“I've learned enough to know that
what you're afraid of is always
worse than reality; it's never as bad as
you think it's going to be.”
-Mary
WHEN MARC FINALLY GAME GLEAN with his wife it was like flicking a light switch. In an instant, he'd changed both of their lives. For him, it was the beginning of his liberation, but for her it was the end of a dream.
Mary thought she'd married the man she would spend the rest of her life with. They'd been together for twelve years, bought and renovated a house, and had two daughters, Madeleine and Kate. They were busy, happy, and stressed, like most parents who set themselves to the task of raising young children. But behind the appearance of a flourishing family, Marc was living a lie. He desperately wanted to be a contented husband and father, he adored his daughters and loved his wife, and yet he was restive.
Mary sensed that something was awry. Her husband had become increasingly distant and distracted, but she chalked it up to life in the family lane. “We became less and less intimate. Life goes on. It's not like you're missing something. You don't even pay attention to the fact that the passion and the romance aren't there anymore. You think, ‘Well, this is what it's like when you have kids. ‘”
Bit by bit, the balance within the family began to falter. One night when Marc seemed particularly unsettled, Mary quizzed him about what was going on. He fled to the living room, and she followed him, demanding an answer. He remembers vividly, “I couldn't speak and I closed my eyes. I knew that the moment I told her, her life would change, my life would change, and there would be no turning back. It was like an accident, it was that dramatic. I knew the consequence of that moment: I counted to ten and I told her.”
Bursting into tears, Marc confessed to his wife that he was gay. She was shell-shocked, and they both scrambled to collect themselves. For months he'd been attempting to come to grips with the secret of his sexuality, and in anticipation of a moment like this had written her a long letter trying to explain. He brought it out and they sat and read it together. Mary was stunned and struggled to digest what she was reading, and then she did something remarkable. She opened her heart to her husband. “I thought she was going to kick me out,” says Marc, “but her first reaction was, ‘I will always love you no matter what.' She accepted me right away.”
“I think it would have been a greater challenge if I felt I had to forgive,” Mary says, “but there isn't anything I have to forgive because Marc is just who he is. Should I be angry at him for telling me? No, that was the most courageous thing he could have done. If I was dealing with somebody who had done something to hurt me that would be much harder to deal with, but it was just circumstances — like bad weather.”
The story of Marc's sexuality is one of ambiguity, denial, and wishful thinking. As a child growing up in a small town in Quebec, he had few friends. His parents sent him off to an all-boys high school where he was always an outsider, the last kid chosen for the sports teams. “The first year I was there, I was in a dormitory and I just hated it. I cried, and I told my parents I wanted to go home. ” His parents had chosen the small school because they wanted him to excel academically, but looking back, Marc still feels the pain of being placed in an environment that was also meant to toughen him up. “I will always remember fighting with some boys. I was losing and one of the priests said, ‘G'mon Marc, your dad sent you here so you can become a man.' My God, that was painful for me. I try not to think about it. I still have nightmares about that time. I picture myself going back there and saying, ‘Listen, I am what lam!'”
Marc ignored whatever hazy sexual attraction he felt toward men, and tried to live a straight life. “I was not sure about myself. I had a girlfriend at the age of twenty-one, the very first girlfriend I had, and I was really in love, you know? Sex was great and when we broke up it was very painful. I had convinced myself that I was not gay.”
In the wake of that love affair, he did make one timid foray into the non-straight world, but it was a disaster. One day he decided to go to a gay bar and test his sexuality. “I hated it. I was nervous and I felt very uncomfortable. I had a beer and then the bartender brought me a second beer and I said, ‘I didn't order that,' and he said, ‘Somebody else ordered it for you.' I freaked out and left. I just left.”
Throughout his twenties and early thirties he remained in denial, but he encountered friends and colleagues who sensed his true orientation. He wasn't ready to be “outed” by them and was wounded by some gossiping that went on behind his back. “Some people at the office hurt me a lot, saying to other people, ‘I can't believe Marc has a girlfriend because I'm sure he's gay.' That's painful to hear, especially when you don't accept yourself.”
When he was thirty-three, Marc met Mary. He had noticed her one Saturday while he was at work, and he was instantly attracted to her. “She's a very interesting woman, very outgoing, very outspoken. We started to date. Mary had so much love to give me that I thought, ‘Well, I believe I can love her. ‘” After a year, their liaison became more serious, and they decided to buy a house together and start a family. It was a project Marc invested in wholeheartedly. “I wanted so much to love women. Maybe fate didn't want me to come out back then because I wanted so much to have a family. I just love children.”
