From This Day Forward

by Cokie Roberts

  The real tension was between mother and stepmother. Their different views of parenting caused constant conflict. “Sari would come on Friday afternoon in her red-and-white polka-dot dress and she hadn’t bathed or had her hair brushed since she’d left on Sunday night,” recalls Perry. “So I’d put Sari in the tub and wash her and brush her hair and wash her clothes and send her back with clean clothes every Sunday night.” Perry remembers those years with fury and frustration: “I was the mother without the honor. And still am.”

  Nancy, not Perry, went with Frank to PTA meetings and teacher conferences for Inez and Sari, and those evenings often ended in recrimination. “Perry could smell Nancy on my clothes and go crazy,” Frank remembers. Perry agrees that being excluded from those school events made her “hysterical,” and she feels that Nancy did not expect her daughters to do well in school and did not push them hard enough. Nancy always referred to the girls as “free spirits” who shouldn’t be shackled by conventional expectations, but others thought she was expressing a latent racism, holding the girls to lower standards because they were not white. When Sari had an asthma attack and was in danger of falling behind her class, it was Perry who taught her third-grade math. And when Sari wanted to apply to a special school for artistic children, it was Perry who encouraged her, while Nancy remained skeptical. “I went nuts, I was in such a rage,” Perry remembers. “She was going to undercut that kid in every way she possibly could.”

  The girls sometimes felt like pawns in their parents’ power struggle. “They would schedule holidays and parties on the same night, and make us choose to prove our loyalty,” recalls Inez. Since Perry is Jewish, Passover became a particular problem, and she still gets agitated remembering the year that Nancy, “with typical insensitivity,” sent the girls back from vacation too late to attend the Seder. The Owens household had “the longest Christmas Day in the whole wide world,” because Inez and Sari spent Christmas Eve with their mother, and Abigail and Mark couldn’t open their stockings until the girls arrived around noon. Then all four kids waited for Perry’s father before opening the rest of their presents. Christmas, sighs Perry, “just goes on forever.”

  Perry has a complicated relationship with her stepdaughters. At times the girls threw “terrible, terrible tantrums,” and occasionally they still do. Not long ago, Sari marched into Perry’s office at a publishing company and shouted that she hated her stepmother “more than life itself.” With grim humor Perry recalls the day: “Thank God I’d been promoted and had a door to my office.” On other days, Sari, who works in a social-service agency, will call her stepmother at seven in the morning and ask for advice on how to handle a particular problem. On Mother’s Day, she called Perry and reminded her, “I have three mothers to choose from”—her adopted mother, her stepmother, and her biological mother, who has recently reappeared in her life. Perry treasures the fact that Sari called her.

  “There were periods that were just incredibly tough, where the girls were acting out big time,” Perry says. “I remember being incredibly upset, but I never didn’t want them. I never didn’t love them.” She takes comfort in the advice of several therapists who explain the dynamic this way: “Often-times the stepmother, especially a good stepmother, is the focus of all sorts of anger and tension because I’m the only one it’s safe to be angry with. To be adopted and have your parents divorce is to be very fragile in a lot of ways. And to be terribly afraid of the anger of both of your parents. But your stepmother is fair game.”

  It was not just the kids who were caught between their mother and stepmother. Frank felt squeezed as well. Perry maintains that her husband favored his adopted children over his natural ones because he was “terrified of being disloyal” to Inez and Sari. And she accuses Frank of not standing up to Nancy on questions of child rearing: “I was furious with Frank because he really couldn’t cope. I would be frantic and upset and we would get into rows, but it never occurred to me to walk away from the kids. Frank maybe, but not them.” Frank has a slightly different take on the conflict: “Perry was angry for a long time, because I cared more for the older ones than the newer ones, but it was mainly a question of age. I care more for jokes than I do for bottles.”

  Handling Inez and Sari has been a major source of friction between Frank and Perry, a recurring spark of discord that at times has threatened the stability of their marriage. Perry wanted her husband to share her hatred of his first wife, but he never did, and they could not get the conflict behind them because the girls were still around, forcing their parents and stepparents to deal with them and each other. It’s easier now, with Inez and Sari gone from home, but the girls can still stir up trouble in the Owens household. Frank and Perry were planning a reception in New York for Inez and her new husband a few weeks after the wedding and Perry wanted something “spectacular,” complains Frank, at least in part to show up her old rival Nancy. But Frank, who still sees himself as a small-town midwesterner, found the thought of a “spectacular” New York party deeply nerve-racking. “I was depressed for a week,” he says.

  In blended families, graduation days can be almost as hard as weddings. When Inez graduated from college, Perry arranged a lunch and Nancy and her new husband, Ralph, both attended. Perry describes the event: “It’s perfectly pleasant and celebratory and Ralph leans across to me and says, ‘Well, I guess we don’t have to do anything like this again until Sari graduates.’”

