Living Happily Ever After
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Dandelion Death

Date: April 24, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” (Charles Darwin)

While doing yard work and weeding a few weeks ago, my middle son surprised me with a bouquet of dandelions. I was thrilled, delighted and quickly rushed to put them in water to preserve them for as long as possible. For that day, they sat in a vase on my kitchen windowsill. Soft, puffy, cushions of yellow sunshine. The next day they were dead.

I confess, I was a little surprised. It has always seemed to me that dandelions, creeping into grass, springing up unbidden, are hardy plants. And although I’m not a weed, flower or gardening expert by any means (as evidenced by the many plants and flowers I’ve managed to kill), I think there’s a life lesson somewhere in their short life span.

From my perspective, dandelions have it pretty easy. They bloom into being uninvited and there they stay. Cheery, yellow, WEEDY; rain or shine. They don’t need water, they don’t need fertilizer and it seems like lawn mowers even have difficulty making an impact on them! It’s an easy life, as long as they remain in their expected and “natural” habitat—outside. But pluck a few, put them in a vase full of water, and they’re dead by nightfall (or at the very latest, the next morning.) I expected them to last at least as long as flowers do in a vase of water!

With such an easy existence, dandelions haven’t had to learn to be hardy, to adapt to change or to challenge. They don’t appear to have ever had to “hang on” when times get tough. They haven’t had to develop roots. Hand them an unexpected new life—indoors, in a vase of water—and they wither and die faster than anything I’ve seen.

Makes you grateful for the unexpected life, YOUR unexpected life of growth opportunities, doesn’t it? Because it’s through our trials that we become stronger. Our challenges strengthen us (if we let them) and by triumphing over them, we become stronger. Better. More than we would otherwise have been. Draught, hardship, the unexpected life…cause us to develop roots and to sink those roots deep to survive. The character-conditioning program called life, especially the unexpected one, makes us more than we ever could have become on our own. And in the end, we master not just surviving new circumstances or new challenges, but blooming wherever we’re planted.

We can find happiness and joy in whatever garden, or yard, or patch of dirt, or pile of manure we’ve had the good fortune (or misfortune!) to land in. Life is good regardless of where life transplants you to. Sink your roots into the soil of your unexpected life, look for the beauties of it, count your blessings and strive not just to survive but to bloom.

“I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.” (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)

Knowns and Unknowns

Date: May 17, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” (Donald Rumsfeld)

When #5 and I were dating, shortly after he told me how he felt about me, he showed up one night with a book. It was titled something like, “1,000 Questions For Divorced People To Ask Before They Get Married Again.” He told me he thought we’d work our way through the questions in the book that night, and on future dates. That book and the whole idea of it caught me off guard, and while I thumbed through it a little bit as he drove, we didn’t really utilize it for our conversations. In fact, I probably made some jokes about it and assured #5 we didn’t need a book like that. (I mean, I interview people for a living!) And eventually, over the course of our unexpectedly long engagement, I forgot about it.

Then it came time to marry. One night I looked at him and exclaimed, “Wait! Where’s that book? We should read it!”

“What book?” he asked.

“The one about everything we need to know, and ask, before we get married,” I answered.

“I got rid of it,” he replied.

“WHAT?” I asked. “Why did you do that? We didn’t even read it.”

“You told me we didn’t need it,” he answered. “So I got rid of it.”

I took a leap of faith…and married him without the aid of that book. Everything went quite well until last week,  when I went to a bridal shower to honor the fiancee of #5′s oldest son.

During the event, they played a game where the fiancee had to answer a long list of questions about her intended. If she didn’t know the answer to a question, she had to chew a piece of bubblegum–adding a new piece to the blob that was accumulating in her mouth for each wrong answer or any answer she didn’t know. And although she ended up with a mouth full of bubblegum, she knew a LOT about #5′s son! I sat there marveling at all she knew about the man she was marrying and I came to a realization: I didn’t know #5–AT ALL.

Honeymoon over.

When I got home, #5 asked me how the evening went. I replied, “Fine, but it made me realize something.”

“What’s that?” he  asked.

“That I don’t know you–at all!” I answered. “I feel like I don’t know you at all and I’m trying to remember what we talked about the whole time we dated and were engaged, since there is so much about you I don’t know!”

“Like what?” he challenged.

I began to rattle off questions from the bridal shower I didn’t know:  favorite actor, favorite play, favorite song, favorite color, first girlfriend, first kiss and many other facts. I wanted #5′s answers; I’m married to him, I probably ought to know him!

That quest, however, brought me to additional realizations, like the realization that there is a reason I don’t know #5. To every answer except the favorite movie  one (his favorite movie is the original “Parent Trap–” he had a mad crush on Haley Mills, I think!) he either didn’t have a favorite or he needed more clarification: did I mean his first girlfriend (from 1st grade), his first REAL girlfriend, or his first girlfriend after his divorce? If experts say intelligent people tend to over-analyze questions and situations, I guess you could say the biggest thing I learned that night was the extent of #5′s intelligence; he is even more intelligent than I had originally thought! He asked for so much clarification I gave up and asked him an easy question I knew he’d know the answer to.

“Never mind, just tell me, where was our first kiss?”

Without missing a beat and without absolutely any hesitation he quickly answered, “At my house, by the door leading to the garage…” and he went on to describe everything in great detail. There was just one problem. That wasn’t OUR first kiss. THAT I knew.

