From This Day Forward (38 page)

There were more breaks to come. Peggy had an affair with a married man, the owner of the accounting firm where she worked, but he never made good on his promises to leave his family. Then her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died within months. The tragedies sent her back to the Catholic Church and she remembers asking God: “What did I do wrong? Please, tell me.” She thought the answer to her prayers was a pilot named Brian Kennedy, who came calling after her father's death. There were “a lot of ‘life is too short' thoughts going through my head,” Peggy remembers, and she agreed to meet his parents: “Everything seemed quite nice, he was a Catholic boy and all those things.” Adds Laura: “He was somebody who was going to take care of everything.”

But even before the wedding, Peggy started to sense that Brian had “a dark inside.” Laura remembers her mother and Brian standing in a garden, made of seashells, and arguing over whether he could adopt her. “My mother basically told him to take a flying leap and took off the engagement ring and threw it at him and it landed in the shell garden,” recalls Laura. They made up the next day, but it took hours to find the ring, with five or six people searching inch by inch through the seashells.

Peggy has another version: two weeks before the wedding, she and Brian were squabbling over the details, from the lim
ousine for his parents to the dress for his sister. “He just got madder and madder and more intolerant,” she says, and at that point she broke off the engagement. But she got no sympathy at home. Her mother said the fight was probably all
her
fault and Laura burst out: “If you don't marry him, you'll be hurting my chances to have a really good father.” When Brian apologized the next day, Peggy took him back, and after the wedding they moved to Virginia, near Brian's new assignment at the Pentagon.

Like her first marriage, Peggy's second match was probably doomed from the outset. Brian was unhappy at work and drinking heavily, and by the time Peggy came home from her office, she had to “work around him and keep him placated.” Laura recalls: “He was a little bit messed up about sex. My mom tells me this horrible story, that they were in bed and she wanted to try something and he called her a whore and all this kind of stuff. There were a lot of times she would just crawl into bed with me and sleep there.”

After Peggy suffered a miscarriage, she decided the marriage was too shaky to risk having a child, so she asked her doctor to insert an IUD, a permanent birth-control device. Brian was furious, yelling at Peggy, “I'm a Catholic, and your job is to bear my children, that's what you're supposed to do.” Laura remembers hiding behind a couch as Peggy and Brian were “throwing things at each other. She said something to him, I don't remember what it was, and he slapped her. I had never seen a man hit a woman. Never.” Peggy snapped: “I couldn't believe my own rage. I was so mad I threw his clothes out of a second-story window and locked him out in a snowstorm.”

They made up, but the damage was done, and then Brian made the same mistake Len had made: he tried to put Peggy in a box. He announced he was taking a new assignment in San Antonio and moving the whole family. Peggy by this time was working at an accounting firm and studying for her CPA
certificate: “I was trying to establish myself in the area so I could start on my career, but that's not what he had in mind at all.” Brian promised to look for an assignment near Washington but he never did, and one day a team of movers arrived at the house: they had orders to ship the family to San Antonio and were calculating the size van they would need.

Peggy decided she had to act. During her lunch hour, she scouted out possible apartments and arranged for a mover of her own to come one day when Brian was at work. She cashed her paycheck, opened a new account, wrote a “hot check” for the first month's rent at her new place, and cleaned out the old one. She left no note, no forwarding address. Once a week she would sneak back to the old house and see if she'd gotten any mail. “I had no idea if he would come looking for me with a gun,” she says. “I lived in mortal terror he would show up eventually.” Two months later Brian called, saying he wanted to see her. She said only in a public place, the local Laundromat. He was leaving for Texas and he wanted her to come along: “He wasn't even asking, it was more like he was demanding.” She refused, and her marriage was over.