He was also really enjoying his intimate relationship with his partner. “It was always a confirmation that I was not gay because I was able to love her. I didn't know there were different degrees, I thought it was black and white. ” He wondered how he could be attracted to her and be gay at the same time. “I couldn't understand that,” he says.
Over the years, Marc found he was beginning to have dreams again about being intimate with men. He felt guilty and frightened as he realized that the part of him he'd been repressing wasn't going to go away. His relationship with Mary suffered. It was hard on both of them not knowing what was causing the growing rift in their love life.
“Our passion didn't come back after Kate was born,” Marc recalls. “We tried to be more intimate. Mary kept telling me, ‘You have to reassure me that I'm still beautiful,' which I tried to do. She said, ‘You never tell me that you love me.' I could show my affection by hugging her, but I think deep down, my saying ‘I love you' was like a lie to her. I didn't want to lie to her, so I avoided the topic all the time. It was like that for a fewyears. Mary was frustrated. I was also frustrated because I wanted to be close to her but because we were not having sex, my gay feelings were stronger and stronger. I was feeling very stressed, and my work became my refuge. Mary said, ‘You are so distant from me,' and I said, ‘Yes, I feel that I live in a shell now.' I was not able to love her the way that she wanted to be loved. I tried to avoid conversations or situations where I felt I was going to lie to her about myself. I would do the dishes, go back to work, go to my laptop or something. It was a difficult process and I was not talking about it to anyone.”
At the same time, Marc changed jobs, moving from a hectic office environment to a start-up operation where he spent a lot of time on his own. This gave him time to reflect, and during long walks at lunch he began to ask himself some of the “what if” questions he'd never dared confront. And then one day, while he was online, he made a bold move. “I checked out bisexuality and gay fathers and suddenly I saw a profile of the ‘typical gay father.' It was basically my whole history . . . it's like somebody wrote the story of my life. I thought, ‘Maybe I'm not alone. ‘”
He needed more information and searched out a therapist who would understand his dilemma. It was the first time he had ever talked to anyone about it. He desperately wanted to find out if he was “bi” or “gay. ” “At that point I think I had accepted the fact that I was bisexual. I was trying to convince myself I could have a happy marriage just feeling attracted to men. ” He tried to rationalize his feelings by comparing himself to a man in love with his wife, but attracted to other women he had no intention of sleeping with.
Marc asked his therapist if, in his experience, people did well when they tried to make peace with their urges. “I said, ‘Is it possible for me to live my marriage for the rest of my life and accept the fact that I'm bisexual and forget the whole thing?' And the therapist said, ‘Do you want me to answer that question for you? ‘And I said, ‘No.' I knew he was going to say it was not possible to ignore who you are.”
Over the next few months Marc wrestled with what to do. He confided in a gay friend at work, and felt huge relief about doing so. “What happened in the ensuing days was a blur. “I came out to him on Wednesday and then I had to go to Edmonton on the following day and he told me he had a friend in Edmonton who's a gay father and asked if I wanted to meet him. He called his friend and I had a drink with him. It was the first time that I realized that maybe there was a positive outcome to the situation. At that point it was obvious to me that I had to come out to Mary but I didn't know when. I thought I should write a letter just in case an accident happened. It took me four hours, but I wrote a long letter on the plane [home] . ” That was the letter Marc gave to Mary on the night he came out to her.
Mary was deeply hurt and confused by Marc's revelation, and there were moments where she flirted with anger, but generally she held it at bay. What threw her more than the confession was how Marc's news might jeopardize their family. His decision to reconcile himself with his sexuality had jolted her to her core, but somehow she understood. “He hadn't betrayed me. He hadn't lied to me anymore than he had lied to himself. I think I felt that very early on. I just never felt angry. I kept waiting. A couple of times I felt a little bit angry because I was afraid he was prepared to throw everything away.”
“There were some difficult moments,” Marc remembers. “Some days were good and some were not good. Now I could accept that I was gay and I wanted to explore that, but it was very difficult for her to accept. This is where the roller coaster started. Mary was very depressed, but my stress was gone. For years I had had this pain in my back, and then it left. The pressure just lifted.”
