“I've stopped telling Joe how he should
feel about things and he's stopped letting me
do it. I don't storm off in a huff and
he doesn't shrug off my concerns. Most
of the time it works.”
-Gate
MY MARRIAGE ENDED one cold January night, over dinner at a bustling Greek restaurant. Joe and I had been to a parent-teacher meeting at our son's high school and had decided to catch a quick dinner afterwards. Over plates of Greek salad and souvlaki, I blurted out what had been on my mind for months. “Either we go into therapy or I will end this marriage. ” Disbelief clouded his face. I had raised the subject before, but this was the first time he seemed to really hear me. “You're kidding,” he said. A feeling of shock settled over our table, and the air became still.
Joe and I have never had a lot in common. We move at different speeds. He ambles; I hurtle. He's an “on the one hand, on the other hand” Libra; I'm a rototiller Leo. He listens to the Ramones; I like Handel. He's a Type-B artist; I'm a Type-A media producer. We met in 1985 at a local farmer's market, where, over back bacon sandwiches, I was breaking off a romance with a colleague of Joe's from the studio where they worked. Oblivious to the drama, Joe wandered over to chat and I was immediately intrigued. He was funny and handsome, with a brilliant smile.
Two weeks later, I asked him out. He was too shy to call me. On our first date, a hurried lunch at a greasy spoon, he spread pictures of his nieces on the table, and spoke lovingly about each one. We had dinner the next weekend at a tiny restaurant where we talked until the staff began sweeping up around us. When we walked under a full moon to the beach, I was completely smitten. I had been married to a cad who had cheated and lied, so I was on high alert for knavish men, but Joe was the opposite, with an honesty and sweetness that made me trust him. Within months, he had moved into my small apartment. We began to collide with each other early on (he once tried to tell me how to cut a cucumber properly, and I didn't take kindly to the instruction), but our shared sense of humor helped us survive even our testiest moments.
After a few years, we bought a dilapidated Victorian row house in a then-unfashionable neighborhood near a downtown mental hospital. The house needed work, and the process of renovating was riddled with conflict. We never could agree about house stuff. When we went to choose wallpaper for our dining room, I wanted a heritage pattern and he wanted primary colors. The strain between us was so palpable that the shop clerk asked if we'd like to cool off in a corner with a cup of tea.
In 1988, when I was 32, I discovered I was pregnant. This was a much-wanted baby, but I was reluctant to marry again. We finally succumbed to family pressure, and six weeks before our son's due date we were married by a judge in her chambers at City Hall. I wore black and insisted only our grandmothers attend as witnesses, and by the time we drove off for our honeymoon, my feet were so swollen from the pregnancy that we had to stop to buy me some size 11 tennis shoes.
Our son, Jake, was born in late December, and Joe and I soon lost ourselves in the business and busyness of raising him — washing cloth diapers and doing daily daycare runs. Four years later I became pregnant again, and since our tiny house couldn't hold another person, we bought a roomy five-bedroom semi in Toronto's west end just before our daughter arrived. Maddie was a shy baby who for the first three months of her life clung to me like the tendrils of a vine.
We were an unlikely pair, Joe and I, but I cherished his kindness and his humor and appreciated that he was a fully engaged dad—so engaged that we once had a protracted debate about whether our toddler should be eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich (my choice) or the “hot and hearty” meal Joe thought his child should be getting. I believed I had virtue and truth on my side and so did he.
For many years Joe gave me comic strips as gifts — depictions of our life together, scenes of domestic bliss, discord, hilarity, and angst. In each strip, there was always one frame portraying me with my jaw cranked open and daggers flying out of my mouth, headed in Joe's general direction. I loved the way those comic strips chronicled our flawed union, and I framed them all and hung them in our kitchen. They were overstated caricatures, but they told a truth about the stormy relationship my mother-in-law called our “funny little marriage. ” It was “funny,” but for a longtime we were able to brush off our differences.
We never waged all-out marital war, but we had constant border skirmishes that I used to call our “lettuce and laundry
wars. ” We'd argue about the kind of produce I bought or how he made the bed. The washer and dryer became the locus of friction as we disagreed about color sorting and wrinkle control. He didn't see the need for either, and I was committed to both. We were so at odds about domestic issues that I sometimes said to him, only half joking, that we should move into side-by-side duplexes with a dial on each door that we could spin to indicate whether the other spouse was welcome to visit (“Come on in” or “Maybe later”).
