“My heart had always gone out to every
kid who had to go back and forth and I knew
f couldn't bear making my kids do that.”
- Darlene
TOM AND DARLENE were a mismatched pair from the outset. He's taciturn and emotionally closed; she's loquacious and emotive. Over the course of their marriage, which was often laced with tension, they floundered, separated, and regrouped several times. After a few false starts, they finally found a way to exit the marriage and enter into a new liaison that kept them close to each other and their kids. But it took patience, and ten years, to get there.
The couple now lives on a tiny island off the coast of British Columbia, where she's the local postmaster and he's a plumber and works on the ferries. They had migrated there seeking the bucolic life of a community removed from city bustle and the fast lane. Their home had magnificent mountain and ocean views, but the Arcadian setting was overshadowed by an ongoing dissonance between them.
The differences that plagued them had come into high relief when they decided to move to the West Coast and had gone there to do some house hunting. Darlene was pregnant with their second child, and the trip was so taxing that it was almost the end of them, she remembers. “The stress on our relationship was huge. When we came back to Ontario, Tom and I were hardly talking. I thought, ‘We're in trouble, we're in serious trouble here. ‘” She was so mad at him that she threatened to exclude him from the delivery room. “He was not coming to my birth, thank you very much. ” They went into marital counseling, and it helped for a while. They decided to go ahead with the move, but they were never fully able to get onto secure ground with each other.
Within a few years, the balance between them became weighted toward their differences. Tom's need to keep his own counsel seemed like a poverty of emotion to Darlene, and she told Tom she wanted out. “I think feeling alone in a relationship is worse than being alone,” she said ruefully. “I just felt like I was going crazy. ” Darlene knew she wanted to leave her husband, but her daughters were only four and nine. She was loathe to splinter her young family and she was determined that her children would not pay for their parents' inability to get along. They decided to try their own version of a “bird's nest” arrangement. It was a pragmatic decision as much as an idealistic one. At the time, it was the only way Darlene could figure out how to avoid moving the children from parent to parent. “We decided to let the girls have the house. This was my husband's and my mess. Why should they have to move?”
The adults began shifting between households. It was a cobbled together arrangement that minimized disruption for the children, but it was difficult for the adults. “I moved in with a friend and my husband rented a cabin,” said Darlene. “I'd stay [with my friend] one week and Tom would be in the house with the kids. The next week he'd stay in the cabin and I would be in the house with the kids. ” Being away from her daughters felt like harsh punishment to Darlene, but she was deeply committed to the idea that children should be raised by both parents and she didn't believe that children should live in two houses. “My heart had always gone out to every kid who had to go back and forth. To me it was completely and totally wrong, and I knew that I couldn't bear making my kids do that. So, it was the only thing I could come up with that felt fair for them. It didn't matter to Tom and me; nothing needed to be fair for us.”
Their arrangement lasted for a year, but it was painful, and Darlene hated it. “It was absolutely horrible! I felt so sad when I had to leave the girls and my home at the end of my week. I have never felt so un- centered and unbalanced as I did during that year of our separation. Not having a constant ‘nest' for that whole time seemed to make a bad situation unbearable. It was definitely one of the worst years of my life.”
The arrangement didn't really suit Tom, either. He found it particularly problematic during the overlap times, and the change of command at the end of each week was stressful. “Although the situation did not work well for me personally,” Tom said, “it made the girls' lives less traumatic and more bearable and that was the bottom line.”
In spite of the minimal physical disruption for the children, it was still an emotionally unsettling time for their oldest daughter, Amberskye, who was quietly rattled by her parents' split-up. She, like her father, is very private, not given to sharing her emotions easily, so she struggled with it silently. Darlene remembers one situation that created confusion and embarrassed her daughter when they were on a school trip together. “Her class did a campout for three nights and one afternoon five little girls were all sitting in the tent and one of the girls looked around and said, ‘Oh, everybody's parents are separated or divorced except for Amberskye's.' One of the other kids said ‘Oh no, Amberskye's parents are separated,' and Amberskye froze like a rock. I tried to talk to her about it but she just couldn't. ” That memory is still difficult for Darlene.