As Mary began fumbling toward some kind of equilibrium, she did it without bitterness but not without cost. Her self-esteem plummeted. It had been shaky in the waning months of her marriage, but Marc's emergence from the shadows threw her into a state of confusion. She hadn't anticipated this emotional landmine and it had caught her quite unawares. “It made sense after he told me, but I had no idea. I felt like there was something wrong with me, which I now know is standard in mixed-orientation marriages. It's very common for the straight spouse to feel that there is something wrong with them. The gay spouse comes out of the closet, and the straight spouse goes in.
“I had to deal with feeling that I'd never had the love that I thought I'd had. That was a hard thing to deal with. But I focused on thinking, ‘Well, okay, I wasn't the princess and he wasn't the prince and I guess that's the way my life was going to have to happen, but I have a wonderful human being in my life who has given me two wonderful children and I have a family.' Nobody really gets prince charming. Well maybe my mom did, but it's rare.”
Mary needed some outside support and so she sought guidance from the Anglican Church. “I went to see my priest and she was amazing. She said, ‘You're grieving your hopes and dreams.' I had to accept that the path I thought my life was on, and the future I thought I had, were no longer mine. She really put her finger on it. I had to rebuild a vision of the future.”
Arriving at that acceptance would take enormous effort, but Mary maintained crystalline clarity about one thing: she did not want her family shattered. She did voluminous research on the subject, read every book she could get her hands on, cried alot, and kept trying to make sense of an upside-down world. “It was all about learning to let go of the idea that I had control over what was going to happen in my life. I had to learn how to trust Marc again. I had to learn how to get hold of the facts so I could get a handle on what I knew was real and what I was just scared of. I wrote down on paper, ‘This is what I know: Marc is gay and he's committed to the girls. Nothing else is certain, which means that nothing else is necessarily destroyed. ‘”
Marc's focus on what mattered most to him was unwavering. His wife and children were the center of his world. Ironically, he'd risked losing everything he cared about most when he came out to Mary, but it was tenderness for his wife that induced him to do so. “One of the reasons I wanted to come out to her was because I kept seeing her so sad. I could see the pain for her in our relationship and I knew I was the cause. I didn't want her to suffer and I didn't think it was fair for me to wait until I retired and then say, ‘Honey, the girls are in university, I'm leaving you because I have this secret relationship with another man.' I didn't want to lie to her or to be having a secret affair.”
There had been no betrayal, and that is what helped Mary to make peace with her husband's news. “I think that betrayal would have been a much harder thing to get over, although I know that people do it. I didn't have as much work to do,” she says.
Still, finding a new equilibrium was not going to be easy. Mary needed to understand who her husband really was and to adjust to her new reality. “Marc and I spent a lot of time doing some family bonding, going for walks together, and spending more time together than we had. That helped to rebuild the trust so that we could build something on that, reinvent ourselves as a family, and focus on what we did have. That really gave me a lot of strength.”
With the help of a therapist, Mary realized that she needed to create a bubble of time so she could find her footing. The therapist had told her to ask Marc not to do anything for six months so that she could mourn her marriage and go through the process of accepting that she was heading into a new life. Marc agreed to hold off on any decisions, and they embarked on a careful process of trying to imagine what might be possible for them. “I had to get down to what is real now. It was important to me that Marc gave that six-month commitment to give me security, so I felt that we had some solid ground to build something on.”
It was one thing for Mary to hear Marc's words about wanting them to have a future together, and another to have faith that he wasn't going to take off. “I had to rebuild that trust because I knew he'd been prepared to leave if he had to. I needed to know that he wasn't going to drop another bomb on me, and I needed to feel I had complete honesty from him.”
Mary was keenly aware of another reality. She'd seen how other families had fallen apart, and it wasn't something she wanted to face in hers. She was pragmatic, and even though her romantic ties to Marc had been cut, she wanted the family to remain intact. “It's like the man has the option to leave and a woman doesn't. That's sort of the default system, so I was trying to make sure this happened in a way that held him to the family because the alternative was that he might disappear. Women are never disenfranchised from their kids and their families. We're fixers in society. I think it's a female thing. . . you feel like you're the one who's the conductor, managing things. Men aren't interested in managing the emotional network of a group of people and women are.”
