Living Happily Ever After
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Another Day, Another Marvel

Date: January 14, 2013  Author: Andrea Merriman

“The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.” (Robert Doisneau)

I’m barely two weeks into the “new” year and have already been blessed with more unexpected experiences than I thought I’d have the privilege to enjoy all year! None have reached the 2009 benchmark (not anything even close, thankfully!) but I’ve had more head shaking moments–where all I can do is laugh at my unexpected life–than I care to admit, and it has only been 14 days!

Which reminds me…note to self: look for the humor in every unexpected marvel of daily life it’s your good fortune to experience. After all, “A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.” (William Arthur Ward)

Happy 2013!

Make it marvelous.

 

Find Humor in Anything

Date: December 7, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.” (Bill Cosby)

Step three to surviving anything and living a thankful life: look for the humor in your misery—it will be there.

As Marjorie Hinckley said, “In life, you can choose to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh!”

Me too.

For example, the very night Shawn Merriman destroyed not just my world but our children’s world and we found out everything we’d thought was ours was gone and we’d be moving who-knows-where to rebuild a new life from scratch as the Five Musketeers (me, the mother, and my four children), my oldest son went downstairs and found a live mouse on the floor of his bathroom. (We lived on 3 acres, surrounded by fields; pests from the outside trying to get inside our home were an on and off again battle.)

He came upstairs to report the discovery and how he’d handled it—he’d scooped it up, dropped it in the toilet, and flushed! I brushed aside worries of what something like that does to the plumbing of a home—who knew how much longer we’d be inhabiting our home, anyway—and we looked at each other, laughed and said, “That’s one thing we won’t miss about this house and our life—MICE!” And chose to laugh at the “bright side” of our loss.

I also laughed several weeks later when my daughter gave her soon-to-be-single mother some advice about love and marriage. She told me I needed to get married to a good man so I “wouldn’t be alone forever.” Honestly, at that stage of the nightmare game we’d been forced to participate in, love was the least of my worries.  I told her I wouldn’t marry again because I was an ‘old bag.’ She helpfully said, “Mom! Botox!” No disagreement with my assessment, just a helpful suggestion. I’ll never forget that one. In fact, I’m STILL laughing about it.

Turns out, we survived. And Bill Cosby was right: “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)

Keep laughing.

Second Marriage Moment #27

Date: November 13, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

Second Marriage Moment #27 actually occurred before I married my husband. One night he called to tell me his son and his son’s friends were coming to my house to hang out. He told me the expectations he had shared with his son—and I made the mistaken assumption that he told me the rules he’d established so I could follow through and enforce them!

Wrong.

The son and his friends did things my fiance/husband had specifically forbidden and I called the son on it right away, as soon as I saw it transpire. In my culture, you see a wrong committed and you correct it then and there. It doesn’t matter who’s around. There’s no yelling or anger, you stop the behavior, re-establish expectations, and carry on.

Also in my culture: parents back each other up. If they disagree on parenting or anything else, they back each other up to the kids and resolve their differences privately. No big deal.

Except for one little thing which made it a BIG DEAL.

In my fiance/husband’s family, experience and culture, you take care of things later. After the friends are gone. All correction is done privately and to do anything else equals humiliation of the highest degree. (And the whole parents backing each other up thing? That never happened either.)

Oops. Second marriage moment #27 was a disaster.

Turns out, my fiance/husband had modified the rules after he’d told me what he expected, so his son hadn’t actually been disobedient; I just didn’t know that. In support of his father’s parenting, I called the son on his behavior immediately, and while his friends were in the vicinity—so I disciplined him AND humiliated him, according to his culture, in one moment, at the same time!

Way to go, Andrea!

Sometimes even I outdo myself.

But we got through it.

We talked it out as parents. I apologized to my stepson. And to his credit, he didn’t hold a grudge. In fact, this far past it…I can shake my head and laugh at the senseless disaster of it all. I mean, ” The next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it,” (Frank Clark) right?

