Living Happily Ever After
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Blog Articles

Of Corpses, Fish and Flowers

Date: July 20, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (T.S. Eliot)

I love “old-fashioned” flowers, like hollyhocks and peonies, but peonies are my favorite. Someone once told me peonies can live to be up to 90 years old. I don’t know if that is true, but it has made me love them even more.
I can’t imagine what they’ve seen and what they’ve survived to live that long.

Kind of like each of us as we live our unexpected lives.

My Colorado yard had LOTS of hollyhocks and peonies.

When I moved to Utah to begin a new chapter in my unexpected life, I left before my belongings. My former spouse, unemployed and waiting to be formally charged for the Ponzi scheme he perpetrated and the crimes he committed, moved my things to Utah for me after I was already working. Knowing how much I loved my peonies and that I had no money with which to buy new plants in Utah, the man I had divorced uprooted 2-3 peony plants from my Colorado yard and hauled them to Utah in buckets, hoping they could be transplanted in my new yard upon their arrival.

In the midst of working full time, tending my children in the evening, and trying to unpack and move in to our Utah home, one of the peony plants from Colorado died before I could plant them. I looked at it, dead, withered and lifeless in an orange Home Depot bucket, and realized I had a lot more in common with peonies than I’d thought. I felt like that plant looked and wondered if I was headed for the same fate. It felt like pieces of my heart were already there. But seeing the dead plant motivated me to plant the two remaining peony plants.

They looked dead, but I figured if that were the case, I couldn’t damage them further. I planted them in the middle of the July 2009 heat and went on living my life, not sure if they were alive enough to take root or if they’d survive the winter snow. I should have known better, though. I probably should have been more worried about whether or not they could survive my children!

Sometime during the winter, my four year old came to me one day, proudly holding an entire peony plant that he had uprooted. “Look Mom! Look what I found trying to grow in our yard! Look how strong I am! I ripped this whole bush out of the ground all by myself!”

My eyes were huge as I looked at the accomplishment dangling from his little hands–my peony plant, roots and all.

The loss of a plant, considering all I had lost, seemed like such a little thing. And it sounds petty, but in a year of disappointments I couldn’t help but add the peony plant to the list. But at the same time I acknowledged there were a lot bigger losses and issues in life, and in my world, than the loss of one pink peony plant. I had experienced too many to count in 2009 and as usual, knew I could choose to laugh or cry about things, so I shook my head at the absurdity of uprooting a plant from its home, hauling it several hundred miles in a bucket in the summer heat, transplanting it when it was mostly dead and with winter coming…and a small child finally doing it in.

I laughed.

It wasn’t THAT big a loss, but it’s still true: “Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.” (Bill Cosby)

It reminded me of our attempt at having a fish for a pet several years earlier. The fish was new to our family when we left on a vacation to Africa for one month. And wouldn’t you know it, I forgot to arrange for anyone to feed it while we were gone! I realized my mistake partway through the trip and prepared myself for a dead fish when we returned home. To my shock, the fish was alive and swimming in its bowl when we returned to Colorado! I fed it, changed its water, and secretly admired the little fish’s survival instinct. The next evening however, as I did the dinner dishes, I realized the fish was missing. Apparently, our cleaning lady had come, hadn’t realized anything was swimming in the fish bowl, dumped the contents down the drain and washed the bowl!

In the case of the peony plant, all I could do was compliment my son on his brute strength, give his “huge” arm muscles a squeeze of admiration, and help him heft the remnants of my peony plant into the big garbage can outside. Another peony dead. Sometimes the best laid plans die or don’t work out due to circumstances beyond our control.

One peony plant was left, but who knew if it was even alive, or if it could survive the rest of the winter?

I was walking in my yard recently and saw it. The peony plant was still in the ground, thankfully. It was finally green. And to my surprise, there were blossoms getting ready to bloom! Who ever would have thought? And after all of this time, one year since it was first uprooted, has passed?

“Where flowers bloom so does hope.” (Lady Bird Johnson)

It looks like I’m going to have peonies after all. With my hope. In my unexpected life.

Laugh Until You Cry

Date: April 16, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

Last April I listened to encouragement from my church leaders regarding tribulation.  While it was comforting, some bizarre part of me found humor in it.

Here’s why.  They mentioned trials of economic challenge OR employment challenge OR family challenge OR marital challenge OR disappointment OR a broken heart.  But no one ever mentioned all of them together, all at the same time! And THAT was my life at that moment.

I had to laugh.

And when I added in the hardship of hatred, persecution from neighbors, betrayal of friends, being “orphaned” without parents during the most unexpected nightmare of my life, crimes committed by my spouse, a prison sentence my spouse was facing, divorce, no alimony or child support (probably, ever), returning to the work force full time, having to send a child to daycare (back then, I thought that was the end of the world–lol), and everything else I was dealing with at that time…I laughed again. Harder.

I laughed as I wondered how I, of all people, got so blessed? Why had I had been given so many unimagineable opportunities for growth–and ALL at the same time?  ”Lucky” me!

