Calvin and I got married six years ago today.
I’m pretty sure you guys are all clear by now on how it is that I feel about my husband. But! For the record, in case you missed it…
I love him, I love him, I love him.
The Eels – “(Goddamn Right) It’s a Beautiful Day”
Gee! I haven’t written since Saturday! That’s not normal, for me. I’ve been working on the Peace Pipe and Crack Pipe track lists (don’t forget to e-mail me with your mailing address by Friday evening and let me know if you’d like one or both!) and have listened to Peace Pipe once through; I think that one’s done, though I might play with the song order a bit. At the rate my day is going, Crack Pipe will probably be done by this afternoon – listening to rage-full music will probably help my attitude TREMENDOUSLY.
I’ve also been fully consumed by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Series. If you haven’t read them, I highly recommend them. They’re the only books other than Old Man’s War that I’ve ever given a perfect 10/10. I’ve read the first two books and am halfway through the third, with the fourth and final book of the series coming out in August, and a movie based on the first book coming out in December.
Jen (from whom I’ve been borrowing the books) is just about as geeked as I’ve ever seen her, and that’s saying a lot. A. LOT.
I’ve been tinkering with an entry about Generalized Anxiety Disorder and depression, but I’ve only been writing on it when I’m in the mood. I’ve also been tagged by Taoist Biker for a mini-meme. AND it suddenly strikes me that I never did write about the Reader’s Choice day in Old Town Scottsdale, though I did upload all of the pictures. I have work to do, and a serious lack of gumption!
It’s just a case of the lazies. I’ll turn myself around in short order.
Slept in. Woke up, had some coffee and read some of J. R. Ward’s new one. Calvin woke up, read the paper next to me. We contemplated what to do with the day.
Wrestled. Showered. Went to Fry’s Electronics to get a USB to IDE adapter because the Dell is SO going back to Best Buy. Stopped at the grocery store. Bought fruit and munchies for an anticipated evening on the couch, and skillet fixin’s for dinner.
Got home. Cut up strawberries, cantaloupe, apricots, watermelon, pears, oranges, rinsed off grapes and cherries. Stuck it all in the fridge, then futzed with the laptop before taking it back to Best Buy for an exchange.
Cursed the FUCKING HEAT. Hello, 118, and I’m not even kidding.
Back home. Listening to 80’s music (“Who’s Johnny!” And when was the last time you heard THAT song?). Calvin’s in the kitchen frying up bacon (never let you forget that he’s a man), I’m about to go back and help him finish up with the sausage, eggs, home fries, cheesy goodness… nom nom nom.
Tonight it’s movies and snuggling on the couch, and fruit and cheese and crackers and summer sausage and pudding (mmm… pudding…) and chips probably. Oh, and ice cream. With strawberries.
Diet = tomorrow. But hey, fruit’s good, right?
Hope your Saturday is as great as mine!
You guys knew I was going to do this, didn’t you? You just KNEW that there was going to be an even enough distribution of “Crack Pipe” vs. “Peace Pipe” (plus enough people crying “ARG! I CAN’T DECIDE!) so that I would just throw up my hands and cry, “Fine! You can HAVE BOTH!”
It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya.
Okay, next question. Do you guys want me to post the track lists here, or be surprised when you receive the CD’s?
Anybody who wants a copy, send me an e-mail with your mailing address, PLUS please indicate if you would like “Peace Pipe”, “Crack Pipe”, or “BOTH plskthx”. I’ll ship to anywhere in the world, so don’t let the fact that you don’t live in the continental U.S. deter you!
I’ll be taking orders from now until midnight Friday June 27th, then hopefully send the CD’s out in the week following. So send me your addresses or forever hold your peace!
***BEGIN WICKED COOL ANNOUNCEMENT***
Hi there, gang! Long-time readers will recall my last fabulous mix CD giveaway in the form of “Dance, Bitches!”. It was a rousing success, and I still get occasional random requests to send copies out to folks. Still! Almost three years later!
Well, since I am very, very fond of my wonderful, incredible, fantastically astute readers who have the most excellent taste to frequent this humble little website, I have decided to do another mix CD giveaway. BUT! Because I can’t decide between a mellow-themed CD (“Peace Pipe”) or a rockin’ out CD (“Crack Pipe”), I figured I’d let YOU decide.
Snerkology! It’s not just a blog, it’s an interactive experience.
