Best First Wife Ever!

I'm on a fence about posting this. I'm leaning towards “yes,” because everything that I have to say about my first wife is positive. I've loved the woman since I met her, and I still do love her. I believe that marrying her was a great bit of luck, and I am grateful for every minute of the marriage and sincerely grateful for everything that she did for us, me and our boys. My only regret is that the marriage imploded short of the target date. I was written out of the script at the end of the second act, and I would rather have been a main character until “The End.” Having nothing bad to say about the whole situation, I suppose I'll go ahead and finish this and post it.

We were married for over forty years! There was a time when I would joke that, “we've been married for thirty-five years, and it's been about twenty-seven of the best years of my life.” She never liked that.

The woman's most prominent feature is her remarkable energy. This surfeit of energy turned out to be a mixed blessing, at least for me it did. On one hand, She got an awful lot done everyday, and organized her career around a self-run business that was very successful. Her many side-projects were also energetically pursued and yielded good results. On the other hand, her sheer drive made her nature somewhat demanding, and she was often disappointed in the slower pace of other people's lives. Like me, for instance. The effort that was required to put up with me finally became too much for her to bear.

There was a time when I thought that it would be a great idea to teach my first wife the game of poker and take her down to the Bicycle Club in Los Angeles and set her loose on the unsuspecting marks that played there all the time. She is a highly intelligent woman, very good at reading people and manipulating them, and she is extremely competitive. She was already engaged in competitions of her own design with everyone that she knew, friends, family, me, agencies of the State and Federal government, and everyone in her profession. The competitions themselves were never the goal. No, the goal was always to win. She'd have out-grown the Bicycle Club within a year or two, and would quickly have made her mark in Vegas.

She imagined our marriage as a catalog of struggles. Our marriage was the nexus of many little wars, against the background of constant tests and comparisons. Who is doing more housework? (Hint: less housework wins.) Who is making more money? Who is making decisions about the boys' lives? Who is spending more money? We did everything her way. There was no discussion. I simply complied with her wishes. Well, to the greatest degree possible.

We discover in life that there are things that we can do, and there are complications that can get in the way of our attempts to do other things. Our personalities, or our temperaments, or our learned behavior patterns, or our body chemistry, any of these things can make it impossible to do what is desired of us. No one can simply wish away depression, or a fearful temperament, or various anxieties. Maybe this is not the time to bring up my shortcomings. I recognize them, but as the three-time loser said when the judge asked him if he had anything to say in his defense, “your honor, whom amongst us is poifect?”

Everything was a competition for my first wife. She had two sisters, and thank God both of them only had two children. We had two children ourselves, which made it a three way tie. To lose that battle with her sisters would have killed her. She became, and remained, furious at me because we tried for years to conceive a third child. Nature did not allow it. Part of her desire for a third child was a desire to achieve a clear win over her sisters. The other part was that her own mother had had three children, thus setting the goal for another competition. Losing that one to her mother became a real sore point in our relationship, because she believed that it was obviously due to a physical failure in me, or I wore the wrong kind of underwear, or something. I had certainly not shirked my responsibilities in the attempt. Something wrong with me, though, definitely. Maybe a motility problem, or a lack of vitamin B. I'm not a doctor, and we did not consult fertility specialists. She remained furious at her mother and me over that loss, long after her mother's death.

We enjoyed eating out. I learned early on never to answer the simple question, “where should we have dinner?” I only answered with a non-response in the form of a question. Like, “what are you in the mood for?” Or, “where haven't we eaten in a while?” Long ago I would suggest somewhere. Maybe, “let's go to Vito's.” She would always respond angrily. “I'm never going to Vito's again! Every time we ate there we were the youngest people in the room! Only old people eat at Vito's!” Any place that I suggested would get that treatment. So yeah, “what are you in the mood for?” was a much better way to go.

We also always vacationed where she wanted to go, bought and sold cars when she said so, modified our house according to her instructions and her schedule, and once we moved from Los Angeles to New York for a year because she had a reason to want to be there for a while. I never minded being the back-seater in the crew, the Goose to her Maverick. There was always something in it for me. For instance, when we went to New York for that year, I was given the chance to finish up a BA at my old university. She got a well-paying, high powered job in her field, and the trip met all of the goals of her agenda for it.

She was an exciting woman, very lively, and beautiful besides. We had a lot of laughs, and I was always proud to introduce myself as her husband at affairs for her various activities. She wanted to be the boss, well, let her be the boss! I saw no harm in that, but she could be funny about certain things. Many things.

Toilet flushing in the middle of the night was an issue where my first wife's orders changed every six or eight months. Sometimes it was a water conservation issue, and I was forbidden to ever flush the toilet during the sleep period. Other times it was a smell issue, and I was ordered to flush every time I used the toilet. At other times it was liable to become a noise issue, and flushing the toilet was forbidden because it woke her up. All of that was easy, though. Just pay attention and follow the rules wherever they led.

Dish rinsing was another sensitive issue. We were married for many years before we had a dishwasher. I stand powerfully opposed to allowing any food to dry onto the dirty dishes, and I generally prefer to procrastinate by not doing the dishes immediately. This resulted in me comprehensively rinsing dirty dishes before stacking them in the sink. (California is an In-sink-erator state, so food down the drain is not a problem.) My first wife was a conservationist on this issue, and felt like I was wasting water by doing all of that rinsing. To make the matter worse, even after we got a dishwasher, I tended to rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I'm sure all of that was due to the poor toilet training that I received as a child.

