapshot scenes: a fountain flowing with champagne, my glamorous cousins in gowns, relatives and strangers linked in the dabke, a traditional Lebanese folk dance accompanied by drums. But like so much of what passed for happiness in the 1960s, these moments were evanescent. Even the hotels are gone.

That’s why I’m so grateful to have this picture of my dad. There aren’t many of them; he was always the one taking the pictures. One of my cousins found an undeveloped roll of film in her late mother’s apartment, took it to a photography store in Cleveland, and surprised me with this print.

As Father’s Day approaches, my dad feels closer to me than ever. I’m sorting through old photos of him (courtesy of my cousin), reading his war letters home, and working on a memoir in which he has the starring role. I’m also sorting through some of my old photo albums, and came across this picture, which symbolizes so much for me.

MarciDabke copy

The author performing the dabke at an international festival.

After my father died, my Sicilian-American mother wanted to keep his heritage alive for me. She joined the local Lebanese social club, and I was enlisted to dance with other young people at the Lorain International Festival. This would have been around 1972. In this photo, I’m performing the dabke, the dance I learned as a child, watching my relatives at those glamorous weddings.

Two years later, I would represent my culture as the Lebanese-Syrian Princess at this same festival. But that’s another story.

All my life, I thought I was participating in these activities to please my mother and honor my father’s memory. It’s only now that I realize the dancing was as much for me as it was for him, keeping the rhythm of love and family alive in my heart.

 

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Gearing up for War: A Soldier’s Letters Home

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Nostalgia, Relationships and Family Life, Transitions

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Family, Memorial Day, War, World War II

MRich_WWIIlettersThey date from June 1942 to June 1945—three years of a life interrupted by the Second World War. They’ve held up surprisingly well, given they are more than 70 years old. They’ve survived scorching summers and frigid winters in various attics, as well as several moves, but they did not survive their author, my father. His letters home to his parents, who owned a small grocery store in Elyria, Ohio, begin and end in June, which would also be the month that he died, in 1969, when I was 13. I’m 58 now, and it has taken me 14 years—ever since I found them in my mother’s attic after her death—to get around to reading them. Filled with bravado and fear, boredom and enthusiasm, pride in his country but a keen longing for home, they are, other than photographs, the only tangible artifacts that I have of my father’s voice and personality; very few people who remember him are still alive. I’m finally getting around to reading these letters because I’m writing a memoir inspired by my father’s absence, and by his interrupted influence on my life.

You might say that I’m finally getting to know him.

Private First Class George G. Abookire was stationed in the Middle East with the U.S. Army’s Persian Gulf Command—a stroke of more than good luck. His posting was a deliberate tack by his commanding officers, since my father could speak Arabic fluently. A first-generation American born in Elyria, where his parents eventually settled, his father was born in Beit El Dine, Mount Lebanon, an area of Syria that would, after the First World War, become what is now known as Lebanon. His mother was born in the neighboring village of Deir El Amar. Both villages were located near the cities of Zahle and Beirut, and when I was growing up my grandparents defined themselves as coming from Zahle. (Rather like people from Elyria saying that they’re from Cleveland.) That I have this information at all is the result of much diligent work and research by several of my father’s first cousins, and—surprisingly enough—his Polish nephew-in-law, who has an abiding interest in genealogy.

The letters begin as my father, 21, is en route to his first training camp at Camp Barkeley, Texas, following his induction in Ohio. He graduated from Elyria High School in 1939, but didn’t enroll in college. It’s clear from this letter that he hasn’t traveled all that much:

In the beautiful hills of East Tennessee…

….It’s really beautiful here, Ma. The people and everything is [sic] so simple but yet they seem that they’re not doing enough for you. Ray’s mother-in-law is swell and his sisters are simply be a u t i f u l to look at in fact all the Southern girls are. …

Try and not work too hard Ma as I don’t want you to. I’d like to see you & Pa on a vacation this year & if its up to me you’re going to have it. Life here is simply grand & wonderful to be in. I can’t find words for it Ma. You’ll have to see it yourself. It’s a different world all together here and I just about wished I were born here….

Your loving boy, George

By the time he reaches Texas, the bloom has come off the rose, but his training as a medic clearly has engaged him:

I didn’t intend to write today as I just don’t know what to do with myself lately. The Captain had my explanation on the history of my chest pains, as the other day one of the Corporals here said I was just a slacker & no good to the army. After telling the Capt. I passed navy & air corps he sort of pricked his ears up. Outside of that I’m a 100% buddy around here to all the boys.…

The studying is terrific. You really have to study to keep up with the awful large amounts of work they give you. Anatomy, Physiology, Pharmacy & bacterial media. It’s fun though….

********

Tuesday night…just got off kitchen duty. I had 11-1/2 hours of it & we just scrubbed every thing after each meal.

I’m in the tent now writing by flashlite [sic] smoking a R.G.Dun that you sent me.

Truthfully Dad the army was tough over where we were at but somehow I managed to overcome it but this out here on the edge of the camp is something else to swallow. We have no toilets. Just a wooden shed & room for 10 or 12 & you can smell it way over on this side of the road as our tent is the last one on the end from Headquarters.