I learned a lot from second marriage moment #27 and to laugh at it, continues the tradition of laughing at everything we can, instead of choosing to be overwhelmed by it, or get mad, at it all.

“I realize humor isn’t for everyone. It’s only for people who want to have fun, enjoy life and feel alive.” (“Real Life Quotes” blog, December 24, 2010, by Kevin Rayner)

Keep laughing.

All We Want To Do Is…Dance!

Date: December 20, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

“There is a strong chance that siblings who turn out well were hassled by the same parents.” (Robert Brault)

When my unexpected life hit, there were many uncertainties. Correction: almost everything was a question mark for me. The only thing I knew for certain, in fact, was that I was going to do what was best for my children. That has been my goal since I became a parent (for the first time, in April 1993), and thankfully, has remained my focus since March 18, 2009.

How you go about accomplishing that, however, is THE feat. In my opinion, there are a lot of contradictions. For example, not one solution is best for all of my children all of the time. So I have had to base my decisions on what is best for the majority.  Sometimes I have to base them on individual need, who needs a certain solution the most.

Years ago, I attended a speech by an impressive parenting expert who advised that if you want to raise good children, give them plenty of doses of Vitamin “N”—no; plenty of “character building” experiences. Another child rearing specialist told me that as a parent you should say “yes” as much as you can, so that when you have to say “no” it will be more impactful to your children. See what I mean about contradictions?

I guess that’s life.

And true to life, my parenting, itself, has a lot of its own contradictions as well.  For example, I’m a fan of humor and laughter. It lightens things up when they need it, it’s cleansing and it also makes things a lot more fun! At our house, we laugh a lot. And right or wrong, I even try to use humor in discipline. I try to correct my children, when I can, with a wink or a joke before things get too out of control and serious. As part of this weird parenting approach, there is also the “consequence” of dancing.

We love to dance at our house. Family dance parties are not unusual. And for some reason, whether we live in Colorado or Utah, they usually take place in the kitchen! One day I realized how much I enjoyed dancing with my kids and how much I hated having to be the “bad guy”/administrator of the consequences of wrong choices. I was struck with a brilliant thought. I decided to get a little creative (after all, I AM the mother of my children) and combined the two. At my house, if you make a wrong choice, watch out.  You may have to dance a solo for your mother, and she gets to pick the song! That worked well for several years, but then I felt my kids started enjoying dancing too much. So I had to change tactics. The new rule? If my son messed up, his consequence was that he had to watch ME dance! (Coincidentally, that son has hardly ever needed correction! Brilliant mothering, if I do say so myself. One dance performance from his mother, and that is all it took to keep him on the straight and narrow: choose the right or be mentally scarred for life. No question my son was going to make good choices:)

He has grown into a fine young man.

With great rhythm.

And you should see his dance moves!

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.

Bachelor #14: The Rule Breaker

Date: July 9, 2010  Author: Andrea Merriman

Bachelor #14 was a nice, normal, successful businessman I met online. He lived several hours away from me. And broke one of his “cardinal rules” to date me: he didn’t drive distances for women or to date them. Yet he drove them for me.

As Katharine Hepburn said, “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.” And as he said, “I can’t believe how many ‘rules’ I’ve broken for you.”

Although we laughed a lot and had a lot of fun, Bachelor #14 isn’t memorable to me because of any particular weird thing he did (he didn’t do any, like I said, he was totally nice and normal!) He is memorable to me because I learned something from him that literally changed my life.

Thank goodness he broke the rules! “If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere.” (Marilyn Monroe)

I have learned a couple of things from certain men I’ve dated. One that stands out in my mind occurred while dating Bachelor #1.

At some point in dating, when things get to a certain “stage,” every man has asked me if I really, truly am “over” my former spouse. They say, “I know you’ve said you are, I know you act like you are, but are you REALLY? How can you be over Him so quickly after being married for 20 years?”