Her children had always been the center of Darlene's life. From the moment she became a mother she began to organize life around putting the kids first. She took jobs that allowed her to be with them as much as possible. “As soon as I found out I was pregnant with Amberskye I went and got trained to drive a school bus. Back then we were allowed to take our kids on the bus with us, and Amberskye had the best social life of any kid I know. From the time she was four months old to the time she was five, I drove the school bus and she loved it.”
Tom and Darlene made a deal to keep new relationships out of the family sphere. After they split, Tom had a girlfriend and the kids didn't know. One day when they were in town, the girls saw him coming down the street with this woman. “When I saw him, I thought, ‘Oh, shit. ‘ Later I said to him, ‘Look, I don't care what you do in your private life away from the girls but don't you dare bring a woman to the house when it's your week in the house, that's totally not cool.' To me it just wasn't okay. He agreed and I still appreciate that.”
After a year, though, the “birds' nest” arrangement became untenable for Darlene and she had to regroup. She told Tom it was killing her and that Amberskye was not doing well. “I said, ‘This is crazy. We need to get back together.' So we got back together that Christmas, and things were okay for a while.”
Darlene wasn't sure how Tom was feeling, but wanted to try to patch things up so she could be with her girls full time. “Tom is not good at being below surfaces,” she says, “and maybe partly it's that he can't and partly that he doesn't want to — the reason doesn't matter. ” They wrestled with their communication problems by doing some self-help therapy with a book that provided exercises geared to mending torn relationships. “It was great,” said Darlene. “It was hard for him, but he did it. It was ten weeks, and you were to give one night a week to do these exercises. About six couples on the island started to do this program, but Tom and I were the only ones to complete it, and I'm sure it was hell for him. It was okay for a while, but then you go back to your old habits.”
Their reconciliation spanned ten years, but many of those weren't very happy. The unhappiness found its way into the family's daily life, and relations between Tom and Darlene became prickly at best. Darlene began to lash out and Tom retreated, and that infused the house with a nervous, uneasy energy. Over time, their efforts to rebuild or even maintain the marriage crumbled.
Annierose, the couple's younger daughter, couldn't figure out what was off kilter in her home until she spent some time in the company of another family. “I always thought that every household had a bit of tension. It clicked for me one day while at a friend's house. The parents were just so caring and courteous of one another, I realized my parents can't be that happy together.”
Darlene was struggling with disappointment and her inability to come to terms with her husband's nature. “You know it's funny, even though I knew intellectually that Tom couldn't demonstrate caring or that kind of thing, emotion-ally I just couldn't accept it. I couldn't deal with it. It hurt. ” Looking back, Darlene realized that what had initially drawn her to Tom was a sense that his quiet nature concealed a deep thinker. They'd had fun together, and Darlene had been really smitten with Tom. “I ended up thinking that I really wanted to be with this guy, totally ignoring the fact that I was doing all the talking and all the planning and whatever. ” Over the years, the feeling that they were ill-suited evolved from niggling doubt to full-blown frustration. “Tom is just incapable of showing love. I remember Annierose coming up to me when she was five or six, and saying, ‘Why can't Daddy hug me? Why can't he cuddle me like you do?' And I just said, ‘You know what, that's something that Dad doesn't do well and maybe that's something that you can give to Dad. You can teach him how to do that.' And she did. ” Whatever flaws there were in her marriage, Darlene made a point of differentiating those from her husband's strengths as a father. “He's been a great dad, he's been a wonderful dad, he would bend over backwards for his kids . . . [he's] always there for them.”