Eventually our differences became too significant to laugh off. We lost the habit of conversation, and disaffection settled in. Every time we tried to broach the problem, it was like striking steel on flint. I would talk and talk to keep the sadness at bay; he'd climb to his third-floor studio and bury his feelings in his work, drawing for hours on end. Or he'd sit in the family room, watching film noir videos and folding huge piles of wrinkled sheets and towels. I'd lie in bed, looking glumly over the footboard at a wall of family pictures, feeling trapped and hopeless.
We weren't a car-wreck of a marriage, but we were stuck in cruise control. I knew we were in serious trouble when our ten-year-old daughter would jump in to mediate as we bickered about something minor—like whether to have pasta or chicken for dinner. Looking at her earnest little face across the kitchen one night, I thought, “Things have gone too far. ” But if we split up, what would happen to our family?
I began therapy and implored Joe to join me. He wasn't ready yet, and by the time he visited the therapist, the “we” that used to be was over. I felt we'd gone as far as we could as a couple, but I had no idea how we could dissolve our couple-life without jettisoning our family-life. We had inhabited our relationship for almost two decades and I didn't know how to take it apart and rebuild. We both struggled.
The central concern for each of us was the kids. Early on, we made one pledge: our children were not going to become cannon fodder in any of our battles. One friend who'd gone through a hideous divorce, and plowed all his money into fighting with his ex-wife, encouraged us to “keep our eyes on the prize” — meaning the children. We knew where we didn't want to go, if not exactly where we were headed. We knew that although we may have been lousy as a married couple, we were good at other stuff. We were partners in the slog of everyday life, and we were great co-parents. We were almost always in agreement about how to raise our children, and tensions in that area were always surface, not profound.
I trusted that we both wanted to preserve what was good between us but get rid of what didn't work, and gradually I found myself trying to imagine what might be possible. Joint parenting was our bottom line. But could we do better? We shared a vague sense that we wanted something other than a “one week on, one week off” routine. Also, there were financial concerns. We had lived within our means, but we were mortgage-poor. Joe and I would each have even less trying to go it alone. Was there some way to stay together geographically but split up emotionally? Since our marriage had always been a little outside the box, why couldn't our separation?
The first few months after our watershed discussion over dinner, we stumbled around while we continued to live together, keeping our decision from our kids. It was hard. I used to sit for hours in front of the fireplace in our living room, musing about how to reconfigure our marriage without nuking the entire family. Joe would sometimes stop on his way to the third floor and we'd talk to each other over the stair railing. Some very delicate conversations took place while he lingered by the newel post and I sat curled up on the couch.
Therapy became a big part of patching together a new reality. The first time I sat in the psychologist's warm, book-lined office on the second floor of her house, I was bristling with anger. A slender, elegant woman, Sheila would fold her long frame into a black leather chair and listen as I poured out my grievances, then challenge me to remember what had drawn me to Joe, even though I resisted. She wanted me to deal with the whole person I had loved, not the two-dimensional man I'd created in my anger, and she asked me to try to envision some kind of future for us instead of brooding about our failings.
She prodded me to think about the kind of person I wanted to be once we had finished our marital makeover, and I often squirmed at having to revise myself as well as our family. But I trusted her method and bit by bit I moved forward, as did Joe, who began to see her on his own. I truly believe she was the midwife to our emerging new relationship.
We had to redraw our emotional boundaries and learn how to be nicer to each other. Sometimes that was unsettling. One day, in a fit of temper, I confronted Joe outside his studio and he sent me on my way, asking me to come back when I'd settled down. I realized Sheila had taught him that he didn't have to engage with me if we were at odds, and as he quietly closed the door in my face, I spluttered all the way down the stairs, cursing our therapist for teaching him to take control.
While Joe and I discussed ways to reconfigure our family, I began to hear about others who had attempted atypical arrangements. In one case, a couple had bought houses kitty-corner from each other, and they and their new partners and all the kids ate together several times a week. Another couple had continued to work together after their separation and live in the same house, new partners coming and going. Every story bolstered my confidence in the possibility of pioneering something new.
And reinventing our life and our space was like pioneering: lots of possibilities, lots of pitfalls. Should we buy two little houses near each other (very expensive) or two condos in the same building, maybe on the same floor? Going through this mental exercise was almost fun for me because I've always been a bit of a real estate junkie, buying and redecorating houses in my head. But change does not come as easily for Joe, and the process, for him, was very stressful. We finally settled on a basic plan: one way or another we would share a space where we could co-parent but still live separate lives. We decided it was time to tell the kids.
