Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (31 page)

I felt a little better about it, maybe three percent. “Five minutes?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’ll hit the ladies’ room and meet you at the café, then, okay?”

“Sounds like a plan, and I love me a good plan.”

I rolled my eyes at him in response.

He swooped me over backwards. A flashbulb lit up my peripheral vision. Scarlett’s hired shooter was still at it. “Hurry back.”

I put the back of my hand to my forehead and said, “Be still, my heart.”

He laughed and set me back on my feet, and we walked in opposite directions.

It felt strange and wonderful to have finished our book launch together, hell, to have written the book at all, instead of just enforcing the 
Chicago Manual of Style
 upon it. As an editor, most of my writers treat me like the punctuation police. Adrian doesn’t. Words matter to him, like they do to me. Even more, my words matter to him. Mine. I hadn’t even known I had my own words. Sure, I’d known I was prone to what my mother called an overactive imagination since the day I ran home from school, gasping for air, and told her I’d seen an elephant walk through my schoolyard and reach into my classroom window. That I’d felt the wiry hairs on his trunk as he lifted me from my seat, through the air, and out the window. Yet somehow—
“It was like magic, Mom!”
—I’d still been in my seat five minutes later to take the terrifying state assessment test. I’d kept that imagination under wraps until Adrian started unfastening all my buttons. And now my name was on a book jacket, too, and more words threatened to come out of me, this time forming themselves into an idea for a fantasy novel, for goodness’ sake, something I hadn’t told even Adrian yet because it was so crazy.

I made my way across the store toward the ladies’ room. Many of the browsing shoppers were people I recognized from our signing. I tried not to race-walk in front of them.

When I finished sprucing up—and answering questions from women in the bathroom who were more interested in my marriage than in triathlon—I broke toward the sounds of beans grinding and milk steaming. Adrian and Connor were talking with their heads together like longtime confidants—and Miss Boob Job was lurking behind them, more Mata Hari than Barbie now. When she saw me, she whirled around so fast her bag flew out from her body like a stripper from her pole. My eyes followed her retreat.

When the door closed behind her, I looked back at my husband and his new old friend. Connor was punctuating his speech with sharp nods of his head and smacking his closed fist into his open hand. Adrian snuck a glance back over his shoulder and saw me, then turned back to Connor and held up a palm. Connor looked in my direction, then back at Adrian, and nodded. They shook hands and Connor left through the same door Rhonda had, all before I could reach them.

I tilted my head. “That was some conversation.”

Adrian planted a firm kiss on my lips. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I started to roll my eyes, but stopped when I caught a flash of white through the window. A small sedan was driving past the bookstore, sending me into another blood-soaked flashback of Adrian on the side of the road with the dead cyclist. I shook my head to clear the image and gripped my husband’s bicep. Warm. Solid.

He picked up a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of orange and yellow tulips from the table beside him and I took them from his hands. “But it’s Thursday!”

Adrian brought me tulips every Friday since one hour after our first not-a-date. It was still hard to believe that a man who looked that good would work so hard to make me feel special. Tan, muscular but lean, and blond with short curls at the nape of his neck, Adrian was delectable. Like double-fudge-brownie-sundae-with-a-cherry-on-top yummy, although he would rather be compared to a gluten-free brownie sweetened with coconut nectar, hold the fudge and double the organic fresh cherries, please. He made me forget that I’m on the wrong side of forty and haven’t changed my hairstyle since my fifteen-year-old started kindergarten. Sure, I have a good face and can render a pretty paragraph, but Adrian was the looker in our twosome.

He kissed the tip of my nose. “Pretend it’s Friday, then, since it’s our anniversary and book launch. Thank Scarlett, though. I ran out of time today, and she saved my ass.”

I laughed. “Well, I have a surprise for you, too, but I’m saving it for dinner.”

“Oh, that isn’t all I’ve got, but you’ll have to wait till tomorrow for your real surprise. Tomorrow night.”

“Then I’ll save mine until then, too.”

“Copycat.” He winked.

We started walking to the parking lot, my arm through his. Adrian’s strides were normally twice the length of mine, but somehow we made them match.

“So, what did Connor want to talk to you about?”

“We debated Coeur d’Alene versus Lake Placid.” Those were two famous Ironman triathlons.

“That’s caca.”

“He heard Lake Placid was the better race for a first-timer. I set him straight.”

My thoughts began to tumble like Keds in a drier. The scene replayed in my mind: Little Miss Boob Job skulking around in the café within earshot of the two men. I couldn’t make sense of what I’d seen, nor could I figure out the source of the dread that was seeping through me. But it was our anniversary. I had two options. I could act the paranoid fool or I could be a grown-up. I chose option B.