Darlene and Tom weren't ready to separate completely but they had to do something to change their status. As so many couples do before they're ready to take more drastic action, they made a change in their sleeping arrangements. It was a stop-gap measure to buy them time before confronting the underlying problem. It did relieve some of the pressure for Darlene, but not quite enough to lift the mood within the family. “That helped a lot .. . but it wasn't comfortable for Annierose. I think she felt the tension in the house. My fault was that I had become really bitter. I wish I had seen it, but I didn't get it at the time. I didn't really know what was wrong with me, I just knew it was pre-depression and I was silent a lot. I look back and I realize I was very uncomfortable to be around. I think they tiptoed around me and I feel really bad about that.”
Darlene remembers one spectacular blowout she had, ostensibly about how the family had managed to accumulate too many possessions. “One day we were cleaning out the garage — an absolute nightmare. I knew I was angry but I didn't get what I was angry at. Things were piled on top of things, you couldn't get to the bottom, and I just went nuts. I was ranting about people in Third World countries making stuff so we could bury it in our garage, so that we could just go to the store and buy more so that they could get paid fifty cents a day so they could make more plastic. I was on a roll. And finally, the first time that anybody in my family had ever called me on my stuff, Amberskye said, ‘Mom, why are you yelling at us?'”
Darlene just stopped in her tracks. She looked at Amberskye and said, “I'm not. It looks like I'm yelling at you, but I'm yelling at me. ” She couldn't believe she had allowed herself to do this. “I think that's why the rage was so strong. I said to her, ‘I'm sorry, you're right. I'm just furious at myself for allowing this to happen. ‘”
Darlene's frustration had begun to affect the family's daily life. She wasn't managing well. Looking back, she still kicks herself for failing to see how her dissatisfaction was distorting the way she related to those closest to her. “I wish someone had called me on it early because it was releasing to be called on it and realize that this was not okay. You don't treat people this way. ” Tom remembers that the tension in the house during this period used to be so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Not long after that meltdown, the family began to downsize. Amberskye headed off to university, and over the next eighteen months Darlene allowed herself to envision some kind of reconfiguration of their family. The exercise of sorting out how to do it fell to Darlene, who had always been the family organizer. In the late fall, she approached Tom about the possibility of separating again. He wasn't ready to agree immediately, but given a few days to think about it, he said, “Yeah, we need to do this, this will be good. ” Tom says that Annierose and finances were the two things compelling him to stay near Darlene, but he could also see that he and Darlene needed to disentangle themselves from a relationship that wasn't doing much for either of them.
They began to imagine what shape their separation might assume. They were strapped for money, and real estate options are very limited on a small island, so their opportunities for choice were somewhat circumscribed. They owned a mobile home on an adjoining property, and Tom thought he might take up residence in that trailer. “He was going to move in the middle of January,” said Darlene. “We had laid new floors and totally fixed it up, but about two weeks before he was supposed to move in, I thought, ‘We can't afford to do this. I don't know how we are going to survive. I don't know how he's going to survive financially.' I spent about four hours sitting with the figures, but they weren't working. ” Darlene went to Tom and asked him if he could make the figures work. A couple of days later she asked, “Have you been able to figure out how to make this work financially?”
Tom said, “No.”
In the meantime, Darlene had another idea. Some years before, Tom had built a small cottage next to their house, attached to it by a long, covered breezeway. It occurred to her that they could afford it if one of them lived there. She felt that in the long run it would be better for Annierose, and that they could re-address how to make it work financially to be on separate properties after Annierose left home. Tom liked the idea. The cottage, while tiny, has a living room, kitchen area, loft, and one bedroom. “Originally I was going to move into the cottage,” Darlene remembers, “but then Tom said, ‘Look, I'll move into the cottage, I don't really care,' and he doesn't. It worked.”
Darlene believed this arrangement would be better for her daughter, who could sleep in the big house but move easily between her mother's and father's places. However, this wasn't immediately apparent to fifteen-year-old Annierose, who, in adjusting to the news that her parents were breaking up again, had fallen for the romantic idea of having two bedrooms of her own when her Dad moved to the trailer, and was disappointed at the news. Darlene sympathized, but felt that her daughter didn't have the experience to fully understand what living in two homes would mean. “She was going to want stuff that wasn't where she wanted it to be and, yes, it's only next door, but when it's pouring rain, which it does so much here, she's not going to want to leave to go and get it.”
