Might as Well Laugh About It Now (9 page)

About a year later, I was touring with my
Magic of Christmas
show. Six of my children made a stage appearance to sing a family song with me. Jessica prefers to be behind the scenes, and she is great at stage managing. Michael organized the microphones and was a pinch-hit drummer. We had a great time, all crowded into one bus, traveling to a new city every day and performing at night. It’s a lot of hard work, but when it’s a holiday show, the audiences are always ready to have a great time and that joy reverberates onstage and is carried onto the bus. Brian started the tour with us, but didn’t finish. It was clear to everyone that we were unhappy together. By the time the holidays were over, so was our living in the same house.

One afternoon, after Brian had left the tour, as I was putting on makeup for a show, I overheard my oldest son, Stephen, talking to his sisters about our marriage.

He said, “I really believe that you have to work at marriage. But I would rather make a good marriage really great than try to make a bad marriage good.”

It was painful to hear my son’s assessment of the marriage, but his honesty gave me a new perspective.

With respect to my parents’ advice to never give up, I would now add my own experienced adage: “Never give up yourself in order to try to make someone else happy.” It doesn’t work. I know change is possible, but I’ve learned that it will only last if you want it for yourself, first. In good marriages, compromises are made so you can both stay happy, not just so the other person will stay happy.

After losing so many of my mom’s sweet needle-crafts and handmade items in the house fire, I was devoted to keeping her Christmas cactus plant, which had survived any long-term damage, alive and well. My mother had such a green thumb and would sing and talk to her plants every morning. Every year her Christmas cactus rewarded her attention with a respectable number of blooms. When we left on the Christmas tour, I gave specific directions for the care of the cactus to a friend who was watching the house for us. Returning on Christmas Eve, I was so disappointed to find it pale and without a single blossom. It seemed to be matching my spirit of sorrow about the inevitability of my marriage ending. I thought over and over about my parents’ marriage and how they not only loved each other, but walked the same path, strove to improve themselves together and separately, and always encouraged each other in all things. And in their closeness, they laughed. Every day.

In the weeks that followed, I had many sleepless nights, wondering if I was being wise. I knew that divorce couldn’t resolve our relationship problems. We have seven children together, and many other choices would have to be made as a result of this one choice.

I felt that God’s answer to my ongoing plea for guidance was to remind me always of the gift of free agency. I was the one who had made the choice to be in the marriage, and now that I found my feet to the fire, it was for me to fix the mess. I wasn’t going to be rescued. The only way I would ever learn and grow was to make the next decision on my own, too.

My heart was heavy and I wished I had my mother with me still. To say to me firmly: “Gather yourself together! You have children who need a happy mother.”

Imagining her saying this to me suddenly gave me the clarity I needed. I would never be that happy mother if I stayed in my marriage. I would never be the best person I could be for my children or for myself. I knew I had my answer. The next morning I called an attorney and said I wanted to file for divorce. Though I knew it was right, I still longed for my mother to tell me that it would be okay, to give me encouragement.

I went downstairs, listening to the voices of my little children getting ready for school. As I turned into the kitchen and went to the refrigerator for the orange juice, something caught my eye. On that February morning, a new beginning was announcing itself once again. My mother ’s Christmas cactus had bloomed overnight and was covered with dozens of bright fuchsia flowers.

Needled

I’m wearing the diamond stud earrings my dad gave me for my sweet sixteen. If you use a magnifying glass you can see them.

I had to wait seven long years to get needled. I had asked for it every year for my birthday, starting at age eight, but my father didn’t think that I was old enough to handle it. I couldn’t figure out why it was such a big deal.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I tried to convince him at age ten. “It’s fast. No blood.”

“You might regret it,” he told me. “You’re still too young for those types of long-term decisions.”

“Now they use a gun!” I pleaded with my dad when I turned thirteen. “They won’t miss.”

“When you’re sixteen, you can decide,” he told me. “Not before.”

It could have been the words like “blood” and “gun” that bothered my father, a war vet, but I think it was more about what ear piercing would signify to him. His only daughter would no longer be a little girl.

So for me, and obviously also for my dad, having a teeny-tiny hole punched into each earlobe turned into a rite of passage, a bridge from girl to young woman.

Needle-less to say, in my own mind, I was already a full-grown woman by age twelve, and my sixteenth birthday seemed like a torturously long, almost eternal time to wait. I knew that I was going to forever love my pierced ears. I was right about that. I wear earrings every day. But I was wrong about the grown woman thing.

My teenagers have tried to talk me into accepting that getting a tattoo should be no big deal. Though it may be true that everyone seems to have one now, from the preschool teachers to soccer coaches, I’m not crazy about the thought of any of my children having permanent dye injected into their skin with needles, no matter how old they are. They’re my babies! I pampered that skin they’re in.

