Living Happily Ever After
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Detours

Date: March 24, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.” (Barbara Bush)

In conjunction with my Las Vegas business trip, I was asked to speak at our corporate event there regarding the philanthropic effort of our company (one of the areas I manage.)

Service is something I’ve always been passionate about, particularly since there were moments upon entering my unexpected life I wasn’t sure how my children and I would have survived without a little help from our friends (and even some strangers) who delivered food to us, made meals for us, gave us cash, sent gift cards, left a thoughtful treats on the porch, wrote notes of encouragement, smiled at us (when it felt like nobody was), made my first Mother’s Day post-Ponzi scheme not just bearable but beautiful and joyful, tended my children while I attended to the details of wrapping up a life…I can’t even list all the ways we were blessed by (and continue to be blessed) by service from others!

For that and many reasons, I was happy to do it and was grateful for the opportunity to talk about making a difference in the world. I am certainly the grateful beneficiary of so many people who have had an influence for good in my life.

I was thankful to do it, that is, until they announced my name, I walked out into the glare of the lights, on stage…and faced over 4,000 people! That’s a pretty big crowd. I don’t think I’d ever spoken to more than a crowd of 1,200 or so people prior to that in my life! Whew! In moments like that, it’s nice to have a monitor prompting you (reminding you) what you had planned to say before your mind went blank at the sight of so many people.

However, despite the emptiness of thought I temporarily experienced, I did have the presence of mind to think this, like I have so many times: “If someone had told me in 2009 that THIS was an experience that would be coming to me just a few years later and courtesy of my unexpected life, I’d never have believed them! Like the Ponzi scheme my former husband perpetrated, I never saw it coming.”

There is a LOT of good in my new life. SO MUCH happiness and joy. So many unexpected opportunities I’d never have had. Tender mercies I’d never have known. Things I may never have learned and certainly things I’d never have known I was capable of surviving, much less doing and accomplishing. I realized something:

I’m grateful for the detours.

“…Believe in your destiny; that you will succeed, you will meet a lot of rejection and it is not always a straight path, there will be detours – so enjoy the view.” (Michael York)

It’s a pretty nice view in the unexpected life. How’s yours?

Destiny, Serendipity…or Chance?

Date: September 13, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

I finally had the age issue under control but had yet to utter the two words that would change everything and take my unexpected life in a completely different and unexpected direction. Verbalizing those two words made me nervous. I continued to hold out.

One night I asked Bachelor #5 how he was so calm about everything.” Nothing seemed to phase him–not my former spouse residing in jail, not four additional children (including a four-year-old), not my devastated financial situation, not the potential challenge of blending two families. He was always patient, calm and optimistic around me and THAT gave me confidence, courage and hope. Although I try to be optimistic, there is a part of me that worries. I needed to know why Bachelor #5 didn’t seem to be worried. He shared his reason with me.

He told me he didn’t know how he met me! (Duh. Even I knew the answer to that one: online.) He clarified, “No. You were NOTHING I was looking for. I don’t know how I found you.” And THAT is why he wasn’t worried? That screams romance like nothing else. You can imagine how well that went over with me so he hurriedly explained the dating philosophy he had lived by since his divorce.

Because the trend was that men date down a decade, and he’d never been a fan or follower of fads, he intentionally looked for women 48 years and older; women his age. (He had also been married to someone older than him the first time.) Because his children were mostly raised, he looked for women whose children were grown. He also looked for a singer or an actress, someone who would understand his passion to participate in theater and possibly join him there. (In case anyone is keeping track, I am none of those things!)

When I asked him if I had met ANY of his criteria, he said yes, “You lived in Utah County. I would not have dated you if you hadn’t lived in Utah County.”

Of all criteria a man could judge by, I’d never anticipated that one. Not ever. (Of course, I’m not from Utah. And over the past year, I have seen the passion many residents feel for their great state–some of which even extends to Utah County residents who love it so much they wouldn’t consider living anywhere else.) After everything I’d ever imagined being judged for, height, weight, outer beauty, inner beauty, education, career, intelligence, etc…I had simply been the right location! I finally get why real estate agents think location is everything. Lol. I guess sometimes it is, even in dating!