So! Please leave your choice of theme in the comments. Tranquil, or head-banging? Serene, or nuts? Work-safe, or drive-angry safe? Once a theme (or genre, if you will (nod to Calvin, who HATES that word, heh)) is decided upon, I will request folks to send me their snail-mail addresses via e-mail.
And then YOU (yes, YOU!) will get presenty goodness in the mail at some point in the not-too-distant-but-certainly-far-enough-to-curse-my-slackardly-ways future!
WARNING: My mix CD’s tend to be random, have jarring transitions, mix decades and genres (THAT WORD AGAIN) shamelessly, often make no sense, and have been known to contain songs that use the word “fuck”. Prolifically. Request at your own risk!
***END WICKED COOL ANNOUNCEMENT***
Life, she is a funny, complicated thing.
Having an affair with Calvin was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life; the worst sin I’ve ever committed. Yet, our affair resulted in the best thing that has EVER happened to me, and a more complete happiness than I ever expected. So… am I going to hell? Did I “make up” for my indiscretions by being a good wife to Calvin, and a good mother to Michael and Marie? In one of the first conversations we all had together after Calvin moved in with me, we both apologized to the kids for how things went down. I personally apologized to the kids for the role I played in breaking up their family – it was certainly already headed that way, but I was the catalyst that set things in motion. Michael and Marie both have said multiple times that Calvin and his ex are much better apart than they ever were together, that Calvin is actually a better father now than he was then (because he’s happier, more emotionally open and available to them), and that Calvin and I are obviously meant to be together. They’ve both even said that the damage to them would have been worse, they’re sure, if Calvin and his ex had stayed together “for the kids”.
They describe finding the right person for them as, “Finding their Laura,” so I consider that to be just about the biggest and best compliment and sign of their acceptance that there possibly could be.
I would absolutely NOT recommend an affair as the avenue to find your happiness. I absolutely still believe, hypocritical though it may seem, that one should practice fidelity while married or in a monogamous relationship. The fact that everything worked out for us in the end is SUCH a long shot, a defiance of the odds and the statistics, that we’re incredibly lucky. We’re lucky the kids don’t hate us. We’re lucky that we didn’t discover that we weren’t as great for one another as we thought during the drama and excitement of our affair. Calvin and I both agree that if we had it to do all over again, knowing what we know now, we would have remained respectful to our spouses and not solidified our relationship until AFTER both of our divorces were finalized.
Now, “once a cheater” does NOT mean “always a cheater”. A lot of people who know our story have asked if Calvin and I are confident each other’s fidelity, given how we got together. I have absolutely NO question – Calvin would never cheat on me. And he feels the same confidence in me. In fact, I have less question of his fidelity than I would have if we had gotten together in a more “traditional” sense. Our feelings for one another notwithstanding, it’s a case of the both of us going through our own special versions of hell and knowing, “Well, I’ll never do THAT again!” No way, man.
“Judge not lest ye be judged,” is just about the best set of words to live by. I’m not a Bible thumper by ANY stretch of the imagination, but that little nugget ‘o wisdom (and, you know, one or two more from the same source) is absolutely priceless. Nobody’s perfect – not me, not even YOU. I do absolutely believe that one has to walk a mile in another person’s shoes before they can really understand what their circumstances are like. So when I hear about other people’s affairs, other people who have fallen in love with someone who is not free, other people who are looking longingly toward another while the one they stand next to has expectations of fidelity… I don’t condone it, I don’t encourage it, but I absolutely DO understand it. I sympathize. I’ve been there. It royally sucks.
I can’t give you advice on how to make an affair “come out” the way you want it. I can’t give you advice on how to make sure your spouse doesn’t cheat on you. And I can’t give you advice on how to repair a broken or failing marriage, or even how to keep one from failing. I can tell you what I would do, but there is NO handbook for relationship success, or BELIEVE ME I would have tracked it down. I will say that in my experience (note that), relationships are harder to break the more communication there is. They’re harder to break if both people want to put in the effort to understand one another and to make one another happy. There is no room for selfishness in a successful relationship, and there is no room for complete selflessness, either. Those who care well for others also care well for themselves. There is NO ONE PERSON out there who will meet every single need of another person, but both people can compromise, work around, and work on the un-met needs. Both people have to give 100% to each other and the relationship, as close to 100% of the time as they can.
I will say that in my opinion you can’t fix a failing relationship if the trust is irrevocably gone. You just… can’t. It will never go back to being whole again, if one person can’t completely trust the other. Now, some people can live with that lack of wholeness, but I know that I could not – not if I was the one not trusting, and not if I was the one not trusted.
