Babycenter

Dating Under the Influence of Age and Adult Children


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Two things inspired this post. The first was a comment or two from the Widower Wednesday series referencing the ire of in-laws and adult children whose widower was daring to date without their permission. The second was a news item concerning Sir Paul McCartney’s recent engagement to his soon to be third wife.

All I can really say is, “Huh?”

When I hit adulthood, it never crossed my mind to seek my parents approval of anyone – friends or potential partners. I was an adult. Free to companion as suited me, my life-style and needs. My parents certainly never concerned themselves with my opinions of their friends or even of the relationship they had with each other – the latter of the two clearly being none of my business.

But it seems there is a segment of the adult world – both parent, grown kids and even extended family – who feel that getting judgey and expressing it in all manner just-plain-juvenile-and-wrong is completely fine and normal.

McCartney sought the approval of his grown children before deciding to marry again. Perhaps he felt the need to verify his choice after the particularly disastrous 2nd marriage to a gold-digger a few years ago, or maybe the big kids informed him that all future step-mothers must be vetted by them. Who knows. But why? Why?

If my mother were to date or even marry again (and I would start preparing for the Second Coming in either case because it would surely follow on the heels of something so mind-bogglingly unlikely – you’d just have to know Mom in person, trust me), I would smile and say nothing – to her anyway.  DNOS and I would have plenty to roll our eyes about in private to be sure, but we were raised better than to presume on our parents’ intimate relations.

Rob’s mother recently remarried and he kept his mouth shut throughout the process that led her online to a Catholic dating site and through a whirlwind courtship that made ours look downright puritan and leisurely by comparison. She’s an adult and sound of mind and it’s her life.

FIL shaped up to be a good match but even if he hadn’t, it wasn’t the place of her children to wade in – unasked – and jump up on the nearest high horse to pontificate about it.*

Back in my message board days of new motherhood, I belonged to a group of women who were all first time mothers. We’d met at BabyCenter and took our cadre off to a private group once our kids arrived. Through the course of several years, we shared our lives and a couple of the women lost their mothers and had fathers who dated and remarried. Oh, the angst. Some of it was grief driven and I understood that, and none of them got up to any antics because they were too well brought up for such trailer park drama, but it’s not uncommon for adult children to over-think and have a hard time letting go of the idea that parents aren’t just Mom and Dad trapped forever in the context of our childhoods. They were grown ups long before us and continue to be long after we’ve cultivated big girl and boy lives of our own.

The “being raised properly” thing is likely the culprit. The past couple of decades have seen parents being less the adults and more the friends and allowing children too much input into how a family is governed. Recipe for entitled-to-meddle-in-your-lives-adult-kids, in my opinion. Heavy emphasis on the word “kids”. Some people never let go of the selfish impulses and world view that drove their parents to distraction when they were physically children and is now quite the lodestone now that they are only physically adult.

Edie and Mick were somewhere between taken aback and actively stunned when Rob announced our engagement to them. They knew about my existence, our dating and that was about it. They felt a little out of the loop, but that’s because technically they were. That’s what happens when you go out into the world and focus on your own life: you stop paying a lot of attention to what your parents are doing. In some ways it reminds me of my middle school students who were always incredulous when details of my life slipped into their line of vision. They couldn’t conceive of me outside the role of teacher. Kids have the same stilted vision of Mom and Dad. We are JUST Mom and Dad. So there was no reason for the older girls to know about Rob’s life and he was equally oblivious to their grown up lives too.

But Shelley and Rob raised their girls well and our new family formed and continues to evolve without any reality show drama.

The issue that extended family or friends may take with a new relationship or spouse though is different. Whereas children’s feelings should be taken into account – though not necessarily catered to because the idea that one’s children – especially those underage – have some mystical idiot savant ability to ferret out bad actors is one I wish would simply vanish. Children are not the equivalent of drug sniffing dogs when it comes to people’s character. They are far too self-interested for one and way too young and inexperienced for another.

One’s in-laws or friends, unless they are point-blank asked for an opinion, should just keep their opinions to themselves. And even when asked, they should remember that no one really wants opinions. When you are asked for an opinion what is really required is validation. So validate with a smile because no one gives even the tiniest fuck what you really think. Really.

