From This Day Forward (40 page)

Rita was almost ten years younger than Stan when they got married, and it was never a good match. Ellen likes to quote an old country-and-western song to sum up her par
ents' marriage: “While the guy's kicking his shoes off, she's putting hers on to go dancing—she's got the ‘Friday-night blues.' She wanted to do things and he'd already done that, he'd had that time in his life, and I think that's where they grew apart.” The divorce came through when Ellen was four, and when the judge gave custody to her mother, she remembers “seeing my dad cry for the first time in my life.” Stan kept fighting the judgment, and eighteen years later the scars have not fully healed. “It was a rough, rough few years,” Ellen explains. “I learned most of the bad words that I still know now at that age, because they were being thrown back and forth between my parents. It was just a lot of hurt. I don't think either of them knew how to deal with it and to leave me out of it, so I was pretty much in the middle.”

Three years after the divorce, Rita wanted a fresh start in a bigger city, so she got the court's permission to move to Houston, but she soon learned a harsh lesson: divorce often sends women spiraling toward poverty. Weekdays Rita worked two jobs, secretary and jewelry-store clerk. On Saturdays, says her daughter, she “was one of those perfume girls at the mall, bugging you as you went into stores.” There were no relatives in town to help out, and Ellen spent her afternoons at the YMCA or with a baby-sitter. Rita was out every night, but her daughter was always “very standoffish” with the guys and figured, “You won't be here long.” Usually she liked their dogs better than the dates themselves. Dogs wouldn't leave your mother or bruise your feelings: “One of her boyfriends had a dog named Buster, and he was my best friend. I would just curl up on the couch with this big Doberman and go to sleep when we were over there late.”

Meanwhile, Stan's business was doing well and he was living a much more stable life. “He always had time for me and we always did stuff,” Ellen recalls. Time and money, Rita says with a tinge of bitterness: “He was able to give her things I couldn't.” And when Stan went to court a third time, seeking
custody of Ellen, Rita gave up: “I just couldn't afford another fight.”

Ellen was eager to live with her dad. Kansas City was home, and Stan was about to get married again, to a schoolteacher named Arlene. But the first time she met Ellen, Arlene almost failed a key test. The little girl, now nine, had a ritual with her dad: he'd buy her a chicken sandwich at Burger King, but she'd only eat half and save the rest for later. Arlene was cleaning up the kitchen and threw out the half-eaten sandwich. “She almost died,” recalls Ellen, “because she knew that if I didn't like a person, my dad would quit dating them. But for some reason, I forgave her.”

Arlene was in her mid-thirties, this was her first marriage, and she was determined to be a good stepmother: “Actually I was marrying Ellen, too. This was a double commitment for me.” During our conversation, Arlene turned to Stan and said, “I don't think I've ever told you this, but the week before we got married, I got cold feet. All of a sudden it hit me—gee, do I know what I'm doing?” But her feet warmed up when Ellen moved in, just weeks before the wedding. “I felt like I was Ellen's parent,” Arlene remembers, “but I was not her mom. She already had a mom.” A mom who did not get along with her ex-husband, so Arlene had to walk a very fine line, staying loyal to Stan without criticizing Rita.

“I did not want to be the parent who put her mother down,” explains Arlene. “I felt if I did that, it would backfire, and Ellen would grow to resent me.” In fact, Arlene came to understand, “the better relations Ellen had with her mom, the better relations she had with us.” It proved to be an important insight. Arlene started out as a friend and “just became my mom,” Ellen remembers. “She would do the carpools with my friends and cook the meals and take care of me when I was sick. She was a mother to me.” But it took seven or eight years before Ellen started giving Arlene a card on Mother's Day that did not say “stepmother” on it. “One year I just said
to myself, this stands out so bad,” she remembers. “It's kind of a slap in the face, after everything she's done for me, to say, ‘You're a great stepmom.'” Did Arlene notice the change? “I'm sure she did, but she never said anything.”