Calvin and I both are big believers in the thought that it’s better to be alone than to be with the “wrong” person. A lot of people just don’t feel that way. I’m sure we all have countless friends, family members, and acquaintances who stay in the same messed up relationship because “it’s better than being alone”. I think that an exchange of vows does not eliminate the ability to leave a bad relationship. Take those vows seriously, yes, but get the hell out if you’re making each other miserable and there’s no fixing it.
Now, certainly, it wouldn’t do to just throw up your hands and give up at the first sign of trouble. If you can work out your problems so that you come out the other side stronger than you were before, you can actually view that as a positive opportunity for mutual growth. I feel that a relationship that has survived some struggle is a stronger one than a relationship that has never, ever been tested. I guess the breaking point is different for every person and every relationship, and one that can’t be defined by me or anybody else who is not in their situation.
I also believe that staying in a marriage for the sake of your children is not necessarily the right thing to do – especially if the household is poisonous, and if the fighting couple presents a bad example to the children on how a relationship should work. Children absorb an ASTONISHING amount of behavior from their home environment, whether or not you’re purposefully directing it, or even noticing it. I’d rather have my child learn how to peacefully end a relationship than how to fight and prolong an unhealthy marriage. Then perhaps in the future they can learn how to be in a healthy relationship if their parents move on to a situation that is positive.
Michael and Marie have said to me in the past, “We learned how to fight by watching Mom and Dad, but we learned how to love by watching you and Dad.” It’s sad that they ever learned the former at all.
There are no right or wrong answers, there are just your own morals and how you live or do not live by them. I am living proof that a person can go through something that is morally wrong to them, acknowledge to themselves that is is wrong while they’re in the middle of it, and yet do it anyway. In the midst of our affair, I didn’t even try to excuse it or justify it to myself. I loved Calvin, there was no changing it, and pursuing a relationship with him while he was married was W-R-O-N-G. And yet, for me, I could not follow the other choice that was available to me. I just… couldn’t. There are plenty of people out there who would consider me a bad person because of my behavior, and perhaps to them I am. I don’t feel, myself, like I’m a bad person. In the end, just as another blogger whom I regularly read recently said, the only person whose good opinion I really absolutely NEED, is my husband’s.
Because of my inability to follow my own sense of morality, I have the blessings of a loving, exciting, supportive husband who is also my best friend. I have two wonderful step-children who have enriched (and challenged!) my life. I have three beautiful grandchildren whose baby heads I got to smell and whose baby cheeks I got to chomp on.
If this is paying for my sins, what on EARTH would my life be like right now if I’d lived it without fault?
(If you’ve missed any of the installments, here’s the prologue, here’s part one, plus the editorial note, here’s part two, here’s part three, here’s part four, here’s part five, and here’s part six.)
I’m going to write about home. It’ll make me feel better, and I need to feel better. I’m not going to get it right, though, how I really feel. The English language is failing me, and this is one of those times that I wish I had three or four or eight other languages at my disposal, the better to express myself.
Homesickness is like the grief of losing a loved one. There’s a feeling that you’re so far away from the place you love that you’ll never see it again. And how will life go on if you know that you’re never going to go home again? Now, logically speaking, I know I’ll go to Maine again. I’ll get off a plane somewhere nearby (I tend to fly into New Hampshire since airfares are cheaper than flying into Portland), get a rental car, and make The Drive. The one that always gets my heart singing and my tears welling because my insides are bursting to be homehomehome. And some day, SOME DAY, I won’t have to get back on another plane a week later or two weeks later or EVER AGAIN later, because I will be home to stay.
My God, how it makes my heart thump to think of going home to STAY. It’s a special kind of hell for a country girl craving greenery and proximity to the ocean to be stuck living in the baked asphalt nightmare that is Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve imagined it… imagined how Calvin and I would leave here with our belongings packed in a moving truck, making the opposite and complementary drive to the one I took nearly fifteen-holy-fuck-years ago.
HOW on Earth has it been that I’ve lived here for fifteen years? I could leave Arizona behind and not look back and not regret it for a single second. Within weeks of living back in Maine I suspect it would start to feel like I had just been on a very long, very unusual vacation. Calvin can be considered the very best of souvenirs. Heh.