Marc had also realized that he had to allow Mary to regain some sense of control over her circumstances. “She doesn't like to be told what to do, so I wanted to make sure she was part of the decision- making. ” They agreed to a go-slow deal, and focused on using the next half-year to adjust and bounce around ideas about what to do. That made sense to Mary, who is task oriented and wanted, more than anything, to work out a solution. She also recognized it was going to take some delicate footwork.
When Mary and Marc had renovated their house, he hadn't always been forthright about his own preferences. He tended to go along with her, and only later would she find out that he had wanted something else. That had been frustrating, and as they rebuilt their relationship, Mary was wary of second-guessing Marc's choices when the stakes were so high. She could see some familiar behavior patterns emerging almost immediately after he'd told her he was gay. “In that first week there was a part of me that was trying to protect him. I was torn between trying to protect myself but also trying to make things okay for him. It's that part of me that's always trying to act in a way that I know will be acceptable to him and meet his needs.”
Mary recognized her tendency to be the fixer in the relationship. She also knew there was a very real threat to her own security if she wasn't able to resolve things in a way that made everyone happy. “In confrontational marriage breakups, the guys are unhappy so they run away. It doesn't do them any good in the long run, but I didn't want to scare him, to push him away. So I had to compromise, to be patient.”
A fluke event affected how things played out. Just a week before Marc made his announcement, Mary had been listening to the radio and heard me interviewed about the article I had written describing how my ex-husband and I share a duplexed house. “After that,” said Mary, “there was, in the back of my mind, this option that I thought was possible, and that was important. I went out and bought the magazine and read it in secret and put it under my mattress. ” Knowing that we had pulled off our arrangement gave Mary confidence that she could deal with the dissolution of her marriage without every part of her life becoming unstitched. The article didn't stay hidden for long before she presented it to Marc, saying, “Why do you want to breakup the family? There are options, and we need to figure out something else. ” The idea of sharing a house appealed to both of them and it became a metaphor for surviving as a newly configured couple.
“What was empowering was making the decision that it didn't have to be shattered, that it could be reinvented,” according to Mary, who was intrigued by the possibility that she and Marc could defy convention. “You are being creative and there's a kind of ‘to hell with them, I'm not going to follow their rules and be miserable, I'm going to make something of this and hold onto what is good. ‘”
Mary became more and more convinced that their situation was neither a disaster nor a diminishment of what they had. It was just different. “[One] afternoon I was lying on the couch in the living room and the sun was coming in. It was all very comfy and I thought, ‘This is all very nice and whatever house I go to I'm still going to have this couch.' It might be a different house, but maybe because I've traveled so much I can let go of those things and know there's a difference between letting go and losing. You can let go because you know something else will come. You can let go of the house because you know you can make another space. You can let go of the specific family structure you had because you know you can build a different kind of family. It's not all or nothing. It's not ‘if I lose this house I have nothing,' it's ‘if I lose this house I'll have a different house. If I lose the marriage, I'll have a different relationship with Marc. ‘”
That summer they agreed to take a vacation as a family. Little by little Mary was slowly regaining faith in their partnership. “Having those holidays together was important for re-bonding and rebuilding the family. That gave me a kind of secure space to work in, that small series of commitments. It's hard when you have the rug pulled out from under you and you don't know what you can believe anymore. Slowly, we fell right back into the same old routine. ” Preserving small rituals was important in that process. “He always makes me coffee every morning, because I don't know how. Planned incompetence; I can't make my own coffee. He promises me if we buy a duplex that he'll continue to make me coffee every morning.”
And there were spontaneous events that gave everyone in the family pleasure. Marc remembers one day when everyone piled into the car after Mary had expressed a desire to spruce up her wardrobe. “She said, ‘I think I need new clothes,' and Madeleine said, ‘Yes, Mommy, you need clothes. ‘We decided to go shopping together — the four of us. Madeleine decided she was going to choose clothes for her mom, and Mary and I were in the change-room and Madeleine and Kate were going back and forth getting clothes. We spent at least two hours in that shop — and four hundred dollars. It was neat, you know. I could see that Mary was slowly transforming herself.”