After Ellen moved in with her dad, she made her biweekly trips in reverse, flying to Houston for weekends with her mom. And while Rita “would cry for about a week” whenever her daughter left, the new arrangements changed her life. Without a child to care for regularly, she was able to fulfill a dream and become a flight attendant. Three months after meeting Tom Branson in an airport, they were married, and Tom took a different view of stepparenting than Arlene had: “Ellen wasn't lacking parenting, and basically, we became pals. I was more like a big brother than a father. We'd call ourselves ‘the three musketeers,' and out of the three, Ellen was the most mature.” But it took Ellen well over a year to give Tom a hug. She still preferred dogs to men.

It helped that no other children entered the picture, leaving Ellen, as she likes to put it, as “the only child of four parents.” With more financial security, and free airline tickets, Rita was able to visit Kansas City more often. After Ellen made the high-school cheerleading squad, Rita would try to arrive in time for the Friday-night football games, and often she and Arlene would sit together in the stands, rooting on their favorite daughter. But having two mothers is never easy, particularly on Mother's Day, and one year Ellen forgot to send Rita a card. Rita had never really forgiven Stan for taking Ellen, or Ellen for wanting to go with her father, and years of resentment came spilling out. “Ellen was having this cheerleading thing, and I was going to go up there and be one of the sponsors,” Rita recalls. “I called her up and said, ‘If you can't find the time to send me a card, I won't spend the time to be with you.' It was very childish of me, but my feelings were hurt.”

It was Tom, Rita's new husband, who stepped in and
smoothed things over. “I told Rita that kids get very self-absorbed, and it was just part of Ellen's growing up,” he recalls. “She shouldn't take it personally.” In fact, Ellen's stepparents have often been the peacemakers. As outsiders, unburdened by buried guilt or bad memories, they can usually calm things down when tempers start to flare. When Ellen was applying to college, Stan favored a state school, but Tom thought his stepdaughter had the brains for the Ivy League and said so. When Stan continued to resist, Tom cashed in enough frequent-flier miles for two tickets, sending father and daughter to see colleges together. And when Ellen got accepted by Dartmouth, she decided to go. At her high-school graduation, she managed to seat an aunt and uncle between her two sets of parents. And then she went back east to college, hoping to leave the tensions of her childhood behind.

For the most part she did, but not completely. During a summer internship at a congressional office in Washington, she made such an impression that she was offered a full-time job. So she transferred to a new school and finished her college degree at night. On her twenty-first birthday she told the secretary that if her father called to put him right through. But when he did call, he was complaining about money and never mentioned her birthday. Ellen was devastated: “I was bawling. My dad's just business-oriented; feelings are the side attachment you sometimes get. So my best friend takes me out into the hall and someone comes out and says, ‘You have to come back into the office, there's someone to see you.' I said, ‘Tell them to go away, I don't want to see anyone.' And she's like, ‘No, you really need to come in.' So I dry my face, and my mother had hired this gorilla in a tuxedo to come sing ‘Happy Birthday' to me and give me balloons. And I'm hitting this gorilla because my father hadn't wished me happy birthday. At that point I realized, you've got to talk about this stuff! You've got to get it out. So after that I called my dad and celebrated my birthday on his credit card that night with my friends.”

Once Ellen left for college, her parents had no reason to see each other or even talk very often. When they did, it was usually over arrangements, for tuition or holidays, and since old resentments still simmered, Ellen found it easier not to mention one parent to the other. The tussling left a mark, though, and she jokes that she'd never marry a man whose parents were divorced, because then they'd only spend every fourth Christmas with each of their parents.

As her college graduation approached, panic set in: “These two separate lives that I had managed to lead for about five years were suddenly colliding.” The big problem was Ellen's father, Stan, who still resented his ex-wife and was the one most likely to make a scene. So Ellen called her stepmother, Arlene, who assured her that everyone would behave. “I said, ‘Well, I just need you to know that if you don't, I'm not having a wedding,'” Ellen recalls. “Since I'm the only child, this is huge to my parents. This was my last threat to them. I was just so nervous.”