There’s a hell of a lot of “Old Money” around in Maine – rich old families whose ancestors go back to the original founding colonists, that own thousands of acres of land and mansions with huge footprints and old architecture. There are coastal tourist villages with multi-million dollar spas and B&B’s and hunting lodges and every other amenity you’d ever want, with some more besides. There’s gourmet restaurants with, of course, the best seafood you’ll ever have pass your lips. There’s specialty shops of handcrafted wares and artwork galleries. There’s several rather advanced ski resorts that are starting to (if they haven’t already – it’s been years since I’ve been) rival Vermont’s much ballyhooed facilities. There’s even a handful of fairly sophisticated night clubs in Portland, if you’re looking for that kind of thing. Vacationing in Maine does NOT have to be the rustic experience that the thought conjures – though of course, the outdoors and natural living is a big draw (hellew, LL Bean). There’s BIG money to be had, drawing people from their non-Maine lives toward “The Way Life Should Be”.
But the Maine I grew up in – as did most of my friends and acquaintances – was humble. Economical. Do-for-yourself. Fix instead of buy new. Nothing was disposable. You bought for quality and longevity. You made things yourself – homes built from the remains of barns and other homes, vehicles constructed from the remains of other vehicles, and food that you grew and harvested and canned and preserved and hunted and cured yourself. Work was taken in trade for goods, and vice-versa. If one guy did hauling for you one weekend, you helped him build his shed the next. Borrowed casserole dishes were never returned empty. The fruits of your garden were shared with your neighbors, and vice-versa. Weekends consisted of baked bean suppers held at the local grange, grabbing a couple of beers “down the Legion”, having lobster and steamed clam cookouts, or working at whatever household project was going on at the time. Or, just being a local tourist. I saw many a birthday pass at Range Pond and Reed State Park, plenty of summer evenings strolling along Pine Point or Old Orchard Beach, and people watching from various vantages in Freeport or in the Old Port district of Portland. Boothbay and Kennebunkport were short enough distances away from where I lived, and Bar Harbor, though further away, provided for great weekend trips.
Of course, if anybody got a strange craving for “the city”, it’s a mere two hours to Boston, and four to six to Quebec or Montreal or Ottawa, in Canada.
Mainers are a hardy bunch – well, they have to be, to survive the one convincing drawback of the area, and that’s winter. Mainers are fiercely independent, pragmatic, practical. Unbelievably loyal to their home town and home state. Wonderfully patriotic. Unwise of the ways of the world, but incredibly wise to the ways of life, if you understand the distinction. There’s a boggled bewilderment toward anyone who is from Maine who expresses the desire to move away, and an inherent suspicion (and pity) of anyone who is “from away”, that is either visiting or moves to their town. Though I will say that the latter are eventually forgiven for being “from away”, since they show the good sense to move to Maine.
Tourists are tolerated, barely, with the acknowledged fact that they bring much needed income to the state. Even people coming up from New Hampshire or Massachusetts are viewed with slight contempt – at the very least because of their “flatlander” status and perceived lack of driving skills. Anyone from any further away is accorded the status of an alien being.
Based on conversations with my sister, a red-hot conservative Republican, the somewhat puritanical and conservative nature of the state is being supplanted by the “damn liberals”, which I suspect is a good thing. Not that I want to change my cherished state in the least, but it can be at times rather intolerant. I hope that there are more folks like me, that have lived away for far too long and gained far too much experience and perspective, who want to move back and ease Maine’s way into broader avenues of thinking, but without taking away any of the wonderful qualities that make Maine what it is. It’s pretty darned isolated up there, so the conservatism is very firmly rooted in tradition which should certainly NEVER be done away with. I’m a firm believer in tradition. Just… gentled and leavened with a level of acceptance for other ways and cultures.
I’m botching this horribly and making you dear readers probably think that the entire state is comprised of torch burning prejudiced freaks, but that is most certainly not the case. Just think… small town atmosphere.
What I cherish the most about Maine are the general values held by the people – family, friendship, neighborliness, and a general all-around “decency” of behavior. The community really comes together in times of need… again, since winters are so hard, it’s natural that neighbors help one another out. Each time I’ve taken (dragged? nah…) Calvin there on vacation, he’s always quite vocally surprised at the general friendliness of the people. The lifestyle is simple, and the people are uncomplicated, but certainly not simple themselves. The pace is just so much slower there, and the values are placed not on acquisitions and wealth, but in the living of a good, clean, purpose-filled life.
