“You’re making me feel so guilty,” she said. “But I don’t want to have so many people watching me talk about this. And I’ve got to finish all my college applications, and I don’t want to be stressing out about being in a video.”
“Okay, Charlotte. You do this video and say five sentences at the luncheon. You and a few friends do the next Heart Walk. You have a bake sale at church and raise $100. Guess what? You can add ‘Student Ambassador for the American Heart Association’ to your college resume.”
“Okay. I’ll do it. And not just because of my resume,” she said.
We soon learned there would be eight to ten hours of filming to make a four-minute video. Even I wasn’t ready for that much camera time.
The young video director asked me to look out our living room window with a pensive expression while caressing Charlotte’s kindergarten journal where she’d drawn a picture of herself in a blue hospital gown with a bright red heart on the left side. It was twelve years past her procedure, and she was a healthy teenager, but I had to reenact the pain and fear I felt when she was born and again when she was five. I also had to sprinkle in the stories and fear of my own heart problems.
The melodramatic introductory scene was forced, but it was honest. Then Charlotte and I learned the definition of B-roll, the footage shown while we talked out of sight of the camera. She was filmed doing all of her hobbies—playing lacrosse, painting at an easel, making vegan chickpea burgers, and messing around with our mutt, Charlie.
“Uhh, I don’t really have any hobbies,” I tried to explain to the very talented twenty-six-year-old videographer named Vee who possessed a lot of camera equipment and no concept of life as a working mom of three. “I go for a two-mile walk with a friend or two a few times a week. Can you film that? It’s really pretty with the sun coming up over Tampa Bay in the background.”
“Well, we need something more visual. What do you do in your free time?”
“Sleep? Drink wine?” I offered.
“That’s it?”
“Sometimes I read for a few minutes, before I sleep.”
Vee looked at me kind of sadly. I knew what he was thinking.
“If your heart is so healthy and raring to go, why aren’t you climbing rocks, running marathons, or at least refinishing shabby chic furniture? Why aren’t you doing something more visual than sleeping, walking, and reading?”
After disappointing Vee, and myself, I was in a bad funk for a few days thinking I had to take up karate or start a nonprofit that would change the world. I told a good friend I’d come face to face with how I waste my limited hours of free time, and she offered another viewpoint.
“Katherine, you’re always meeting someone for coffee, or a walk, or drinks on the Vinoy hotel porch. Who else schedules calls with high school friends or cousins when you have a free hour to go for a walk on a Sunday afternoon? Your hobby is people.”
Okay. I’ll take it. Having “people” as a hobby doesn’t get my body in kick-ass shape, but it does enhance my life. Two of those people I make a special effort to stay close with came to the luncheon to see Charlotte and me on the big screen and teared up when Charlotte, the reluctant star, brought down the house.
“I’m glad that everything worked out because I couldn’t imagine coming home from school and never seeing you or never hearing your voice again,” Charlotte said in the video to me as we awkwardly leafed through her kindergarten journal. “Going through the same journey with heart disease has brought us closer. Knowing that makes our bond really strong because we have both been able to go through really tough times and make it through,” she added.
I didn’t know then that these sweet yet strong words would soften the blow two years later when she came home from her gap year of working abroad with a tattoo. It wasn’t a butterfly on her lower back or a four-leaf clover on her left shoulder blade. She wasn’t even sure she was getting one until she looked through the book and saw the little heart with a hole in the middle.
“That’s how I always explain why I had to have heart surgery, because I was born with a hole in my heart,” she told me after raising her shirt for a few seconds and flashing me the tatt. It’s about the size of a Kennedy half dollar on the far-left side of her upper rib cage.
I was shocked. I was scared my parents would find out. And I completely and absolutely loved her.
“Well, Charlotte, at least it has real meaning. It’s a sign of your resilience.”
“I thought of that exact same thing as I was getting it.”