I am continually astounded by people who put up with people who behave like the cast of Jersey Shore. I don’t have any tolerance for it. Neither my younger brother CB or my youngest sister Baby act out with impunity and when my older nephew got snotty with Rob on his first visit, he was squashed. It didn’t prevent further fires, but he knew I wasn’t putting up with it and I didn’t. We actually packed up and checked into a hotel during our 2008 visit when N1 unleashed one of his classic tantrums and I unceremoniously kicked CB out of the house the afternoon Dad died because he launched into his famous imitation of his substance addled teenaged self. Though I loathed Dr. Phil, the oaf got one thing right – you do teach people how to treat you. The choice to be a doormat in your own existence is entirely yours.

Rob has had to set both his SILs straight about what he will and will not indulge as far as their grief issues go, but by and large, our road has been baby butt smooth compared to the horror shows of some of the women I have encountered in the comment sections here and there.

Stalking, verbal harassment, poisoning the opinions of small grieving children. Not okay. If the party related to these people is not acting, that’s telling, and if you are not drawing hard lines in quick drying cement, telling as well.

We have this idea that drama and the “course of love never did run smooth” means that a relationship is meant to be because adversity is good for romance. That’s just sick twisted Hollywood garbage. As the credits roll, the actors are snug back in real lives and the people on the screen are make-believe.

*Rob’s youngest sister was a bit blistery when she first met him – after the engagement and slightly ahead of the wedding – but Rob didn’t back her up. We all sat, rather uncomfortably, around the table while she had her say. Gee handled the episode with more grace than I would have.

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Stumbling Across Good Blogs


I am not much for slogging through blogs in search of entertainment or good writing or both. The handful of blogs I read regularly belong to women I met through the YWBB and that I have listed on my Widow Blogroll. Anything that is evenly remotely entertaining, my husband Rob found using StumbleUpon and then went on to find others through the links he found on the worthwhile blogs he stumbled across. Stumble is a program that you can use to find specific topic oriented blogs or just randomly flip through like a couch potato with satellite. Through Stumble Rob discovered A Riot is an Ugly Thing along with its host, Uncle Keith. Uncle Keith, I should warn you, will not be everyone’s cup of tea. He is middle-age though he claims to be old. He is unapologetically incorrect and he likes to post pictures of scantily clad women who could be his (of legal age) daughters. But he can be funnier than hell while doing all of the above. Another pervert Rob discovered before the days of Stumble was the host of What Would Tyler Durden Do? (WWTDD) For you non-Fight Clubbers out there reading this from your IKEA-ized domains still in your khaki cubicle uniforms, Tyler Durden is the the name of the character played by Brad Pitt in the movie, Fight Club. It is one of my husband’s favorite movies and my step-daughter’s favorite books by her favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk. When I first began corresponding with Rob via email (because yes, where would two internet junkies meet but on the www), he told me I reminded him of Marla Singer. I was appalled (after I googled her up on Wikipedia) but in retrospect I can think of at least one area where she and I have some in common – though I am forbidden to go there (much) in my blogging. WWTDD is a celebrity eviscerating site, where the host skewers the flavors of the week and waxes pornographically about the current crop of famous tail. He may be Uncle Keith’s nephew. Tyler Durden came to us courtesy of The Gil Meche Experience. This is a cadre of writers there who claim to be law students somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S. The main blogger is a young man named Pulp who is on a mission (one of many) to expose David Brooks as a tepid writing talent. Nurse Myra of Gimcrack Hospital (PG) is someone Rob met through Uncle Keith who obviously enjoys her because on Friday she posts tastefully done pictures of herself in provacative clothing. She is a real nurse though in a real retirement home in the real place of Australia and she is a very talented writer. She writes with wit and style about the day to day of her job and the people she encounters. Rob discovered, inadvertently, that she was widowed as we are and thought at first that I should categorize her with the other widow blogs. While her “about me” states that she blogs to keep sane, she is not writing about her grief. Even if she were, I would still put her with the interesting blogs because she and it are that.The Diary of a Mad DC Cabbie is a Stumble find. He is not mad but he is a cabbie in the DC area and he blogs on all manner of things. He is funny. He is smart. And he is a very good writer. As is Johnny Virgil over at Fifteen Minute Lunch. I would do much to be that funny. His rantings on washrooms have earned him a place of honor in my esteem forever. Waiter Rant is just that, and apparently its author has written a book and was approached about turning it into a movie according to my oldest step-daughter. She is the original source of this blog and though my husband reads it – aloud to me – every so often, I don’t find it compelling enough to read on my own. It is well-written and others find it quite entertaining. And Rob likes it. He has much better taste in blogs as a source of leisure reading than I do. I am from the quaint old school of building community and friendships via the blogosphere. He does not believe that one can be friends with people who may or may not really exist at all. As one of my mommie friends from yore pointed out when she and the other women I now call friends met on BabyCenter – back in the days before we moved to a private group home – who knows who any of us really were. One of us could have really been a 55 year old man simply pretending to be a thirty-something pregnant woman or new mother. After all, you never know what some people will do to entertain themselves. Rob explains us, in case you are interested, as above average anomalies and exceptions to all rules.Blogging, in my opinion – ’cause that is the only one that counts around here, is a viable source of the written word as entertainment or information. One could do worse than to check out and become a daily reader of any of the blogs I have mentioned.