On a June afternoon, with the late - day sun spilling across the black-and-white tile floor of the kitchen, we asked the kids to sit with us at the table. “Daddy and I have something to discuss with you,” I said. The minute our daughter realized what was coming, her face crumpled and she ran to hide at the back of the coat closet. Our son, who was then fourteen, struggled to maintain his composure, and just one tear rolled down his cheek during the conversation. Many times they asked us why. Why did we have to do this? We tried to explain that we had grown out of being married partners but that we would never stop being a team when it came to raising them. In all the years I've been a parent, this was the only time I felt that I'd betrayed my children's trust. They knew divided families where the children bore the brunt of their parents' failed relationship, and it would be a long time before they believed that Joe and I would still be friends, that we'd remain united as parents, and that we'd all stay together.
I enlisted the help of a real estate agent who knew every-thing about the market in our neighborhood. She hauled me out to look at every place that might have potential, and I traipsed through more grotty houses than I cared to count. It was demoralizing. We toyed with the idea of staying in our house and dividing it into two apartments. We even talked to an architect friend who spent hours with us, helping us rethink our space over spaghetti and cheap wine. The truth was, while we were discussing walls and windows, we were actually figuring out how to redesign a family.
Then, in October, the real estate agent called to insist that we see a house she'd found just a few blocks over on a tree-lined street, a lovely old matron of a place from the 19205, already divided nicely into four apartments. We knew from the minute we walked in the front door that it was meant for us. Joe could have the apartment on the second floor, which had a studio, and I could have the apartment on the ground floor. Our son would have a bedroom in Joe's apartment, and our daughter would have one in mine, and they would float between us. We'd find tenants for the basement and the third-floor apartments. Joe and I could have the privacy we needed, but we could all stay together.
We went home and did the math. With the rental units to help defray the cost, we could just afford it. In a matter of days we made an offer and put our old place up for sale. It seemed ironic that, in the midst of separating, we were moving up in the real estate market, assuming more debt and becoming landlords.
Our families and many of our friends thought we'd cracked up. Some reacted with astonishment or dismay and some with envy. Doubters took us aside and pointed out potential pitfalls. At one family party, nobody seemed to know quite how to deal with us, and one fellow we knew chatted amicably with me for a long while, but sidled up to Joe the moment I left and advised him to “lawyer up. ” Our own lawyer asked us if we were sure we knew what we were doing.
Two of the couples we were closest to were so rattled by our undertaking that they didn't know how to behave if they couldn't choose sides. I had to take them to dinner and exact a promise that they'd trust us to know what we were doing. We didn't know, of course, but we were slogging hard to move in the right direction and those friends have since become our staunchest allies. Luckily, we had cheerleaders, too. Once our parents and siblings were onside, their support was solid and generous, even if some were perplexed by how we might accomplish our goal.
On the day we signed the final mortgage papers at our kitchen table, the bottom of my stomach fell out, and I remember looking at Joe to see if he was as terrified as I was. He was. But it was one of those moments when you hold your breath and jump.
In preparing for the move, we each had to choose what we wanted to keep and get rid of the rest. Shopping had been my anodyne, and our house was jammed full of memorabilia and antique furniture I'd collected. Joe didn't want the armoires or antiques. He wanted to divest himself of the things that had come to represent — for him — the failure of what we had been. In the end, nineteen station wagon loads of castoffs went from our house to a charity.
Getting ready to move was one of the most stressful times of my life. As usual, our pace was different. I packed quickly and Joe packed — well, methodically. He wanted to throw things out; I wanted to hang onto stuff. Eventually we learned to divide up the work and stay in different rooms on different floors, but it took every lesson learned in therapy and every ounce of will to avoid defaulting to toxic behavior.
Articulating how I feel is the way I choose to work my way through pain, but Joe is a man of few words and humor is the balm for his soul. At about this time, I could tell that he was beginning to repair emotionally. He developed what he called “the Freedom Dance,” and as a demonstration of how he was going to feel about not being my husband anymore, he'd stab the air with his arms and leap around like an aging rock star, singing, “Freedom, freeedom, freeeeedom. ” This would send people into hysterics, and while I was glad he was able to see the upside of our demise, my feelings took a little bruising when he did it once too often.
