Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  “Oh, you don’t want to that,” he quickly replied. “I brought my kids to Mexico once and my son and I watched those people sit there at that bar for hours, and you know what we noticed?”

  “What?” I said.

  “No one ever gets up,” he said. “How can they drink that much and never get up to go to the bathroom? Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  When he told his coworkers the next day about what he’d said, they all replied, “You talked to her about peeing in the pool on your first date? What is the matter with you? No wonder you’re single!”

  But honestly, that comment—that had me laughing so hard I couldn’t talk for five minutes—and his face, red with embarrassment, appealed to me. By the end of the date I was comfortable enough to mention that if I had known we were going to play basketball in the arcade, I would have worn my sports bra. And even more shocking to me was that I was okay with getting a quick kiss as we parted ways.

  And the sweet sting I felt surprised me so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

  Who knew I still had it in me?

  • • •

  For those people who are waiting for the “right time” to start dating after loss, I have some bad news for you. Yes, you should be self-aware, know what you’re looking for, and be in the healthiest place personally that you possibly can be. But, like child-birth, even if you have all of your ducks in a row, chances are you’re going to go through some growing pains.

  And many times, also like childbirth, things will happen when you least expect it.

  The truth is, there are certain things that you can’t work out before you’re in a relationship. There are things that you have to work out while you’re in it. Even if you’ve talked yourself out of feeling guilty, once you feel truly committed to the next person, those feelings might temporarily surface again. Even if you know with all of your heart that your first husband would really want you to move forward, there is a part of you, when you’re with someone new, that just doesn’t want to. You start realizing all of the things about your spouse that you loved and wish you had back, and then you start liking new things about your significant other and wonder why your husband never did that.

  By the time you’re dating the second time around, chances are the person you’re dating is also on his second time around. He could be widowed himself, divorced, or have just ended something long-term. Dating later in life means that everyone comes with some sort of baggage, and part of the process is figuring out if you can help each other carry what you both have without sinking under the weight.

  The bottom line is: we all have something to work on when we’ve lost something we were once invested in. And it involves patience from both parties.

  I had no idea how abandoned I felt by Brad’s death until I was in the thick of my relationship with Mike. And I don’t think he knew how abandoned he felt after going through an agonizing divorce until he met me. We went through a long and painful phase of alternately pushing each other away.

  Just when I would think things were going well, Mike would somehow upset the apple cart and make me doubt why I was with him. And just when I could see that he was getting completely comfortable…Bam! I’d step in with a whopper of my own. I’d push, force him into fights that were completely unnecessary, and generally turn his world upside down when he least expected it. I’d cut off communication suddenly and without reason, blindside him by telling him I needed some space, and through it all, my subconscious seemed to be asking him one question:

  “Are you sure you really want to be here? Because I’ve gotten past the point of being easy to commit to.”

  I’ll never forget the first time Mike told me that he loved me. It was late at night in the summer of 2009, and we were sitting in the dark on my back porch. One of the things I loved most about our relationship was how we could just rattle on like two friends who hadn’t seen each other in years, even though at that point we were talking multiple times a day.

  We never seemed to tire of telling each other things about our pasts, both funny and painful, and learning new things about each other was our favorite hobby. I remember looking at him, his face half glowing from the light shining through my kitchen window. There had been a pause in our conversation, and he suddenly looked at me a little sheepishly and said, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  I’d like to say that I had no idea what was coming, but I did. Women usually know when a man is getting ready to tell her that he loves her. We try and act surprised, but believe me, most of the time we’re not. We’re either dreading it because we’re still not sure about how we feel, or we’re hoping for it because we didn’t want to be the one who said it first.

  I fell into the latter category.

  “What’s up?” I said, trying to look innocent but really feeling like a fisherman who knows he’s finally caught the big one.

  “I…I think I’m in love with you,” Mike said, his face turned down a little and his eyes looking up at me.

  Now, I know a savvier woman would have been more collected at this declaration. She would have said, “Oh. Well. I’ll need some time to think about that. But thank you for sharing your feelings.”

  Not me. I stood up from my chair, walked over to his, and hugged him around the neck.

  “Thank God you said it first!” I exclaimed. “I’ve had to catch myself so many times before I’ve said it when we hang up the phone! What a relief it will be to just be able to say it!”

  Mike hugged me back and we began chattering away again, talking about when we first thought we fell in love with each other. We talked on and on and I’m not sure when that switch was flipped in my head, but I think it happened somewhere around midnight.

  “In love?” I thought. “What am I doing? I can’t be in love! It’s too risky! I have too much at stake! The kids…my sanity…my heart. Nope. Nope. Back it up.”

