The Kids are All Right

My one complaint about life is that people don’t talk to me with the same eloquence and wit as they do in the movies.  Well, as they do in movies such as “Juno,” “Sex and the City” and the movie that I saw this weekend, “The Kids are All Right.”  In one scene, I was nearly sobbing as I listened to Julianne Moore’s character Jules apologize to her wife and kids for her infidelity.  She poignantly argues that marriage just isn’t easy, at all.  After a while, it’s drudgery, it’s a marathon, it’s slogging through life, and along the way, you project a lot of your crap, insecurities and dissatisfactions onto your partner.  Her wife is clearly moved by the speech, and it seems to achieve her goal of breaking down the icy wall that has formed around her family members since her not so minor peccadillo was revealed.

As I watched that scene, I kept thinking that I wished that my ex had had screenwriters to pen his dialogue when we went through a similar scenario.   Read the rest of this entry »

A Happy Marriage is an Inside Job

By Mindy Pelz-Hall, my beautiful sister

Three years ago, my life was exactly in the place that I had planned it to be.  Happily married with two kids (a girl and a boy), a successful chiropractic office, a large house in San Jose across from the beautiful city Rose Garden, an amazing group of friends, and an incredible private school that my kids loved and joyfully bounced off to everyday.  I had the fairytale life I had always dreamed of having.

Then something profound happened that rocked my world in a way that I never thought it would.  My sister and my sister-in-law both got divorced around the same time.  Now I came from a family where marriage was a priority.  “Working things out” was just something that you did in a relationship, no matter how tough.  My parents have been married for 47 years. Yes, they have had their ups and downs. Yes, they have had times in which they vastly disagreed with each other.  But they always worked it out.  They always came through it.  You could often find them dancing in the kitchen with each other just a mere 24 hours after a tearful fight.  So my parents modeled for me that you will have ups and downs in a marriage, but if you keep working at it you will pull through.  Getting out of the marriage was never an option.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is There Room for Career and Friends in Your Marriage?

The topic on my mind today is marriage, not divorce.  I was married for ten years, so it’s something I know a little bit about.  Plus, my divorce has me questioning what it takes to have a successful marriage.  Now that I am outside the fray of it, I have wondered what I could have done differently…or what I could do differently in the future.  Ironically enough, I think that I made my marriage too important and too central to my identity and my life.

A friend recently told me a story about a colleague of hers that had just graduated from medical school and had, with considerable effort, launched a six-figure practice.  Suddenly, she gave it up because her husband didn’t like her long hours and said that she didn’t have enough time for him (don’t men often work long hours?).  She said that she had to decide between her career and her marriage.  Now I am the first to admit that you can never really know what truly goes on between two people, but my friend and I both felt sad that she was giving up a successful career that gave her economic independence and a sense of fulfillment.  My friend reminded her that her marriage, while certainly a top priority, might not last forever and that she might want to have her career as a safety net.

Personally speaking, keeping my career intact has not only been important to my self-esteem, but also to the stability of my family.  A year after our breakup, my ex lost his job and has not yet returned to his former income or career status.  My job has allowed us to have health insurance, to keep our beautiful home, and gives me enough expendable income to travel to visit my family and go out with my friends (with a bit leftover for shoes).  While I have tremendous admiration for stay-at-home moms (especially since I have seen how much they contribute to the running of the public schools) and feel that is a valid career choice for women, my own satisfaction is tied to both the happiness I derive from my job and the economic stability that it affords us.  Plus, as many unemployed people note, jobs keep us tied to a larger group of people, give us a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, and often give us a social outlet.  A friend of mine who works from home says that he has to do online dating because he never meets anyone because he spends so much time alone.

Now for some people, a social life might not be that important, but I do know that many happiness studies indicate that friendships and community are the keys to a contented life.  In the later years of my marriage, with my job, husband and kids to attend to, I admit that I let my friendships take a backseat and I began to regret that.  For me it is crucial to have people to bounce ideas off of, to laugh and get silly with, and to share my deepest secrets and fears with.  Sex and the City is popular not just because of the open sex talk and the fashion.  It highlights the very real ways that friends enhance, expand and shape our lives.  I now have a group of friends that I love dearly and their role in my life cannot be overestimated.  They provide me with joy and the kind of deep love that I once experienced with my husband until our unrealistic expectations of each other led to resentment and bitterness.  Even my introverted ex hubby has admitted that he feels lonely without his family nearby and without a group of friends (I was the one to maintain the social connections and organize events with them).

I know that I am stepping into controversial territory, and I would love to hear the opinions of my readers on this subject.  Personally I think that a relationship is best served if both partners have a certain amount of financial, emotional and social independence.  One person cannot meet all of our needs.  We’ve always been told not to put all our eggs in one basket.  We need a variety of relationships, interactions and outlets to feed different parts of our personalities and interests.  We need time for ourselves, our partners, our families, and our friends.  Variety is the spice of life, and, as my girl Pink astutely notes, “You taste so sweet, but I can’t eat the same thing everyday.”  While that might sound like a manifesto for polyamory, she’s really just asking for a little space.

I don’t believe Adam and Eve

Spent every goddamn day together

If you give me some room there will be room enough for two.

It’s basically another variation on the Airstream idea.

Us versus Them?

I grew up in Los Angeles.  In the 80’s it was hard to be immune to Magic’s charm.  I’m talking about Magic Johnson, of course.  Of the Los Angeles Lakers, in case you didn’t know (is there someone who doesn’t know this?).  Now I live in Western Massachusetts and my sports teams are in Boston.  So when this year’s NBA finals found the Lakers facing the Celtics, I got interested in basketball again, for the first time in years.

