Living Happily Ever After
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The Speech, Part III

Date: March 6, 2014  Author: Andrea Merriman

Long story short, within days U.S. Marshalls descended on my home and inventoried my possessions, anything of value, for seizure. Victims contacted the media. U.S. attorneys broke the news and my home was soon surrounded with media satellite trucks from across the country, shining spotlights on my home and into my windows night and day, filming every move, looking in my windows, knocking on my door.

Victims appeared at my home and screamed and yelled the worst of things at me and my children for the things my husband had done. One victim loaded a gun and made it all the way to my front door, prepared to blow someone away, before changing his mind. Federal agents seized everything of value. Hate mail came from across the country. And public speculation ran rampant–even about me. Of course I had to have know, of course I was probably involved; you name it, if it was hostile, hateful, untrue or anything of that nature…someone thought it and shared it with the world via the media. Victims even entered my home one night and terrorized my teenage daughter.

I had a matter of weeks to put together a life for my children and I. Thankfully, I found a job. (It didn’t cover all of our living expenses, but at least it was something!) I divorced my husband–I had no money, so I wrote my own divorce to the best of my ability and with the help of a friend, and went to court to have it finalized.

My ex-husband was taken into custody and eventually sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison. And I began to claw and crawl my way out of the deepest, darkest, blackest pit of destruction and despair I could never have imagined. Lets just say it’s not quite the happily ever after I EVER dreamed of as a young girl (or at any time of my life, for that matter!)

But I was raised on fairy tales. I still enjoy them! I believe in happy endings and that a happily ever after is possible for everyone, regardless of their challenges.

So today I’d like to share my formula for HAPLY EVR AFTR (™), courtesy of my unexpected life. It comes not from a fairy godmother, but from living through and recovering from an indescribable horror–we all have one, don’t we?

It worked for me. And it can work for you, too!

(Sorry to drag this on, but tune in again tomorrow and in the coming days for the good stuff–HAPLY EVR AFTR!)

“That’s when the great stuff happens…” (Carol Kane)

The Hardest Thing

Date: January 8, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

I went to my first kick boxing class recently. I left feeling pretty inept at boxing. Sort of the way I felt the last time I came even close to boxing. In the 1980s. In high school. It was SO “not me.”

I blame it on basketball–one game in particular, and it didn’t even count, it was P.E.! A friend and I played a game of 2 on 5, against a group of five, short Hispanic girls…and it wasn’t pretty…because my friend and I actually played basketball outside of P.E. and we were beating them soundly. The other girls were frustrated, but it didn’t dawn on me (like it would now) to let them win or at least score a few points. It was my experience that “you win some, you lose some,” that’s part of playing the game, and I preferred to win as much as I could.

The next thing I knew, I was on my back, just outside the key. My friend was leaning over me, worried, questioning, “Are you ok?” The other team was standing around with satisfied smirks on their faces as my friend filled me in: while I’d been airborne for a rebound, one of the short girls had gone for my pony tail, grabbed it, forcefully yanked me down from behind, flat on my back onto the court, which knocked me out when I landed!

Told you they were frustrated.

I got back up and continued to play. But every time one of the other team got near me they talked trash and threatened to beat me up outside of class. I ignored them; I thought they had to be kidding. I mean, fight? In my world, that behavior never dawned on me. No one I knew fought or even thought about beating anyone up. I thought they were kidding–until they followed me around everywhere and warned me I’d better pray they never caught me alone or better yet, alone in a bathroom.

I didn’t respond to their threats, I ignored their taunts, I pretended I didn’t see them trailing me (but I confess I was always relieved when I walked into a bathroom and saw other girls in there, just in case) and after what seems like a few weeks (but was probably more like a few days) P.E. ended and I don’t remember ever seeing those angry girls again.

That’s my near-boxing experience.

“I’ll bet the hardest thing about prize fightin’ is pickin’ up yer teeth with a boxin’ glove on.” (Kin Hubbard)

Add pickin’ up yer teeth with boxin’ gloves on to the list of hard things in, and about, life.

Challenges.

Things like sickness, death, disease, poverty, crime, betrayal, divorce, unemployment, emotional trauma, abuse, too much, too little, and every other unexpected challenge that comes your way. Life is full of hard stuff. In fact, life, itself, is hard. As Katherine Hepburn said, “Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”

But before it does, at least TRY to pick up yer teeth. Don’t quit until you succeed in clearing the floor of your molars and cuspids, or whatever your adversity may be. I’ve found, sometimes, that what I’m going through isn’t quite as hard as picking up teeth with boxing gloves on would be (while other times, one year in particular, I admit to wondering if dying wouldn’t have been easier than the challenges I was facing. Thank goodness I never, personally, discovered the answer to that myself.)

