Crisis Management

This past week, something very troubling and sad happened in our lives, something that many of you may have seen on the news.  My daughter’s second grade teacher was arrested and charged with the possession and creation of child pornography.  This event was disturbing on so many levels, but the one that I want to mention is that it made me question my ability to trust people, especially men.

Layla’s teacher was a truly amazing and dedicated educator, and the allegations against him made me wonder what secrets each of us is keeping.  My faith in humanity was truly rocked.  This man, whom so many parents and children adored, had a secret life that was not only illegal but also quite harmful to the same people that he professed to care about.  The irony of this situation was quite painful and confusing for me.

Fortunately, a silver lining appeared in this incredibly dark cloud that was hovering above me.  People started reaching out and demonstrating a tremendous amount of kindness.  As is always the case, my Facebook community responded with overwhelming support.  I disagree with the criticisms made about the superficiality of social media connections because my online community has buoyed me in several moments of turmoil, and their love and admiration for my response to this situation helped restore my faith not only in humanity but also in the role of the Internet in our society (very bad for the dissemination of child porn, excellent for social support).  In addition, the parents at my kids’ school reached out to me, and we shared and bonded in a profound way that wouldn’t have been possible if not for a crisis that made us forget about our busy schedules and take time to talk to each other in a meaningful way.

In this difficult time, I want to mention two people who were particularly supportive to me, two people whose presence in my life I appreciate so much: my ex husband and Jon.  When I first heard the news, my immediate reaction was to call my ex.  It didn’t matter that we had just had a disagreement over plans for the kids’ February break about five minutes before.  I knew he’d care.  And I knew that he would listen to me.

I literally sobbed on the phone.  The mere fact that we could turn to each other in a time of crisis was so important.  No matter how much anyone cares about our kids, no one has the love and investment in them that we both do.  As a divorced couple, we don’t get to share that daily.  However, due to our peaceful relationship and continued friendship, we do have the ability to bond over the big things.  It was very helpful for me (and for him too, I believe) to process this together.

Jon was another great source of support.  I was really blunt with him about how this was coloring my view of men and eroding my ability to trust.  He said something that might seem small to some, but spoke volumes to me.  He reassured me that I could trust him.  He reminded me that he had been honest with me from day one.  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, sometimes that honesty seemed too much for me.  I wanted a rosy, romantic view of him.  Yet in this moment, when I was feeling a devastating lack of trust, I realized how right he had been.  By being forthright with me, he showed me an integrity that not all people are capable of.  And that felt really comforting.

So here I am, once again attempting to find the positive lesson in a very trying situation.  My heart was deeply saddened by the news that someone that my family had admired and trusted had allegedly betrayed that trust.  And it temporarily closed down.  Yet the presence of so many good people (and I use that word deliberately) in my life ended up opening it up wider than it had been before.

Maybe now you can see why I work to keep my exes in my life.  They enrich it in so many ways.  And for that, I am extremely grateful.

Change of Relationship Status

My parents recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  They met on a blind date, got engaged three dates later, and were married within six months (three of which my mother spent alone in Europe).  This kind of impulsive, romantic love has become a big part of our family lore.   My sister and I were a bit more cautious, yet we fell in love very quickly with our future spouses and within months were living with them.   I guess you could say that excitement and optimism over love’s potential is a family trait.

When Jon and I started our relationship, I thought I might show some restraint.   I know that infatuation doesn’t always last and that it takes time to see if true compatibility exists.   Yet Jon’s enthusiasm was infectious, and within mere weeks we were talking about moving in together.   As we relished in our new found connection, we fantasized about buying a place, and he sent me real estate listings and spreadsheets on how we could afford them.  We made daily Facebook updates about our amorous adventures.   A month later I met his family during the Thanksgiving holiday.   Two months later he came to California to meet mine.   I was thrilled at the thought of having found a future life partner, especially one with so much energy, zeal for life, and dedication to family.