The enthusiasm of the population is generally focused on all things natural – the harvest fairs, the farmer’s markets, the locally grown and locally manufactured, and the preservation and conservation of precious resources and the state’s natural attractions. When I recall just how MUCH there is in Maine to see and explore and do, I get rather bored with anything that city life has to offer. Can Arizona offer me wide sandy beaches filled with sand dollars just waiting to be collected? Is there a single nearby stream or lake that was NOT man-made in this Valley? Can one see blankets of stars overhead while standing in the middle of the state’s biggest “city”? Can I walk alone through the middle of that same city in the middle of the night and not fear for my safety?
I think not. There just seems to be not one ounce of clean, fresh, happy, calm, replenishing and enriching living to be had here in this desert. Now, I know winters are wonderful here – temperatures in the 70’s rather than feet of snow and all that jazz. But in my opinion the summers here are worse than any winter Maine has to dish out. There’s just something about being unrelentingly BAKED and BLINDED by the bright unfiltered sunlight that’s more depressing and difficult to me than having to bundle up and scrape ice off of my windshield. Summer in Arizona just makes me want to hide indoors, while winters in Maine at least offer skiing and snowmobiling and ice fishing and the like. You can always put more clothes on to get warm, I always say, but there’s just so many you can take off to get cool before you’re nekkid. And don’t even get me started on the lack of GREEN anything – the color of the plants that pass for trees here can’t even compare to the thick forests in Maine. There is no feast and delight for the senses in Arizona, is I guess what I’m trying to say. At least, none that satisfy me. Even the spots that are lovely – Sedona, and Flagstaff – seem to me to be poor substitutes of what I really want and where I really want to be.
And it’s just so damned busy. People are indifferent toward one another at best, harshly violent at worst. Crimes that happen here on such a frequent basis that they can’t even be all mentioned on the evening news happen wonderfully infrequently in Maine, if at all. The traffic is a mess (though not as bad as some states, as I understand it), everyone is in such a wound up state to get where they’re going that they forget to be where they are. It’s always onward, onward, onward. What’s next, what’s more, what’s better. There seems to be NOTHING original here – strip malls crop up with alarming frequency and speed, with the same combination of restaurants and services in each one, so that every corner looks like the one before it and the one after it.
While I know that there are people who are equally as passionate about Arizona as I am about Maine, and can offer counter-points for each point against it that I offer… well, this place is not what stirs my soul. That doesn’t make me wrong, it just makes me different.
Maine is not perfection. There’s crime, there’s indifference, there’s humanity for God’s sake. There’s the winters and the roads and the taxes and the slower economy and the encroaching “damn liberals”. Maine has as much its own share of crap and nonsense as every state in the U.S. and every location on the globe. There is no Eden this side of death. But it’s what’s perfect for ME. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s beautiful, it’s rural. It’s the feast and delight to my senses that I crave. It’s what calls to my soul. It’s what drives the running internal chant (sometimes out loud, even), from morning till night every day that I’m apart from it, “I want to go home home home”.
No matter where I happen to live on this planet, or for however long and far away from it that I must live, I will always be from Maine. We WILL live there again.
Someday. Please God, let it be soon.
(Here’s the prologue, here’s part one, plus the editorial note, here’s part two, here’s part three, here’s part four, and here’s part five.)
Throughout the months nothing really improved, and for Calvin’s situation things were getting steadily worse. It really wasn’t a matter of if, but when, his marriage would fail completely. Contact between Calvin and I was limited to secret phone calls whenever and however we could, and we both knew it wasn’t over between us. It was just so deeply complicated, especially with kids at such an impressionable age, that any quick or snap decisions were utterly impossible.
So, given our limited contact, I was surprised when the phone rang early one Sunday morning in February of ‘98.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hey,” said Calvin.
“Hi! What’s up?”
“What do you think about going up North, maybe doing some skiing today?”
“What, really? What about your wife?”
“I’m supposed to be at work today. If I blow the day off, park the truck somewhere, ride up with you, and get back by 6:00, she won’t know.”
“Um, wow. Okay, let me get myself ready.”
“How long will you need?”
“I dunno, a half an hour?”
“Okay, I’ll meet you… at the Village Inn?”
“Okay, see you soon.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Thus we spent a clandestine day together. I, of course, was mad crazy to spend any time with him that I could. If you’ve never suffered the experience (and I really hope you haven’t), let me just express how very VERY hard it is to be in love with someone who isn’t free, who you can’t spend time with, and the feelings for whom you have to hide or suppress. I was sick to death of the hurried and secret phone conversations, sick to death of being limited to seeing him at work, sick to death of the entire situation. So, the prospect of spending an entire unhindered, unscrutinized day with him thrilled me to my very toes.