Because when you’ve collected your teeth and pulled yourself together, when the bell has rung and you’re back in the match giving it all you’ve got, there’s nothing quite as exhilarating as a knock out. The knock out that comes at the end when you win because you endured. Victory.

The more I think about it, boxing is a lot like the unexpected life. Here’s why:

“As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.” (Budd Schulberg) At some point, we probably all have a love-hate relationship with our new and unexpected life. As much as we love it, we wouldn’t have chosen it. And as much as we may dislike certain aspects of it or the way certain things are, we wouldn’t trade it for the alternative. Life is glorious, regardless of your circumstances.

“Boxing gave me the opportunities to grow into the person that I am today.” (Alexis Arguello) Where would we be, who would we have become, what would we have learned, how would we have grown…without our unexpected life?

“Boxing is the ultimate challenge. There’s nothing that can compare to testing yourself the way you do every time you step in the ring.” (Sugar Ray Leonard) Life, especially the unexpected one, is a test every single day. So it’s vital we get through it. With a passing grade, or better yet, an A+. Our score lies in how we choose to solve the problems and answer the questions put before us.

“Boxing was not something I truly enjoyed. Like a lot of things in life, when you put the gloves on, it’s better to give than to receive.” (Sugar Ray Leonard) Don’t underestimate the importance of giving, giving back, and making the way easier for others as you travel through life. I can’t imagine where my children and I would be today if we hadn’t had a little help from our friends, if others hadn’t reached out to us and helped make our way easier. Truly, it IS better to give than to receive.

So don’t quit. Hang in there until the bell rings and you get a breather. Don’t expect to understand everything all at once, or even in this lifetime. Just trust, as I do, that someday we will be able to see the grand design of a beautiful plan put in place just for us and our necessary growth. Someday, every mystery will be solved.

“When archaeologists discover the missing arms of Venus de Milo, they will find she was wearing boxing gloves.” (John Barrymore)

The unexpected life.

Ding-ding!

Shock…And A Grin

Date: September 15, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

“Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.” (Augustus Hare)

Night before last I was up until midnight, hanging out and chatting with my oldest. Talking about anything and everything EXCEPT the sentencing of his father which took place yesterday. But it had to have been on his mind because he didn’t seem to want to be alone with his thoughts; I sensed he needed someone to talk to.

When he went to bed, I checked on my 10-year-old and found him crying in his bed, worried about the pending sentencing of his father. I offered words of encouragement, tried to help him look at the bright side and attempted to cheer him up–until nearly 1:30 a.m. It broke my heart and I realized in that moment, regardless of the outcome of the sentencing and the remorse my former husband feels for what he has done to so many people, there are some things he just won’t quite understand. He hasn’t been around to witness it firsthand; he has been incarcerated. He hasn’t had to look into the devastated faces of our children. He didn’t have to (or get to) watch them live with pain He caused. He hasn’t had to help them pick up the pieces and struggle to carry on and create a new life when the going was tougher than any of us ever imagined.

But, I sent everyone to school, to press forward in their lives and with their responsibilities despite the challenging circumstances–and I went to work, too, awaiting word of the sentencing outcome. Looking back, I think I worked all day under an inordinate amount of stress. I don’t think I even realized the stress I was operating under until I got a phone call near the end of the day. A Colorado friend was calling to report the outcome of my former spouse’s sentencing hearing for operating a Ponzi scheme/stealing over $20 million.

I anticipated, based on the last collect call I received from my former spouse, that the hearing would take two hours. Instead, more than eight hours later my friend called, crying, to report the maximum sentence had been handed down in a courtroom whose atmosphere was so tense and hateful she felt sick to her stomach.

I don’t know what more I can say about the importance of choosing to heal instead of hate, but I love what Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) He was absolutely right.

So as my friend recounted the events of the day, I really only heard a few words: The maximum, 12 1/2 years.

How was I going to tell my children?

I don’t know what I wanted the outcome to be; I don’t know what I expected. I have only prayed that I will be o.k. with whatever the judge decides and that somehow, I will be able to help my children be o.k. with it too. But to hear the words, “151 months,” “12 1/2 years” shocked me. It sent me into a very unprofessional, uncontrollable crying-in-the-workplace episode; the likes of which I never expected or imagined.

My poor co-workers. I’ve held it together for over a year. I’ve never done anything like that in public that I can recall. But today was so unexpected. The unstoppable wail of a woman in shock, broken-hearted, traumatized by the senseless destruction and tragedy unleashed on so many by the terrible choices of one man. The grief of a mother knowing the next time her teenage son saw his father that son would be almost 30 years old. The cry of a single mother trying to hold her little family together, knowing she had be the one to share the bad news and see pain in a little boy’s eyes, again, when he learned the fate of his father.

If I ever think I’m having a bad day…remind me of March 18, 2009, or September 14, 2010.

