remarriage of widowed people

Conversations with Dead Husbands


Just to clarify, I get song signs from my late husband, Will, and that’s it. There’s never been anything more aside from a couple of dreams here and there where he has more or less been just an extra. He doesn’t speak to me or rattle windows or make the floorboards squeak. In the early months after his death, he – according to Dee – would stop by and play with her and there was that picture he showed his face in, but he saves visitations for Rob.

I’m not kidding. He visits Rob in dreams.

I woke Friday morning to find that Rob was up even earlier then usual and dressing in the shell of our not quite finished walk-in closet. Allergies are currently beating me about the sinuses and ear tubes due to the fall harvest ringing our little hamlet with a thick dusty residue making uninterrupted sleep impossible, so I lay in bed for a bit to get my bearings. The other night I’d heard my name being called from the corner of the room by the wall cupboard and for some reason I glanced over there this morning. I saw a bright glow behind the door that quickly skipped to the middle of the room and vanished on a run towards the blinds.

“Was it headlights maybe?” Rob asked when I told him.

No, headlights aren’t yellow or perfectly round and they leave streaks.

But I digress because I only mentioned the voice and the light to Rob after he told me about the dream that woke him up early.

“I was sitting at a lunch counter with Will,” he said. “He was on one side and I was on the other. There was a third person too that I didn’t know and seemed to be facilitating our conversation.”

I searched the first husband archives in my brain for a place that matched the description. Nothing matched. We didn’t have haunts like that though something makes me believe it was a place where Will used to play pool. Perhaps in one of the little hole in the wall southern Iowa towns in Warren county.

“I wasn’t sure it was him at first because he had longish hair and was leaning forward so the hair covered the sides of his face,” Rob continued.

Will started losing hair shortly after we were married. It vexed him horribly because male pattern baldness ran on both sides of his family and, in addition, he was sprouting hair on his chest for the first time.

“I’m going to be bald and have a hairy back,” he would complain. “Great.”

But when he was young, and unemployed, he had long hair and really wanted to find a job that would sanction long hair. He kept his hair short – sometimes shaved to the wood – for comfort in the stuffy warehouse were he worked and then later because of the fact that his hair was falling out, but he really was a Kurt Cobain wanna-be with his flannel shirts, dreams of long locks and a dark inner poet.

“We had a long conversation, and I don’t remember it all but two things stood out,” Rob told me. “He said he wanted to take a bike trip in Mesa Verde with you and that he thought I was doing a great job with Dee.”

Will talked a lot about the Boy Scout camp down in New Mexico. It was his favorite place after the mountains. We schemed for a while about making a move to Denver after we were married, and he always talked about wanting to make sure that at some point we took our children to visit his favorite places out West.

“And then there was a group hug at the end,” Rob finished.

The last time Will visited Rob in a dream, he hugged Rob. Hugging was something he picked up from my mother – who basically forced the whole huggy culture thing on our family when she went through her middle-life crisis and was a Charismatic for a while. The hugging stuck and the talking in tongues mercifully faded into family folklore.

I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit annoyed by the surreptitious way Will keeps tabs and inserts himself. However, I am glad for the mini-updates on him, knowing that he is getting on with his existence on whatever plane he is residing and is happy with the way things are going here.

This Kinda Pissed Me Off


I am not reading blogs as I used to (sorry, but I scan/read through my blog reader because I am crunched right now) which means I don’t comment much either (though I am really trying to pop over and leave a note for those of you who are friends – ‘cuz I do care to know about you and yours and stuff). Sometimes I read things still that work me up enough to actually write a comment that says more than just “hi, I was here and thinking of you”.

Mommy blogs bore me. I don’t read them. I have my own mom moments and mom stories, and I prefer to get my advice from known sources. But I read Jessica because she is smart, irreverent and herself, which isn’t always a given. Bloggers have personas that don’t often match their real life self. You would have to know me for a while to hear the same kind of honesty from me that you read on my blog. Discretion is actually one of my real time virtues.

The subject has come up before on this blog and it irked me then too. It’s the idea that DNA trumps with a sub-theme of “I could never love another as I love my spouse”.

Okay.

So I am adopted and until I had Dee, there was literally no one else in the world with whom I had a blood relationship. And I have to be honest, I didn’t love her at first sight. I was perplexed and a bit unsure because I was told I would love her with the intensity of a million suns from moment one and frankly, I didn’t feel that. She was a stranger who I thought I knew because of all the time she’d spent growing inside me. She was a little person from the start who I had to learn – just like I have had to learn everyone else in my life. As a result, I am not an advocate of the Disney Princess School of Motherhood.

I should have known this going in. I had witnessed plenty of instances of mothers and fathers whose regard for their biological children ranged from disinterest to pure duty with all sorts of cringe-worthy twists and turns in between. Biology ensures almost nothing in terms of attachment. Case in point would be Nephew1 who regularly threatens his mother (my youngest sis) with:

“If you do not come and visit me the next time I am at Grandma’s, I will divorce you when I am 18 and you will never see or hear from me again.”