If my older daughter gets a tattoo, and she probably will because she doesn’t like her younger sister one-upping her, it will be at least twice as big. I hope it will symbolize her brilliant resilience as well.
I’ll never get a tattoo. That’s one rule I know I won’t break. But I have one etched in my mind. It’s Carolina blue, American Typewriter font, and simply reads: “Resilience.”
19. Miranda Lambert is Not a Licensed Therapist
Miranda Lambert was far from the final nail in my marriage. Nobody, not even my closest confidants, went on record saying after twenty-four years of matrimony, it was over. The country singer, however, helped me understand why some relationships have reached their end.
In her song “Baggage Claim”, she sings about suitcases that she’s incredibly tired of carrying because she can’t get a grip on them and they keep getting heavier.
In “Dead Flowers”, she tells the story of a husband who doesn’t notice the shriveled-up flowers in the vase of gray water. He tells her how beautiful they are but seems distracted. She sings of Christmas lights left on the house in January and a car that keeps rolling when the tires are threadbare.
In “Unhappily Married”, Ms. Lambert sings from the perspective of a wife telling her husband all the things they both find wrong in their marriage, then asks why break up? They’ve made it this far, might as well keep going.
In “Tin Man”, she offers advice to the Wizard of Oz protagonist. Having a heart really isn’t that great. Love is hard. She’d happily take his armor if he wants her heart, scars and all.
I married the right person. I felt so lucky that a guy from New York City and a girl from Raleigh somehow crossed paths in Spartanburg, S.C. Even with our different backgrounds, we had so much in common. From our first date on, we never ran out of things to say.
That’s how millions of relationships start. But we stayed immersed in each other long after courtship, marriage, and babies were born. When we drove eight hours between Tampa and Fripp Island, S.C., several times a year, we talked constantly, pausing only to change Disney videos for kids in the backseat or refill sippy cups. We never even turned on the radio.
We got married in Raleigh and moved to Tampa knowing nobody except two bachelor friends from my high school. Our first holiday season, I invited them for a formal dinner with the fine china and Waterford crystal we’d received as wedding gifts. Adam made a delicious and complicated Thai pasta from a New York Times recipe. Matt and Lee showed up more than an hour late. Drunk. But they said it was the best peanut butter spaghetti they’d ever tasted.
I slightly knew another woman from college and invited her and her husband over for dinner several times, but they weren’t available. After my third invitation, she spelled it out.
“We have a lot of weekend friends. We are not going to be available on a Friday or Saturday for you. But maybe we could try something during the week,” she suggested cheerfully.
I didn’t call her again.
Because Adam and I were two people alone in Tampa, we grew even closer.
After six years of marriage, we moved to a great neighborhood in St. Petersburg with brick streets and big, shady trees. Charlotte was a newborn and two-year-old Olivia was thrilled to have a towering live oak on which to hang a swing. There were none sturdy enough in the spanking new, antiseptic planned community we’d left behind in Tampa.
A college friend introduced us to lots of families with small childre
n and the network I’d longed for took shape. We were on a busy circuit of toddler birthday parties and dinners with friends. I finally ran into people I knew at the grocery store and had plenty of “in case of emergency” contacts to list on those blue forms submitted at the beginning of every new school year.
Adam covered the city of St. Petersburg for the daily newspaper, then called The St. Petersburg Times, and I wrote the paper’s weekly parenting column called Rookie Mom. My oldest daughter, Olivia got a little confused and told her friends I worked for Pokémon.
One hectic morning after Wade was just born when all three kids needed something at once and Adam was packing to go out of town, the Today show ran a segment on empty nesters. Marriage therapists offered tips for couples who find themselves lost after kids leave for college.
“We will have no problem as empty nesters,” I remember saying.
“None at all,” he said, as he kissed me goodbye.
If we had just a mediocre relationship from the start, maybe it could have survived evolving into worse than mediocre.