Yet as many love stories do, this one has come to an end.   I think it started back in December when I noticed him getting more distant, distracted, and moody.  When we were together, he was spending more time checking his iPhone and less time looking me in the eye.  I tried to reach out and talk to him about it, but to no avail.  I found myself playing a Joni Mitchell lyric over and over in my head, “I sat up all the night and listened to thee/ Just to see who in the world you might be/ And what you might mean to me.”  In his words, Jon still showed the same commitment to our relationship, but I was starting to wonder if this was the kind of relationship that I wanted because I like to have a strong, constant, and intimate connection with my partner.

I spoke with my family and friends, especially those with spouses who worked long hours and traveled a lot to see how they dealt with the moments of separation and potential disconnection.  I told myself to accept him on his terms, to focus on what I liked best about him and our relationship, and I tried not to give too much attention to my concerns.  Yet I also set an intention at the New Year to gain some clarity on the situation.

When we returned to California, he brought up the question again of cohabitation.  I said that we should think about it, and, as I often do when I am trying to figure something out, I blogged about it. I tried to imagine what our life might be like together.  On Monday, after we hadn’t seen each other in a week, and hadn’t been alone in two weeks, I felt the need to talk to him about how I felt that we weren’t connecting.  He didn’t know how to respond to me, clammed up, and said that he couldn’t talk at that moment since he was at work, which was understandable, yet it had been his suggestion to talk that morning.

Later that day, in another attempt to process my feelings, I wrote a blogpost about our past mistakes and how to avoid allowing them to ruin our present relationships.  Ironically, it did just that.  Jon felt very hurt by the post and wanted to talk to me about it right away.  At that point, I was with my kids so it was impossible to talk on the phone for long.  So we started an email and IM exchange where a lot of our feelings and frustrations were finally aired.

I took the post down and edited it.  I sent it to a few close friends, asking for their input.  I was having a really hard time understanding why he was so upset about what I wrote, then he got angry that I didn’t understand him nor show sufficient compassion and sensitivity.  Then I got frustrated that he was so willing to talk about his concerns, when I felt that he had dismissed my concerns earlier in the day.  We basically hit an impasse.

The next day, clarity came to me.  We made plans for him to come over after the kids’ bedtime to talk.  I knew that there were two options: that we were going to decide that we were emotionally incompatible or we would find a way to take some concrete steps to improve our communication and connection.  He decided on the former.

This morning, as I drove my kids from a dentist appointment, a song by the Tedeschi Trucks band caught my attention on the radio.  “I’m gonna learn how to love you. I’m gonna show you show me how.”  I guess we never really learned how to love each other, at least in the way that each wanted to be loved.  Yet is true love something we learn or does it come naturally?  I don’t know, but I do know that I learned a tremendous amount about myself in this whole process.  And I truly believe that I have gained a dear friend along the way because when I care about someone, a breakup can’t change that.  I’ve had a change of relationship status (which Facebook has duly noted), not a change of heart.

We Have No Secrets

Okay, today I’m taking on an even tougher topic than co-habitation (if there is one more difficult than that).  It’s the issue of our past mistakes and how much we share them with a new partner.  Love the second time around is different because now we have a pretty colorful history.  Some of it is wonderful, and some of it is, frankly, regrettable.  Part of moving on, clearly, is learning from our mistakes so as not to repeat them.  Yet, in order to do that, must we share, or confess even, our past errors to our new partners?

I tend to think that in the beginning of a relationship, you want to put your best foot forward and show what a great partner you can be.  Of course, I am a huge optimist that always looks for the good in people, and I can be blind to people’s faults (which is usually a good trait).  However, every now and then a voice of doubt creeps into my head and makes me wonder if history is doomed to repeat itself.

A year ago, I wrote a blog piece on this topic, but I never published it.  Back then I was listening to my friends talk about their lovers.  One friend was devastated to receive a phone call from her boyfriend’s ex-wife, regaling her with horror stories from their past.  Another friend was concerned because her lover admitted that he had cheated on his wife, and she was fearful that once a cheater, one is always a cheater.  Yet another man told me that he ended a relationship with a woman because of the problems that she had with her daughter.  He was concerned that indicated that she would not make a good step-mom.

