second marriages

The Second Proposal


I am not one of those who had multiple opportunities to marry throughout my life. I know people who could have married anyone. Had numerous suitors and sorted through them like a closet stuffed with clothing. Not me. I can count on one hand the number of men who were even remotely attracted to me and not one of them saw me as a take home to mom prospect. For me there has only been Will and now Rob.

My first engagement was storied. Surprise. One knee, rose, wine and a ring in a box. Very school girl fantasy.

Rob and I were not school kids though I was hardly a girl with Will either being 35 and all. But Rob and I came to be engaged after knowing each other for just a tad more than three months, and I would characterize the courtship as not usual.

The third anniversary of our betrothal is tomorrow  – sort of – and I don’t think I have every really written about it.

Rob came down to Iowa to pick me up for a Spring Break trip. He actually began planning this vacation for me early in our friendship when we were still just friends. Destination – Arkansas. We took Dee to my folks but had headed back to my home in Des Moines to visit with BFF and her husband before heading out. We went to dinner and saw the raunchiest comic/hypnotist show at a local comedy club before getting home around midnight.

A couple of weeks early, we’d talked about my coming to Canada. I made it clear that a move of that magnitude was not whimsical nor could I do any “test-driving” of living together. It’s not that I am old-fashioned. I just think living together is not a test for marriage compatibility.

“Let’s see if we are compatible by playing at house.” is a stupid idea that is mostly doomed to failure because I have rarely witnessed two people do this having discussed in advance what they want or where they are really going. And playing is how children learn things. Adults at play are … well … adults just playing. Nothing more or less.

Before you wonder, I told Will the exact same thing when he was basically spending every minute at my house within a month of our dating. I don’t live with someone unless we are getting married in the very near future. I don’t believe that two people learn anything from the process that simply having frank discussions about wouldn’t reveal and compatibility is like happily ever after – a matter of mindset and resolve. If I am in love and committed, do socks and underwear on the floor or snoring or never remembering to start the dishwasher before bed so there are clean dishes for the next day really matter all that much? Shouldn’t tightwadness or ditzy behavior have already been apparent? Sexism isn’t something that is easily cloaked until close quarters flushes it out and if you need to “test drive” someone, isn’t that really a red flag?

I knew that Rob and I were compatible. I wasn’t so naive that I believed that marriage is some flower and singing animal strewn forest of nuptial bliss. I didn’t need a test drive. Do you test drive friendships or do you just have them?

Before we went to bed, Rob took a box out of his suitcase and showed me the rings. An engagement band and a wedding ring.

“I’m not ready to ask the question, but I want you to wear this,” he told me.

I protested. I didn’t want this until he was ready. I could wait. He insisted.

We headed out the next morning to stock the ice chests for the trip and then hit the highway south with me ringed. It felt strange to wear a ring again. I’d taken my wedding ring from Will off the day after his funeral and it took months of rubbing my ring finger raw to get used to it being gone. Now it felt funny to have the finger encased again. I chalked it up to my whole thing with jewelry in general. I just am not meant to be adorned.

The second night in Arkansas – and again we were in bed – Rob said,

“You know what I wasn’t ready to ask? I’m ready. Will you marry me?”

And I said yes because I was too.

On the way back to pick up Dee at my folks’, we had a marathon discussion session. I don’t think I knew as much about Will after several years of marriage as I did about Rob after Arkansas. Very little was left unsaid. Full disclosure then and since. Too often we fall into this trap of believing that all will be revealed over time through gestures and situations and that another person can be learned through proximity. But I lived with my parents for 18 years and I don’t think either one of them ever really knew me. And it wasn’t for lack of time or love. We just didn’t talk. Really talk.

Closeness is more than sharing a bed and bath.

Lot’s Wife


Once, when I foolishly allowed Q&A from the dear readership, Sally asked me if I ever pondered a future where Will hadn’t died. Hadn’t been sick at all in fact.

Truthfully, I hadn’t and still don’t see the point of such an exercise though I know that it is a common one among widowed folk.

But I was talking with my BFF tonight, making plans for an upcoming trip down south and she mentioned that Will’s best friend, Wally and his wife Cherish were struggling to pay for their son’s funeral last month. I’d mentioned at the time that I planned to send a donation but there wasn’t a fund set up to send anything to, so I hadn’t done anything about it yet.

