Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  From then on I watched them both wondering how, and if, the two of them could ever rehabilitate their relationship. I wanted them to but realized that I had no dominion over that. I was not even certain he and I could manage that for ourselves.

  That one incident changed how I approached each day from then on. I accepted that the marriage was over while hoping that we’d find some way to save at least parts of our relationship. I began to think about the steps we needed to take. I felt that my husband had begun to handle things on the advice of others or as he felt he needed to despite our long conversations and agreements about how to proceed. We were no longer in alignment about issues we’d once agreed upon. My focus changed from how he and I had been to how we should proceed to making what I thought were the best decisions for our children.

  My ability to trust in him or anyone became harder and harder. My ability to be civil began to wane as well.

  We finally told the younger girls that we were separating and as I expected they did not understand.

  “But you never fight,” our middle one, Sharon, said.

  “You love each other,” said Jane, the youngest.

  “We still do,” I assured them. “Things are different now. I understand that it is hard to understand. I’m so sorry.”

  I knew how they felt. It was all too hard to understand. Even for their mother.

  Though we had not settled on a specific date—a year and a half had passed since his disclosure—it was clear that sometime within the next six months or so we would officially separate and sell our home. We began to tell our neighbors. For ten years, we had developed a close group of friends on the cul-de-sac where we lived. We couldn’t have asked for better friends, and both of us felt supported and cared for by them. Past the confines of that small group, things were different.

  There is a welcoming and supportive LGBTQ community that extends open arms to someone who comes out, but the straight spouse remains in the personal world the gay spouse leaves behind—and it is filled with prejudice and misunderstanding.

  The private person that I am I began to feel exposed. Rumors were plentiful, people had questions. Some children were no longer allowed to play with mine. Some who were still allowed to play with them were not allowed to come to our home for birthday or slumber parties. Though my husband assured me that there had been no past or current relationship with anyone outside our marriage and I believed him, some people assumed that was not the case. I was told by one woman that I was lucky: “At least there isn’t another woman.” Others asked me if I’d been tested for HIV/AIDs. “You really need to go in right away. You never know!” It all became too much, and I retreated inward.

  I was angry, no matter how hard I tried not to be. Despite my experience and skill at relocating and setting up new households, I resented the prospect of having to pack up the remnants of our life, the life I loved, to move to a new place, and begin to build a new life alone. I hated having to sell what had been our dream home, and having to find a new one that I could afford on my own in the same school district for our children, trying to answer the children’s questions, supporting them, all the while maintaining a happy and “everything will be okay” front with my husband and everyone else. Once again, someone else’s orders directed my being displaced.

  My husband showed his disappointment, frustration, and anger at what he may have felt was my inability to be happier for him or trust that caring for us and being gay was not mutually exclusive. I don’t know whether he had those thoughts. We didn’t talk about them. As usual, I assigned reasons for his behavior toward me. As he offered ideas about how we could move forward, I listened while thinking of all the ways they could not work.

  Slowly, I began to resist hearing about the groups he attended or the new people he was meeting. It seemed to me to portend of what was to come—him living a new life and having experiences I would not be part of.

  He spoke about new people he met, some couples, like us, in which the husband was gay and the wife not. He shared the various ways they handled “life after the disclosure.”

  “They still live together in one house with their children.”

  I looked at him and asked myself, “How does that work? Do they meet once a week to talk about separate date nights and to schedule babysitting? Do they both date? What happens if one of them has a breakup. Is the other one expected to pick up the pieces?”

  “This couple lives in the same house but he has the upstairs apartment with his partner, and she lives downstairs with the children and hers.”

  I began to develop a checklist for “next steps and moving on.” When you’ve exercised all your options, make a to-do list, I always say. One Sunday afternoon, as we drank wine on the deck, I asked, “Where do you see this going? What do you think we should do? We obviously can’t continue like this.”

  “I guess we should separate,” he said, “and then file for divorce.” He looked uncomfortable, and I realized that I had made that decision already but set up the situation so that he would have to be the one to initiate it.

  I calmly pulled out my list. How calculated and passive aggressive it must have seemed to him that I would flaunt the evidence that I’d already decided on the direction we would take to end things. There, laid out in black and white, was everything I’d been thinking but not speaking about.

  Leaving was something I knew how to do. So was leaving first. Never underestimate a military brat’s ability to walk away and never look back, someone once said. Cut your losses, bite the bullet, walk away as you toss a live grenade over your shoulder. No gentle descent into the end of our story. Pretend it’s easy, leave the field under your own power. There would be other battles on other days. What I didn’t know was that I’d be my own worst enemy.

  As we worked through the lists, I fought my negative feelings and tried to focus on the good things about him, about us. But I could not always stop the negative thoughts. I tried not to believe that he’d chosen to abandon us happily or that he’d chosen the time, waiting until pivotal people in his life were no longer with us so he could enter a whole new world where it was easy to deny he’d ever been in ours. But hardest to accept was my sense that he now saw me part of his enemy camp.

