What Happens After the Fairy Tale

It promises to be a lovely day. This evening, my family and I will drive out to a beautiful vineyard here in Oregon for the 10th Anniversary celebration of our good friends, Dixie and Bob.  I’m excited. There will be lawn games and wine tasting and dinner and dancing. I even bought a new dress. But I’m excited for other reasons. Dixie and Bob are some of our closest friends, and I’m thrilled to be included in the day, especially since many people would consider our relationship to be improbable.

Let me explain. I used to be married to Dixie’s brother, Kelly. She became my sister-in-law and soul mate over 28 years ago, and even after my marriage to Kelly ended nearly 20 years ago, Dixie stayed on. Our friendship has continued and deepened.

Like most relationships, however, it didn’t happen without effort or commitment. Dixie and I worked to stay in each other’s lives and to spend time together. She was a major source of support and encouragement during my years as a single mother. When I married Doug and we created a blended family with four kids, Dixie welcomed everyone with kindness and enthusiasm. Our friendship continued through the end of Dixie’s own marriage, and Doug and I were both thrilled when she married Bob–about ten years ago. When Dixie’s mother–and my former mother-in-law–died last summer, Doug and I were at the hospital with Dixie and Bob, and I considered it a great privilege. They truly are two of the most important people in our lives.

I’m so grateful for this, especially recognizing that the ending of a marriage is usually the ending of a fairy tale we all grow up believing in, and most of us aren’t sure how to write the next chapter. But an unwritten story is also a great opportunity. We can write it any way we want. And Dixie and I have co-written a story that gives great meaning to my life, and makes me proud. We had help. I appreciate that Kelly was gracious enough to support the friendship not only with Dixie but the rest of her (and his) family, which took courage and confidence. I’m grateful that my husband Doug not only understood the connection I had to my ex-husband’s family, but eagerly joined me in it.

Tonight, Dixie and Bob are having a brief ceremony to honor their marriage, and they’ve asked me to read an excerpt from Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindberg. I’ve read the book several times before (at Dixie’s suggestion), but had forgotten this passage.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits–islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.

It’s a good message for a marriage, for sure, and an apt description of what I love about Dixie and Bob’s relationship. But if you think about it, it’s true for all relationships. Even improbable ones.

I’ve had a few tides that have rushed through my life in unpredictable ways. I never thought I’d be divorced, or a single mother, or a member of a blended family. I also didn’t expect that one day I would attend a party with my husband, my kids, and most of my ex-husband’s family. It’s a different twist in my story than I ever thought to expect. But I’m thrilled with the way it’s turning out.

Happy Anniversary, Dixie and Bob. Thanks for being part of my story.

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