We drove up to Flagstaff, two hours away, skied the slopes at Snowbowl, pretended nothing was awkward and that we weren’t anxious, and drove back home again. Calvin was distracted and kind of distant all day. I was acting hyper and pretending the hell outta nothing being wrong. And, like a girl, asking him all day long, “What’s wrong?” “What’s the matter?”
Uh, GEE, could it be that he felt guilty for spending the day with me, anxious about his marriage, and conflicted about what he could do about it? I have no excuse except to say that I was dumb and a rather immature twenty-three.
When Calvin got home he told his wife he’d been skiing, just not with whom. He just told me right now that he’d spent the entire day paranoid that he would get sunburned and have a clear outline from his goggles on his face, so he just decided to tell her where he had been. Again, spending time together had made things both better, and worse. We wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to be together, but parting at the end of the day was, as usual, THE SUCK.
Our separate lives continued – me simultaneously pining for him and trying to get over him, he struggling and failing at a marriage gone bad, afraid to grasp for some personal happiness, and feeling guilty for wanting it.
A couple of months later, I got another phone call, this one mid-week nearing midnight.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” said Calvin. “You doing anything right now?”
“Um, no, just getting ready for bed.”
“Do you mind if I come over? Things… aren’t so great over here right now.”
“Uh oh. Sure, okay, I’ll open the garage door for you.”
Thus we spent the next WEEK together. Calvin stayed with me, but visited the kids at his home each day. He and his wife had had (another) HUGE fight, and the atmosphere became so intolerable that Calvin felt he really was ready to leave and end things with her. I enjoyed the hell out of that week, taking extreme satisfaction in just little things – cooking for him, watching TV together on the couch, learning and observing his nighttime and early morning rituals, anticipating him walking through the front door at the end of a day at work… and of course, falling asleep next to him every night. I was happy and scared (hell, ECSTATIC and PETRIFIED) at the same time – happy to finally be with Calvin, scared that he could change his mind at any moment and go back to his wife.
Which… he did. At the end of the week, Calvin’s wife called him and said they needed to really sit down and discuss things. So he left, and didn’t come back to my house that night. I spent it VERY sleeplessly. The next morning, as per usual, I went to work, got settled, and called him at his desk. I almost didn’t want to call him. I already knew, since he hadn’t come back to me, that whatever he had to say to me would not make me happy. I wanted to pretend for a few more minutes that I could still be as happy as I had been for that entire week.
When he stopped by my desk, instead of going to the cafeteria for breakfast as we usually did, he drew me into a conference room.
Nothing good EVER happens when you get hauled into a conference room first thing in the morning.
Once again he told me he was going to try to make things work out with his wife. This time, instead of being accepting and understanding as I had in the past, I got PISSED RIGHT OFF. I was tired of feeling like he was jerking me around, tired of waiting for him to “grow some” and make a clear and definitive decision, and tired of putting my life on hold. I was tired of him coming to me and relying on me to make it all better, and then going right back into the negative fray again. I was tired of getting my hopes up, and then getting them dashed again.
I believe I expressed this all to him, quite thoroughly, there in that conference room. Basically, it didn’t make sense to me. His relationship with his wife was obviously beyond repair, and yet he was still too scared to make the “leap into the unknown”, as he put it.
As I’ve said before, Calvin does NOT suffer change willingly.
This being my blog, of course I am expressing things from my perspective. I know and remember my feelings about the whole situation very, VERY well. Here I will quote Calvin, as he tells me what it was like for him during this time:
“Basically, the exact same things as what Laura described were going through my mind. I think the thing that held me back the most was the history I had with my ex, and I was really afraid of the emtional toll that a divorce might take on the kids. I wondered if maybe people were right when they said that, “You should just tough it out for the kids,” and, “The kids would rather live in a broken home than be from one.” Or were they wrong, and was it the other way around? And, I was absolutely terrified of the unknown. I also wondered, was I really not concentrating enough and working hard on things as much as I thought? Was I not being as tolerant as I thought because Laura was there… because there was a distraction? I know now all of that wasn’t true… it was just pure and simple incompatibility between me and my ex, and nothing was going to fix that. I just couldn’t seem to finally pull the trigger on it as long as there seemed to be a glimmer of hope. It seemed that for all the past months, though I wasn’t trying very much, my wife wasn’t trying AT ALL. Back to that particular night when I went back to talk to my ex, and then stayed, it was with the promise that we would both try to make it work. I should have known, though, just like it was through our whole relationship, it was her usual “I will, I will, I’m gonna,” and it just never happened.”