“Okay.”

***

My stomach bulged against my waistband, but I was not about to stop now. Why had I suffered through a sixty-five-minute swim and a two-hour run that day if not to overindulge on a special occasion? I’d eat like an Ironman contender tomorrow. Meanwhile I’d savor each bite, made even more dear because my Oxheart meal cost what I’d normally spend to eat for a week.

Tex, our Vietnamese waiter, arranged my dessert in front of me and backed away with a theatrical flourish. His voice was pure epicurean hip. “Your tapioca pudding caressed by Buddha’s Hand citron, ginger-galangal ice cream, and apple mint.”

Oxheart was definitely on the cool side: local ingredients and hip, rustic-leaning décor, light years away from our elderly Jewish neighborhood.

Tex lifted a bowl from his tray and held it high and away from his body like he was serving up a dead rat. “Your berries, sir.” He thunked the bowl down on the table. Plain ole fruit hadn’t been on the menu.

“Great, thanks.” Adrian was oblivious to the waiter’s pique.

Tex nodded at me, gave his head a barely perceptible shake at Adrian, and left.

I dug into my pudding. “Oh my.” I held a bite in my mouth and moaned, letting the flavors seep into my tongue. Heaven. Heaven in a spoon.

Adrian stabbed a strawberry with his fork, then held it suspended in the air in front of him, forgotten. He looked at me instead, looked into me, in a serious way unlike his usual self. “Lately I’ve noticed more strangers recognize me. I don’t like it as much as I thought I would. You’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful. Watch out for the crazies, don’t take chances, tell me if anyone does anything weird around you. You’re my world, Michele.”

I couldn’t recall a single time my free-spirited husband had scared me, but he scared me so much right then that I pushed my tapioca away. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.” He shifted upwards like he was going to interrupt, so I hurried on. “I promise, though, I’ll be careful. Will you promise me the same?”

“Yes. I promise.”

His definition of careful and mine don’t even belong in the same dictionary, but I accepted his answer. “Is something going on?”

“No.” He drew out the word. “I’m just sentimental because it’s our anniversary.”

I narrowed my eyes.

He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

A lump rose in my throat. “I wouldn’t last a day without you.”

“Sure you would. You’re the strongest person I know. You’re my little Itzpa, my Butterfly.” He held up his hands bent into claw shapes. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Seriously, you know it’s me who’d crumble.” He leaned toward me and extended his hands palms up across the table. I put mine on his, our hands and fingers barely touching. “Please, honey, whatever you do, don’t leave me alone in the house with those two teenagers.”

The tension slipped off of me like a silk robe to the floor. Annabelle, his seventeen-year-old daughter, and my Sam were good kids, but they were your normal handful of hormones. I tickled his palms with my fingertips. “I think Belle and Sam would love it. Party every night and sleep all day.”

He snorted. “Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.”

I smiled and pulled my tapioca bowl back into place. I couldn’t help but think, though, that if anyone’s nose had grown that night, it hadn’t been mine.

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Going for Kona
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It’s not that we didn’t try to screw this parenting thing up. By all rights, we should have. We did everything that we possibly could that we weren’t supposed to do. We gave them refined sugar when they were babies, didn’t enforce nap times, spoiled them with expensive and unnecessary gifts. We said yes when we should have said no. We said no when we should have said yes. Our swear jar was always full.

Oh, yeah. And we were one of those “blended families”—you know the kind, the ones with broken homes, divorces, stepparents and complex custody arrangements. Those people. The ones other parents are leery of, like divorce is a communicable disease or something. Who knows? Maybe it is. My own parents even told me once that I had made my children a statistic by choosing to divorce their father. That I had created an at-risk home environment for them.

Me? Perpetual overachiever, business owner, attorney, former cheerleader and high school beauty queen? The one who’s never even smoked a cigarette, much less done drugs? My husband? Well, he’s the more likely candidate for an at-risk homemaker. Surfer, bass player, triathlon enthusiast. Oh yeah, and chemical engineer and former officer of a ten-billion-dollar company—but you know how those rock-n-rollers are. We probably teeter somewhere between the Bundys and the Cleavers.

But there we were, watching yet another of our kids cross yet another stage for yet another diploma, with honors, with accolades, with activities—with college scholarships, no less. Yeah, I know, yadda yadda yap. There we were, cheering as the announcer called Liz’s name. Three of her four siblings rose to clap, too. The fourth one, Thomas, couldn’t make it because he was doing time in the state penitentiary in Florida. (Just kidding. He had to work. At a job. That paid him and provided benefits.)

