remarriage of widowed people

Things in The Night Pt. 1


I know it’s Tuesday and from a fresh news perspective Dee’s first day of school yesterday, the “growing” push for Texan succession and the latest Glenn Beck YouTube parody – except it’s really him and not terribly funny – will all pass the smell test and what I want to talk about won’t. And I’m sure at least half of you are tired of the blending and the widowy, but things come up. They run around the rooms in my mind before burrowing in and blossoming with the rapidity of qwack grass after a soaking rain.

Saturday was the hamlet wide garage sale and hockey swap meet. There is nothing like a dozen or so neighbors displaying their junk and the lure of hockey equipment to bring out the crowds from The Fort. Rob and I, being us, worked until after 10 on Friday night setting up. Other people toss their unwanted onto tables and are done. We treat it like it’s a real business or something. Consequently, other people get more sleep than we do.

By the time we’d cleaned up and were in bed it was after midnight and the plan was to be up by eight to finish the remaining pricing.  At 4:30 I woke. My right leg was stretched across Rob’s side of the bed and the toes were dangling off which is something that can only happen if Rob is not there.

The dimmest bit of light was straining to lift the blinds and I headed downstairs in search of my husband (and to use the toilet because I am old).  At this time of day the sky is bruised by the indirect light of a sun still too far east to do more than send word of its impending arrival. Such a difference from just a few weeks ago when the sun never seemed to set at all.

I found Rob wrapped in our old comforter on the couch.  He was grumpy from lack of sleep and the fact that the sadist train engineer had just crawled past the hamlet with the whistle at full throttle.

“I’d just managed to fall asleep too,” he said.

He’d been up since two. For reasons he didn’t explain until much later, he was up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. He hadn’t wanted to wake me tossing and turning, so he’d gone downstairs, fiddled about on the ‘Net until his eyes burned and tried to catch a few winks on the sofa.

I got him to come back to bed. He was so exhausted by this point that he fell asleep quickly, but I was awake. I got up at 5:30 and was out in the garage by 6:45 and that is mostly where I remained until 3P.M.

But I did come in a bit before 8 to wake Rob who thought perhaps I had a birthday present  for him despite the fact that he’d issued a no present edict earlier in the week. The next day he would say,

“It was probably one of the worst birthdays ever.”

So much for birthdays not being a big deal.

We’d planned dinner in the city with the older girls for seven that evening. It should go without saying that neither of us was energetic enough to really be looking forward to the 45 minute drive – each way – but the sitter had been booked. Last minute sitter cancellations can lead to difficulty finding willing sitters, so we headed into the city.

Let me digress a minute. Earlier in the week, Rob noted that I had been commenting a bit more on widow blogs. He wondered if I was okay. I was heavy into the memory mode with purging old things for the garage sale. On the surface I felt fine but after a bit of reflection, I realized I was a bit blue about Rob’s birthday. Not that it was his and not mine. I actually love planning parties for other people more than I like celebrating my own birthday. It came down to the fact that we were having two celebrations to accommodate the children. We took Dee out for dinner on Friday night and had cake upon returning home. Saturday was with the older girls because their adult schedules sometimes make it too difficult for them to always be traipsing out to the country.

The thing was that Rob has three daughters, but I have one. As much as I love Edee and Mick, they are not my daughters. I am not their mother. My birthday doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Which is not to imply that I think it should or that they are not wonderful or that we have a contentious relationship. But where Dee becomes more Rob’s child than Will’s, they remain Rob’s daughters.

It’s not something I expected to bother me. I knew perfectly well that, with their being adults, we would not have the relationship that Rob and Dee have formed and will continue to form. And I get it. I really do. One of the reasons I have shied away from searching for my birth parents – my birth mother in particular – was that I didn’t want to feel bound to love her like I love my mom or to have expectations of any deep connection.

And though we get along quite well and the girls are genuine and warm, I know they struggle with just who I am in their lives.

The word “step-mother” is not used. I am introduced as “Ann” or sometimes “This is Ann, Dad’s wife.”

And to clarify further, no one uses the “step” prefix in our family aloud really. Dee doesn’t even know what a step-dad or step-sister is.

I am ever conscious of my actions and words. I don’t want to push or encroach or presume or give the impression. I walked into this with more knowledge than Rob, who at one point declared himself willing to be Dee’s father figure but that he could never be her father father.

We stopped by Edee’s to pick her up. She’d been home with her cat, one of Bouncy’s brood if you recall, who was at death’s door from a blood parasite she’d picked up. And I mean the literal door. Pandora was at a point where she was using her reserves to try and crawl away from wherever Edee put her – looking no doubt for a place to die. Even I know enough about animals to know that.

Dinner was back and forth between pleasant conversation and tearful worry. There was hugging and reassurance and I never know when I am doing too much or not enough.

We’d told the sitter we’d be home between 10 and 10:30 and it was 11 because after dinner at Edee’s poor Pandora was no better. We finally left after assuring Edee that whatever she decided to do concerning Pandora’s care  we would support. The naturopath vet had prescribed an antibiotic with herbal back up and instructions to bring the cat in on Monday if she was no better but still alive or a trip to the emergency vet clinic, an expensive affair that makes a jaunt to the human ER in the states look affordable by comparison.

Rob called me from the car after dropping off the sitter to let me know that Edee had texted him and needed him to go along to the ER with her and Pandora. He didn’t get home until about 2:30 where he found me still awake.

Why? The ghosts are back … but then he already knew that.

Remarriage: What Do The Kids Think?


There is a fascinating dialogue over at ye olde widda board right now dealing with remarriage and children. What’s fascinating is not the fact that the dissenters are invariably not remarried at present (or even interested in anything remotely heading in that direction like say, dating), but there are two camps of thought that butt heads regularly for the entertainment, more than the enlightenment, of others.