So. I went back to my solitary life with renewed determination to Get Over Him Already. I tried harder not to just sit by the phone and wait for his call. I tried harder to hang out with my friends. I tried harder to distance myself from my very heart. Calvin and I remained friends. We continued to keep each other filled in on what was going on in our lives.
A couple of more months went by, and by this time things had reached a crescendo between Calvin and his wife. There was just absolutely NO fixing things, and come to find out in the midst of all the drama, Calvin’s wife had been carrying on an affair herself for an undetermined and undisclosed period of time… and there had been more than one, throughout their relationship. Calvin finally (FINALLY) decided enough was enough. They were hurting each other, they were hurting the kids, and most obviously everyone would be better off if he and his wife were no longer together.
He filed for divorce. He told me he decided, finally and irrevocably, to be with me. I took the news with just about as much joy and suspicion as you might imagine. He said he decided not to move in with me right away, but to try to finalize things with his divorce first, stay in the house (possession is 9/10 of the law when it comes to community property states), and make things as calm and as positive for the kids as he possibly could.
His wife, though, had other ideas.
One evening, the same week that Calvin filed, he and I went out to eat and went to the comedy club (neither one of us can remember who we saw). I felt positively high, I was so giddy and happy to be with him. We had the best time, the most wonderful night, and the feeling of relief was just immense. We walked along the street and held frickin’ hands for all the world and anyone who happened to drive by to see. We made plans and we talked. We discussed how to re-introduce the kids to me, and what parts of the whole story we should share with them. We wanted to be truthful without being inappropriate for their sensibilities and ages. We talked about simple things like what we should do with my house, and fun things like stuff to do on the weekends and places to take the kids. I told him how I wanted him to go to Maine with me in the near future to meet my family (I’d been corresponding a LOT about what had been happening with my sister, and nearly nothing at ALL about what had been happening with my grandmother).
Anyway, we had this grand and wonderful night, after which Calvin planned to drive me home and drop me off, then head back home to his own house. When we pulled into my driveway, though, we saw just piles and piles of… stuff… sitting by my front door. It appeared that while Calvin and I were out, Calvin’s wife gathered nearly all of his belongings, drove them over to my house, and dumped them at the door. Including, we were shocked and angered to find, a couple of LOADED guns from his collection, just sitting out there in the open for anyone (any CHILD) to happen upon.
We hauled all of the stuff inside, during which activity Calvin discovered that she had neglected to include a few belongings. Since he didn’t want to just give up his house without a fight, and especially since he didn’t know how much the kids were being impacted at that moment by his wife’s anger, he decided to go back over to his house. Just to talk, to gather a few items, and come right back.
I’ll be succinct about this, since it’s essentially a simple story. He drove over there, saw she had broken the key off in the door lock so he couldn’t get in, and she wouldn’t open the door when he knocked, then pounded. He kicked the door in, she called the cops, he yelled while she was on the phone that he was leaving (“I just came for my TOOTHBRUSH and UNDERWEAR!”) and that he just wanted to check on his kids. She said that he had guns (?!?), and that was all she wrote. Calvin had left and was driving down the street when the police passed him going the other way. So he turned around and went BACK to the house (I know, huh?) so he could talk to the police and diffuse the situation. They cuffed him and hauled him to jail for his pains. They said that they cited Calvin’s wife, too, and they were both being cited for messing with community property (the key broken off in the door, said door being kicked in), and since someone had to stay with the children, they were taking Calvin instead of his wife.
All of this I learned during Calvin’s “One Phone Call”, which reached me at about 2:30 in the morning. You can imagine all the things I was thinking and wondering and worrying about, from the time he left until the time he called. Yes, even the thought that he may have decided, AGAIN, to try to work things out with his wife. But no, he was just in jail.
Heh.
I’m going to bold this, because I think it’s a fun coincidence. You’d think I timed it this way on purpose, but really I didn’t. See today, dear readers, is the 10th anniversary of the day that Calvin went to jail. Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the day we permanently moved in together. The latter date we celebrate, the former not so much.