It made me laugh so hard I cried.

And as the tears rolled, for some reason I realized, again, that I could do it.  I knew I was going to survive, although a tiny part of me felt it would be much easier not to. Somehow, some way, I was going to make it through my nightmare.  For me. For my children. I had to.

I was going to make it because I believe in a higher power and have always believed everyone has a purpose on the earth; things to accomplish, other things to learn.  Last April I wondered if maybe THIS experience was one of the things I was here for.  ”…And who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14) I couldn’t allow myself to fail.

Like Esther in the Old Testament, who had to stand for something in very challenging and difficult times to save herself and her people, I had a work to do (on a much smaller scale.  I only had to save myself and my four children.) I firmly believe we each have a work to do and we can’t quit or give up.  ”After we have done all we could do…and withstood the evil that men have brought upon us, and we have been overwhelmed by their wrongs, it is still our duty to stand.  We cannot give up; we must not lie down.  Great causes are not won in a single generation.” (Joseph F. Smith)

I had to keep trying to laugh in spite of feeling like crying. I had to keep getting out of bed each day and facing what was ahead no matter how much I dreaded it. I had to keep forgiving. I had to keep rising above the challenges. I had to keep doing everything I could to pull myself out of the black hole I had been thrown into. And I had to help my children do the same.

It was my duty.  I couldn’t let myself down, and more importantly, I couldn’t let my children down and allow this experience to ruin their lives before they’d ever really had a chance to live.

So I laughed until I cried.  Sometimes I just cried.  And I kept trying to learn and allow myself to grow through the experience that had become my unexpected life.

Questions I Pondered as I Drove

Date: March 11, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

Question: Have you ever been foolish enough to wonder if it’s possible to have your heart ripped out of your chest and survive?  Have your spouse of almost 20 years tell you what mine told me, on March 18, 2009, and you’ll know.

The short answer?  Yes.

The long answer?  Keep reading this blog.

Another question: How had everything I’d lived through from March 2009-July 2009 not (physically) killed me?  How had I not at least had a heart attack?

Followed immediately by another query:  How can it be possible to have the rug ripped out from under you, lose your entire life, get thrown off a cliff, survive the fall but land in the biggest giant mess of carnage and sewage imagineable, be hated by many who knew you and many who didn’t for simply surviving the fall and continuing to exist and still survive? (To maintain the integrity of this blog and my life, I should clarify much of the above is simply descriptive language.  I didn’t actually get thrown off a cliff, but it sure felt like it!  However, losing the “rug” underneath the existence of my life and the “filth” of crime, media coverage and publicity, hatred and vilification, being unrighteously judged by others, and everything else…I completely stand by!:)

Question:  Andrea, how do you get up every morning?  How do you get out of bed every day?  I know you don’t sleep anymore, I know you haven’t slept since March 17, 2009…but how do you get out of bed and face what is now your life? (This question I didn’t just come up with on my own.  Many people, good friends, had been asking me that one for a few months.)

There are two answers to all of the above questions, really.  Two reasons why I didn’t lay down and die or wander off into the sunset somewhere like, I admit, I was tempted, on occasion, to do.  Two reasons I didn’t quit or give up.  Two reasons why I got out of bed each morning to face another day in the life I certainly never chose and would never have forced on anyone else (even someone who hated me.) Two reasons I chose to live my unexpected life.  (Because I firmly believe “to live” is a choice.  I’m talking about truly living, not just existing, but carrying on and “blooming” wherever you’re planted.)

One answer is my children.  I survive for them.  Everything I do, I do for them.  To teach them how to live a good life, the right kind of life we all should be living–no matter what happens to us.  To give them a shot at having a future.  To help them achieve their potential and continue to achieve their dreams.  I mean, after all, your dreams shouldn’t change or die just because your life does.

The second answer is because of how I was raised and what I had been taught, especially by the example of the strong women in my family who had gone before me.  Truly, it was they who taught me to carry on NO MATTER WHAT by not just what they said, but by what they did.

I couldn’t believe it.  Another bolt of lightening.  (And thankfully, again, no unfortunate Harry Potter-esque facial scar!:)

I realized, as I drove my Subaru from Colorado to Utah, that I had the misfortune to be  the THIRD generation of Colorado women in my family who had disaster strike, got handed an unexpected life they wouldn’t wish on ANYONE, and left Colorado for Utah to begin again!

How had I never realized that before?

What kind of heritage had I been handed?

And I realized, also in that moment (but not for the first time):  a DARN good one!

I actually WAS prepared as much as anyone could have been.  I had been taught, by those who had gone before me, what to do and how to do it with grace and dignity.  I had been raised by incredible women who practiced what they preached, who carried on in the face of adversity.  I was going to do what they had done.  Because they had done it, too.

THAT is why I knew it was possible to have your heart ripped out of your chest and survive.  THAT is how I knew you could crawl out of the deepest hole of the best sewage life has to offer.  And THAT is why it never occurred to me to do anything but get out of bed each and every morning and carry on.

That is why I kept driving to Utah.