Now Peggy was the sole support of herself and her daughter, and times were tight. They lived in a shabby, third-story walk-up, trying to save enough to buy a town house, and Peggy baked bread and made clothes to stretch her salary. Laura remembers a showdown with her mother over a box of pencils: “The Snoopy pencils came six to a pack, and they were a dollar-fifty. Then there was a twenty-pack of plain yellow pencils for a dollar-fifty. My mother and I got in a screaming match in the middle of the supermarket because I could not fathom that we could not afford the Snoopy pencils.” Christmas was also bleak that first year: a homemade tree, made of green cloth, with crocheted red ornaments. But, Laura recalls, “it was also the most amazing time because it was just the two of us. The two of us against everything.”

Peggy was always ambitious, and she felt thwarted at her accounting firm: “I was the wrong sex and wrong religion.” She sent out some résumés and was “flabbergasted” at the response. A computer-industry trade association offered her a job at thirty thousand dollars a year, a 50 percent raise, and she recalls: “I'm thinking thirty thousand is a fortune, but all I could think to say was ‘Is that all?' So they upped the offer—I don't know how I kept a straight face.” They bought the town house, and Peggy's social life, never slow, picked up speed. There was Marty the banker and Buddy the car repairman and Laura's flute teacher, ten years younger than Peggy. “My grandmother at that point threatened to take me away,” Laura recalls. “She said my mother was behaving like a child. That was a really weird year.” There were other bad influences on Laura as well: thirteen-year-old pot smokers in the neighborhood who had little adult supervision and spent their afternoons shoplifting at Kmart. “I was growing up too fast,” says Laura, and Peggy agrees: “She did everything in her power to flunk out of school, she became a real problem child.”

To make matters worse, Peggy went to a conference in Houston and met Bill Rinaldi. When they decided to get married after only a dozen dates, Laura was appalled: “He came to visit and I hated him, like instantaneously hated him. I think I was threatened. I know I was threatened. Here my mom and I have done all this on our own and I don't want to share her with anybody.” Since Bill wouldn't move to Washington, Peggy agreed to move to Houston, and Laura boycotted the wedding in protest. She was just starting high school and wanted everybody to know how unhappy she was: “I was like, this sucks. You are taking me away from my friends. Why are you marrying him? He's gross.” Then, when they got to Texas, Bill decided to quit his job and start a software company of his own, and Peggy felt compelled to help him out in the evenings, leaving Laura alone in a new city. “Laura was pretty much left out in the cold,” Peggy now
admits. “We really didn't explain to her in a reasonable way that Bill was starting his own business and it would be hard on all of us, especially her.”

Bill's scheme was also hard on the marriage. The company never did very well, adding to the family's emotional and financial stress. After a few years, Peggy took a consulting contract in California that was supposed to last two weeks. The assignment stretched into months, then led to an offer of a permanent job. She saw it as a great career move, and Bill promised to join her in California, but he never did, and money continued to eat away at their relationship. She was supporting her own family financially and Bill objected fiercely: “He was totally against that, against our giving money to my mother and brothers, partly because he was still feeling quite needy himself.” Under Texas law, a couple can divide their assets without getting divorced and Peggy proposed that as a solution: “I didn't want to feel guilty if I wrote my mother a check, but Bill had to be in control of all the finances, I couldn't make any decisions on my own.”

Money was mixed up with issues of power and pride. Peggy went to China on business and Bill wanted to join her, but she said no: “I needed to concentrate and focus on business, and I didn't have time to be a travel agent for my husband.” One weekend she canceled a trip to Houston and instead went to New York, to oversee her company's initial stock offering, and Bill exploded: “He was just going crazy, calling my hotel room every five minutes. I told him I was at the lawyers' office until three
A.M
., but he found that totally irresponsible.” After he left her a series of “belligerent and horrible” messages, Peggy called a friend and asked him to recommend a good divorce lawyer in Texas. “Do you want the mild-mannered guy,” he asked, “or the thermonuclear-war guy?” She hired the low-key fellow over the phone, and to this day, almost three years after the divorce, she's never met her own lawyer in person.