The new house required some cosmetic work: new carpets, paint, and fixtures. My mother became our “consultant,” spending time with every member of the family to help them envision their new space, sleeping in the empty house on a lumpy cot, and overseeing the painters and contractors. Together, she and Joe designed his apartment, which evolved as a “not-Gate” space, and as I saw him exercising his very different taste, I felt like cheering for him. In our other life, he had surrendered control over the domestic world to me, but now he was able to pick whatever tile and carpet he wanted for his new apartment. His place became a cheerful palette of blues, greens, and yellows, while mine retained the earthy shades I loved so much. Our daughter pored over color charts with my mother, choosing a pumpkin orange for her walls, while our son requested custom shelving in his room for his beloved computer and stereo. The move gave us all a chance to imagine a new and different future.
Thirteen months after my dinner-time ultimatum, a moving van pulled up to the house at 6:45 on a cold February morning. It was a day of small sadnesses. My mother-in-law arrived at our old house in mid-afternoon, when it looked empty and forlorn, and stood looking at the shell where our kids had been babies, where we'd celebrated birthdays and High Holidays and hung stockings on the mantel at Christmas. We'd lost something she had also loved, and she looked so disappointed. But I felt enormous relief. Being alone in my own space was intoxicating, and the first night in my new apartment, I closed my door and collapsed onto the sofa, repeating the word “mine!” like a mantra. I sensed that although we were still tied so closely, we had given ourselves and each other the gift of independence.
It took a few months to establish new routines. Joe and I each have our own kitchens so we take turns with lunch and dinner duty. Our doors are never locked, and the kids roam between the two apartments. When I'm not home, our daughter sleeps upstairs in her dad's apartment. Our son, who has now moved out on his own, used to wander down to my kitchen rooting for food at all hours, often clad in nothing but his boxer shorts. There's a clear division of our households, but also lots of overlap. For us, that works well. It allows us to participate equally in our children's lives while helping each other with the mundane details of daily life. We share our little mutt, Cola, and she sleeps wherever she wants. We created a system of being on and off duty, taking turns doing dinner or making lunches, ferrying the kids to music lessons and getting them to doctors' appointments. We trade off responsibility for weekends, confer regularly about our schedules, and share our parenting responsibilities in a way that gives each of us a lot of flexibility. We communicate a lot via phone now, but early on we had intercom units that sat on the kitchen counter in each apartment, and most mornings there'd be a buzz at around 7:45. “Good morning. You guys up yet? Can I send Cola down?” The dog would come bouncing down the stairs and park herself at my front door until I let her out into the garden for a morning pee. She still does. Thousands of minor decisions were negotiated over those little speakers, everything from making sure school forms had been signed to extending a spontaneous dinner invite.
Over the years, there have been times when we've had to work hard to maintain a balance within our unusual family. We discovered that potentially explosive issues are sometimes better resolved in writing than in person, so e-mail is our mediator. We've sent each other hundreds of missives over the last fewyears and used the good disaster prevention tactic that a friend once taught me: never push the Send button on a contentious message until you've stopped to breathe and reflect on the impact your words might have on the recipient.
However, we've also learned to listen carefully to each other, and to trust that we will back each other up. We are, in a lurching kind of way, beginning to change old patterns of interacting. I've stopped telling Joe how he should feel about things, and he's stopped letting me do it. I don't storm off in a huff, and he doesn't shrug off my concerns. Most of the time it works. For the rest, we do what we've had lots of practice doing: we apologize when we are in the wrong. That's something we were always good at; no matter how infantile or petulant our behavior, we always knew how to say that we were sorry.
Throughout this process, we've taken great pains to explain to the children that we are committed to working things out when we disagree, and over time they've seen us wrestle with some perplexing and difficult situations. Our arrangement demands that the adults behave like grownups, even if they're not feeling particularly mature about things, and I've learned from this experience the importance of empathy for the other characters in our domestic drama. We do have moments when we push each other's buttons, and familiar demons whisper in our ears from time to time, but we're getting better at recognizing them before they wreak havoc on our state of calm.
There have definitely been moments where the kids have been frustrated or frightened or downright angry with one or both of us. Our daughter hates it if we have a less than convivial discussion and tries to intervene if she senses any tension between us. We've had to explain that disagreements don't necessarily signal an impending storm. She's just beginning to believe that she doesn't have to act as her father's protector. Our son has a different temperament. Like many teenage boys, he holds his emotional cards close to his chest, and he has always taken things in stride. Recently my daughter confided to me that she'll always wish we had stayed married, but if we had to break up, she's glad we did it the way we did. My son has told me the same thing. Neither of our children could possibly have understood what a gift they were giving with those words.