Calvin’s going to kill me for this, but I just have to say that after spending the night in jail, he smelled to high heaven.
Sorry, baby, but you did.
(At this point Calvin would like me to let you all know that it wasn’t his fault that he smelled. Jails are less than sanitary places, especially if you’re thrown into a “tank” with a bunch of drunks.)
Anyway, Calvin got stuck with eight weeks of anger management classes for kicking in that door, and his wife got absolutely nothing. I brought him back home, he showered (heh), and we started in on the business of being together. There was a while of getting used to living together, with each other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies. There was a period of re-introducing the kids into my life, and me into theirs. We took things very slowly and were very honest about all of our feelings.
Calvin’s divorce was long, drawn out, and in the end he got shafted in a BIG, BIG way. Calvin’s ex turned out to be mean, vindictive, bent on revenge, and would do anything – even use the kids – to get what she wanted. We fought for the kids (by this time Marie was coming up on eleven and Michael was fifteen) to have a week-on/week-off living schedule between the two households, which they had decided upon for themselves. Calvin’s ex was afraid of what this split schedule would do for her child support amount (essentially, it rendered it unnecessary because they were sharing equal time), so she fought (against the kids expressed wishes) for full custody. More money was spent on court-ordered psychologists to make the call. In the end he decreed that the original week-on/week-off schedule was best for all involved.
But by this time Calvin’s ex was drawing the kids more and more into the negativity. According to what they described to us later, she would bad-mouth Calvin to the kids. She would say that they couldn’t love her if they loved me and Calvin. She moved her parents in with her, and they were telling the kids the same thing. There were times that the negativity was so bad in the house that one or the other of the kids would want to call Calvin to come get them, and Calvin’s ex would physically prevent them from doing so, and even take the phone away. One day Michael had to walk across the street to a neighbor’s to use their phone to call Calvin, and Calvin’s ex called the neighbors ahead of him and forbid them from allowing him to use their phone. Marie would call, crying, and then hurriedly try to pretend that nothing was wrong if her mother came into the room.
It was just awful, and we tried to shelter the kids as best we could. We took to dropping by Calvin’s ex’s on the weeks it was her time with the kids, to bring them some ice cream or just to say hi. Just to make sure they were okay, and especially if they weren’t answering the phone or seemed stilted and unnatural when we talked to them. Not surprisingly, within a year after Calvin moved in with me, Michael decided to live with us full time. Not long after, Marie decided to live with us full time as well. Calvin’s ex fought it, but it was clear that the kids were old enough to make their own decision in the matter. Both kids said that they realized, after Calvin had moved out (or, heh, had been moved out), that he was the primary parent they had always relied upon. They didn’t realize how little mothering they got from their actual mother until they no longer had their father there to buffer it.
I can imagine how that made Calvin’s ex feel, losing her husband AND kids in the course of a year, but in the end it was her own behavior that drove the kids away, and continues at times still today to drive them away. By this time, Michael and Marie have established their own relationships with their mother, based in adulthood on their own terms. She missed out on so, SO much by driving them away as she did.
For a couple of YEARS we dealt with her anger, her legal machinations, and her manipulations. She would show up at our house and shriek and yell in the front yard, causing the neighbors to be quite curious indeed. But after a while, after everything was finalized and settled (and she got the house without having to buy Calvin out AND all the belongings AND half of Calvin’s retirement AND half of his severance when he got laid off from AcronymCo AND stuck him (us!) with all the debt), we started hearing less and less from her. Nowadays, with the kids grown, we have no interaction with her at all. She’s re-married, and the kids say that she seems happy with her new husband.
So, this mostly brings thing up to date between the time that Calvin and I met and the beginning of this on-line journal, which has of course been primarily about my life with Calvin and the kids. I will epilogue this whole story soon, as there is (still!) more. As always I welcome any thoughts, questions, or feedback you all may have. You guys have been awesome in light of the hard truths and the fact is you could have been very, VERY judgmental. The fact that you guys have been, as ever, so mightily supportive, just further convinces me that I have the Best Readers On The Planet.
More soon!
A shot of me and Laurell K. Hamilton at her book signing for the “Blood Noir” release on 6/5. Blurry. Laurell’s husband Jon kindly took the shot. Jen and I went together and had a grand girls’ night out of it. Here’s her entry about it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t care for the book all that much.
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I cleaned out my spice cabinet, and this is what I KEPT.
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Me. New hair. No make-up. Keepin’ it real!
There are a few more pictures over here.
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