Peggy's involved with a new man now, but he's more
committed to the relationship than she is, and her daughter feels sorry for him, because she's seen what happens to men who think they can control her mother: “I'm like, you're about to get run over by a truck.” Peggy sees no need to tie herself down: “At this stage I can enjoy the benefits of companionship and I don't have to have a marriage license.” At the end of our conversation, we asked Peggy this question: after three marriages and countless affairs, have you ever been in love? “Probably once,” she answered, her voice quavering, and it was clear she meant Jim, the pilot killed in Vietnam. Have you ever admitted that to yourself? “Maybe,” she said. “It's not something I dwell on.”

At age thirty, Laura says that when she talks to her girlfriends, they all agree that “as we grow up we feel that we are so much more like our mothers than we ever really wanted to be or expected to be.” And after her last romance collapsed, she became convinced that like her mother, she'd be no good at marriage: “When David and I broke up, he said, ‘I think I was wrong, I think I made a mistake when I told you that I loved you, because I don't.' I could not imagine hearing that after being married with kids. Imagine twenty years from now, my husband comes to me and says, ‘I think we made a mistake, I don't love you.' I don't want to hear that again.”

Afterword

Hearing these stories, we are struck by the legacy of divorce, the impact of broken marriages on how the next generation views love and commitment. Children of divorced parents are two or three times more likely to fail at marriage than young people from intact families. But nobody coming of age in the last twenty years can escape the divorce culture entirely. Even if your own parents are still together, odds are that you know many couples who are not: aunts and uncles, teachers
and coaches, mothers and fathers of friends. The National Marriage Project says this culture “has made almost all young adults more cautious and even wary of marriage,” and that's certainly true for the families we profile in this chapter. Nicole and Peter Tobin are so scarred by their parents' breakup that they threaten to “kill each other” before either one can end a marriage. Cathy Bishop feels that her parents' divorce made her suspicious of men and reluctant to have children—attitudes that helped undermine her own relationship. No wonder her daughter, Shannon, thinks growing old with her cat is an attractive option. After watching her mother's three failed marriages, Laura McDonald speaks for many children of divorce when she says of matrimony: “It just scares me.”

BLENDED FAMILIES

Many Americans don't live out their married lives in Leave It to Beaverland, with Mom and Dad and their 2.5 biological kids all together all the time. Many forces—death and divorce, estrangement and adoption—can fragment traditional families and then fuse the pieces back together in new shapes, creating new family forms to carry on. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's assumed new configurations. In earlier times, because so many women died in childbirth, it was quite common for children to grow up cared for by women who were not their real mothers: stepmothers and grandmothers, aunts and cousins, even family friends. And some of those arrangements could get quite confusing. Cokie's great-grandmother died giving birth to her fourth child, and her husband quickly married his late wife's sister. They proceeded to have four more children, who were both half siblings and first cousins to the first four. Steve's grandparents took in a niece for several years after her parents died. As complicated as these arrangements might seem, they were much simpler than what many modern families experience. Divorce can poison relationships, even when parents and stepparents have good intentions toward their children, and it's much worse when children become the focal point of their parents' unresolved animosities. In America today, more than five million children live with a stepparent as well as a parent. Life in these “blended” families can present special problems and provide special joys for married couples. Here are portraits of three families we've come to know. In some cases, names and other details have been changed to protect their privacy.

Connie and Tony Morella: Nine Is Enough

When Connie Morella's sister, Mary, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was thirty-eight, a divorced mother with six children. As Mary grew weaker, relations with her ex-husband grew worse, and her last months were shadowed by the question, what would become of her children? Connie and her husband, Tony, already had three of their own, but as she sat at her sister's bedside one day, Connie suggested, “Maybe Tony and I could take them.” Twenty-three years later she remembers that day vividly: “I don't think I'd even consulted with him at the time. I had my fingers crossed, not really knowing what this would lead to.” When Mary protested, Connie soothed her dying sister: “I think we could do that, so don't you worry about it.”