Ironically, I had tried so hard to live elsewhere. When thrust into my unexpected life I had tried my utmost to stay in Colorado but even a woman as dense as I can be finally had to admit that for some reason, I was supposed to live in Utah. EVERY thing had worked out for me to live in Utah. But when I had given in to the idea of living in Utah, my plan had been to live in Salt Lake City. And when I couldn’t get that to work out, I had planned to live in several other Salt Lake-area locations, but nothing had worked out for me anywhere but in Utah County. So I ended up in Utah County, commuting to work, but I knew I was where I was supposed to be–for whatever reason. I had assumed it must have been for my children, and maybe it was. But I’d never stopped to think it might also be the best place for me.

So when Bachelor #5 told me the one criteria I fit, I had to laugh. Only I knew that I had tried so hard to work out so many living situations OTHER than Utah County!

Bachelor #5 said he logged on to the singles site one night, input his criteria, and although I shouldn’t have been a match, there I was on his computer. My profile should never have been there, there wasn’t much about my profile that fit the criteria he was looking for: I wasn’t the right age, I had children at home (and one of them was young!), I wasn’t a singer or a performer, but he read my bio anyway and said when he had finished reading, none of his criteria mattered any more. He contacted me, got to know me, eventually asked me out, met my children, and the rest of the story…is still unfolding!

He told me, “All I can tell you is that I feel so good about everything, so at peace with everything, I’m excited to be a part of it all. And I feel very strongly we didn’t find each other on our own. There is no logical way to explain how we found each other; we never should have found each other; we couldn’t have found each other without ‘help’.”

Maybe he was right. I was attending singles activities sometimes (Sunday night meetings and dances, on occasion) but Bachelor #5 NEVER participated in them, so I never would have met him without some help from somewhere. He was online, but I was nothing he was searching for; he shouldn’t have found me based on his search criteria. Add to that, he and I were each online just one month and our one month participation on the same site, out of all the sites there were to choose from, just happened to overlap. Maybe we had been “helped” in finding each other.

Or maybe it was destiny. “Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Or serendipity. “Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.” (Lawrence Block)

Or chance. “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.” (Anatole France)

Call it whatever you want–serendipity, destiny, chance, a miracle, a “tender mercy.”

But I began to believe I was on the right path to reach my fairy tale after all. It’s got all the makings of one, even from the very beginning. The only thing missing was “It’s Time.”

The two words Bachelor #5 was waiting to hear.

Bachelor Bee Gee

Date: June 21, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

Bachelor #2 (aka. Bachelor Bee Gee) was paranoid about houses. At least that’s the impression I got. He asked me out on a date, for dessert, but insisted on meeting me at a nearby parking lot rather than my home or the restaurant. He told me he never let anyone know where he lived on the first date.

Should that have been my first clue?

I met him at the parking lot he designated, he helped me into the cab of his giant white truck and he turned on the engine and revved it–a sign of things to come. High school.

Again?

He put the truck in gear and drove toward the restaurant. As he drove, he reached over and turned on the stereo. It was blasting so loud I thought he was joking with me, you know, turning up the radio and blaring an 80s song to act young for me or something. But no, he didn’t even look at me. He was too busy singing along and bouncing in his seat and I realized it wasn’t 2009 anymore for at least one of us on the date! The music was so loud it hurt my ears. And then he began to shout over it.

“Do you like the music?”

“What?” I asked.

“Do you like this song? This music?”

I had to reach over and turn it down to hear his question. When I finally figured out what he was asking me, and with my ears still ringing, I realized it was a hard rock song I hadn’t heard since the 1980s. High school. Again.

As we drove he told me all about the song I was hearing and how much it cost him to purchase it; that he had every song from the 80s loaded into his system and how much each song had cost; and the grand total he had spent on music. Then he moved on to the benefits and features of his stereo system–how much he had paid for everything. And then what he had paid for his truck. And then the travel he planned to do in the next few months–and how much he planned to spend.

The whole drive to the restaurant was like that. He talked about everything he owned and how much everything had cost–all the while shouting over the 80s hard rock music he had blasting. I wondered (not for the first time, since I began dating) if I was being punked!

No such luck.

We arrived at the restaurant, the hostess seated us, gave us the dessert menus, and we chatted while deciding what to order. The server arrived to take our order and Bachelor Bee Gee directed me to order first. I did. The served looked at him, expectantly, but he closed his menu and said, “I’m not having any dessert. I don’t like sugar. In fact, I rarely eat.”

Total “Jive Talkin’.”

Then why in the heck had he asked me out for dessert?

The server raised his eyebrows at me before walking away. He seemed to say, “Where in the world did you find this winner?” He didn’t want to know the truth. Online. “I Started A Joke” the day I got online.