In addition to the emotional terrain they had to traverse, there were logistical issues to deal with. Sleeping arrangements had to change. Marc decided to move into an extra bedroom downstairs. By chance it was a transition that took place quite seamlessly. “I was not looking forward to the day when I said, ‘Bye, Mary, I'm moving to the basement.' How do you choose that date?” Circumstance and the weather rescued him. During a heat wave, Marc headed for the cool of the basement, and he never left. “When the third night arrived Mary said, ‘You just moved into the basement.' It just happened. She looked at me and said, ‘Goodnight. ‘”
They also had to figure out how to explain the situation to their daughters. According to Marc, Kate, who is only six, has been oblivious to the import of the changes. “I never really told her that I was gay because she's too young. She knows that I am downstairs and she's never really asked why. She just accepted it. The other day she had a little friend here on a sleepover and in the morning they went to see her mom upstairs and then downstairs to see me. She said, “This is my daddy's room,' and her friend didn't even ask why we have separate bedrooms.”
Marc broke the news to nine-year-old Madeleine while the two of them were on an outing. “One day we were biking together and I think we went into a coffee shop. I decided to tell her. We are really lucky because our neighbors are a gay couple and Madeleine knows that and she understands what ‘gay' means. She said, ‘Wow!' Her first two questions were, ‘Why are you gay?' and ‘How did you become gay?' I was not expecting her to ask those questions, not right away. I told her, ‘I think Daddy was born like this. Daddy really loves you.' I tried to make the whole thing positive for her. I decided to go against some of the recommendations I saw on the Internet — to tell children this is a family secret. All the people I care about knew and I didn't want her to feel ashamed about this and think there is something wrong with it. ” Marc and Mary had been advised by a family therapist to be open with their children and include them, within reason, in the changes that would be occurring within the family.
On that outing, Marc had a brainstorm about how to involve Madeleine by seeking her assistance. “I said, ‘I need your help to redecorate my room' and she said, ‘Oh yeah, good.' And then when we were biking again, she stopped and said, ‘Daddy, I'm going to have a hard time to redecorate your room. Boys like blue and girls like pink. I'm going to have to think the other way around from now on. Do you like pink, like the color of my room?' I laughed and said, ‘Madeleine, Daddy will always like blue, no matter what. I don't like pink, I will never have a pink room, don't worry.' And that was it, she never asked me any more questions.”
Madeleine did want to check on her mother to make sure she was all right. Mary remembers that conversation. “She was worried about me. I was honest with her and told her I was sad because I didn't have a boyfriend anymore, that Daddy was still my best friend but he wasn't my boyfriend anymore, but I'd be able to handle it. She told me that she'd help me find a boyfriend.”
Mary was careful about how she set the stage in terms of any changes that were ahead, especially when she talked to Madeleine. “She has two close friends who come from separated families and in one case, her friend moves back and forth all the time between her parents. I was afraid that Madeleine would be frightened by that. ” Mary balked at the idea of her children becoming divorce nomads and she took pains to reassure her daughter that this would not be her fate. She explained the duplex idea to her nine -year -old, hoping she would understand that whatever changes were ahead, the four of them would be together as a family.
Marc found that his older daughter was able to distinguish between the acrimony of her friends' parents and the good will between her own when she said to him, “It's very different because you and Mommy love each other. ” He told her, “Yes, we still love each other and I'm not leaving the house. We may have another house together, but you will be part of the decision.”
There was one family member who suffered, though. “The cat was the one that was bothered by it,” said Mary. “She's very set in her ways. She tells us when to go to bed, and when to wake up in the morning, and she always slept in our bed with us. When Marc moved into the basement she was completely disconcerted. She didn't know where to sleep. For the longest time she would go up and down the stairs all night long, crying.”
As they began to adjust to the experience of regrouping as an unconventional family, Mary began to gain confidence that she and Marc could build something completely new. “A number of the books I read confirmed what I was coming to terms with, that there was no benefit in being angry or in tearing your life apart if you don't have to. ” But it really irked her that the preponderance of materials she picked up about divorce were so bleak. “They all assumed that you go off and have separate lives and have nothing to do with each other. Some of them said you shouldn't have holidays together, you shouldn't be talking to each other, because you have to get on and start your new life. I have a friend who is separated and when her daughter is with her ex, she doesn't phone her, she doesn't talk to her, because her psychologist said that in the first year it is much better if the child has complete division of their lives. To me, that's just so completely false.”
As she searched for alternatives to the traditional divorce model, Mary kept coming upon stories of disaster. “Everybody says that kids are resilient, they'll survive. But that doesn't mean that split houses are the best thing for them and that we can't find something even better. ” The assumption that it was the kids who should have to move back and forth between two parental homes and live out of a suitcase riled Mary. This was not what she wanted for her daughters. “I am really curious how many positive alternatives exist that nobody ever talks about. Only angry people seem to talk. If you were living in a terribly confrontational and disruptive, dysfunctional situation there might be value in that, but I'm not. We're still a family.”