  And so I did what I always did to Mike. I picked a fight about something random, something out of the blue, and something that really didn’t matter. And Mike, who was suddenly having similar fears of his own after realizing that we had shared something that made us truly committed, fought right along with me.

  On and on we went. I don’t even remember what it was about, it was so insignificant. It was probably something years and years down the road that I was worried about. All I know is that at two in the morning, it ended with me kicking him out, telling him to go home, and that I wasn’t sure how I felt about him anymore.

  How’s that for an ending to that romantic story?

  As we always did, we cooled off, and by the next afternoon, everything was okay. We were back to talking and texting, nothing resolved because for some reason we were both thinking that our fight actually had something to do with what we were fighting about and that it would figure itself out later, when in reality, our fight had nothing to do with our discussion. It had to do with our fear.

  What if I left him as his wife had? Where would that leave him? And what if he died on me? Was I ready to take that chance again?

  I kept the arguments that Mike and I had to myself, not really talking to anyone about them, and for the first time, I felt like I couldn’t talk to my friends and family. Oh, I knew that they would listen. In the years that I had been married, my friends and I had all shared with each other the problems and annoyances that we had with our husbands. But Mike wasn’t my husband. He was my boyfriend…something that my friends had never had “later in life.” So there was a part of me that felt like they either wouldn’t understand or that they would dismiss these issues because he wasn’t my husband.

  My voluntary solitude with these problems was made worse by the fact that my kids were getting so attached to Mike. They would crawl up into his lap, hug him constantly, and generally couldn’t get enough of him. Every time I worried that the relationship might be too much or that
I might want to back away, I’d look at those faces, happy in anticipation every time they asked, “When is Mr. Mike coming over?”

  And that scared me even more.

  It was during a particularly heated insignificant battle when Mike finally raised both his hands and said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Do you want to be here?”

  “Of course I do!” I replied, ready for an argument.

  “Are you committed to us?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, so am I! So what in the hell are we arguing for?”

  It’s amazing what fear of the unknown can do to a relationship. I had to understand that yes, it was a possibility that he could die on me. But knowing that didn’t outweigh how much I loved him and how much I wanted him in my life. I started realizing that even though losing Brad was by far the most painful thing I’d ever been through, I wouldn’t trade the happy years I had with him, even if that meant I wouldn’t have had to go through the pain of losing him.

  I had to accept the bad with the good. The fear with the security. And I had to learn how to love all over again.

  23

  I was more than two years into widowhood, and I felt like things were finally coming together—that my life was starting to shape up into…well…a life. The kids were doing well, going to school and becoming small people who provided me with company, as opposed to toddlers who just gave me a headache. Firmly entrenched in my relationship with Mike, I felt like I was moving forward as I should be. But with the kids developing their own lives—in their own activities and constantly on the go with friends—and Mike on the road most weekends, a question kept popping up in my brain.

  What was I going to do?

  I could see the children becoming more and more independent. Mike had a life outside of our relationship that kept him busy and fulfilled. And so that question—about my future and where I personally wanted to go—would keep me awake at night and generally not leave me alone. I wanted something that would allow me to make my own schedule so that I could be around for the kids, something that was important to Brad and me. I wanted something that didn’t require going back and getting a master’s degree (something I felt sure that I didn’t, at the time, have the attention span to do). I wanted something that was my own.

  I had a sudden flashback to a conversation Brad and I had had years earlier about my going back to work someday. “You ought to look into getting your security clearance and work on proposals,” he said. “Contractors make good money, and they can pretty much make their own hours.”

  “What in the world would I do, working on proposals?” I said, laughing. “I’m no engineer.”

  “No, but you can write,” he said. “They’re always looking for technical writers.”

  So, after thinking about it for a few weeks, I decided to email Brad’s boss, Mary, and see if she had any insight on how I could get into writing as a consultant.

  Do you know how I can get involved in working on proposals? Brad mentioned something about it a while ago and I thought I would ask.

  To which she immediately replied:

  Yes. I’ll put you in contact with a company you can work through. I’ll hire you through them.

  For the next few months, I worked on getting my security clearance, taking a class on writing for business to brush up on some skills, and waiting for an email saying that they were ready for me to work. And that email never came. Later, I read:

  We want to work with you, but all of the proposals we’re working on are on the East Coast. And we know that you can’t travel.

  Even though I should have been discouraged to find out that my current life situation made it impossible for me to work a job I thought was a sure thing, I wasn’t. At that point in my widowhood, I had gotten fairly good at taking things as they came at me and really not panicking about anything. I felt like even though they didn’t have a job for me yet didn’t mean that they never would. And I did my best to hold on to that thought every day as I got the kids ready for school and did my usual tasks around the house.