This is the only thing that will rouse my sister from the reality show disaster of her life to spend an hour or so with her son. The third of four children to whom she has given birth. The other three she gave up for adoption without a second thought. The one she kept so she could go back on state aid because she was tired of couch surfing and living out of paper grocery sacks with her toothless boyfriend -who isn’t the father by the way. He wouldn’t oblige. She seduced the teenage friend of another guy – who also declined to impregnate her. Award winning mother material my sister is not and that’s my point. There are more people in the world like her that disprove the “I would lay down my life for my (bio) child” than not.

I would have taken umbrage even before I remarried (yeah, I’ll get to that) and became a step-parent. If there is any disparity in my feelings for my older girls and Dee, it’s because we are still getting to know each other. It’s harder when they are older and living on their own. We just don’t get opportunities to interact like Rob and Dee do, but I wouldn’t be able to choose among them in one of those hypothetical “you have to toss one from the boat scenarios” which are stupid anyway.

Blending fails when adults in the scenario make decisions that will ensure it does. Adults set the tone, make the rules and provide the examples, and if you go into a second marriage with children with whom your past track record as a real adult is in question, you are going to have your work cut out for you.

My Uncle Donnie married a widow who was 8 years older than he was and who had seven children – some of them already grown and married when they wed back in 1968. They all call him “Pops”. He is their children’s grandfather. They aren’t as blended into my mother’s family as they could have been because at the time, my mom’s siblings weren’t as close as they could have been – are now. This was the result of adult decisions. My grandmother didn’t like Auntie Bern very much. Different personalities. But as far as Auntie Bern’s family went Uncle Donnie was welcomed and became “husband” and “dad”. Auntie Bern passed away quite a while ago and nothing has changed.

Perhaps it’s what you are taught growing up? Dad’s family is the direct result of a second marriage after widowhood. His father’s older step-brothers had issues with their father, but they never let it keep them from integrating with their new siblings (who were the same ages as their own children really). Sometimes a certain amount of “suck it up, buttercup” is necessary to make blending work and this, I think, is what separates the true adults from the wanna-be’s and posers.

So, the nonsense about not being able to love another as much as your spouse? Crap. People fall in love after having long, short and in-between marriages to people they truly loved all the time. Often what I hear from them is that they are even happier in the second relationship. Because they didn’t love the first spouse or it wasn’t a “soul mates” thing? No, it’s because they know how to create a loving relationship. They make the extra effort because they have lost someone and know the searing pain of regrets and what-if’s and opportunities lost.

Love is something you choose to do whether there are biological ties or not. It is not magic or genetically hardwired. Believing in love as some kind of compulsion based on forces beyond our control is what allows us to not care about people who are homeless or without health care or are being imprisoned by fanatical religious extremists in parts of the world that don’t interest us because we don’t have family or first spouses there. It’s the kind of thinking that allows us to dehumanize others and dismiss them and their welfare and that kind of reasoning has never led humanity to any happy place that I know of.

I choose to believe that I am capable of  more than that.

The Exception


We watched a romcom over the weekend based on a dating/relationship book that sprung from a cutesy (but very true) line on an episode of Sex and The City, which I never saw. Based on the rather roundabout route the idea for this movie took from conception to the big screen, the likelihood of it being anything more than a time suck that steals hours from one’s life was rather small, and the premise itself ensured that it would be more sadly true than funny. But I found a few things worth pondering hidden between the painful reminders of what it is like to be single/unmarried when you would rather not be.

1) That the idea of soulmates should not be taught to our children – our daughters especially. One of the story lines followed a young woman determinedly pursuing a married man based on the faulty  idea that one can simply find the person you were meant to be with (who means for this to be is never made clear or even discussed) via chance and regardless of whether this person is already in a relationship, the universe will bend to your greater destiny.

This is, of course, bullshit. Sure, the characters (and probably you too) can recite anecdotal stories of two people meeting while married/committed to others, running off and living happily ever after for decades together. But as a male character points out at one point in the movie – they are exceptions in a world where nearly everyone is always the rule.

2) Which brings me to the “rules”. We allow our teens and young adults to teach each other how to date/mate, and most of what they have to say to each other is wrong and reinforces nonsense and fantasy.

3) Living together is not the path to marriage for most couples and there are very few couples who forego marriage completely who go on to live out their days together (and please don’t remind me of the handful of rather public figures who buck this trend – they are exceptions and most people are rules. In your real life, how many common-law couples of decades do you know? I know three and two are same-sex and don’t have the marriage option – they would be married if they did.)

4) The reason most people are single is that they believe the chase has something to do with love. It doesn’t. If it’s love, there is no chase. Or they confuse what the movie calls “the spark” with real feelings.

5) If someone is “into you”, they are always available, kind, concerned and interested. They are never too busy. They call back, show up and generally can’t see or hear from you enough. That’s actually what being the “exception” is. It’s too bad that it’s so difficult for so many to understand that being this kind of “exception” is better.

This is what I have learned:

  • Know what you want.
  • Ask for it.
  • Walk away when you don’t get it.
  • Trust that in doing so you are opening yourself for someone who gets you as you are.

You can be the “exception” if you remember that the “rules” as played by most people are not interested in promoting long-lasting, healthy relationships.