They decided to spend their three-week vacation in Victoria with Mary's family. “We knew we had to tell her parents,” said Marc. “They were celebrating their sixtieth wedding anniversary and we didn't want to tell them that news before-hand and break up the party. Mary and I were so nervous. I'd been able to find a lot of resources on the Internet, but I can tell you there is nothing about how to come out to your father-in-law. Mary joked about it, saying, ‘It's your news, you tell them. It's your punishment. ‘”
Mary's father is a little deaf, so what ensued had moments that, in retrospect, amuse both Mary and Marc. “It was almost a comedy. We had everything planned. We were going to tell them on Monday night so they'd have two days to think about it before we left. We put the girls to bed about 9:30 in the evening, and we were sitting, the four of us, in the living room. Then her father fell asleep. I didn't know what to do. Mary looked at me and gave me the high sign: not tonight. ‘Oh shit!' I thought. The whole day was stressful for nothing.”
The next night they knew they had to do it. “My heart was pounding, and Mary said, ‘Dad, Mom we have something to tell you. Marc will tell you the news.' I started to say, ‘Mr. Allen, I've struggled a bit with my life,' but he couldn't quite hear me and said, ‘What did you say?' I looked at Mary for help, so Mary said, ‘Marc is struggling with his life. ‘
“Mary was holding my hand the whole time, and telling them that we want a functional family. We told them about the duplex idea to reassure them that the girls are in good hands. After a long pause, Mr. Allen said, ‘Onbehalf of both of us, we accept you.' That was very moving.”
Marc remembers that Mary's mother worried about her daughter and asked later, “Can you just live like this for the rest of your life?” Mary told her that eventually she and Marc would likely separate because he needed to explore and live his life. When they heard the news, other family members called to say they still considered Marc part of the family. Mary's parents invited the whole family to go to Hawaii with them the following summer, and Marc says, “I wasn't sure if I was going to be invited because of the situation, but they insisted. ” In the end, five families — fourteen people — took that trip and had a wonderful time.
The next hurdle was telling Marc's own family. Stoked by the positive reaction they'd received from unveiling their secret to Mary's clan, they headed to Quebec City. Marc confided in his younger sister first. He was alone with her when she asked, “So, how are things going at home?”
“I said, ‘Fine .. . there are some difficult moments,' and she said, ‘What's wrong? Are you sick?' No. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?' No. A boyfriend?' I started to laugh. No, but Once he told her the situation, she was very supportive.
Marc had worried about telling his parents. He was concerned about his father's failing health, so he decided to tell his mother first. “My mom is cool as a cucumber. I've only seen her crying three times in her life and each time was at a funeral. Her family, which is a big family of fifteen, doesn't show emotions. Her reaction was, ‘Well, you're forty years old and you know what you are doing. If you are happy, so be it. ‘” Even now Marc says he has no idea how she really felt.
“After I told my mother, I told my father. He started to cry. But he wasn't crying because of me being gay, it was his fear that he'd lose access to his grandchildren. And he asked me, ‘Am I going to be able to see Mary?' I said, ‘Of course. She is part of your family just like I am to [her family] . At that point Madeleine arrived and it was the four of us together. I said, ‘Madeleine, I just told Grandma and Grandpa about our news.' The fact that Madeleine knew helped them to accept this, and the weekend after I told them, my father called me and said, ‘You are always going to be our boy. ‘
“They came to see us a few weeks ago. We needed to redecorate Mary's bedroom as it's a new beginning for her, and I had asked my father to help me. It was the first time they had come to see us in our new family situation, and they saw my bedroom downstairs. So my father helped me to paint Mary's room. It was for her, not for me, and it was a way for him to show us that he accepted the situation.”
Mary believes that she and Marc will remain kin to each other for the rest of their lives. It's a link she wants to preserve and nurture. “I think the bottom line to me is that when you have kids, the words ‘till death do us part' gains a kind of biological imperative. It's up to us if we are going to be functional or dysfunctional. Marc and I are still best friends. We like each other, and you don't throw away love, you don't undo it. If it's there, you nurture it. The problem is there's no model for doing that when your marriage ceases to exist. You have to invent it.”
