That Man O Mine

What kind of a guy would put up with me on a two-year trek around the country? The same one who’s been gracious enough to stay married to me for 40 years.

We were city folk when we met, John having moved to New York from Stamford, CT, at age 11 when his parents divorced. I was the suburban girl who longed for the bright lights and big job in the city, who moved into her own apartment at age 23 and subsequently spent almost every weekend at home because I missed my big, noisy family. My littlest sister was only three, and I worried about missing her growing years.

I met John in a Manhattan bar called Mr. Laugh’s, owned at the time by Joe Namath and a couple of other football players. It was a gentler time then, and you could meet someone and talk with him all night without being labeled “easy.”

I liked him right away. He was genuine, funny and easy to talk with. But he was going to be my friend while I searched for Mr. Right. Two years later, I realized I had Mr. Right right at my side, so I married him.

We had two boys, Jonathan and Jeff, a dog named Fluffy, and a perfect life. We moved to Tarrytown, where we lived for 25 years. At a certain point, John lost his job, so I bit the bullet and went back into advertising, a big decision for me, since I was old-school, and thought I should stay home to raise my kids.

John adapted well to Mr. Mom. He set about building a new business from home, and took over almost all of the child-rearing, even making the dinners he knew well – pork chops, steak, spaghetti with clam sauce, and American pizzas – on a rotating basis. I never got home until seven at night, at the earliest, so I was happy to have dinner waiting, but Jeff to this day will refuse these delights in favor of veggie dinners, fish and anything but pork chops. Too much of a good thing, I guess.

John’s business failed due to an inability to get growth money – he grew so fast, his credit line couldn’t support the number of orders he was taking in, and his was a credit-driven mail-order business. A shame when your very success is your undoing.

So after a few really low months, he picked himself up and launched himself as a salesman to the catalogs he once competed with. He’s a great salesman, I was to learn. His genuineness and lack of pretension made him trustworthy and his experience in creating his own catalogs made him a valued advisor.

Not only that, he had a honey of a commute. Down the hall to his office in his pj’s and slippers. I used to tell him I wanted his life.

So far, I’ve told you about his strong points. Honesty, truthfulness, humor, wit, adaptability. But, hey, he’s a man, so he’s immediately not perfect. He thought housework was for women, even when I was working 12-hour days. He could easily sit and watch me scrub windows, wash toilets and vacuum rugs on my day off.

He gets grumpy and refuses to say why. Most men do, and most women can’t stand that. They’ll ask again and again for an explanation, and only succeed in making Mr. Grumpy grumpier. Then when we become frustrated and angry and explode in exasperation, Mr. Grumpy becomes Happy Hooligan, all smiles and confused about our “sudden” moodiness. “PMS?” I was asked more than once in my lifetime. Which of course only made me more furious. Being asked, “Menopause?” didn’t make it any different, just older.

John liked, in this order, our kids, shooting trap, the NY Giants, Frozen Milky Ways, and me.

Then life changed in an awful way. In June of 1994, our eldest son, Jonathan, having been diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia a couple of months earlier, took his life. He was 23.

No parent should lose a child, for any reason, and certainly not John, who by any standards, was the father every kid should have. Warm and loving, a den mother, ball-tosser, hockey father, dog-walker when the kids had too much homework, pinewood derby car-whittler, Christmas tree buyer, pork chop maker, church escort (and he’s Jewish), confidante, back-rubber, he was everything to his kids, and they to him.

86% of people who lose a child end up divorced. The pain and the blame are too much to bear. We determined not to be a statistic. We went to counseling together and learned to let each other grieve at his own pace. We were kind to each other, we cried openly and unashamedly for years, and we never fought. We worked on helping Jeff to understand that he didn’t have to be two sons to us, now that the family had lost his brother and best friend. Jeff, by the way, is an amazing human being. Strong, very very funny, sweet and incredibly nurturing. Like his father.

We moved to a new, big, beautiful, serene home. It was bright and sunny and helped us heal. John could work in a sunny room instead of a dark basement, and I could grow thousands of flowers, which the deer promptly consumed.

Then three years ago, John decided, perhaps because this loss gave him a new take on life, or maybe just because we were getting older (and less well-to-do), that we should downsize, I should quit my established, successful business, and we should live simply and less extravagantly.

Oh yes, we had been treating ourselves well. We had the money, and we deserved it after all we’d been through. We had four cars including a Lexus and a BMW, a truck and a station wagon. We took vacations regularly, bought time-shares in Mexico, and even had a luxurious condo on the river that we rented out when it became clear that no way was I moving from my home. I owned a business, wore a fur coat and diamonds. We had flowers delivered regularly.

John became obsessed with our financial situation. More money was going out than was coming in. His sales business was slowing down dramatically, he felt old going to call on young twenty-somethings, and I was out of the house all the time. We fought, went to counseling, made up and fought some more. I promised to retire at 65, then worked another year beyond that. We put the house on the market, finally, and the market took a downturn. He worried all the time. He became diffident, angry, frustrated and a person I tiptoed around. I still loved him, but at times I didn’t like him very much.

We sold the condo, and then after three years on the market, somebody wanted our house. Life was about to change, and dramatically. I couldn’t hold my ground any longer. I brought home a bottle of champagne, sat him down and told him, “Okay, let’s do it your way.”

So here we are, doing it his way. We sold everything except for our mattress and a few antiques, bought this bloody big RV with everything you could want in the way of creature comforts, I turned my interest in the business over to my partner, had a great big retirement party, and a week later got on the road with a new man.

John’s the new man. He’s like a little kid. No, he’s like the guy I married so long ago. Happy, funny, taking life in stride, no more grumps, no more worries. He sits at his computer, maps and guides surrounding him, and plans out our next stops. I hate that kind of thing, so I’m glad somebody’s doing it.

He does most of the driving, half of the housework, what little there is, all of the barbecuing, all of the setting up, including the dreaded yucky dump station thing, most of the dog-walking and all of the fixing, lugging, and even some of the bed-making. (I still do it better.) He also finds things to keep himself busy while I’m incommunicado here at my work station on the picnic table under the awning, my diet coke on one side, and my last (I swear) pack of cigarettes on the other.

Oh make no mistake, the guns are in the camper, and I’m sure we’ll hit our share of shooting tournaments. I’ll be on the sidelines, bored to tears, probably, but I have this beautiful new laptop, a gift from my dear partner Frank, and all the time in the world to write about how it’s not such a bad thing to chuck it all and live the simple life.

Live and learn.
Betty