Living Happily Ever After

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“Yours Mine And Ours”

“I don’t answer the phone.  I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end.” (Fred Couples)

The phone call came at the end of the work day Monday afternoon. It was from the ice arena. Our sons, the boys we’d disagreed about and had broken our engagement off over just the night before, had gotten into a public brawl on the ice. Supposedly, his son bumped my son while they were skating and hitting pucks (that’s hockey.) But my son didn’t like that and hit his son. His son hit mine back for hitting him. And then my son took his hockey stick to his son, swung it like a baseball bat and hit his son across the back!

My oldest son witnessed it, ejected my middle son from the ice, and the offender was MAD. He called me, wanted me to pick him up from the ice rink so he wouldn’t have to wait there and watch the other boys having fun. Unfortunately, I work in another city so that wasn’t possible. (I also thought it wouldn’t hurt him to cool off, to sit and watch the other boys having fun on the ice, so I told him we’d talk about it when we got home.)

I hung up the phone and shook my head. WhoEVER would have thought I’d be the mother of a son who got in a brawl, in public? Certainly not me! (Yet here I am, delighting in all kinds of unexpected experiences I’m continually blessed with.)

Then I called #5 and left him a message. ”I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but there was a physical altercation on the ice today. I’m calm, I’m not upset; I hope you are too. While I don’t know if you have other plans for this evening, I don’t think we can let this go any longer. We need to sit down and talk to the boys, together, tonight.”

It’s funny how life prepares you for…life. How certain things (people, places, events, experiences) can prepare you for other things–even when you don’t realize you’re going to need them. Like how we’d had our disagreement about our boys just the night before. At the time, I’d thought it was a terrible thing–to fight and then break up–yet in reality, it allowed us to work through our issue, separate the issue from us, get it together and present a united front to our children.

When #5 walked into my home that night, he looked at me with a smile and joked, “What would Mike and Carol Brady do?”

There was only one answer to that. I’d learned it from my wise Colorado friend when I mistakenly expected to make my remarriage/blended family situation like The Brady Bunch and it wasn’t working, and I’d thought I was disappointed–until she straightened me out. I shared it with #5.  I said, “PLEASE! It doesn’t matter what Mike and Carol would do. We aren’t the Brady Bunch, never will be, and I’m ok with that.” I added, “Mike was gay; Carol was depressed; Greg kissed his step-sister Marcia; Alice couldn’t get her love, Sam-the-meat-man to commit…I don’t want or need to be The Brady Bunch!”

And in that moment I realized, again, I really feel that way. What #5 and I have, with our children, is right for us. It’s actually very, very good. We need to help a couple of our children learn to appreciate each other a little more–however biological siblings sometimes need to work on that, too.

But it was a good opportunity to tell #5 what I DID want: ”If we’re going to be like anyone, I want to be ‘Yours Mine & Ours!’” I exclaimed.

He looked at me strangely, couldn’t figure that one out, I guess, because he asked, “‘Yours Mine & Ours?’ Why that? They had way more kids than we do and besides, I’m not in the armed forces.”

“Yes, I know!” I explained. “But Rene Russo is WAY hotter. If I’m going to be like anyone, let alone any stepmother, let it be her!”

We laughed, went in together and had a great talk with our sons. I have to say, I think that challenge made us better; stronger than ever. The challenges of life, the unexpected life itself, have a way of doing that, you know.

“Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.” (Henry Ward Beecher)

Fortune

“Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.” (Mark Twain)

Living an unexpected life, I can’t help but sometimes compare the “then” to the now.

Here’s one: fortune cookies.

When I was married, my former spouse had a hostility toward certain things. (And of course, criminal tendencies that have now been revealed or not, as with all people, it’s never what you expect.) Shawn Merriman felt anger toward fortune cookies. The sight of them on the tray at the end of an Asian meal upset him. To have someone read their fortune out loud from the scrap of paper they removed from the crisp cookie shell made him mad. I believe his venom toward the end-of-meal treat stemmed from his mother’s propensity to consult real fortune tellers for prophecies about her life, and that she made plans and lived according to the information they divined–something he completely disagreed with.

Whatever the reason for his hostility, and for the sake of peace and harmony in our relationship, home and family, I gave them up. I didn’t look at or read a fortune from a fortune cookie, for most of the 20 years I was married. Then I got divorced.

A year ago my sister came to town and took my daughter and me to a Chinese restaurant for lunch. When the meal was over, the fortune cookies came. My sister grabbed one, opened hers and read it. My daughter and I did the same. That small event was so huge to me, I recorded it in my journal–not as a defiance of my former spouse and the old life I had lived, as evidence of things from the life of Andrea Christensen I was embracing again–and the crazy single woman I had become. I hadn’t read a fortune cookie in decades.

My fortune cookie revealed, “Someone from your past will happily enter your life.”

So I saved it.

I even put it in my wallet!

I knew I was crazy, and my behavior toward the fortune cookie’s prediction proved it.

Things changed, again, with Bachelor #5. He gave me an entirely new perspective, even with fortune cookies. He not only reads cookie fortunes, he adds certain phrases to the end of them as he reads them out loud, and laughs! His fortunes have opened up whole new realms of possibilities for me. Lol.

Speaking of fortunes, here are some helpful ones for the unexpected, single life. Wisdom I offer to all from a knowledgeable and trusted source: the fortune cookie.

“Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.” (The problem is knowing the language they speak, as evidenced by the international set of bachelors AND by the love language every bachelor speaks–but that is another blog post in itself!)

“Your secret admirer will soon appear.” (Just watch out for stalkers!)

“You are surrounded by fortune hunters.” (That is true for women AND men. I’ll never forget the man who told me he didn’t mind that I had four kids, “As long as they’re provided for by someone else.”)

“Behind an able man, there are always other able men.” (Helpful to remember as you’re looking for your Mr. Awesome and haven’t found him yet. Don’t give up. If he was out there for me, he is out there for you!)

And last but not least: “Answer just what your heart prompts you.” (Useful for you-know-when; THE moment; THE PROPOSAL.)

In fairy tales and real life.

“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale of all.” (Hans Christian Andersen)

Questions I Pondered as I Drove

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.