“Must have been someone else,” I joked.

“It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” (Will Rogers)

Apparently, I’m not the only one who doesn’t KNOW things!

Second marriage moment #10. That instant where I realized, again, that I was so happily married to a man I love despite the fact I don’t even “know” him! (Or at least, trivial details about him.) And that’s ok, because as Katharine Hepburn said, “Someone asked someone who was about my age, ‘How are you?’ The answer was, ‘Fine. If you don’t ask for details.’”


Smarter Than You

Date: February 13, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

“Girls have an unfair advantage over men: if they can’t get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb.” (Yul Brynner)

Except where preschoolers are concerned, if you happen to be their mother.

My youngest was chatting with me over dinner when out of the blue he said, (and I promise I didn’t say or do anything “dumb” before he shared his observation),”Mom, my teacher is smarter than you.”

“Really? How can you tell?” I asked.

“My teacher knows ALL her ABCs!” he replied. “And can count to 100 and 80…even a thousand!”

“Wow, that IS smart,” I commented. But try as I might, I could not convince him my intelligence level was anywhere close to that of Miss Wendy’s.

The irony of my debate with my youngest regarding my intelligence is that when I was thrust into my unexpected life, I took a lot of heat from many people who insisted I had to have known a Ponzi scheme was taking place because “I was TOO SMART not to have known!”

You can’t see what is intentionally hidden from you through layers of deception and lies carefully crafted for more than a decade. And sometimes, even the brightest of people, can’t see what isn’t right in front of their eyes. Even Andrea Merriman, with all of the intelligence, genius, brilliance and “smarts” I’ve been accused of possessing!

You win some, you lose some, I guess. As evidenced by my unexpected life…and motherhood.

“I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean, S-M-A-R-T!” (Dan Castellaneta)


Junk Vs. Joan

Date: January 21, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

“Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.” (Paul McCartney)

My life, my focus, has never been about “things.” In fact, if I’ve ever been consumed by a quest to acquire anything, it’s memories. Making good memories with my loved ones. Because I’ve never believed you can take “it” with you. I believe the only thing I’ll leave this life with is my spirit–some would call it my soul, my memories, my intelligence, the things I have learned and the knowledge I’ve acquired.

However, I was married to a man who looked at “things” differently than I did. He talked all the right talk, of course. He would nod his head and look sorrowful (I thought, in agreement with me) when we’d talk about how sad it was that some people chose to sell their soul for things. He was generous with his means (although now I know he was generous with what was never actually his.) And he acquired a lot of “stuff” in the process, though I never actually knew exactly what, or how much, because he stored it all in the building behind our home, where his “office” was, and I rarely went back there. It was his “manspace;” really cluttered and filled with all manner of junk and disorganized chaos, not the way I lived or operated, so I stayed out of it!

When my unexpected life began, there were things that needed serious purging. Namely, contents of a household that was downsizing. As featured on news reports about the Ponzi scheme my former husband perpetrated, I had ties to some material things. (I don’t know if those broadcasts are still around, but feel free to check them out if you’re curious: watch the motor home driving away towing the boat; see the “mansion” nestled in the trees; hear about the cabin in Idaho and the fine art; learn about the trailer loads of “things” that were hauled away over several days when the asset seizure began.)

In criminal/fraud situations, the government seizes everything of value from the criminal (my former husband) so victims can receive some compensation for their losses, which is all as it should be. The hard part, however, is what to do with everything that has no value. Everything the government doesn’t want.

Like the 9 crockpots–four from my home and four  my cabin (we frequently hosted large group gatherings) and one from the motorhome.

A yard sale wasn’t an option. I had seen my home and property featured on the news enough; my neighbors were stalking us with cameras as my children and I came and went, when we were outside, if we left the garage door open, and through the un-curtained windows of our home. Our neighbors gathered in front of our home to talk and trade notes of what was going on, what they had seen or heard, and they sometimes made it difficult to get to my home if they weren’t in the mood to allow anyone to pass their human barricade.

Case in point. One day a pastor attempted to go to our home to retrieve a set of scriptures from inside. Our neighbors were standing in the cul-de-sac we lived on, our driveway and all around the property and refused to let the pastor through. He explained who he was and the one simple thing he wanted from the house but they wouldn’t let him pass. Their crowd mentality, their hostily and venom, made him apprehensive so he called another neighbor, a mutual friend of his and the neighborhood crowd, and asked that friend to vouch for him so the neighbors would let him pass. The friend refused.

Those were crazy times, but a reason why a yard sale wasn’t an option–I didn’t think neighbors would allow anyone to participate in a yard sale at my home, IF anyone even tried to show up or buy anything!

So the crockpots met me in Utah and now sit on a shelf in my garage awaiting the someday I host a large group gathering again (if that day ever comes) or, alas, finally part with them in a yard sale!

Junk, leftover from my previous life, taking up space in my unexpected new one.

I’m hoping it’s true that, “Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.” (William S. Burroughs) Someday.

Or maybe I’ll become an inventor. “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” (Thomas A. Edison) If that’s the case, I may qualify for a patent yet.

Regardless, I try not to worry about it too much. (A key to living an unexpected life: don’t worry, be happy.) Because, “You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.” (Rudyard Kipling)

Junk vs. Joan.

I’m going with Joan.

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.