Shaking, somehow I managed to drive all the way home, bawling, and tried to pull myself together enough to face my children. To break their hearts one more time. I’ll never forget the dread I felt as I pulled up to my home, knowing what I had to go inside and do. Break my children’s hearts.

I spoke with my daughter first. I told her the outcome and she accepted it calmly, with grace and dignity (unlike her mother.)

I sat my 10-year-old down and prepared him for the news. He was happy and smiling until that moment then a serious expression came to his face as I shared the events of the day. Instead of the devastation I anticipated, he chose to look at the bright side, “Well, if he has already served 13 months, and he gets time off for good behavior, he’ll be free to see us when I’m only in college! That’s not so bad!”

Stoic and optimistic. All on his own. I could not have been more proud of him than I was in that moment. And despite the terrible struggle coming to terms with his father’s choices has been for him, I was amazed at how my sweet son has grown over the past 18 months. If I can only help him realize that if he will choose to handle all of the setbacks that come his way like today’s, he is destined for greatness–regardless of, or perhaps because of, his adversity.

My oldest son got the news on his phone before he even got home. When I sat him down to tell him, he already knew. Everything was what he had expected, and he is to the point in his life where he is actually grateful for all that he has learned as a result of all that he has passed through. He can see how he has been blessed as a result of his trials, so he tried to laugh about it–revealing he and his sister had placed bets on the outcome and he had gotten out of doing the dishes this week!

I guess everyone deals with shock, grief and trauma in their own way. Who’s to say which way is right or wrong? Certainly not me. But as one co-worker encouraged when I was in the throes of my unexpected reaction and trying to apologize for it, “I’d worry about you if you didn’t react.”

Note to self: one “secret” to the unexpected life is to let yourself feel so you can heal. (Just remember: no wallowing!)

We did that yesterday, each of us in our own way, and as I sent my children to bed each had a smile on their face, which brought one to mine. We’ve survived another unexpected development in our unexpected life…and we came out grinning.

“It’s easy to grin when your ships come in and you’ve got the stock market beat, but the man worth while is the man who can smile when his pants are too tight in the seat.”

We’re going to be o.k.

And now, back to the chick-flick portion of my unexpected life. What’s coming just might be worthy of a grin, too.

Farewell To Joe

Date: August 2, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

I have to take a break from the unexpected life, single scene, dating, dances, and men to pay homage to an important member of my family I’ve never written about.

Joe.

Our dog.

A gigantic white lab (more like a miniature horse) with the best looking dog face I’ve ever seen. In fact, when my oldest son saw the movie “Marley and Me” his only comment was that our dog was much better looking than the movie’s star! Our canine star, however, hated water, was afraid of a lot of things, but tried to protect us by barking a fierce bark (yet gave himself away with a tail that never quit wagging.) He LOVED all people!

When our world fell apart in 2009, and our unexpected life began, believe it or not, in addition to all of the worries I was trying to balance, I was worried about our dog. I didn’t know where we would be living (much less if our living situation would be conducive to a dog), I didn’t know what we’d be eating (much less if we’d be able to afford dog food) and I knew we really couldn’t afford a dog, but I just felt I had to do everything in my power to allow my children to keep their pet. They were losing everything else and as crazy as it may sound to some, I hoped and prayed, for my children’s sake, that they wouldn’t have to lose their dog too!

We were blessed to end up in a home in Utah with a fenced backyard. So my children kept their dog for awhile. And then Joe developed a health condition that had no guaranteed fix. Our only choice was to free him from the extreme pain he was in. And as the only adult in my little family, it fell to me to take him to the veterinary clinic that final time.

I have always dreaded a moment like that.

Just when I thought we were healed, we had to lose our Marley.

In the terrible moments of 2009, in the height of my despair and when there was nothing I could do but endure my pain, sometimes I just had to get away from my life. A couple of times, when it was THAT bad, I jumped in the car and drove the country roads near my old neighborhood. Sometimes I simply had to get away from the stranger I had allowed to remain in my home, quickly, and so late at night I’d go outside to be alone.

I’d sit outside in the pitch black dark and mourn my losses. I mourned the end of the only life I had known as an adult. I’d worry myself sick about the future and all that lay ahead. I’d cry. I’d pray. I felt more alone than I imagined it was possible to feel. And then, in the midst of the pain of my grieving (and wallowing in my misery) I’d hear a thump and find a giant white head attached to a wet black nose in my lap. Despite how I felt, another manifestation that I wasn’t alone.

Joe. There for me. In the literal and figurative darkness of my new unexpected life.

That was all I could think about as drove to the clinic and as I sat in the examination room the last few moments of Joe’s life.

My oldest son was with me too. As we sat in the room, he looked at me with tears streaming down his cheeks and told me how Joe had been there for him always, but especially during the terrible events of last year, when my son didn’t know what he was going to do or how our new and unexpected life could be his. He told me how he’d lay on his bedroom floor by Joe and cry. And how Joe had helped him carry on.