All of these friends are quite politically liberal.  One works for a social justice organization; another is on the board of directors of a local anti-poverty group; the third is a therapist.  As I heard them talk about their lovers’ pasts, I kept thinking, shouldn’t our political and philosophical beliefs dictate that we give them a second chance?  If we are working for social change, shouldn’t we also believe that personal improvement is possible?  Should marital infidelity or other relationship mistakes be a black mark on someone’s record rendering them as unlovable as an ex-convict is unemployable?

Yet now that it is me who is going through such a situation, I can see much more clearly why my friends were feeling insecure.  I really do believe that people can change.  I’ve seen it happen in myself and in others.  I do think that we can learn from our mistakes and be not only productive members of society, but also skilled practitioners of relationships.  In short, I want to judge someone’s potential by how he treats me now, not how he treated someone else five years ago.  I want to be a compassionate lover who accepts and loves my partner despite his flaws (man, we all have them).  Nevertheless, Carole King’s song “We Have No Secrets” keeps popping into my mind. “Sometimes I wish.  Often I wish that I never knew some of the secrets of yours.”  Followed by Sheryl Crow’s “Lie to me. I promise I’ll believe.”

So, my friends who are experiencing love for the second time around, how do you deal with this issue?  How do you listen compassionately to your partner when they share difficult past experiences without worrying that they might come back to haunt your current relationship?  How do you have an honest and open relationship without judging your partner?  Is there such thing as unconditional love?  I hope so.

Living Together?

An article came out in today’s New York Times from a woman, Dominique Browning, who said that she loved living alone but noticed that men didn’t, and she postulated her own theories as to why (women like to nest, men are more concerned with danger and want someone to watch their backs).  I’m never fond of gender generalizations, but the article did intrigue me because Jon and I have been discussing the idea of moving in together, and I am wondering how I will like cohabitation again.

Now before you all start saying that it is too soon for us to be considering this idea, I will agree that it is.  That is the simple answer.  Yet blog pieces are not born from simple answers.  Furthermore, judging by the conversation that is taking place on my Facebook wall, this is an issue that impacts many of us middle-aged women and men, single or divorced.

Just a year or so ago, I was proclaiming the joys of living alone, and cheekily said that any man who wanted to live with me had better bring his own Airstream to park out back.  Yet my circumstances have changed.  Now I am living in a more expensive town, the Boston area, where living alone takes a much larger financial toll.  In fact, I noticed at a party the other night that most single people here have roommates, and one young man told me stories of how his parents took in boarders as soon as his brother went to college.  It got me thinking about whether or not I should consider this option.

I discussed this with a recent divorcee who took in renters to help him make his house payments.  He proclaimed that living with a roommate is a lot easier than living with a romantic partner.  However, my own history doesn’t necessarily prove that.  In my twenties, I had a series of crazy roommates.  One of them, in San Francisco, was a white woman who had recently been initiated into the Afro-Caribbean practice of santería.  She asked us to leave the house periodically so that she could do her rituals, and even threatened the wrath of the gods (the orishas, for those in the know) on us because my roommate’s boyfriend drank some rum from one of her many altars.  Another turned out to be a cocaine addict and was understandably erratic and failed to pay the rent on time.  My ex was a wonderful respite from my rental trials and tribulations, and in the early years, I said that he was the best roommate that I ever had.  Unfortunately, as things got tense between us in the later years, that was no longer the case.

My best non-romantic roommate experience was a sweet activist named Karen, with whom I shared a house in Berkeley.  My only complaint was that her boyfriend woke me up in the mornings with the tap, tap, tap of his razor on the sink as he shaved in the bathroom right next to my bedroom.  I worked from home at the time, and she worked afternoons and evenings and often spent the night elsewhere, so I was the main person in the house.  Perhaps that is the key to cohabitation for me?  Jon spends very little time in his own apartment, and it would seem that he might be same if he lived here with me.  He works about an hour away, travels a lot for work, often stays late at his office, and likes to take his son on weekend trips when he has him.  In a lot of ways, my current routine with my kids would be untouched.

When I told one of my married friends about our nightly ritual of climbing into my bed and reading aloud, followed by cuddling and falling asleep together, she said that she would be loath to allow a man to interfere with that.