  But when Sari graduated from college in Ohio a few years later, there was no second attempt at togetherness. Frank and Perry were talking to Sari after the ceremony, and as Perry remembers: “Nancy comes up and says, ‘Oh, are you ready? Let’s go, we’re going to have lunch and go to these antique shows,’ and takes Sari and walks away. I cried all the way to West Virginia. I just cried and cried and cried. I was just so upset and angry. There’s nothing you can do.”

  No one in Perry’s family questions her devotion, but they do question her judgment. Frank says his second wife always felt competitive with his first wife and “it was very important to her” to tell the girls “what a lousy mother Nancy was.” But in Frank’s view, “the girls didn’t want to hear that” from Perry, and her animosity toward Nancy “gets in the way of the adult relationship she wants with the girls.” Abigail agrees with her father: “It’s got to be hard to be a stepparent, but there are times when you have to shut up and deal. You have to remember that you aren’t the only parent and some occasions are not meant for you. There are times when you should back off.” Inez agrees that her stepparents should not feel so competitive: “I keep wishing they wouldn’t try to supplant my original parents. It doesn’t have to be one over the other.”

  Despite considerable professional success, Perry says, “I’m pretty much defined by my family and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She is proud of her children, all four of them, and happy that they all see each other as siblings. And she knows that being a stepparent means making mistakes and accepting compromises: “But you have to play with what’s there. Do I regret any of it? No. Do I wish I’d kept my temper better? Do I wish I weren’t so tired so much of the time? Do I wish I hadn’t been on overload so much of the time? Yes, very much. Very much. I worry that they will think of me being so strung out and tense, when I was juggling, juggling, juggling all of the time. But are they all terrific? Yes, absolutely. They’re really super.”

  Afterword

  After talking to us, and comparing notes with each other, these three families had some fascinating reactions. In just about every case, people told us they’d learned things about each other and their relationships they hadn’t known before. Ellen Terry says it was like “therapy” for her two sets of parents to express themselves about some long-simmering grievances and hear her version: “This was an excuse for me to bring some things up and make my parents think about them, because obviously these are conversations you try to steer clear of.” In particular, her mother, Rita, was struck by the insight of her stepmother, Arlene: ther
e shouldn’t be a competition for Ellen’s affection. If she had a good relationship with one woman, her relations with the other improved as well. “Now my mother wants me to have a better relationship with Arlene,” Ellen notes. Tony Morella learned, for the first time, that when he came home one day and smelled something burning, it was not overcooked grilled cheese—as he had been told at the time—but the incendiary effects of his son’s cigarettes. It was also news to Tony and Connie that their six wards are now in touch with their biological father, a subject they still don’t discuss. And one of their nieces, Ursula, had this reaction when she read that Tony considered his six surrogate children a “gift from God”: “I wish we had heard that sooner.” Frank and Perry Owens read our conversations with their daughters before attending Inez’s wedding and it helped them survive the weekend. “I really understood what was going on a lot better,” says Perry. She also realized that her husband and her daughter Abigail were using us to send her a message: be less critical and more tolerant of others in the family. All this reinforces a simple point. Communication is to a marriage what sunlight is to a plant: a basic necessity.

  Chapter Seven

  OUR LIVES

  FROM THIS DAY FORWARD

  Becca’s wedding completed a cycle that had started thirty-one years before, almost to the day, on the exact same spot. For both children, their primary responsibility was now to somebody else, not to us. When they arrived safely somewhere, they would call their spouses, not their parents. But seeing them married, to people we liked so much, gave us a wonderful sense of completion. Parenthood is easily the hardest job either of us has ever taken on, but also the most rewarding. Now we could say, “We’ve done it.” Sure there was a sense of loss, but that’s what life is about, letting go. The words of the wedding ceremony, “from this day forward,” had new meaning. Our travels together still had a long way to go, and now our children were starting on their own journeys, joining their own partners, writing their own stories.

  CR: At this stage of life, with the children grown and gone, think how sad it would be not to have each other. We’re still able to look at each other in the morning and say, “Gee, I’m glad you’re here.”

  SR: Or at least most mornings! Let’s not get too sappy here.

  CR: Fair enough. Most mornings. I think the word is devotion. There’s a special level of affection that is based on longevity, on knowing each other well over a period of time and going through many things together, happy and sad.

  SR: I think of the day my dad died. Cokie was supporting my mother as we walked down the corridor in the hospital to see my father for the last time. Those moments are as meaningful as walking a daughter down the aisle to be married. I think that there is a great joy in familiarity, and the most obvious sign of that is the way we finish each other’s sentences.

  CR: Or don’t even have to begin them. The kids think we’re quite loony. They picture us as these doddering old people, barely managing to make it through the day!

  SR: Well, we do give them reason to believe that! We are creatures of great habit.

  CR: Humans, you mean.

  SR: Humans in general but us in particular. At times in our lives we’ve lived in exotic places and done adventuresome things, and with any luck we’re still able to do that. One of the things I’ve learned in midlife is the importance of accepting new challenges, and the first day I walked into a college classroom at age forty-seven I was taking a long leap off a high board. But I also think at this stage you come to cherish what’s comfortable and ordinary, sometimes in very little things. I plant white geraniums in the same pots every summer so we can see them from the kitchen table, and I’ve told Cokie one of my aims is to fill her life with flowers…

  CR:…I’m afraid we’ve become fogies…

  SR: We’ve lived in the same house for twenty-two years.