  Sometimes I would say something and he’d nod knowingly, saying, “They said you would probably say that.”

  It enraged me. I wondered who the hell “they” were. Whoever they were, they had replaced me in his sphere of trust. They did not know him as well as I did, I thought. No one did, in my mind, completely discounting that I had never really known him either.

  One night while discussing something, the topic of which I do not remember, he said, “I really don’t care what you think.”

  I recoiled inside. Since his disclosure, my husband had always treated me with respect. I remember studying him for a few seconds to determine whether perhaps he’d had a mental breakdown from all the stress and did not recognize who he was talking to in that moment. This was not the man I knew. Not the man I’d married. Not my best friend.

  I said slowly, “Do you know who I am?” as though my next question would be, “How many fingers am I holding up?” or “Who is the president of the United States?”

  I asked in all seriousness, checking his expressions, body language, and affect for signs of mental distress.

  He looked at me squarely and said, “Yes. I do. I know exactly who you are.”

  I felt threatened—not physically, but in the sense that I no longer held any place at all in a relationship with this man. He could not possibly be interested in working anything out. He was done, but I persisted. Still not convinced he wasn’t suffering some sort of memory lapse, I asked again, “You know I’m Nancie. Your wife. The mother of your children?”

  He stood up from the chair he was sitting in and walked toward me.

  “Yes.”

  I looked up at him. “And you truly do not care how I feel or what I think?”

  “No, I don’t,�
� he responded.

  I saw the act of standing up and walking toward me as the first real phase of claiming ground of his own, pushing me away and out of his life. Just for a moment I wondered what I’d said that set him off. Maybe I had contributed to some sort of face-saving response in him by some expression or tone of voice.

  And yet, suddenly, all fear and confusion left me. I stepped away and looked at him.

  “Okay, that’s all I needed to know,” I responded, pleasantly, I think. Then I turned and walked away. He said nothing as I left the room.

  It had been a while since I’d experienced such clarity. Years, in fact. I felt lighter. I accepted it as a gift. I slept downstairs and all the way through the night for the first time in a long time.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, his bike was gone, indicating he was on a ride. I was grateful for a couple of hours of alone time. I found a note from him on the kitchen counter when I went to grab a mug of coffee. It was a lovely apology for what he’d said and how he’d behaved the night before. He wrote that he didn’t know why he’d acted in the way he had because I didn’t deserve that from him. He wrote, “I love you.”

  I stared at the note. And then, I was pissed, but not because I didn’t believe him or want to. It was because I knew it was over, that I would never get past his saying he didn’t care what I thought or how I felt. Nothing he could say now would ever change that.

  I tore the note up in little pieces, placed it in a small china dish, and lit it with a match. I watched it burn while I drank my coffee. Then I left the ashes in the dish on the counter where I found the note and went into the dining room to read the newspaper.

  After his ride, he came into the dining room and sat down.

  “Hi! Did you see my note?” he asked hopefully.

  “Yes, I did.” I said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I put down my paper and picked up my coffee mug.

  “No, I don’t,” I responded.

  Then I told him I thought he should find a place to live by January 2. That I did not want the children’s Christmas disrupted and that we could talk about details of the move, the sale of the house, and all the other arrangements later. But for now, I had nothing else to say.

  Later that day, I took the girls and we went shopping to buy new linens, a comforter set and accoutrements for the downstairs guestroom and bathroom.

  They helped me make up the sleep sofa and arrange all my towels and toiletries in the bathroom. I tried to make it cheerful. I felt unburdened and wanted them to know I was okay.

  Later my husband came downstairs. When he realized what I planned to do he said, “This isn’t necessary. It’s not right. You stay in the bedroom. I should move down here.” But I wanted, I needed, to be the one who moved. I had everything I needed downstairs, especially the floor separating where the two of us would sleep until he left.

  I began to take the girls to open houses so we could choose a new home together. It would be so hard for them to move. As a child I had promised myself that I would not make my children move a lot, or change schools, especially in the middle of the school year. I began to figure out when the house should go on the market so that they could end the school year in this house. And I looked for houses in the same school district so that they would not have to leave their friends and so we’d be moved in and settled before school started the next year. I wanted them to feel as though they had some say in something, even if it were just a new house. I wanted them to know I had not forgotten that this affected them, too.

  Still, I tried to understand why I couldn’t be more understanding about what he was going through. It finally dawned on me that I did not need to be married to him. I just didn’t want to lose my best friend.