All of this worrying about water was silly, of course, and pointless. I played golf, so I knew what real water-wasting looked like. I saw how all of the golf courses just left spigots open all day with the water running down the drain. That was in addition to their vast use of water to maintain the green grass over the entire course in the middle of a desert, with humidity down about ten percent, and the sun blasting down as though it were fifty meters away. They left all of the spigots on to insure that their water allotment would not be cut for the next year. Bear in mind that in Los Angeles, golf courses are as common as temples in Thailand. Every neighborhood has one. If every family in Los Angeles rinsed dishes like I did, it wouldn't add up to one tenth of one percent of what the golf courses wasted. But I always tried to follow my first wife's program, and to keep up with the frequent changes.

My first wife did all of the bill paying for the family. Those days, it was all done by mail, receive a bill, send a check. We put our pay into the same bank account, and the checks were drawn on that. Every couple of years she'd get sick of it, and yell that it was my turn, she was sick of doing the bills every month. After getting a look at all of the bills, I would inevitably become alarmed at our spending. “The balances on the cards are too high,” I'd explain. “I don't think we should use the cards at all for at least three months, and we should start sending them at least $50 over the minimum every month.” She would start gathering up all of the paperwork. “You don't know what you're doing,” she'd say, “give me that.”

I never found any of this annoying. I love the woman! Early in our marriage I would find arguments in this competitive atmosphere, but I stopped competing at some point. I learned how to avoid disagreements in my town growing up, where disagreements frequently led to fighting. I'm not sure if my increasing passivity became part of the problem. More likely it was a mixture of disappointment and compassion fatigue.

We joined the Peace Corps at age fifty-five, which came to me as quite a surprise. Although she had never shared the desire me me, she had hoped to serve in the Peace Corps since its inception when we were both in high school. Kennedy's speech drew her to it. I readily acceded to the idea. It would never have occurred to me to suggest it, but I liked the sound of it. We were “invited” to serve in Thailand after a lengthy application process. We worked on modernizing the grammar school English curriculum and teacher development issues. I thrived in the role, but she was homesick and miserable after about six months. She rode out the enlistment, because not to finish what she had started would be a black mark in the “loss” column in her philosophy. Two years shoulder to shoulder, sleeping and waking, working and relaxing, almost every minute of every day, was the last straw. I had officially become much too annoying.

Her plan to be rid of me was ingenious. It worked perfectly, except for one small detail. Thank God for California's Community Property laws! She wouldn't file for a divorce, because that would look too much like a failing on her part. Instead, she maneuvered me into filing. I was unemployed for a while when we returned from Thailand, and she asked me very seriously, “could you get a job if you went back to Thailand? Get a job and support yourself?” Of course, that would be easy, and in the event, within seven days of returning I had a perfectly good job and a place to live. I thought that I was coming back for a year or so, just to give her a break. I had the first job for a while, and then got a much better job with a one year contract. I told her in an e-mail that after the contract, I'd really like to come home. I missed her, and our sons, and everything. That's when she let the cat out of the bag. “I can't live with you anymore. Don't come back here.”

I gave her a bit of push-back, but she was adamant. “I really feel like it's time to come home,” I said. Her reply was, “make your own long range plans; maybe you would like Oregon.”

I waited five years for her to change her mind. Five years living alone and having no girlfriend. The job worked out superbly. I'm still there. I returned to Los Angeles for a visit every year, but she always said, “you're better off where you are. You can learn to take care of yourself. Stay in Thailand.” Finally, to drive home the point, she agreed to pay me to stay away. That's when I realized that she was serious.

Her plan was to be rid of me, but not get divorced. That way there would be no division of property. She knew that I couldn't support myself in California, or any of the other forty-nine states, especially without a property settlement. She wanted me to remain far away, leaving her to be in sole possession and control of our property.

At some point I had to stand up for my legal rights. On a visit, I told her, “I don't want to rush you. I want you to have plenty of time to plan your future without me. But this time next year we need to file for a divorce.” There was no way that I could take full financial control of the rest of my life without the financial settlement.

She just said, ”I don't want to get divorced.” Fortunately for me, California is a “no fault” divorce state, with Community Property style property settlements. If one partner files, it's a done deal, as long as the property settlement follows the rules.

I think that it has worked out okay. I remarried a few years after the divorce was final. A nice, normal, age-appropriate Thai woman with a decent education, by the way. I'm no cradle robber. I bought a nice condo in what has been my neighborhood for thirteen years now, close to my university, and my favorite mall, and my hospitals, my doctors, and my dentists. Things are okay.

I hope that my first wife is also doing well. I receive no updates on the subject. She really fit the bill for a great first wife. Between the two of us, we made a good living and built a good life for ourselves. We raised two wonderful men, who are good men, good friends, good husbands, good workers, and good neighbors. One of them is even a very good father! (That's not a dig. Only one of them has been blessed with children.) That's my family, and I love them all. If I was ultimately a disappointment to my first wife, that is not exactly a surprise. I was also a disappointment to my parents. But those relationships, both over now, are cut in stone. Death and divorce are only changes in legal status. In our dreams, our family remains our family.

My Thai wife is a wonderful second wife. Confucius said, “a common man gets angry; a wise man understands.” It's been years since I've seen my second wife angry, and that wasn't even directed at me. You could say that she cools down before she gets angry. She understands. It is perhaps the greatest good luck of my life to have been blessed with a wonderful first wife, perfect for that busy time of life, and a wonderful second wife, perfect as a companion and a comfort in my old age.

I have often said, as depressed as I have always been, I know that I am a very lucky man. If I can get through the time remaining to me without disappointing my current wife, that will be the icing on the cake.