Boy, Joe was a busy dog. Especially last year. I’d had no idea all that he had been up to.

Joe was there for me. Joe was there for my oldest son. Joe was there for all of my children when they needed him. And in the end, although I couldn’t be there for him to miraculously save his life (like I felt he deserved after all he’d done for me), my oldest son and I were there for him as he departed.

Sometimes I hate being an adult and having to make adult decisions. But it’s a part of life.

Another unexpected aspect of my farewell to Joe was the thought of another person who flashed across my mind in those final moments. I couldn’t believe it. It will probably make me look psychotic, but this blog is my attempt to share the whole truth and nothing but the truth of my unexpected life. So here goes.

I thought of Him.

Shawn Merriman.

And this is what I thought: “I should hate him for putting me in this position. For making it so I have to endure this, too.”

I couldn’t believe it had been one year and He came to mind. You remember your former spouse at the oddest and most unexpected moments. At least, I did. And then, just as quickly, I pushed that thought out of my mind.

I went into this whole unexpected life determined not to hate and I still feel that way. I believe it’s the right thing to do.

Life. It’s unexpected. There’s nothing better. And yet, there’s nothing more difficult, at times, too.

All I know is that you have to keep looking for the good. You must keep counting your blessings. You have to forgive. You can’t hate. And you must keep pressing forward and carrying on, ideally, with a smile.

Miracle Mail

Date: April 20, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

I am terrible at remembering to collect my mail each day.  I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because my former spouse always got our mail, so it has been over 20 years since I’ve had to collect my mail.

But one year ago that changed. Due to my spouse’s crimes, the revelation that He had been running a ponzi scheme for 15 years, His prison sentence looming, our pending divorce, and other traumas…I took over everything–including the mail collection.

Each day, it seemed, hate mail arrived. I was shocked that we received it, and even more surprised at where it came from: total strangers, all across the U.S. It became so frequent for awhile there that one day I realized it had been one week since we had received a piece of hate mail!

An occasion to remember.

However, not all of the mail was hateful.  For the first two-three months of the nightmare, other anonymous mail arrived, the complete opposite of hate mail. I would open an envelope to find a gift card to a grocery store, Target, Costco or WalMart.  Other weeks, I would open an envelope to find some cash.  Other times it would be words of encouragement or an uplifting thought I really needed at that moment and that helped me continue on when the day had been particularly disastrous.

I called it Miracle Mail. It was such a blessing to me and to my children. It helped us survive, not just emotionally, but physically.

Thank heaven for those who “never suppress a generous thought.”

We were getting by on very little money as all of our accounts had been frozen. The cash I had I withdrawn on March 18, I had put in my wallet and then kept my wallet with me at all times. I didn’t let my spouse know where the money was because I was afraid he’d steal it! Trust was non-existent. (I guess it shows you may choose to allow a stranger to remain in your home for your children’s sake and because you feel it is the kind thing to do, but that doesn’t mean you trust Him.  At all.)

Any time my children needed lunch money, etc…I pulled a small amount of cash out of my wallet and used it.  I didn’t dare look at it, because to see the minimal amount, and to see that minimal amount dwindling, would have added even more stress to a life that was already bursting at the seams with it!

I remember getting down to the last $20, and then finally to the last $1, and wondering what we were going to do…and then an anonymous piece of mail, miracle mail, containing a gift card or cash would arrive at the very moment I needed it. There are some amazing, generous, kind, and charitable people. They literally saved us.  And of course, most of it was anonymous so I had no idea who to thank.

We also lived off food we had stored for emergencies, so although we weren’t eating our favorite things, we were able to purchase less at the store and still had food to eat. And, as with everything else, we got by with a little help from our friends.

A friend stopped by one day and unloaded a car load of food items from Costco–”fun” food, as she called it, that my children hadn’t seen in awhile like fruit snacks, crackers, Mickey Mouse-shaped chicken nuggets, cookies, etc…THAT was a highlight of the nightmare experience for my children! It was like Christmas in our kitchen!  They were thrilled to enjoy, once again, some treats they remembered from their former life.

Other friends called when they were heading to the store and asked if I needed anything.  If I didn’t need anything, they usually dropped food off anyway. Other times, they picked up what I needed and more.

And many women from my church delivered meals to us as well.  I think we had one entire month of dinners brought to our home by good women who were concerned about us and wanted us to not only have food to eat, but to feel loved. They delivered dinner every night until I finally asked them to stop–I couldn’t move my food storage and felt like we needed to use it up and provide for ourselves as much as we were able to.

Another friend brought us huge, delicious Sunday dinners EVERY SINGLE SUNDAY until we moved out of state.

True, we may have been hated by some, but we were also SO LOVED by so many.  That compassion, and Miracle Mail, got us through.