I tried the most logical reason, sounding very much like my father: “Tattoos are permanent! What if you change your mind?”

They insisted that they never would.

“Tats will always be cool. I would never regret having one,” they tried to tell me.

Did I have an answer for that: “When I was your age, everyone thought that wearing leg warmers with jeans and Let’s Get Physical headbands would always, always be cool. Good thing they weren’t permanently attached. Right?”

At this point, my daughter offered up one word that blew away my reasoning, unquestionably: eyeliner.

How could I defend my position about tattoos when I had not only one, but two? They have now faded away to nothing, but at one time you couldn’t miss them. I had one on each eyelid. They were Cleopatra black. Tattooed eyeliner.

It seemed like the perfect solution at the time to an upcoming makeup dilemma. I was going to be one of the parents on a three-day rafting trip with my daughter’s youth group. We would be sleeping in a tent overnight and could only take a small knapsack, one that wouldn’t weigh down the raft. There would be no spare room for a makeup bag, and even if I could wear makeup, I knew I’d probably end up being dunked under water at some point.

I was telling this to a friend of mine who has a beautician’s license.

“Look at my eyes,” she said with some excitement. “It’s tattooed eyeliner! I did it myself.”

It looked really good on her.

“I never have to worry about being caught without makeup,” she told me, “even on our houseboat on Lake Powell.”

“I need that!” I told her. “It’s the perfect solution to this rafting caper. I won’t have to resort to using a permanent black Sharpie for my eyeliner.”

That afternoon, after doing my radio show, I went to her house, where she was all set up and ready to go. She numbed my eyelids with some gel and got out a tiny microscopic syringe filled with dark ink. I think getting a tattoo on your arm or ankle must be a lot easier. I don’t know about other people, but if you saw a needle coming toward your eyeball, you’d flinch! Right? And then flinch again! Not to mention the twitching. I mean, it’s a NEEDLE, by my eyeball!!! It’s a good thing my friend has such calm hands and meticulous aim. I could have ended up looking like Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in the pirate movies. Arrrrrrrrgh!

I loved the results, until the next morning, when I could no longer see the results. I couldn’t see anything. My eyelids had swollen shut. Every eyelash follicle felt like a porcupine quill.

My beautician friend had warned me. She told me to go directly home, and lie flat for at least two hours while applying ice packs. But I had a slight problem with her advice. When you’re wearing ice packs on your eyes you can’t see what your kids are up to!

I had to get my four younger kids through dinnertime, shower time, story time, and finally bedtime. It was about five hours later by the time I got to lie down. I remembered the ice packs about two seconds before I drifted off into a deep sleep. I may have dreamed about ice packs, but that didn’t help.

After the kids left for school in the morning, I decided to give my own “pupils” the cold treatment. I lay down with an ice bag on each eye. I had exactly twenty-four hours to look normal before grabbing a paddle and living the Hiawatha life for three days on a river.

About thirty minutes later my cell phone rang with a 9-1-1 call from another close girlfriend.

I picked up the phone to a long wail that I recognized from my own past.

“I can’t take this,” my girlfriend said. “My hormones are so out of control that I spent the night walking the floor. My heart is racing and I can’t stop crying.”

She wanted the name of the doctor who helped me through my postpartum depression.

I could hear in her voice that she was in no shape to figure out how to get to any appointment.

“Hang on,” I told her. “I’m coming for you. I’ll take you to the clinic. You’ll be okay.”

The swelling in my eyes had gone down far enough to see to drive, even though my eyelids were so heavy that blinking felt like weight lifting.

“I can’t go today!” my girlfriend cried over the phone. “I look like a wreck. You wouldn’t believe how red and swollen my eyes are. Don’t come for me. I’m not going.”

I could tell she would only go downhill. She needed some attention.

“Listen,” I said. “If I promise to look worse than you, will you go with me to the clinic?”

“You never look bad,” she sobbed.

“Just come get in my car when I get there. Okay?” She agreed.

As soon as she got in the car and saw me, I knew that she was going to be all right once she got her hormones balanced. The tears running down her face were now from laughter.

“At least if your raft tips over you won’t drown,” she said. “You’ve got two floatation devices on your head!”

I looked so awful that the clinic receptionist called a nurse over to check on me instead of my friend.

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “I brought in my friend. She’s having a hormonal meltdown.”

The nurse looked over at her.

“She looks perfectly fine compared to you,” she said.

And she did. My girlfriend seemed to be cheering up by the minute. As I waited for her to get her blood drawn, every nurse, doctor, and patient that walked down the hall stopped to take a long look at me. The word on the street was “Marie is experiencing a horrible relapse of her postpartum depression. She looks
awful
.”