I never know what to say to that, other than the truth: I am over Him. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, I just know that I am. I always assumed it was because the lies, the betrayal, and the deception were so deep, so complete and so thorough (into every aspect of our life, our faith, our friends and family, and his career.) I assumed all of that was what had helped the love die so quickly and the tie fade so fast after I had the rug of my entire existence ripped out from under me in that one fateful moment on that one terrible day: March 18, 2009.

But I learned there was probably more to it than that. Bachelor #1 pointed it out.

He told me I was missing something important. That I’d received a blessing I didn’t even realize. He had known people married only 3-4 years and unable to move on after their divorce. He said I had received a huge blessing that I was able to get over something so huge and to move on so “quickly.” He said it really was a blessing to me.

I believe in counting your blessings, looking for the good, acknowledging the tender mercies you receive each day and living your life with gratitude every day in all things. So I was thankful that although I’d been too clueless to see it, someone else had seen it and pointed it out to me so I could realize it. So I could acknowledge a miracle, a blessing, in my life.

I realized, “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.” (C.S. Lewis)

That was certainly true for me.

Bachelor #14 taught me something different: “You don’t have to tell your story any more.”

It was a moment for me. An absolute epiphany.

I looked at him in shock. “What? Not tell my story? But how? Everyone always wants to know why you divorced, what dysfunctional tendencies you have that led to something so terrible. I can’t lie!” I said.

Bachelor #14 replied, “I’m not telling you to lie. I’m telling you that you don’t have to tell your story any more to anyone. You don’t have to tell it to the people you date. Of anyone I’ve met, your story really isn’t your story–it isn’t what you did; it’s what someone else did. You did nothing wrong or criminal, you were not involved, it has nothing to do with you other than it completely changed your life and you ended up with a new and different one in Utah. But you don’t have to tell your story to any one any more.”

It was one of those things that had been right in front of me all along, yet I had never seen it! However, as soon as I saw it, it made perfect sense to me and I wondered how I’d never realized it before.

I clarified, “Well, what do I say to people who asked me why I got divorced? Everyone always asks that.”

Bachelor #14 had a good sense of humor. He laughed and said, “There are so many things to choose from in your case, can’t you pick just one?”

That made me laugh. What he said was totally true. There were SO many reasons I got divorced. I seriously could pick just one “little” one from the plethora of reasons I’d had and it would be a big enough reason for any normal person to understand!

Bachelor #14 encouraged, “You CAN do that! Just tell one little reason and the rest is nobody’s business.”

That conversation changed my life.

It allowed me to separate myself from everything my former spouse had done. In that moment, I was able to let it all go. I had known all along my former spouse’s actions weren’t mine, but because I had been married to him, they were a burden I carried to some degree–as I lived each day with the consequences His choices had thrust upon me and as I felt shame not only for knowing someone who had done such terrible things but for having been married to him while he did them.

But in an instant, I wasn’t ashamed any more. I wasn’t humiliated any more. I wasn’t trying to hide any more. I wasn’t worried about living a life of anonymity or about trying to hide who I was and what I had come from.

I was free to be me, and only me, again.

Andrea Merriman.

Why had it taken me so many months to realize that? I’d had good friends who had told me that over and over, but somehow I hadn’t been able to see it or believe it before. But in that moment, I finally did.

Like that old game “Red Light, Green Light” where you take baby steps at first so you don’t get caught by the “it” person, but the closer you get to the end and to winning, your steps get bigger and bigger until the last one or two steps are giant, almost reckless leaps…THAT is what that conversation and the realization it led me to were for me.

Prior to that, I’d felt almost completely healed. Thanks to Bachelor #14, the remaining gap narrowed considerably. In fact, was there even a gap any more?

Things with Bachelor #14 were perfect while it lasted, but it wasn’t meant to be. There were some core values we differed on. So goodbye Bachelor #14, but I’ll never forget you.

“You are remembered for the rules you break.” (Douglas MacArthur)

I’m so grateful he did.

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.