Real Writers don’t Blog


A columnist in the Daily Mail and Globe (Christie Blatchford), which is the Canadian equivalent of USA-Today minus the excess pictures and celebrity suck up section, wrote her Saturday piece about bloggers. Her disdain for the genre and the poor writing. She holds the common opinion among those of us who can write that writing is not for everyone. I agree. Writing is a gift that some of us are born with and develop over the course of our lives, but it isn’t something that just anyone can do. It’s like singing or dancing or painting. It’s an art. Having said that, I don’t think being a person of average writing skill should preclude anyone from writing and seeing that writing published somewhere. There are people who sing and dance and paint who haven’t much skill either but sometimes that’s not the point. We all deserve an artistic outlet regardless of whether we are truly talented. What someone might call a hobby is someone else’s great soul fulfilling passion.

I think what puzzled this columnist the most is why anyone would put what she considers to be no more than a diary up on the web for public display. The simple answer is that writers, good, average or really awful, want to be published. The only medium to which people have a fairly democratic access is on the Internet. To someone who writes for a living, and to whom the finished product is a matter of a paycheck, it would probably seem odd as well that anyone could write for free or without benefit of copyright. However, to someone who just wants to write and would be happy of any audience, blogging or Facebook or just an online community can be a welcome opportunity.

Another point of contention the writer had was with the concept of online communities and the idea that you can have relationships with “virtual” people. Like most who have never truly experienced this, she falls back on the snotty superiority of the fact that she not only prefers REAL friends, she actually has them too. While it is true that there are many people for whom online communities are their only social outlets, it’s not true for all people. The majority of those I have met via message boards have families, friends and rich REAL lives. They came to the different boards during times in their lives when they hadn’t anyone in their lives they could connect with for various reasons. One group of women I have been messaging with for over six years now came to be when we met on a site called BabyCenter. We were all “older” women trying to conceive and most of us didn’t have peers are our age to relate to when it came to trying to get pregnant in your late thirties or early forties. As we one by one became mothers, we moved our group to a private message board and continued to share our lives with each other because by this time we were friends who had move to talk about than just ovulation charts and birth stories. Two of us became widows in the time we have known each other. There have been location and job changes. New babies to celebrate. Some of us know each other offline and those of us who travel quite a bit meet up from time to time when things can be arranged. I wouldn’t consider any of us freaks or even freakish.

I met my husband Rob through an online community for younger widowed people. We started off as email pals much in the same vein as the old pen-pals of yore. Another member of the same community is a friend to the point that she attended our wedding, and there are several others we keep in contact with via email and their blogs. The community itself has produced a viable offline network of events and countless friendships and romances (some that also have led to marriage) have blossomed because of this. I think it is easy to look down on or even make fun of online social networks but it would be a mistake to think that everyone engaged in this rather recent means of meeting people is just for the desperate. My husband’s two twenty-something daughters have met some various nice people via Facebook and we use the site as a way to keep in touch with them and with extended family and far off friends. In a world where we are so far from the “neighborhoods” we grew up in and Grandma doesn’t live just a few blocks over anymore, it’s a good way to stay connected.