Things have played out much the way Darlene and Tom hoped they might. “Some weekend mornings Annierose will crawl out of bed, and still in her pajamas and with tousled hair and a yawn, go over to her dad's house and have breakfast with him,” Darlene says. “She'll have lunch with whoever is home and in her opinion is having the best food. She will read a book and have a nap on either couch. ” Annierose likes that her parents live side by side, says Darlene. “Obviously she would rather us be together but that isn't the way it is. I think mostly she likes that we are so close.”
Annierose herself had mixed feelings about her parents' split. She was relieved because they were happier and more relaxed, but “the hardest part was trying to evenly divide my time between the two houses,” she remembers. “After some time, though, I found myself going from the peacekeeping role to making sure I spent an even [amount of] time at both parents' houses. I still preferred this arrangement a hundred times more than them living together.”
It's impossible to avoid some pitfalls, though. There are moments when old irritants rise to the surface, prompting familiar behavior patterns, and this bothers Darlene, especially when it puts her child in the middle. “I must say, there are times when I'm pissed at myself because I don't keep my mouth shut,” says Darlene, remembering when Tom, trying to work out some complicated transportation arrangements with his daughter, made decisions involving her car without consulting her about it. “He refuses to communicate with me and it just drives me crazy. So I said, ‘Oh man, Annierose, I need you to tell me things because Dad doesn't tell me anything, and especially when you are talking about my car, you know?' And I just wished that I had shut my mouth.”
Annierose hated being caught in the middle. It wasn't until she got older that she realized it wasn't her job as their child to try to fix her parents' problems. Darlene and Tom didn't have knock-down-drag-out fights, they were just tense with each other a lot of the time and the tension insinuated itself into Annierose's consciousness. “These weren't massive feelings, something that smacked you in the face. You never really noticed that they were there until someone else pointed it out.”
Small annoyances aside, Tom and Darlene found simple ways of nurturing and maintaining convivial relations. The family created a new ritual where all three meet for dinner every Sunday. Tom and Darlene take turns cooking, so the venue for dinner switches back and forth. They rent a video or play games together, and Sunday has become the day of the week that's sacrosanct as family time.
As Annierose reached the age where she too would be leaving the nest to head off to university, Darlene began looking to a future where it would just be her and Tom. Darlene is a planner, and she needed to find a vision that would inform the coming years. She said to Tom, “I'm thinking you might want to go to the mobile and live there, or I'll go in the mobile and you live in the house, but we need to figure out what we're doing. I need about six months' notice to get used to the idea, to plan, to figure out how it's all going to work, so think about it. ” A couple days later he announced that he was fine staying where he was. Darlene says, “It threw me. I said, ‘You're going to stay in the cottage still?' and he said, ‘Why not? It works and it's cheap.' I was totally thrown for a loop. I'm still not sure if I like the idea. In one way it ends up being handy, because the girls are going to be coming home to visit, and here we are, all in one place.”
As time passes, Darlene has begun to see other threads that tie her to her ex-husband. “A friend asked me the other day if I missed saying to Tom, ‘There's a big piece of wood that I can't chop' and I said, ‘Oh, I ask him. We're still friends. ‘”
Tom and Darlene had reconfigured the family for the sake of their daughters, but sometime during their journey a new friendship began to take root between them, one that may survive long after there's a practical need for it to endure. They lean on each other in solving the problems of daily life, and that reliance shows itself in small gestures. “One day I realized the outside tap was on and I didn't know how to turn it off, so I got Tom to come and show me how to do it right. We're like neighbors who happen to share children — a cross between parents and neighbors.”
The friendship's also there in more profound ways. “I know that I could ask Tom to do anything for me and he would do it,” said Darlene. “And he could ask me to do anything for him and I would do it. I find that interesting, because even though we didn't work together, there's this bond that could never be severed.”