Life went on. Kids got older. Stuff happened. Baggage accumulated. We argued. We gave cold shoulders. We got lost in work. We got lost in kids. We disconnected. Something broke the ice. We laughed. We reconnected. Then stuff happened again. New baggage was packed on top of old baggage. And so on, and so on.
Whenever I felt we were in a really tough cycle, I’d suggest marriage counseling and Adam agreed every time. That’s more than a lot of husbands do.
Most counselors, whether in their nondescript professional buildings or bungalows converted into offices they shared with acupuncturists, made the same suggestions.
Don’t say “you always” or “you never.”
Repeat your partner’s statements to make sure you are interpreting him or her correctly.
Use “I statements.” For example, “When I speak to you and you don’t respond, I feel like you don’t think what I say matters.” Or “when you leave notes reminding me to take out the trash, I feel like you think I don’t help enough around the house.”
My cousin Lynn remembered the “I statements” from her rounds of marriage counseling before her divorce. She ended up saying, “When you act like you do, I feel like you are an asshole.”
In and out of marriage counseling and life’s stresses, Adam and I experienced good days and good weeks when we finished each other’s sentences and made each other laugh. Then we’d have days and weeks when we couldn’t walk the dog in the morning without an exchange that ended in silence or one racing ahead of the other to leave for work without saying goodbye.
We were both conscious of how we acted in front of our kids. When they worried about arguments or tension, we told them that it’s a normal part of marriage, which is very true. But to my closest friends, I confided it wasn’t normal for our marriage. We had been so happy and compatible and then we just weren’t. One day I looked back at the past few years and saw we had become a roller coaster, Himalaya, or (insert your carnival ride metaphor here).
I went from missing Adam terribly when he traveled to being relieved when he told me he had to go out of town for work. When I got home from the office and saw his car already there, I rolled my eyes. I told him this and he admitted he often felt the same way. We started seeing our sixth marriage counselor in 2017 with the goal of putting our baggage on the table, sorting it all out, and getting back on solid ground.
We saw a man we both liked relatively well from January to June. Not much changed. We saw another counselor in the fall.
This seventh therapist told us that seeing six prior marriage counselors meant nothing if they weren’t good. We liked him. He was direct with pointed questions. He tried to get to the roots.
Of all the therapists I’d written checks to in my lifetime, however, be they psychologists, psychiatrists, or licensed social workers, he was the only one who directed me to make it out to “Dr. So-And-So.”
After an uncomfortable therapy session, I told a funny story to Adam to break the silence as we drove together back to work. I remembered another PhD who insisted on being called a doctor. He taught public speaking with my mother at North Carolina State University.
The speech department went to a convention at a Wrightsville Beach hotel, which was still old school enough that guests signed a register when checking in. My mother’s PhD colleague, who was one of several with that distinction, signed in as Dr. James Bucknell while everyone else used only first and last names.
On the second day of their conference, a three-year-old girl staying at the hotel was stung multiple times by a jellyfish. Her parents dragged her little body out of the water and up on the shore as hotel employees ran up and down the beach bellowing for Dr. Bucknell. The good doctor rushed to the scene and rubbed a handful of sand on the welts rising on the girls’ legs and suggested she take some aspirin. It was all in a day’s work for a speech professor.
When I finished recounting the story to Adam, he laughed and told me I was a great storyteller and I kissed him. By the time we went to bed that night we were completely irritated with each other and I slept in our guest room, like I did on many nights.
A week later, we went back into marriage therapy. More unhappiness poured out on the doctor’s cluttered desk. Nothing the PhD said or we said seemed to lessen the flow.
“We don’t have a great marriage. A lot of the time it’s pretty bad,” Adam explained. “But sometimes it’s okay. I feel like we could muddle through.”
That’s when I decided our marriage was over. I wasn’t going to muddle through on a roller-coaster ride with valleys growing deeper if there was no hope of getting off.