We tried our best to screw it up. We had the perfect formula. But we didn’t—not even close. Somehow two losers at their respective Round Ones in love and family unity got it close to perfect on Round Two. By our standards, anyway. Because we didn’t give a good goldarnit about anyone else’s.

What’s more? We got it right on purpose. We made a plan, and we executed the plan. And it worked. After all that effort to screw things up, after the people in our lives who loved us most wrung their hands and whispered behind our backs (and those who didn’t love us chortled in anticipation of our certain failure), we went out and done good.

Now, I’m no expert on child rearing (although I’ve had lots of practice), but I am an expert in helping grownups play nice and behave at work. How annoying is that? I know. I’m a scary hybrid of employment attorney and human resources professional, blended together to create a problem-solving HR consultant. And from where I sat, our blended household—or blendered family, as we call it—looked a lot like a dysfunctional workplace in our early days.

Or a little warren of guinea pigs on which I could conduct my own version of animal testing.

The HR principles I applied at work were, in theory, principles for humans, humans anywhere. Blendering occurs in workplaces when a leadership team gets a couple of new members, and it happens in a home with kids from different families of origins. HR principles = people principles = 
blendering
 principles. Right? That was my theory, anyway.

Statistics tell me that you, dear reader, are or will be in similar straits: divorced, starting over, trying to make it work. If you’ve already been there and done that, I hope you’ve disappointed all your naysayers, too. You’ll enjoy this book all the more as you relate to the pains and the joys of blended families. But if you’re on the cusp of what feels like an express train descending into hell and wondering how to buy a ticket back, I can help you.

Really.

Okay, probably.

If not probably, then quite possibly.

At the very least, maybe I can say I warned you, or made you laugh. It’s a crazy and unpredictable ride, but the destination is worth it.

Blendering Principle #1: It’s hard to get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going.

Most of the members of my generation know all we need to know about blended families from the Brady Bunch, right?

Not.

Please, folks. That was just a sappy television show, and didn’t Florence Henderson have an affair IRL with one of the TV sons? Sounds a lot like incest to me. We clearly need a new set of role models, yet I’d be vacationing in Fiji right now if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “Oh! You’re just like the Brady Bunch!”

The Bradys wove their magic through engaging scripts and clever sets, cute young actors and the star power of Florence Henderson. Eric and I didn’t have those crutches to lean on. Neither will you.

Real blended families start with two adults who want to pledge their troth, which in English means they want to marry. Or at least cohabitate with commitment. Oh, hell, maybe not even that. But that conundrum brings us to the genesis of our blended family success, and IMHO, a critical element.

Each of our kids had already endured one familial breakup. Were we ready to provide them stability and an example of enduring love? If not, why would we knowingly put them through sure trauma again? Nothing is certain in life, but Eric and I were all in. Not only were we all in, but we both had a consuming desire to demonstrate to our children the type of relationship we dreamed of for them, and neither of us felt like we had done so in our past lives. Scratch that. We absolutely 
knew
 we had not done so in our past lives.

So, we were madly in love and promised forever. Believed forever. Were confident in forever.

Still, this left a lot up to chance.

Pretend for a second that you married a touchy-feely HR consultant. Imagine that she had a penchant for things like mission, vision, and values statements. Picture her love of goal-setting and accountability. Some of you have mentally drawn up your divorce papers already.

Eric didn’t. He and I created a relationship operating agreement (ROA) for ourselves as a couple. I may or may not have promised years of sexual favors to secure his participation, but his attitude about the project was good. Now, this isn’t a relationship book. Well, it is, in a way. It is a book about our relationships with our children within a blended family. But it is not a couples’ relationship book, so I’ll spare you the gory details behind the ROA.

While we entered into our ROA to make our great relationship stronger, we did so knowing it would set the framework for co-parenting. Why? Because our kids were the most important things to each of us, besides one another. And since most second marriages break down over issues of stepparenting, money, or sex. Hell, many first marriages crash and burn on those issues. We had less than ideal co-parenting relationships with our exes, for sure.

So here’s how our ROA looks:

Our (Exceptionally Wonderful) Marriage

Mantra: Make it all small stuff.

Our relationship’s purpose is to create a loving, nurturing, safe environment that enables us to

• make a positive, joyful difference in each other’s lives,
  
• respect each other’s needs and differences,
  
• encourage each other’s spiritual, emotional, and physical needs and development,
  
• practice caring, open communication,
  
• role-model loving relationships to our children,
  and
  
• work as partners when we parent and make major decisions.
  

Because we recognize that life is not always about the incredible highs, we are committed to these strategies:

• Stop, breathe, and be calm.
  
• Allow ourselves to cherish and be cherished.
  