  CR: I’ve lived here for forty-seven myself.

  SR: We vacation in the same house for the same two weeks in South Carolina every year. The shape of the beach, the smell of the sea. It’s all the same.

  CR: We don’t like to make choices. We have to do that all day, every day. We have to decide what stories to write, what people to interview, what’s important, what’s the lead, what words convey the meaning. We also have to be “on” a good bit of the time, to perform. But at the end of the day we want to shut down, have our own time…

  SR:…to unplug from all the sockets…

  CR: In fact, when a rumor spread recently that our favorite neighborhood restaurant planned to close, I stormed in there and attacked the owner! Don’t you dare do this! We are incapable of change!

  SR: And, we’ve learned after all these years, we’re not going to change each other. For all the ways we’ve adapted and the quirks we’ve accepted, we remain different people with different backgrounds. For instance, I will never share Cokie’s experience as a woman, or her education as a Catholic, and occasionally we’ve disagreed so strongly on an issue that we’ve split our newspaper column in half, with each of us writing a different opinion. But the differences show up in personal ways, too.

  CR: I was raised in a situation where family members and close friends stayed with us for weeks and even months at a time. I would move into my sister’s room with her and the guests would take my room. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t inconvenience myself for other people. My aunt Tootsie, who had seven children and not much money, had a saying that summed up the family attitude: “If there’s room in the heart, there’s room in the home.” And sure enough, I would sometimes move into her home for the whole summer. That was very different from the way Steven was raised. I don’t think you ever had people spend the night, right?

  SR: That was partly because we lived in very cramped conditions. By the time my sister was born, almost every room in our house that wasn’t the kitchen or a bathroom became a bedroom. But basically I agree with you, we grew up with a very different sense of privacy, and it’s taken more than a little adjusting on both sides. I had to learn to be more flexible and Cokie had to learn to be more protective.

  CR: But it’s still a source of tension, in fact the greatest source of tension in our marriage. There are times when I feel Steven is being selfish, when he doesn’t want to put himself out. Other times I know he is absolutely right, that if we operated the way I would instinctively operate, we would never have a minute to ourselves, we would be completely overtaken by other people’s demands. But there are still times when I think he’s wrong.

  SR: I think at times she allows our lives to be dictated too much by other people. She can push herself to exhaustion with the demands of work and entertaining and caretaking. I love having our home be the center of family events. The portrait of Cokie’s father hangs right there over the dining-room table, a table that has been the setting for so many ceremonies and celebrations. But Cokie has finally learned that our house can’t always be the center. Other people in the family and other friends want the chance to be the host, and not always come to us.

  CR: That’s true.

  SR: Sometimes there aren’t enough holidays to go around. Our niece Elizabeth, who’s very special to us, is married to a Danish man, Michael Davidsen, and in Danish culture, Christmas Eve is a special time. So they’ve made a big point in the last few years of making Christmas Eve their holiday. Michael cooks a Danish meal and we go through the Danish customs, like finding the nut in the rice pudding. It’s a good example of the next generation saying, “We don’t always want to be the kids, we want to be the grown-ups,” and it’s important to give them that chance.

  I’ve discovered that with my students as well. I have a deal with them—when they’re undergraduates and don’t have any money, I always pay when we go out to some campus beer joint. Once they graduate and have jobs and want to take me out to lunch, I will happily accept.

  CR: It’s a passage.

  SR: I now have students calling up all the time saying, “I can buy you lunch!” Which means,
I have a job. One young man, during his first week at his first law firm, took me to lunch and paid with a credit card that was so new, it was glistening. It was a great moment for him. I’ve learned that it would be insulting for me to say, “No, I’ll pick up the check.”

  CR: It’s also nice for kids to have adult friends who are not their parents. To have someone who is interested in you and cares about you but does not have the emotional baggage of a parent-child relationship. But it’s good the other way around, too—for us to have young friends who are not our children.

  SR: Then there are the four-legged friends. I had never grown up with animals, but our kids let it be known at a young age that they would not be similarly deprived. When Lee and Becca were little, we had the usual assortment of guinea pigs and hamsters; then, even though Cokie is wildly allergic to them, we collected a few cats as well. The move back to America meant the younger generation’s demand for a dog was no longer something we could ignore.

  CR: Sebastian, a cute little poodle-terrier mixture from the pound, had hair just like Steve’s. In fact, one night when Steven was away on a trip, he got home earlier than expected and crawled quietly into bed so as not to disturb me. When I turned over and felt this mop of curly hair, I started fussing, “Get out of this bed, you know you’re not supposed to be here.” Steven was somewhat taken aback, to put it mildly. When I realized my bedmate was my husband, not my dog, I thought it was pretty funny.