The kids have taken turns testing the solidarity of our arrangement in their own ways, checking to see what they might get away with. Our son once tried to pull a fast one over curfew times, playing Joe and me off against each other. The three of us had a spontaneous meeting on neutral ground, the stairs between Joe's place and mine, and we explained to him that we were still operating as a family, that Joe and I discuss him and his sister every day.
We try to present a united front to the children, making the family's ground rules clear and consistent. This is particularly important in an unorthodox arrangement, since we break with convention in so many other ways. And since our arrangement doesn't look like most family setups, there are times when we have to stretch to find solutions to problems it presents, but we've found a balance that allows us to co-parent our children while retaining space to lead independent lives. When we get rattled, we remind ourselves what drew us to this solution in the first place, and we're okay. There are times when we find it necessary to reiterate the reasons: our children live with both of us full time, and we each have a better quality of life financially. If emotions or fatigue or frustration cloud our understanding of what we're doing, restating these simple facts helps us restore equilibrium.
Dating is complicated in this new world of reconstructed families. Joe and I have both had new romantic partners. It hasn't been an issue for either of us, but we've learned to tread lightly where our children are concerned. It made our daughter uneasy when I began to date again. She worried that her dad would be lonely, and she looked askance at “the new guy. ” When a new woman entered her father's life, she relaxed. For the most part newcomers haven't been threatened by our arrangement, perhaps because they've seen their own share of sour separations. But what Joe and I are doing is not what is expected of separated couples, and that does present challenges and impose some limits on any new relationships we form. But what mid-life romance doesn't bring with it a set of complications of its own? Individuals rarely arrive solo. They, too, have families of their own, ex-partners they deal with, and baggage they carry around with them. A courtship at this stage of life must be a flexible one if it's going to work and be fair to everyone. Joe and I have always tried to make room for each other to live independent romantic lives and we've learned to acknowledge a broad spectrum of needs — ours, our children's, and those of our new partners and their families. Sometimes it's tricky to accommodate everyone's feelings and schedules, and sometimes we trip over our good intentions, but as long as we approach it with a sense of humor and a helpful attitude, we manage. Our children are our first priority until they're both fledged, and after that we'll renegotiate.
Life has begun to take on a somewhat predictable shape. Our family tree keeps growing—getting bigger, and producing more branches, and we try to spend big family events together — Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Easter, and birthdays. One Christmas, my former mother-in-law, my sister, my children, my partner and his ex-wife and their daughter were all seated at my dining table. There have been many sweet moments; one year my long-distance beau was in town on Mother's Day, and he and I, Joe, the kids, and the dog all had brunch together. Joe and the kids have tradition-ally presented me with breakfast in bed on that day, so we modified the tradition and everyone gathered for a spring feast in the garden. I was aware of a slightly surreal quality to the situation, but everyone was happy to be there. Even after my long-distance romance faded, I continued a friend-ship with him and his ex-wife and daughter. The family tree becomes a little complicated to explain sometimes, and even I got tongue-tied when my ex-boyfriend's ex-wife's ex-girlfriend came to visit me and I was trying to introduce her to others.
It has now been more than four years since Joe and I separated, and we've eased into the new kind of complicated, unorthodox, flawed, and unfinished family we've become. I'm enormously proud of this work-in-progress that has given our kids one house, two proximal parents, and the knowledge that even the most serious disagreements can be managed. Initially, Joe and I made all this effort for our children, who had no choice but to come along for the ride. Lately though, I've begun to notice that something else is happening. The other morning, Joe and our daughter were sitting on my back steps while I bustled around the kitchen, and I overheard him tell her that he couldn't imagine life without Mommy in it. I silently thanked him for his generosity, not only for her sake, but for mine.
When we separated, Joe stopped giving me comic-strip gifts. But on my fiftieth birthday, a new one arrived. It documents our life as a reconstituted family, and while there is one image where we're squabbling a bit, there isn't a single frame in which I'm using my mouth as a weapon. As I looked at it, I realized that at last we've begun to find the friendship that eluded us in the tug-of-war that was our marriage.
I, too, wanted to celebrate our history together and our future as co-parents, so I took the eternity ring that Joe had given me on our tenth anniversary and had the diamonds reset in a new band that symbolized for me the evolving relation-ship with my ex-husband. I wear it with another circle of tiny diamonds that represents my enduring relationship with my children, and those two rings serve as a daily reminder of what matter mosts to me.