To be more honest, I discovered that shortly after the funeral Wally made a point of asking BFF’s husband to take him to visit Will’s grave and it peeved me a bit. Not that Wally made the visit. As I understand it, Wally stages regular pilgrimages to the cemetery to see Will. What grates is that he shows more devotion to the rock I buried Will under than to Will’s daughter – his goddaughter, who he hasn’t bothered to inquire about personally for the last three years.

Now that I have gotten that petty digression off my chest, there is a fund-raising effort underway to help with the expenses. Cherish contacted BFF’s husband and told them that the funeral home had given them 30 days to pay off the $12,000 they’d spent.

How they managed to rack up such a bill, BFF didn’t know. Having dealt with these funeral home people, I don’t have the same difficulty imagining it. I do, however, wonder why the funeral home extended any credit at all to a couple who’d recently declared bankruptcy for the second time.

Money is to be sent to BFF’s hubby and he will cash checks and turn it into a money order to send to Wally and Cherish – as their bank is no longer on good enough terms with them to allow for checks to be made out directly to them*.

I told Rob about the conversation later in the evening and admitted that if there was a hell – and I am certain that’s just a Catholic wives’ tale – I would burn in it for my thoughts about the whole situation.

“If Will was still alive,” I said, “I’d be up to my neck in the whole sordid affair trying to keep him from spending our money to bail them out.”

Rob just circled his arms around me, drew me close and said,

“Yeah, you are so going to hell.”

“Maybe not though,” I said. “He’d be 35. He could have outgrown that high school blind loyalty thing.”

“No,” Rob said, “he wouldn’t have.”

Damn, my husband is good. He knows me and he knows Will through me.

But he was right, I’d have spent the last month alternating between guilt and anger trying to reign in Will’s insane devotion to friendship regardless of reality.

Think not?

BFF regaled me with accounts of the funeral. Will’s buddies gathered to be pall bearers. They carpooled to the visitation and then headed off to the hotel where they proceeded to party all night like it was a high school reunion. Not one of them offered to help BFF’s hubby out when it came time to pay for the rooms nor did they offer any assistance to Wally and Cherish.

All but one or two of them have donated to the current fundraising effort. I guess it should go without saying that not one of them asked me if I needed help paying for Will’s visitation or burial. I did, but my aunt helped me out without even having to be asked. She wouldn’t even discuss my paying her back.

So, I guess Sally, I do sometimes play out current day scenarios with Will in them. Usually when something/one from the past disturbs my present. His friends get married or experience tragedy. His mother or aunt sends a card and asks for pictures that I sent already but just haven’t arrived there due to the paranoia at the border thing. When the past intrudes, I wonder what life would be like. Look like. What he would be like as a 36 year old man because I have nothing to base this on as he was 28 when he was diagnosed and effectively ceased to exist as the man I knew. It’s quite the gap to fill and my fiction instincts err on the side of the awful for some reason. I never imagine hearts, flowers and perfection like many widowed do.

*Or so she says. I know way more about their finances than I need to due to the fact that Cherish’s younger sister worked at the health club I went to back in Des Moines and her sister … had a big, indiscreet mouth. If my sister shared that much information about me with strangers, there would be consequences. Let’s just say that the whole story is fishy. Can a couple declare bankruptcy twice in four years?”

It’s Probably Just Me


I don’t like being a “dance mom”. Two nights a week I haul the girl into town and pass time sitting on a cement floor while people I pay pretend to teach her to dance. Dance is just another version of those horrifying child beauty pageants. It’s all about outfits, costumes, hair and make up. Dance is incidental.

The ancillary stuff dominates. At the beginning of the year, the moms anguished over the ballet uniform: hair up in bun, black leotard, pink ballet shoes and ballet pink tights (yeah, it’s its own colour). Some of the girls weren’t dressed out properly and moms who’d been lectured on their own daughter’s dress code violations were stewing none too silently over what they saw as preferential treatment.

I’ll cop to being one of the privileged moms. Dee’s dance instructor doesn’t approach me with complaints on the odd day that I don’t get Dee’s hair into a bun, but that has more to do with my “who fucking cares” demeanor and the fact that I am 46 and  the teacher is just 18 than anything else.

“Why do you care what a teenager thinks about whether or not your child arrives properly dressed every time?” I asked. “Sometimes life gets in the way. The laundry didn’t get done or we didn’t have time to put hair up. It happens. No high schooler is going to lecture me on parenting.”

Unsurprisingly, none of the other moms had a response to that.

The current crisis concerns the costumes for the girls’ ballet festival performance. Festivals are weekend time sucks where dance schools gather and compete for bragging rights. I will miss both festivals this spring due to conflicts – yoga training weekends – thus saddling Rob with “dance mom” duty. He has been quite Dalai Lama about it.