As I told Ma we had a miniature hurricane here Sat. while we moved. Our raincoats saved us but our feet & hands froze & we had to set up new living quarters (tents) kitchens & dig ditches & all in all that rain. One fellow in our Co. caught pneumonia & died yesterday. This life here is so tragic & unbearable I don’t see how I’ll take it. 2 of the boys here went A.W.O.L. Sunday. I went to the show & walked around about 6 miles in camp.…We have no lights … we’re not even to go to the toilet at night. We shower in cold water & then we only have 3 faucets for over 300 men.

I could go on telling you about this but what’s the use of it. My studies are terribly hard Pa but I’ll get it.…Drill study – Drill – classes & then sleep & all over again. I wouldn’t know what to do if I could be home with all of you now. It’s like looking for an actuality but you know your [sic] living on borrowed time. Well I’ll just have to swallow it.…

The experiences at Camp Barkeley, where my father is a member of Company A, 62nd M.R.T.C., underscore not only how challenging all of this soldiering will be, but also how the Army is still building from scratch. His reference to “living on borrowed time” suggests a familiarity with the real horror of the unknown. Reading these letters with the benefit of history and hindsight—we know how the war will end, and I know that my father will survive it—emphasizes their in-the-moment nature. He doesn’t know his fate, nor do his “buddies” in the camp.

I never thought of that before. On past Memorial Days, when I’ve thought of my father as an army veteran—a member of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”—I thought of him in his uniform, thrilled by the adventure of it all, proud to do his part for what he calls, in a subsequent letter, “the good ol’ U.S. of A,” and visiting family in Lebanon while stationed in Iran. It never occurred to me to consider what had to come before the neatness and the pride and the adventure: hard, back-breaking work in the constant rain, and the fear of an unsettled life.

My father in uniform during the Second World War. The photo in the rear, to the left, shows him as a young boy holding his baby sister.

My father in uniform during the Second World War. The photo in the rear, to the left, shows him as a young boy holding his baby sister. Included in the photo of his letters (above) is a picture of him in football gear with two of his buddies from the medics. He’s in the center.

 

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From My Home to Yours, Happy Thanksgiving

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

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

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

blogs, Family, Life, Thanksgiving

English: Saying grace before carving the turke...

English: Saying grace before carving the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner in the home of Earle Landis in Neffsville, Pennsylvania (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quite a lot has happened on the home front of late—so much, in fact, that I haven’t had a chance to fully process it all, let alone write about it. But on this Thanksgiving Eve, the most important thing I can share with you right now is to tell you that I’m keenly aware of all that I have to be thankful for this year—my husband’s love and the health of my family foremost. I’m writing this from the home I carry with me in my heart, rather than from our physical home. We’ve traveled again this year—to Ohio again this year—and I’ll have more to share with you about that at a later time. For now, I just want to add one more item to the list of things I’m grateful for: Your readership and support. Knowing that you are there, at the other end of the line, as it were, fills me with joy. Because of you, this little blog has grown beyond my wildest imaginings. A Thanksgiving post that I shared with you last year on this site appears today on Better After 50, a weekly online magazine, curated by Felice Shapiro, that was featured in the Boston Globe last month. So thank you, dear readers. Your support, your visits to this site, make a difference. I wish you and your loved ones a very happy, healthy Thanksgiving.

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Over the River and Up I-95: A Thanksgiving Journey

23 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Relationships and Family Life

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Tags

Family, Life, Thanksgiving

After ten hours, 500 miles, and four rest stops—with Sandy, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel alternating between a perch at the back of our RAV IV and my lap—John and I arrived safely in Ohio. We’re staying with my son and his lovely Jenny, whom we haven’t seen since May. It feels wonderful to be here. The kids cooked us a delicious pasta dinner, and we walked all three dogs (they have two) by Lake Erie, across the street from where they live. The air was crisp, and the clear sky was full of stars.

Tomorrow will be the first time John’s sons and mine will be together since our wedding 15 months ago. It’s late, and we’re all tired, so this will be all I have time to write tonight.

Happy Thanksgiving, one and all!

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

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Food for Thought, Relationships and Family Life

≈ 102 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Divorce, Family, Holidays, Home, Life, Remarriage, Thanksgiving

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.

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Marlo & Me—Act I

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Relationships and Family Life, The Cultured Life, The Writing Life, Well-Dressed

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Baby Boomers, Beauty, Entertainment, Family, Hair care, Life, Marlo Thomas, Nostalgia

“COMPLICATED HAIR”

Had fashions in the late 1960s been otherwise, I would not have the strength of character that I possess today. I was born with complicated hair—thick, unmanageable, impossibly curly hair. And not the good kind of curly, either—the Andie McDowell/Julianna Margulies-kind of curly—just coarse and wiry and frizzy hair. This frizzled look would be en vogue today, when stylists spend considerable time crafting the look for runway models—a look that used to send me reeling in horror from the bathroom mirror. No, mine was the era of Carnaby Street, Twiggy, and the Summer of Love, and I had complicated hair. The fashion at the time was either cropped short, like the iconic pixie cut Vidal Sassoon created for Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, or long, sleek, and straight, like Jean Shrimpton or Julie Christie—all blondes, I might add. Relief came for a little dark-haired girl in the form of a beautiful brunette named Marlo Thomas, who, in the landmark television series That Girl, wore her straight glossy hair in a flip with bangs. The fact that Marlo was Italian and Lebanese, just like me, and had a father with whom I’d been photographed earlier in the decade, clinched the deal. She—that girl!—would be my role model. God knows, I needed one. I had complicated hair.