Along the way, Mary and Marc have been surprised and stung by some of the negative reactions to their efforts from people outside the cocoon of their families. “Nobody out there seems to understand,” Mary says, recalling some of the thoughtless comments she'd heard, like ‘How can you talk to each other?'' How can you put up with each other?' ‘Why aren't you angry? ‘You must be in denial,' ‘You must be repressing something,' or ‘You must be victimizing yourself.' “No,” she says emphatically. “I'm trying to take control and hold my family together. As far as I'm concerned my marriage is an annulled marriage. It may be null and void, but my family is still a viable family.”
At this point she is a bit weary of trying to help the world make sense of their unorthodox approach to the circumstances. “I don't want to tell anybody now, because it's so complicated. I don't want to explain myself. The last person that we told phoned me later and said, ‘I don't think you should go for a duplex.' When I asked why not, she said, ‘You'll be really hurt if Marc brings home boyfriends.' She was underestimating both of us. She thought that he was going to turn into somebody else and put his family aside and only think below the belt. He's not going to bring home boyfriends until he's serious about them and if he's serious about them he'll bring them home to get us to check them out.
“I was angry because she thought that I would be prepared to destroy my family because I might feel some pain. If he meets somebody else, it's going to hurt no matter where he lives. I'm quite prepared to deal with what comes, but I'm not prepared to lose my children for fifty percent of their lives.”
Some of Mary's strength has come from her faith, which infuses her entire philosophy of life. “I'm Christian so I've always had this belief that God can't give me everything I want, but maybe God can give me the strength to handle what comes at me and get over it. People are amazingly resilient and I think every human being has the capacity to build their life. People allow themselves to destroy their lives but I think everybody has the capacity to get over that hump if they can find the strength. The only thing I'm afraid of now is not knowing what situation we're going to get into. I guess I have fear about how I'll feel if Marc finds a new partner, but that's something to deal with then. You know, I think I've learned enough to know that what you're afraid of is always worse than reality; it's never as bad as you think it's going to be. I have faith that whatever happens I can handle it,”
But what about her future and any possible partners who might come into her life? What if she met somebody who couldn't deal with the fact that Marc lived in the house? “I figure if I met somebody, I'd have to get them to meet Marc before I really started going out with them. If they have a relationship with him beforehand then he's not really ‘the other.' I'd want to make the family situation upfront from the beginning so that there are no surprises.”
Both Marc and Mary did begin new relationships — at around the same time. Marc describes the early stages this way. “It was a little odd at the beginning, or ‘weird' as Madeleine said, but everyone got used to each other's new friends. The neighbors all know about our situation and, I am sure, have been talking a lot about all the ins and outs from our place.”
On Mother's day, Marc invited the whole gang to celebrate. He reserved a table for eight at a restaurant and Mary invited her new entourage along. “[Her new beau] has two girls, a little older than Madeleine ... actually, one of them was, and still is, our babysitter. It was fun and this extended family event made everyone more at ease with each other,” Marc says. Marc and Mary are taking a “more the merrier” approach to their expanding new family. It's working for the kids, too, according to Marc. “They both have lots of opportunities to know my friend and Mary's friend and everyone is accepting each other very well. Madeleine is amused about having so many men around her now.”
“Once you have kids, you're family for better or worse,” Mary observes. “That's just the way it's going to be. You're family until death do you part. You can have good relations or bad. Estranging somebody and trying to pretend you can have a life without them just makes it more difficult when you do have to deal with them. Just because Anglo North American society has come up with a model that says you have to be a nuclear family doesn't mean that extended families don't exist all over the world.”
In an effort to affirm their viability as a family and define their relationship according to their own values, Mary and Marc chose to observe the first wedding anniversary after their split in a special way. Getting married had been an important statement to one another and the world. They didn't want the anniversary date to become a mark of failure, a symbol of what hadn't worked. They thought carefully about it and decided to celebrate by privately recommitting themselves to each other. They went to lunch at their favorite restaurant, a converted old house in the country. Marc remembers, “We decided to just focus on each other. If we can't commit as husband and wife, we can recommit as friends. ” They repeated the vows they'd made to each other nine years before, and then made another gesture to symbolize their ongoing relationship. Each removed the wedding band from the left hand and placed it on the ring finger of the right hand. Together, they had come out to the world.