Telling our children and seeing them struggle to adjust to divorce was harder than the worst scenarios I’d imagined. At the time of this writing, my parents have been married sixty-two years and still live in the house where I grew up. My children have to deal with things I never faced. Adam and I get along well, so that helps. Still, I keep mental lists of high-functioning, seemingly happy people who are children of divorce to remind myself that my kids will be okay.
I do know that I am okay. Wonderful friends and family have enveloped me when needed. I feel safe at home alone on the nights I don’t have kids around. When Uber drivers deliver me from the airport to my dark house, I tell them I can’t wait to get inside and see my two wild dogs, Scylla and Charybdis. (I really have a mutt named Charlie who adores anyone crossing the threshold or breaking through a window.)
I told a friend of mine who has had serious relationships, but never married, that I thought of her when I pictured a life with an uncertain future because she has lived one of the most full and happy lives I know.
“All I can say is that until I was about fifty-five or sixty, people sort of went ‘awww’ and felt sorry for me when I said I wasn’t married. Since then I’ve experienced nothing but envy!” she replied in an email, adding: “I’ve always thought nothing would be greater than a great marriage though, and there are some out there.”
This helped. So does my favorite song by Miranda Lambert.
It’s called “All Kinds of Kinds”. I don’t have the rights to include any of her very beautifully astute lyrics. But I think the title speaks for itself.
20. Snoopers Never Prosper
After I got divorced, the thought of going on a date with someone was intimidating. The last time I’d been on a date with someone new, Madonna was voguing, Macaulay Culkin was home alone, and Lori Loughlin was still just sweet Aunt Becky.
A few friends set me up on dates that went nowhere. I met one man after work for a drink, and he told me that he realized my children would always come first in our relationship before I’d even finished one glass of wine.
A date with another man was going well until he told me he had always been against gay marriage, but it was the law of the land now he had to respect what the Supreme Court decreed. Though I am a Democrat, I could date a Republican, but not someone who seemed to think to
lerance meant accepting gay people have the same rights as everyone else only when the Supreme Court mandates it.
I actually did have dinner with a Republican who was even a generous GOP donor. I liked him enough that I Googled his name when I got home and found an article about his ex-wife’s claims that he had an armory of guns, and she felt threatened when she agreed to their divorce settlement. It seemed like she was trying to get more money out of him, and the situation was ripe for exaggeration or total lies. Maybe there was no armory, but where there’s smoke, there could be an AK-47.
After this string of non-starters, a friend’s husband suggested he fix me up with his buddy who was an investment banker with a great sense of humor. Money and laughter sounded like a good combination, so I was all in. Turns out the funny banker was already dating a beautiful young ax thrower who performed at Ferg’s sports bar in St. Petersburg.
I dated a college professor for a little while who was a smart conversationalist and liked gourmet restaurants, art shows, and intriguing plays. We had plenty in common even though he was twelve years my senior. I’d been warned that the second time around in the dating world, men prefer women ten or fifteen years younger so therefore, women tend to date men who are ten to fifteen years older.
After we’d been going out a few times a week for about a month, I met him after work one night for dinner. He was sitting at the bar, had already ordered a nice glass of chardonnay for me, and kissed me when I arrived.
He knew my favorite wine and was kissing me in public. “This man really likes me,” I thought to myself.
After dinner, my date excused himself to go to the bathroom and left his phone sitting at the bar. I looked at it and started wondering what he was texting right before I walked in the door.
Maybe it was: “I’m about to meet the most amazing woman for dinner,” or perhaps, “This chick knows how to chow down.” I picked up the phone thinking it was probably locked, but when it wasn’t, I decided to quickly see if I could find out what he really thought about me. As soon as I started scrolling, I realized I was about to cross a serious line, plus he could walk out and catch me at any second. I set the phone down and patted myself on the back for resisting the temptation. He reemerged, suggested we split one more glass of wine, then held my hand as we walked to my car.
Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Page 10