Of course, this weekend is the first weekend that I have been alone in weeks.  Fittingly, it is the first time I have had to even consider how I feel about living alone.  Jon invited me to join him on his ski weekend in Vermont, but I opted to stay in Boston and spend some needed time in my apartment.  Like Browning, I enjoyed spreading out on my bed with my books and stuff without a care for accommodating another body.  I blissfully ate dinner in bed, played Words With Friends online, read my novel that I haven’t cracked open since my last solo weekend, and watched a movie ‘til midnight.  It was wonderfully relaxing, yet I couldn’t help but notice a pang of solitude when I woke up this morning and contemplated my day.  I found myself ticking off the number of days since I had seen Jon (six, after spending four straight days together with my family in California) and wishing he weren’t so busy (he heads out on a business trip tomorrow).

So I imagine that my conflicting needs for space and companionship, for time alone and time together, will continue.  It’s a delicate balance, and there will probably be many days like today when the scales tip too far in one direction.  My parting thoughts come from the novel that I was reading last night, called Falling Together about a single mom who lives with her adult brother and young daughter: “You like your little pockets of solitude, but you’re not made for being alone for long.  There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.”  I think I like the talking and the touch too much to live alone forever.

A Proper Apology

Jon and I have a new term that we have been using: “second time around.”  It is a play on one of the lines that I put in my online dating profile that I like a man as I like my clothes: stylish, gently used, and previously loved.  It is also the name of a vintage clothing store chain in Boston where he recently bought me a little, black skirt.

As divorcees with kids, Jon and I are both conscious of the fact that we are experiencing love for the second time around.  There are both pros and cons to this, as we certainly don’t have the blind, innocent infatuation that we did the first time around.  However, the self-knowledge that comes from the introspection that we both did after our marriages fell apart is, frankly, priceless.

We are both aware that we want to do things differently and better, obviously, and as a result, comparisons to our previous spouses are somewhat inevitable.  Such a comparison came this week, when we had a little bump in the road, and fortunately for me, Jon came out smelling like roses.  The conflict arose after we returned from our Thanksgiving road trip in which we traveled to Philadelphia, New York City and Vermont, where I got to meet two of his three brothers and his ex-wife.  It was wonderful trip, so good that I didn’t blog about it because it would be too saccharine for my style.  You all know that I like a good conflict to overcome and learn from, and, well, I got one.

I won’t go into the details of the fight (something has to be private, right?).  Suffice it to say that we returned from this really great trip where we got to experience some wonderful intimacy, and on Monday morning, Jon mentions to me this really petty thing that I do that, well, annoys him… a lot.  And it’s something that I can’t easily change.  He brought it up because in his version of second time around, he is trying to be more honest and deal with conflict more openly instead of stuffing things inside where they might fester and explode.  Ironically, though, my marriage taught me the opposite because I felt like I told my ex too many things that bothered me about him, thereby hurting his feelings.  Since then, I have been trying to let more small things go and appreciate Jon, instead of discussing issues to death.

In a nutshell, Jon was trying to do what he thought was best for our relationship, but I felt judged and hurt, and it made me retreat and close up my heart a little.  However, Jon handled the situation really well.  He apologized profusely for hurting me and acknowledged that it was his issue.  Then he sent me a dozen roses the next day.

I was really touched by this gesture and by his attitude in general.  In the past (here comes the comparison), I felt like my ex never really apologized when he did things that hurt me.  He would say that he was sorry, but there was always a caveat attached to it.  There was usually a justification about how it was really me who brought the issue on.  To be fair, I’m sure he would say that I did the same thing.  Yet from where I stand here and now, post-divorce, the second time around, I am extremely appreciative that Jon was able to give me a pure and unadulterated apology.

The conflict, which at first made me question our compatibility, in the end brought us closer.  Not only was I impressed with his ability to make amends, but I also felt even more intimate with him.  I allowed him to see some of my vulnerability and insecurity, and he accepted me nonetheless.  Dealing with our tension also forced me to admit that he is a man worth fighting with, and for (sorry for the dangling prepositions, Jon.)

In short, I learned that sometimes a little bump in the road makes you appreciate the smooth ride afterward.