Camp Dissent believes that remarriage cannot take place without the full and unreserved blessings of one’s children – regardless of their age or agendas. This camp goes so far as to believe that any parent who doesn’t co-parent with their own kids shouldn’t have become parents at all. A child’s “happiness” is the measure of one’s parenting skills. Things like being smart, well-mannered and progressing towards full status independent adulthood are of lesser merit than a child who is pleased with life and his/her parents role in it. There is also a sub-set of this group that believe remarriage in general reeks of personal desperation and grief denial and that suffering – sometimes loudly – is the true mark of a good widowed person.

Camp Hitched is actually divided in their stance. Both believe that parents should be the ultimate decision makers in a family, but some believe that children’s discomfort with recoupling should be given full credence until they turn 18 – a magical watershed moment – while others believe that blending is a process that time, love and elbow grease can handle.

Like most charged discussions, this one quickly devolved into a dogpile on a single poster. Not that I feel much sympathy for the victim because she is someone who confines herself these days to posts on remarriage and never misses an opportunity to call out remarried widows as desperate settlers who don’t love their children, probably didn’t have good first marriages – hence their remarrying, and are just a divorce away from enlightenment, but the original topic of the thread – the tendency of extended family and friends to expect widows to stand still in time until they are ready to let go – got lost.

The one thing about marrying again I have discovered is that it highlights the disparities in the grief time-lines of all parties. Spouses and parents grieve daily. How can we not? Children are blessed with the gift of grieving in spurts – like they grow – but they are still in touch more often than extended family and friends who only have to confront loss occasionally. Family gatherings are excellent examples of occasional grief. Weddings, holidays and reunions highlight the absent sibling or auntie/uncle/grandparent who is little remembered on a daily basis because of distance and the tendency we all have to be caught up in the life we are living.

I have mentioned before that Rob’s in-laws have been wonderful. Though I hear about the difficulties they had and still sometimes have with his remarrying just short of the first year of Shelley’s death, they have been kind and welcoming to Dee and I. Shelley’s auntie, as an example, invited us to Christmas dinner that first year, and we have a standing offer of lodging whenever we are up towards Grande Prairie  or out Vancouver way from a couple of Shelley’s cousins. They have never let their grief get in the way of Rob’s journey or imposed their opinions about what he should or should not be doing in terms of the course he took.

Our kids have gone through various stages where our remarriage is concerned. The older girls expressed concern at the “haste” with which we moved from dating to engaged to married”, but they never acted out. They voiced their feelings to their Dad only and they listened respectfully to his answers and he in turn reassured them about their concerns. In the end, they were the generous and wonderful young women I have only ever known them to be. They trusted their Dad, which goes to show that laying a good foundation with your children as they are growing up is really that important.

Dee never had a father in the active sense, and she was very young when Rob came into her life. She took to him immediately but theirs is still a relationship in progress and we’ve had tense times as they’ve adjusted, as I have gotten used to co-parenting – something I never had the opportunity to do with Will.

How do I feel about needing my children’s permission to make decisions about my life? I don’t need permission. I’m an adult. An adult weighs the options, looks at possible and probable outcomes and does the deciding based on what is best long-term for all. That’s how my parents did it. That’s how, I believe, all grown-ups do things.

The kids are alright in our family because the adults are adults who think and consider and act as a unit. A family is not a democracy. It is the out-growth of a marriage.

Spoons


I set the table for breakfast yesterday morning and I got the spoons wrong again. I laid out a small spoon for Dee and a big soup spoon for Rob.

“Honey,” Rob called from the dining room as I headed back to get the oatmeal. “Can you bring me a small spoon.”

“Oh, it’s the small spoon for oatmeal, isn’t it?” I said as I headed back with oatmeal and proper spoon.

“Yep, it’s small spoon for ice cream and oatmeal and big spoons for cereal and soup,” Rob said as I dished up breakfast to Dee.

“You’d think I would know that after all this time,” I said.

And yet, it hasn’t been all that long. Two years and small change of married life and just a smidge more as a couple. It just feels like we’ve been together since the dawn of existence, and it’s moments like this which remind me that I am a johnny-come-lately to Rob’s life.

The spoons thing isn’t a big deal. Dee has an obsession with a particular spoon that she would eat with exclusively if I felt like catering to her. I don’t. The big spoon/little spoon thing is something that Rob learned as a child and it stuck tenaciously. We all carry our families’ odd quirks or specific ways of doing things with us as we make our way in the world. If we are lucky, we don’t completely warp our own children with them.

Dee watches Rob like paparazzi stalking the Jolie-Pitts. Very little escapes her notice and she imitates him and adopts his preferences.

Over the weekend she was at a sleep-over and took a nasty tumble on the new sidewalks in front of her friend’s home. She barked the hell out of her knee, ankle and the back of her thigh. Nearly as I can tell, she almost went end over end. Friend’s mother cleaned and dressed the wound with the appropriate Hanna Montana band-aids but as Dee is the kind of child to let bandages wear off, neither Rob nor I checked the extent of the wounds. She said she was fine and we took her at her word.

Tuesday evening, Rob peeled them off her after her bath and discovered weeping, pus-pocked wounds. That and a nasty case of pool-induced conjunctivitis kept Dee away from swim lessons on Wednesday and might scuttle this round of lessons. Rob expertly cleaned, disinfected and dressed Dee’s knee. When I went to clean it off the next afternoon and reapply polysporin this is what I heard,

“That’s not how Rob does it, Mom. Just listen to me and I will tell you what he does.”

Right. What he does is right and you do … not right.

Right now she loves that little spoon, but I can see the soup spoons on the horizon.