Arlene had a request as well. Years before, in a fit of annoyance, Ellen had said that maybe she'd have both Stan and Tom, her father and stepfather, walk her down the aisle at her wedding. “It had bothered me ever since,” said Arlene, “and I'd always looked for an opportunity to bring it up with her.” This was the chance. “I'll make your dad behave,” she told her stepdaughter, “if you promise him that he'll be the only one to give you away.” Ellen was amazed, she'd forgotten the incident entirely, so it was a small price to pay for a peace treaty.

Graduation time came. Ellen was waiting with Stan and Arlene in front of a campus building where a reception was being held. They spotted Tom and Rita, coming down the street to meet them, and Stan leaned over and whispered to his daughter, “What happens now?” Nothing bad, it turned out. Everybody behaved. At one point during the weekend, Ellen and her roommates were hosting a small party, and Ellen looked over to see Rita and Arlene, her two mothers, side by
side, decorating the table and putting out the food. Tom and Stan fixed stiff drinks for themselves and stood together talking. Ellen savored the moment: “I just kind of stopped and looked around and said, ‘What's going on here?'”

Progress, apparently. Ellen has withdrawn her threat to avoid a big wedding, but her painful past has left her deeply cautious about marriage: “I will not get married until I can be at least 99 percent sure. Saying ‘I do' will have a different meaning for me. I will never put my children through a divorce. I wasn't like the rest of my girlfriends, having these casual fun boyfriends. It just wasn't me—I think because I was so afraid of getting hurt. It definitely has affected my relationships. The one thing I've always told myself is that I will not get married until I know I will not get divorced.”

Marriage might not be forever, but kids are. And blended families have to learn to live with imperfect solutions. “The bad thing about divorce is that it's not going to end,” says Rita. “When Ellen gets married, and has children, and they have a birthday party, we'll all want to be there. So we'll have to make the best of it.”

Frank, Perry, Inez, Sari, Abigail, and Mark Owens: A Mother Without the Honor

Inez Owens wanted a small simple wedding, but she didn't have a small simple family. A dark-skinned woman of West Indian origin, she was adopted by a white couple who then divorced and remarried other people. But since her mother and stepmother detest each other, a joint bridal shower was out. So her groom's mother stepped in and organized the party.

As for the wedding itself, her stepfather sent out the invitations, with all six “parental persons,” including her in-laws, listed as hosts. Her mother made the tablecloths for the reception. Her father brought the champagne, and her step
mother's father, a retired judge, presided. Says Inez: “I was trying to navigate very carefully. I divvied up the jobs so everyone got something to play with.”

Still, the anxiety level was sky-high. When the florist suggested different-colored corsages for the stepparents, Inez nearly panicked: “I said, ‘No, no, no, we can't do too many line drawings here.'” She even thought about having two aisles instead of one, so the bride's side could be divided in half and her parents wouldn't have to sit together. “Where do you put everybody,” she mused, “when they don't want to talk to each other?”

No event tests a divorced couple like a wedding. That's the moment when old rivalries and resentments are most likely to surface. Even the smallest detail is weighted with symbolism. People who don't want to talk to each other have to share the same child and the same room. And the child is caught in the middle, trying to keep everybody happy and wondering whether she can succeed where her parents have failed, and stay married.

Frank Owens, Nancy Clark, and Perry Friedman all knew each other in college, and Frank jokes that his two wives hated each other before he married either one of them. Frank and Nancy's marriage was troubled from the outset, and a series of miscarriages added to the tension. In Frank's view, they adopted Inez and Sari—another infant with a West Indian background—in large part to “save the marriage,” but “it didn't work,” and they divorced when the girls were seven and nine. As Inez recalls, “We were relieved when our parents divorced; they had been fussing for years.”

When Perry heard about the breakup, she invited Frank to dinner with other friends. Perry remembers what happened next: “Someone called me up after the dinner party and said, ‘Are you out of your mind? Why did you invite other people? He's very interested in you and he's terrific.'” When Perry told Frank the next move was up to him, he asked her out.
“He took me to dinner and I said, ‘It seems to me that you are flirting with me and that you have been for maybe fifteen years.' He thought about that and said, ‘Well, if that's true, why don't you let me continue?'”