Credit: Marlo Thomas' Facebook page

“You have to suffer to be beautiful.”

That’s my godmother, “Aunt Fannie,” speaking. It’s 1968, and I’m in the seventh grade at St. Mary’s School in Elyria, Ohio. We’re having our class pictures taken in a few days, and my parents have driven me to her house to have my hair done.

Perhaps I should explain.

Aunt Fannie was a licensed beautician. (That’s what they called hair stylists in those days.) My godfather, Uncle Bill, was a gifted carpenter, and although he was not a professional contractor, he built their lovely ranch home in a rural part of Elyria from the ground up, and turned one of their basement rooms into a hair salon for my godmother. My father drove my mother there to have her hair done each week, and I was always in tow. With school-picture day looming, I begged and pleaded with my parents to let Aunt Fannie cut my hair so that I would have bangs and a flip, just like That Girl.

I finally wore them down. It wasn’t long before I was seated in the chair that swiveled around like a carnival ride. Aunt Fannie’s fingers wielded the silver scissors like some magician’s wand—snip! snip! snip! I had been turned away from the mirror the entire time, and couldn’t wait to see my idol’s impeccable hairdo in place of my tangled Medusa mane. When she spun me around, I was shocked.

I looked awful.

None of us had really taken my thick frizz into account when calibrating the outcome of my longed-for flip hairdo with bangs. The flip flopped, and I looked like a Labradoodle.

An Australian male Labradoodle at 9 month of age.I hesitate to say this, because you’ll think that I spent my entire childhood in tears, but I have to tell you that I cried. Not a full-throated cry—just a whimper, with a steady stream running down my cheeks.

“Isn’t–isn’t there anything you can do?” I asked my godmother, sniffling. Flat irons had not yet been invented. She thought a moment, then brightened.

“We can straighten it!”

My father, who had been watching television in the other room, walked by just in time to hear this. “Not if I have anything to say about it!” he thundered. “She has beautiful hair. You never should have cut it in the first place.”

“But George, look at her,” my mother said. “She can’t go around looking like this!”

“I can’t go around looking like this, Daddy.” I thought he should know where I stood on the matter.

The tension in the air was palpable. My parents exchanged words. Aunt Fannie busied herself by rearranging her hair clip drawer. I escaped upstairs to soothe my nerves with a tall glass of 7-Up. When I came back down, the charged atmosphere had eased. I’ll never know who convinced him—my mother or Aunt Fannie—but my father had backed down. Aunt Fannie was mixing the chemicals that would solve the crisis and turn me into “That Girl” for my school pictures.

“This stuff stinks!” I cried when she began stirring the mixture near me. And when she started combing the goop through my hair, my eyes began to water—and not from tears. “It burns!”

“You have to suffer to be beautiful,” she replied sagely.

I don’t remember how long I sat in that chair. It seemed like months. But I finally was directed to the shampoo bowl, and felt the cool relief of water soothe away the stinging, rotten-egg smell of the straightener. Aunt Fannie washed and conditioned my hair and combed it through. I was entranced! When I touched it, it felt smooth and sleek; I had never experienced such a sensation in relation to my own hair before. My head looked smaller, too. It wasn’t my hair anymore; it wasn’t me. It was better. New and improved, as the commercials used to say.

Aunt Fannie set my hair in rollers and sat me under the dryer, where I perused the latest movie magazines. When I was dry—cheeks red and hot from the heated air, rolled hair crisp to the touch—Aunt Fannie set me back in the swivel chair, where she began unpinning the rollers, vigorously brushing out my new hair.

It gleamed. It shined. I had never seen anything like it. She sprayed hairspray all over me—the air was thick with it. I sneezed and coughed. But I looked beautiful.

You have to suffer to be beautiful.

And you are! Look at that girl!

To be continued …

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Latitude Adjustments

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Remarriage, Transitions

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Family, Home, Life, Love, Marriage, Oberlin Ohio, Relationships and Family Life, Romance, Transitions, Women

Here it is—the essay that started the blog. This originally appeared as “Latitude Change Brings Attitude Change” in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on April 3, 2011.

Geographically speaking, 10 degrees separate Oberlin, Ohio (82˚) from Richmond (72˚), at least on the longitudinal scale. In 54 years—my entire life—I never lived anywhere other than northeast Ohio. Then, last September, I moved to Richmond. On the life-experience scale, the degrees separating my old life from this new one might as well be 10,000.

Here’s what happened: I fell in love.

But wait, there’s more

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Welcome!

24 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by themidlifesecondwife in Transitions

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Tags

Divorce, Family, Love, Marriage, People, Relationship, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Romance, Transitions, United States, Women

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!

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