Familial Loyalty...What Happened to It?

When someone becomes an ex…

A lot of people in my long years of life have found themselves in a divorce, in the process of divorcing or by golly, should be doing one of the above.

I was never much a proponent of divorce until it finally occurred to me that spending the next 30 years miserable and angry at everyone by staying in a marriage that was for all intents and purposes truly dead, or divorcing and being financially unstable, but finally able to breathe and be myself was something I was faced with.

I know couples that divorce and remain friends.   I will be honest here and say I am so very glad that this is possible in the world, but I don’t think it probable for the majority.   My son was on a youth baseball team where the ex-husband coached with the new husband and it was all hunky dory….the wives would show up and sit together.  That was impressive, but I makes me wonder what was said behind closed doors?

In my own extended family there have been a good many divorces.   My uncle divorced his first wife and married another and for years they didn’t really talk and be together but as age has advanced they seem to get on better than ever.  In fact, I think she sees the mistake it was to divorce him.   I wonder if that is because we are a bit more tenderized in our latter years?

My ex-husband and I are barely on speaking terms.  Of course our divorce was rife with the ugliness that killed it and my subsequent acting out and on it, but I have tried, since day one, to steer clear of things that would make others around us uncomfortable.  At our grandchildren’s games, I sit away from him and allow him the comfortable space to interact with others easily.  In doing that I’ve alienated myself somewhat from the “others” he so easily interacts with now.  I thought I was ok with that but am now finding that surprisingly…I too want that.

My son’s first wife left him for a troll, who she subsequently married, and when I see her at games I avoid her at all costs.  My words to her are few, and were it not for two gorgeous grandchildren they’d be so plenteous that no words would ever be necessary again.  One day this will happen.  

What I have difficulty understanding is loyalty to family members once a divorce happens.   I have a friend I work with who tells her brother that if he ever leaves his wife, they are keeping the wife and getting rid of him.   While that is amusing to hear and I can see where you may feel that way every great once and again, the simple truth is HE is family, and while she is currently family, she is family by marriage only.   Should they divorce and the divorce be contentious it is my HOPE that the family would tend, love and take care of the brother first and foremost.

When Left Brain’s ex, whom I not-so-affectionately call “the she-b (you can fill in the blanks)” gave him the ultimatum of “you will move me into the city, you will do x, y, and z…or we are done” (paraphrasing there) and then moved out of their marital home…you’d have thought his siblings would have become his allies in totality and familial love.   Alas his family not only put the dys in dysfunctional, but the word loyalty seems not to be in their lexicon, which is odd, as they all pride themselves on their wordsmithing.
The she-b treated him abysmally, leaves him and guess who they all interact with?   Her!   Loyalty, they have none.  Now I know there is history there between the siblings that may not be the best but they chose her over their brother.   They are on her Facebook page sending her greetings of love and their brother…nothing!

Left Brain had an aunt and uncle pass away and they didn’t even contact him to let him know!   Left Brain’s father died and to punish him they put in the obituary, his name as a single man and had him still living in Illinois while he was in Michigan and married to me…and they knew it!  Things with that family are very wrong, but one of the worse things is their lack of loyalty.  Yet they are loving the she-b like she was one of their own!

For myself, when I left my ex…my family was flabbergasted.  I didn’t tell them why for years, and then they understood, but it left them reeling prior to that knowledge.  

My own mother loved my ex.   She loved him more than she loved me which was always evident (as were her comments that he was too good for me, etc) and this was made very evident when she invited my ex to her birthday party at her house…and didn’t extend the same invitation to me after the divorce.  She had no loyalty either.   When confronted about this her reply was “this is my house I’ll invite whomever I want,” which basically said to me, her daughter…’I want him, not you, I prefer him to you.”

This brings me to the impetus of this blog post.  

My son, a good person, a loving person….well, his wife had several affairs on him and eventually left him for the Shrek she is now married to.  I don’t understand it, but to be intellectually honest, I am glad she is gone and he is very much better off without her. 

My immediate family do not post on her Facebook page or interact with her.   Too much ugly water has not only gone under that bridge but swamped that sucker.   My sisters want NOTHING to do with her, they’ve informed their kids that when you hurt one of us the family, by and large, are done with you.  (Seems my  mother is the exclusion to that rule).

My extended family, however, are not of that same deep loyalty thing.   My cousins and even an aunt are still on my ex-husband’s page, sending him all kinds of love.  They do this for me too, but I don’t buddy up with any of their exes, and never will.  My cousins, and an aunt also go on my son’s ex-wife’s Facebook page and make loving comments.   They say it is about the kids and I say while that is lovely….STOP.   They are part of us, to be sure, those kids are ours to the millionth power, but that woman, she is nothing or no one to us.  

I’ve even asked a few of them to stop interacting with her…but they continue to spread the love.

At a recent wedding of an extended family member, the ex-husband showed up and sat with his ex-wife at the family table.  They sat in awkward, ugly silence…but he came!  

I often wonder should my ex predecease me…should I go to the funeral home to support my son, or avoid that and hope my son understands.  I suppose this is something I should discuss with my son should that time come, but my preference would be to NOT go to NOT make his extended family feel anything toward me but to focus on their memories of him and to support my son.

I honestly don’t understand this phenomenon of choosing the non-family member over the close DNA types…but I don’t understand a lot of things. 

My hope is that one day my ex can be comfortable enough with me and Left Brain to hold a civil conversation at our granddaughter’s eventual wedding, college graduations….great grandchild’s birth.  My hope is that my grands never feel uncomfortable around both of us, but one thing is for sure…if you are mine, I’m going to choose YOU every time!

Love Worn Stones

I wear the diamonds that were once in the ring of my husband’s grandmother every day.   Sadly the state of her ring was so poor that I could not wear the ring itself as my engagement ring.   It was fragile and frail from years of wear and enjoyment.

We took her ring and had the gorgeous “nearly perfect, Old European cut” stones removed and placed into a setting quite different than her art deco design of the early 1900’s .   My preference would to been to keep her gorgeous stones and ring together but that could never be.   We did the next best thing.

Sometimes I’ll catch the glint of the larger stone and wonder. 

I wonder about this woman’s life.  I wonder what adventures she’d had while wearing these stones…where she went with them.   History she’d lived while wearing them. 

Did my husband sit as a little boy and play with the ring on her finger as my grandchildren had done with mine?   I like to think of him, little boy chubby legs tucked up in her lap talking to her while he twirled the ring on her finger watching those stones catch the light.

I wonder about the day she received the ring with these stones from her love.  Did he stutter and stammer a proposal, did she blush?  Was she surprised?  Did she love him as I love her grandson?  Was their wedding big or small, lavish or more personal?

I wonder what her thoughts were as she looked down at that ring and those stones in moments of sadness or happiness, contemplative moments or happy, silly moments. 

These diamonds have seen a lot of life.   I like to think they’ve seen a good bit of the good in people and life.  I like to think that the woman that had them before me knew grand love.  I hope she did. 

I wear them and see the photos of her that my husband has and smile to myself knowing that one day, although we have no children together, the granddaughter we share will wear these stones.  I plan to make sure she knows its history and all the things these stones have seen through the generations.  Laughter, tears.  Hard times, great times.  Adventure and mundane things.  Bread dough and garden soil, dirty diapers and happy tears of laughter.

I like to think that one day our granddaughter will look down and catch a glint from the stones and think of a woman she never met, who wore these diamonds with love and pride.   That she’ll think of me and the adventure that is my life, and wonder at the thoughts I think as I peer down at them.

The thought that these diamonds will continually be worn by women very much loved pleases me very much.  I hope it does my husband’s grandmother too.