  I didn’t realize it yet, but by preparing myself for that job—taking classes, doing research, and generally dusting off the skills I already had—I had been unintentionally working toward something I’d always wanted to do. I had been reminded of how much I loved to write and why I’d gotten that degree in English in the first place. I loved the process, the thinking behind it, how one sentence had the ability to make you laugh, while the next could have you in tears. Like putting together a puzzle, even the driest, most technical sentence can be configured just right so that everything comes together and makes sense. And I enjoyed figuring out a way to make that happen.

  After coming to the conclusion that this whole proposal-writing thing wasn’t going to happen, or at least not in the near future, I was back to “now what?” And even though I didn’t have a firm answer for myself, I felt a new idea right at the edge of my brain. And the answer came from a most unexpected place.

  People magazine.

  I was lying on my living room couch reading the book reviews to see if there was anything interesting that I wanted to pick up. I was reading a review for a memoir—and to this day I can’t remember which one—when I literally sat up and said out loud, “I can do that.”

  I walked down to my basement office that day and began to write. Not a book…I just started writing. Somehow, in that one moment, a voice was born and couldn’t be silenced. I wrote about all of the funny stuff that had happened to us that I knew would come as a surprise to a lot of people. All of the transitions the kids and I were going through. The good, the bad, the life affirming, and the life altering. It all came pouring out of me like it had been waiting there all along.

  “You know what you should do?” Mike said a few months after I showed him a little of what I had written. “You should start a blog. I mean, it’s free and you never know who might pick up on it.”

  And so I did. Completely confident that not one person out there would read it. But I underestimated myself.

  My mom and my college roommates never missed a post.

  I loved it. I loved writing about what we were doing, what we had done, and where I thought we were going. It became a diary of sorts and a way for me to process all that was happening. I made a promise to myself that whatever I wrote would be positive or at least end in a positive way so that even if no one else ever read it, I might be inspired by all we had done and how far we had come. Putting that goal in front of myself forced me to think about even the worst situations in an upbeat way. I contacted the Donor Alliance and told the volunteer coordinator there what I was doing, and she promised to spread the word and asked if I would start speaking for them as the wife of an organ donor. And even though I wasn’t getting paid a dime, I couldn’t help but feel that I had somehow found my calling.

  By the summer of 2010, Widow Chick, as I called myself on Facebook, was getting hits from people all over the world. I watched in amazement as other widows and widowers would try and connect with each other through comments and posts on the blog site and on the Facebook page. People who thought like I did. People who needed the same connection that I was looking for. People who wanted others to listen to them, laugh with them, cry with them, and ultimately say three magical words to them.

  “You’re not crazy.”

  It was all-consuming for me and I loved it. But there was a part that I couldn’t quite put my finger on…that just wasn’t enough.

  It came to me, as most of my good ideas do, while I was driving down the road in my trusty minivan. And when it came, it all came in a rush, complete with goose bumps and an optimism I can’t explain. I suddenly saw my life unfold before me in a way that I never had before and I knew—I just knew—exactly what I was supposed to do.

  “A website,” I thought. “Someplace where people can come together at any time of the night and talk to eac
h other. Where they can search for each other and find people they have things in common with—maybe even meet for a cup of coffee. Where they can talk to other people about issues like funerals, sex, dating, and dealing with in-laws without having other people who might not understand judge them or what they’re going through. This is it. This is what I’m meant to do.”

  I’ve since read articles from other writers about a “moment of obligation”—that instant when you realize that you need to stop waiting around for someone else to create or start something that you wish you had. I had no experience with websites. My technical abilities consisted of turning on my computer and checking my Facebook page. I could never even remember to update my virus software. But I remembered those early months of widowhood—before I had found my young widows group—when I thought, “Why doesn’t someone start something so that we can all find each other?”

  And two years later, that someone was me.

  I met with graphic artists, attorneys, and, of course, my ever-faithful financial planner, Kristi. After six months of meetings and late nights, copy and code, www.theWiddahood.com was born—something that I never knew I had in me to create—and in the months following, I saw people coming together, grateful for this place where they could find unconditional support.

  A place to come together.

  A place to connect.

  A place where, no matter what self-doubt plagues us on this journey, someone will be there to say what we all need to hear.

  “I believe in you. And I know you can do this.”

  Everything was falling into place. I felt alive and like my life was being driven by something that was bigger than me. I could work on the website and my writing on my own schedule. When the kids were on break from school, I could drop everything to spend the time with them that we all needed. Mike and I were spending more and more time together as a family—including his kids—which left us both exhausted, but in a good way. There were days when I found it hard to believe that this was my life because it was something I had never imagined before.