• Be positive. Assume a positive intent and give a positive response. Speak your mind as positively as possible.
  
• Be reasonable. Am I being oversensitive? Am I dragging my own issues in unnecessarily?
  
• Be considerate. Is there anything to gain from what I am about to say? Is this the right time to say it?
  
• Be respectful. Don’t mope, don’t name-call, don’t yell, don’t be sarcastic.
  
• Be open. Explain your intent.
  
• Be present. Don’t walk away, physically or emotionally.
  
• Be aware of time and energy. After 60 minutes, stop talking. Schedule another conversation for 24 hours later if there’s no resolution.
  
• Make it safe to cry “calf rope.”
  
• Be
   it. Do the behaviors you’re seeking in each other within an hour of the first conversation.
  
• Be loving. Don’t go to bed angry or with things unresolved.
  

He asks of her:

• Trust and have faith that I love you, enough that we don’t have to solve everything the second it happens.
  
• Assume a positive intent.
  
• Listen, don’t interrupt.
  
• Don’t be sarcastic.
  

She asks of him:

• Come back to me faster and don’t drag things out, because I need you.
  
• Speak your mind assertively, and don’t be sarcastic.
  
• Don’t assume the actions I take are always because of you.
  
• Assume a positive intent.
  

We didn’t get this smart on our own. Both of us were trained to draft this type of agreement in our work lives, one of us more than the other. I specialize in working with hyper-competitive, confident-bordering-on-egomaniacal executives who are somewhat lacking in people skills, so I’ve spent years mediating, soothing, recalibrating, and at times walloping high-level business people into line. One of the best tools to get all the warring co-workers from different backgrounds to reach détente is an operating agreement. Even better? An operating agreement grounded in shared values, vision, and mission.

This worked so well for me with one of my problem executives that we ended up married. In fact, you just read our operating agreement.

Blendering Principle #2: Your mom was almost right: Do unto others as 
they
 would have done unto them.

So we addressed parenting, but more importantly, we addressed how we would handle ourselves in situations of higher stress and greater conflict. All of our commitments about behavior applied equally to the parenting context. Now, when a parent/stepparent decision point arose, we could act in accordance with pre-agreed principles.

Or we could try.

Execution got a little sloppy at times. When it did, we always had the agreement to return to, a touchstone, a refocusing point, a document which reminded us that for all we didn’t agree on, there was oh-so-much-more that we did.

We filtered our day-to-day co-parenting decisions through this model. Chores, allowances, length of skirts, cell phones—you name it, we used it. Even better, we used it when we designed our family structure and plan. Did I mention I believe in planning? I believe in plans. And I believe in modifying the plan within the context of agreed principles when new circumstances arise. We got the chance for a lot of planning and re-planning, right from the start.

When Eric and I first married, his eldest son Thomas had graduated from college and had a real job, Eric’s middle daughter Marie was entering college in the South, and his youngest daughter Liz lived with her mother on the East Coast. My Susanne was in elementary school, and my ADHD son Clark was in middle school; they split their time between their father and me. Our original parenting plan called for the two youngest kids to live mostly with us, for Liz to visit frequently, and for us to see Marie and Thomas as often as possible.

We envisioned all of our children, and someday their children, in our home as frequently as we could get them there. We bought a house in a great school district in Houston, with a veritable dormitory of four bedrooms upstairs and our master bedroom on the far side of the downstairs—because we love our kids even more from a distance. And how could we resist this house? It has a lush back yard with a three-level pond full of fat goldfish and koi that reminds us of the home we left behind on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Just as this is not a book about couples’ relationships, it is also not a book about divorce or custody battles. I could dish on those, but I won’t, because even though I’ve changed the names of all parties in this little tome to protect the innocent
^[
, some things should and will remain private. They were painful. Isn’t that the case in all divorces? You don’t divorce because the relationship exceeded your expectations. You don’t divvy up with a light heart the time you will spend with children you cherish. Most of you don’t, anyway, and we sure didn’t.

So, for whatever reason, within four months of “I do,” Liz had taken up primary residence with us in Texas, and a year later Marie transferred to a university two hours away. I had never pictured myself taking a role of such primacy with two teenage stepdaughters. Teenage girls get a bad rap for good reason. It’s not the easiest time in their lives, or the easiest time for the people that love them, even with great girls like Liz and Marie. Yet this new arrangement fit the model we envisioned. We just needed to flex. A lot.

I held onto my husband’s hand for dear life and sucked in one deep, cleansing breath after another. We could do this. I could do this. We would have no regrets or remorse, we would give our kids the best we could, and be damn happy doing it. Yeah!

And so, very carefully and very cautiously, we began to blender.

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How To Screw Up Your Kids.