  From the time of his disclosure, I had known that we could not remain married or continue to live together as he began to live life as a gay man. That’s a different thing than accepting it happily. But I had hoped that the only thing that would change was his address and that I’d sleep alone. I wanted him to remain my closest friend. I wanted him to still want to spend time with me. Not just the children. I wanted him to come over and have dinner, call up and ask me to do things that friends do, all the activities we had enjoyed doing together both with the kids and without.

  I did not want to think of him being smitten or in love with someone else. I knew what that was like. The thought of someone else in my place didn’t make me jealous. It made me terribly sad. I had hoped we could evolve into “best friends with children.” I was desolate when that didn’t happen, and it appeared as though we would become a statistic, the stereotypical ex-spouses who did not get along.

  We had discussed and worked out a plan for almost everything that needed to be handled prior to his leaving except one. We never discussed or settled on what we would be to each other when it was done.

  In fairness to my husband, there were times in the beginning when he attempted to reach out or to comfort me. There were times during the years after that he tried. I rebuffed his gestures. Not because I didn’t want the comfort or his care, but because when he left again, I’d miss it more.

  I did not want to have to need him or rely on him, though I had grown to. I fell back on the only thing I knew to do in difficult times—pack away the pain, hide it in a closet of my own making and carry on. It hurt terribly that I missed him and needed him more than he did me.

  For all our management skills and experience, despite all our years together, first as friends, then as spouses, we had not known how to navigate this new terrain and salvage any of what had brought us together in the first place. And though we were clear on who we were and who did what in terms of the children—schedules, responsibilities, etc.—we had not defined what we were to be to one another. We hadn’t even discussed it.

  Many years later, I went to his apartment to pick up one of the girls who planned to meet me after she finished work. He offered me a glass of wine, and we talked amiably while I waited for her to arrive. One of his neighbors casually walked into his apartment. Clearly, she was used to dropping by. He interacted with her easily, far more comfortably than he had with me in years. She wanted to fill him in on the status of another neighbor who had been hospitalized. Did I just imagine that he positioned himself in a way to block her view of me? As she glanced awkwardly at me and politely tried to include me in the conversation, I wondered how long he would pretend I was not in the room or that she didn’t see me sitting on his couch with my glass of wine.

  Finally, the woman walked toward me extending her hand, “I’m so sorry for interrupting your evening.” My ex-husband looked as though he would jump in front of her to block one part of his world from touching the other. He said, “Oh, I’m sorry. This is Nancie. A friend.”

  “I’m Sharon and Jane’s mother,” I said, smiling as I reached out to shake her hand.

  “Oh, I know your daughters. Lovely girls.”

  Lovely girls, as though I had to be told that. It felt very strange. I was hurt. A woman without a role. I was no longer his wife, not even his ex-wife, or even the mother of his children. I was “a friend”—not a best friend, not a good friend. What kind of friend was I?

  After the woman left, I queried, “A friend? I’m your friend?”

  I wasn’t sure why the word friend seemed so insulting. Hadn’t I hoped we would remain or at least grow into friends again? We had not and I did not realize it until that moment.

  “I didn’t know what to say,” he responded, obviously as startled by his reaction as I had been.

  “How about ‘This is Nancie, my ex-wife’ or ‘This is my Nancie, my daughters’ mother?’” I suggested. I tried to make light of it. I felt his discomfort. There was no point in coming up with a plan for a next time. There would be no next time as far as I was concerned. I’d make sure to stay outside of his universe, though he couldn’t help but continue to be part of mine because of the children.

  I would describe
our relationship after that as only children-centered. He backed me up if I called him in where discipline was necessary. He joined us for holiday and birthday dinners, for special events at school, traveled with us on team trips, and was indispensable if something needed fixing around the house.

  Once in a while, in between apartments, he lived with us in our downstairs family area where guests stayed. Even then, we were not able to find our way to what I would define as friendship or even discuss the possibility of one.

  For the next ten years, I redirected myself, my emotions in particular, to my work and my girls. My goal was to shepherd all three of them through high school and college as alive, happy, and healthy as possible, without drug problems or early pregnancies. Life went on and like a good soldier, I just kept marching through it.

  After nearly ten years, I was not equipped emotionally to find a new way to relate to him and his new life. Nor was I able to even think about redefining a life for myself. I was still in too much pain. I began to think like a short-timer—a soldier coming to the end of one station and looking forward to another. My youngest would be graduating in June and off to college. I’d be an empty nester. I could live and work differently. I resorted to habit and thought about packing up and moving on. Leaving that place and arriving at a new one.

  Then my mother died.

  CHAPTER 17

  Need to Know

  SEVEN YEARS after the demise of my second marriage, I called my mother to catch up. Mom and I always spoke on the weekends at least. When she didn’t answer I kept trying. After several attempts I began to worry, but Dad finally picked up the phone.

  “Hi, Dad. How are you?”

  “We’ve had some bad news,” he said.

  I expected him to tell me that my 102-year-old grandfather had died.