Now that I am a mom of two young kids, watching a game usually consists of getting in bed at the time that my children usually fall asleep and catching part of the game there, with them.  Layla could care less, and Jonah shows only sporadic interest.  It’s not super engaging that way.

However, last night’s game was riveting (what with Ray Allen swishing three pointers and setting a new finals’ record), and Jonah got really turned on.  He was a bit confused whom to root for.  He kept asking shouldn’t we be for the Lakers since they are from California and so am I.  I explained to him that I liked the players on the Celtics better and that I tend to choose my sports allegiances based on that.

As we were watching the game together and bonding over it, I felt an old surge of passion and excitement.  Very few of you know this about me, but I used to be a huge basketball fan.  When Pat Riley left the Lakers and went to the Knicks in the 90’s, I followed him.  For some strange reason, I fell in love with that team.  Clearly I must like scrappy underdogs because I preferred John Starks and Charles Oakley over Michael Jordan, everybody’s favorite player (or maybe I just like to be different).  Then I moved to New Haven, CT to go to graduate school and the Knicks became my local team.

That is when I met my ex and in no time I had recruited him to my current obsession (I also recruited him to soy milk, poor guy).  Hugo and I were rabid fans.  We planned social engagements and trips around the playoff schedules.  I remember when my friend Barb got married in 1999, and the Knicks were in the semi-finals against the Indiana Pacers, and we were worried that her wedding was going to coincide with the final game of the series.  As luck would have it and to my and Hugo’s great excitement, the Knicks won in game 6, as we babysat a friend’s child while watching Larry Johnson sink a three pointer while getting fouled and winning the game (and the series) by one point in the closing seconds.  That moment ranks as one of the best thrills of our relationship.  I’m not kidding when I say that I can still feel the chills, and I am sure he would say the same.

Hence the reason I write about basketball in a blog on peaceful divorce.  Last night, while enjoying the sense of camaraderie that Jonah and I were feeling while watching the game together, I remembered the way that sports used to bring Hugo and I together.  A big part of our relationship was the Knicks and…the Yankees (forgive me Red Sox fans but when you were a Knicks fan, it was great to at least have one winning team).

The excitement over watching a great sports game and having your team win brought passion to our relationship.  Mind you it wasn’t the only passion, but it was an important one.  Maybe it was the feeling of us versus them.  For two people who came from different cultures and classes, it brought us together and made us feel like we were on the same team in much the same way being graduate students in the same academic discipline did.

When we left Yale in 2001 and moved to Rhode Island, the Knicks were sputtering, and the Yankees started to lose a bit of their luster too.  We had a much harder time seeing the games since they weren’t our local team, and by the time we moved to Northampton, we were frankly a bit intimidated to admit that we were fans.  In 2003, we chose to have dinner at a friends’ house instead of watching the Yankees face the Marlins in what turned out to be the final game of the World Series.  We clearly made  the right decision because the Yankees lost, and, significantly, that dinner convinced us to try to have another child, and Layla was conceived the very next day.

I would never, ever rewrite our history, but upon reflection, our relationship lost a bit of its spark when we stopped watching sports together.  We had lost a shared interest, and that, coupled with the addition of two children, made us lose a sense of “us.”  Somehow, it no longer seemed that we were on the same team.

Our Anniversary Gingko

Many years ago, when my husband and I were in living in an apartment in New Haven, we had a maple tree in our backyard that was kind of sick.  It had black spots on the leaves and didn’t ever turn beautiful colors in the fall.  Then one spring it started to look better, and a friend of ours asked us if the tree represented something in our lives that had been infirm but now doing better.  My first thought (and I might have even said it) was why ask us about something negative and stir up trouble like that?  No tree was going to be a metaphor for some sort of pathology in my life.  But my husband, who is adept at getting in touch with his inner pathos, went into some deep analysis about how the tree did indeed represent some lingering malady of his that was now on the mend.  I remember my internal scoffing at the notion.

Well, several years later, I find myself returning to the tree metaphor.  On our last wedding anniversary before we broke up, my now ex and I decided to plant ourselves a tree.  My mother had planted trees when my sister and I were each born, and it seemed like a good idea, especially since our deck is overly sunny and needs some shade during the summer.  Being the fanciful sorts that we are, my ex and I chose a gingko tree because we find it aesthetically pleasing.  It has such beautiful fan-shaped leaves and turns a gorgeous golden color in the fall.  After planting it though, we read that it isn’t really a good shade tree.  Oh well.

The tree was pretty small because we didn’t have the money to invest in a more mature tree.  But it was more than a sapling, and we thought we’d be living in the house for a while and could wait to see it grow.  My ex had done some research that gingkos were prone to grow crookedly if they weren’t staked well in the early years so for the first year, we rigged something together, something, mind you, not very sturdy or sophisticated.  Alas we are academics, not terribly handy people.

I don’t think the marriage survived much more than a year past this planting by no fault of the tree, of course.  This spring, however, I looked out my window and noticed how good the tree looks.  Its trunk is growing really straight and tall.  It looks strong…and proud, actually.  Even though I had resisted the original mention of the tree metaphor (perhaps because I found it displeasing to think of my sick tree as a representation of something in my life), I couldn’t help but make the same analogy today.  Despite our break up, my relationship with my ex is thriving.  In fact, it is much better than it was when we were together.  Even though we no longer have the stabilizing force of marriage to hold us up (the staking of the tree, if you will), we communicate and see each other almost every day, not just because of the kids-although they certainly bring us together- but also because we are still friends.  We still love each other and want to be a part of each other’s lives.  Like the tree that has new branches and leaves, we have found new ways of communicating and resolving conflict.  Like the tree, we are reaching for new heights.  What we were unable to do when we were together, we are doing now,and that is getting along.  And for this, like our anniversary gingko, I am quite proud.