Harry Potter inspired the choreography and it’s cute really. After 4 years of ballet, it finally appears as though Dee is actually dancing, but the costume is a mish-mash and two of the mothers aren’t pleased with the full effect. Every dance night there is a discussion about what can be done about the unacceptable costume. The poor little dance teacher keeps to the fringes because she’s afraid of simply scrapping and starting over – money has been spent and clothing purchased so far is non-returnable. She’s only 18, as I mentioned earlier, so I understand her reticence, but I am tired of the angst.

Who the fuck cares? It’s a stupid costume in a dumb festival that even a year from now, let along a hundred, won’t matter one bit.

But okay, I am not a girly, dancey, overly invested in my daughter’s hobbies kind of parent. It’s fine if you are, we all find our parenting level and rise or sink. I’ve, obviously, chosen the lower levels to dwell in, but I don’t aspire to motherhood as some kind of personal nirvana.

Against my will, I volunteered a few suggestions last evening when the discussion began to veer off into territory that might involve more personal involvement on my part. Interestingly, they were not dismissed out of hand.

More interesting, to me, was the jealous twinge I had a bit later as I sat and listened to one of the moms discussing the purchase of their new home.

In the newer suburban tract of The Fort, there is an attempt at upscale, executive type, homes. They bottom at about $500,000-ish, but keep in mind that housing prices in this neck of Alberta are stupid. Case in point, my home in Iowa – 1400 sq ft with sizable yard on a cul-de-sac sold for $163,900 at the beginning of the housing bubble burst. That same house here? Probably $350,000. People here pay, without a second thought, for slapped together shite on postage stamp lots in neighbors so choked with trucks, SUV’s and holiday trailers that parking is a nightmare in the residential areas. I will give Canadians this one kudo – they are fanatics about green spaces, bike/walking paths and parks, but neighborhoods might as well be tenements given the lack of space between houses.

The new home owner’s daughters are friends with Dee and the mom waxed on about the new home’s spaciousness – the exec housing is on three-quarter acre lots and have stupid amounts of square footage in addition to all the other superficial things like the upgraded flooring, counters, bath accessories and three/four car garages.

I don’t have counter top envy. Granite? Whatever. I do have space envy.

I’ve mentioned previously, and on numerous occasions, that in my last house I had very little furniture. I fought against the accumulation of it. My mother and MIL couldn’t grasp not wanting a living room set. But I have always preferred sitting on the floor and in fact, sitting on the floor is anatomically better for a person in the long run. There was so much space. Sometimes I would sit on the top of the landing and just bask in the openness.

As she talked about space and de-cluttering, as she is in the midst of packing, I felt jealous.

My practical side, for which I can thank my Depression-era born father and my brush with bankruptcy during Will’s illness, can’t fathom buying a home in Fort Saskatchewan of all places for $630,000 when the house I live in is paid for. Especially at my age in these economically dangerous times and with my level of paranoia about “what ifs”.

Still – space – the temptation.

Must think more yogically – detach!

UB mentioned the Buddhist (and its yoga premise too) idea that attachment is at the root of what we term “unhappiness”. Our inability to accept the impermanence that is all things in life holds us fast. Attachment roots and not in a good way. I have struggled with the idea but not the practice ironically.

Occasionally I comment on widow blogs. It’s not smart because I am far removed from common grief-think. Someone wrote about how being in a new relationship does not make things better and I disagreed. Falling in love with Rob and marrying again did make things better. I shouldn’t have said so out-loud because it’s heresy wide-open for misinterpretation, but I weary of the doom and gloom about the future after loss. I was “attached”, if you want to put it that way, to Will but I never believed that our marriage was anything other than time and place. We were destined to have a time and a place together that at some point one of us would leave. Everyone dies eventually. The idea that we have more than just brief moments together here and there over the course of existence is not something I question.

Sadness can balance happiness over the course of a mortal existence or one can swamp the other. I think we know going in what the general outline will be and it’s when we stomp our feet against it that life is harder than it would have been if we’d merely viewed it as transitory.

Marrying again didn’t make the fact that Will died better, it made me better. It re-grounded me, gave me an outlet for love again and bolstered my faith (I won’t say “rewarded it” because I don’t really believe in the whole reward/punishment model of existence). I think if one denies the benefits of moving on – however it manifests – it ‘s just resistance to the reality that life is impermanent and that should be re-examined for one’s own sake.

But, it’s probably just me.