I offered to cancel my order so we could do something more to his liking, he said no, and proceeded to tell me how he ate only every 3-4 days and that he never ate dessert. (I thought, “This is going to be a long night. Maybe when he sees I eat sugar, then he’ll take me home early!”) I wondered how he was going to entertain me while I ate dessert. I soon found out.

He decided to entertain me with strange facts about himself, like the “fact” that he lived in a home that was once owned by the Bee Gees. He said it had been the Bee Gees’ mountain retreat in Utah. (Hence the name, Bachelor Bee Gee!) He told me about talking to the Bee Gees on the phone, negotiating the deal, etc…

My dessert came, I ate a little but saved most of it to take home to my kids. I figured Bachelor Bee Gee may not eat sugar, but my kids would enjoy a treat courtesy of the man who starved himself and apparently, liked to watch other people eat dessert! We weren’t at the restaurant long. There is nothing appetizing about eating dessert in front of someone who not only isn’t having any, but who never eats any–or for that matter, supposedly, never eats food!

We got in his truck, and instead of driving me back to the parking lot as I expected, he started driving toward the mountains. I thought maybe he was taking a shortcut to the parking lot that I didn’t know about (I was still new in town, he was not) but finally I figured out we weren’t heading to where I wanted to go. I asked, “Can you tell me where we’re going?”

He told me, “We’re going to my house–to the Bee Gees’ mountain retreat.”

I said, “Wait. I thought you didn’t let anyone see where you lived on the first date.”

He looked at me, winked, and said he wasn’t worried about me. He had a feeling that I was “safe.” I wasn’t worried about me either. But I was seriously starting to wonder about him!

We pulled up to the house and it wasn’t what I had expected: a 70s-style house in the middle of a neighborhood. I tried to imagine why the Bee Gees would buy a house like that and put it in the middle of a normal neighborhood. If I were coming to enjoy the Utah mountains, and traveling from down under to do it, and if I were a celebrity, I think I would want a bit more privacy!

I walked in the door, expecting a total 1970s-style, funky house and it was not what I expected. He took me on a tour and showed me where every Bee Gees decorating touch had been, what it had been, and showed me how he had ripped it out and replaced it with something modern! There was absolutely nothing BeeGees about the house at all. What a waste! It was a “Tragedy!”

He took me into the family room of the house. A fire was roaring in the fireplace. (That should have been my first clue.) Suddenly, and mysteriously, BeeGees mood music came on and I realized a serious case of “Night Fever” might be coming my way. It was time for me to focus on “Stayin’ Alive.” Literally.

I told him it was late, I had to work the next day, it was time for me to go home, and I headed for the door. It was almost as if his truck was calling, “Run To Me.” So I did just that.

He took a while to come out of the house. As I stood there in the dark and cold waiting for him, I imagined having to have to call my teenager to come pick me up and give me a ride home. (If the previous events of 2009 hadn’t scarred him, THAT probably would have! lol) But fortunately Bachelor Bee Gee came out and gave me a ride to my car–music blaring, no shouted conversation this time. I think he got the hint.

But that is the amazing thing about dating. About men. Just when you think men understand, you realize some of them don’t! He must have thought he was a “Heartbreaker.” We got to my car, I opened my door and jumped out. He looked at me and asked, “Hey, would you like me to call you again?”

I was stunned! A wave of…change…washed over me, as I realized in that moment that just a few months earlier I’d been married (and married for 20 years), I’d had stability and security; and yet there I stood, living a completely different life, divorced, single, and ending a date with a virtual stranger who was whack-o. All I could do was laugh!

I couldn’t answer him, I was laughing too hard. (You know, as I’ve said before. In life, you can choose to laugh or cry: I choose to laugh!) I never did answer him. Instead, I laughed all the way to my car. And as I opened my car door I heard him call out, “Remember, the phone line works both ways!”

I drove home, walked up to my room, realized how fortunate I had been and stopped laughing. A wave of “Emotion” washed over me and I burst into tears at the unexpected life that was now mine. “Alone.” I couldn’t comprehend that Bee Gees-wannabes were my destiny. If that was the case, I didn’t think it was possible “To Love Somebody.”

I didn’t think my love was deep enough.

“I was always the one left behind. Out in the streets, when they saw me they’d say, ‘That’s just one of the Bee Gees.’” (Maurice Gibb)