Money was mixed up with issues of power and pride. Peggy went to China on business and Bill wanted to join her, but she said no: “I needed to concentrate and focus on business, and I didn’t have time to be a travel agent for my husband.” One weekend she canceled a trip to Houston and instead went to New York, to oversee her company’s initial stock offering, and Bill exploded: “He was just going crazy, calling my hotel room every five minutes. I told him I was at the lawyers’ office until three A.M., but he found that totally irresponsible.” After he left her a series of “belligerent and horrible” messages, Peggy called a friend and asked him to recommend a good divorce lawyer in Texas. “Do you want the mild-mannered guy,” he asked, “or the thermonuclear-war guy?” She hired the low-key fellow over the phone, and to this day, almost three years after the divorce, she’s never met her own lawyer in person.
Peggy’s involved with a new man now, but he’s more committed to the relationship than she is, and her daughter feels sorry for him, because she’s seen what happens to men who think they can control her mother: “I’m like, you’re about to get run over by a truck.” Peggy sees no need to tie herself down: “At this stage I can enjoy the benefits of companionship and I don’t have to have a marriage license.” At the end of our conversation, we asked Peggy this question: after three marriages and countless affairs, have you ever been in love? “Probably once,” she answered, her voice quavering, and it was clear she meant Jim, the pilot killed in Vietnam. Have you ever admitted that to yourself? “Maybe,” she said. “It’s not something I dwell on.”
At age thirty, Laura says that when she talks to her girlfriends, they all agree that “as we grow up we feel that we are so much more like our mothers than we ever really wanted to be or expected to be.” And after her last romance collapsed, she became convinced that like her mother, she’d be no good at marriage: “When David and I broke up, he said, ‘I think I was wrong, I think I made a mistake when I told you that I loved you, because I don’t.’ I could not imagine hearing that after being married with kids. Imagine twenty years from now, my husband comes to me and says, ‘I think we made a mistake, I don’t love you.’ I don’t want to hear that again.”
Afterword
Hearing these stories, we are struck by the legacy of divorce, the impact of broken marriages on how the next generation views love and commitment. Children of divorced parents are two or three times more likely to fail at marriage than young people from intact families. But nobody coming of age in the last twenty years can escape the divorce culture entirely. Even if your own parents are still together, odds are that you know many couples who are not: aunts and uncles, teachers and coaches, mothers and fathers of friends. The National Marriage Project says this culture “has made almost all young adults more cautious and even wary of marriage,” and that’s certainly true for the families we profile in this chapter. Nicole and Peter Tobin are so scarred by their parents’ breakup that they threaten to “kill each other” before either one can end a marriage. Cathy Bishop feels that her parents’ divorce made her suspicious of men and reluctant to have children—attitudes that helped undermine her own relationship. No wonder her daughter, Shannon, thinks growing old with her cat is an attractive option. After watching her mother’s three failed marriages, Laura McDonald speaks for many children of divorce when she says of matrimony: “It just scares me.”
BLENDED FAMILIES
Many Americans don’t live out their married lives in Leave It to Beaverland, with Mom and Dad and their 2.5 biological kids all together all the time. Many forces—death and divorce, estrangement and adoption—can fragment traditional families and then fuse the pieces back together in new shapes, creating new family forms to carry on. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s assumed new configurations. In earlier times, because so many women died in childbirth, it was quite common for children to grow up cared for by women who were not their real mothers: stepmothers and grandmothers, aunts and cousins, even family friends. And some of those arrangements could get quite confusing. Cokie’s great-grandmother died giving birth to her fourth child, and her husband quickly married his late wife’s sister. They proceeded to have four more children, who were both half siblings and first cousins to the first four. Steve’s grandparents took in a niece for several years after her parents died. As complicated as these arrangements might seem, they were much simpler than what many modern families experience. Divorce can poison relationships, even when parents and stepparents have good intentions toward their children, and it’s much worse when children become the focal point of their parents’ unresolved animosities. In America today, more than five million children live with a stepparent as well as a parent. Life in these “blended” families can present special problems and provide special joys for married couples. Here are portraits of three families we’ve come to know. In some cases, names and other details have been changed to protect their privacy.
Connie and Tony Morella: Nine Is Enough
When Connie Morella’s sister, Mary, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she was thirty-eight, a divorced mother with six children. As Mary grew weaker, relations with her ex-husband grew worse, and her last months were shadowed by the question, what would become of her children? Connie and her husband, Tony, already had three of their own, but as she sat at her sister’s bedside one day, Connie suggested, “Maybe Tony and I could take them.” Twenty-three years later she remembers that day vividly: “I don’t think I’d even consulted with him at the time. I had my fingers crossed, not really knowing what this would lead to.” When Mary protested, Connie soothed her dying sister: “I think we could do that, so don’t you worry about it.”
But it was Connie who was worried. She remembers thinking about her husband: “It’s my blood that goes through these children. I’m the one that pulled this together. Is he going to feel alienated? How about our children?” Connie recalls telling Tony of her offer: “Thank goodness I had a great guy, who said, ‘All right, we’ll all move over.’ They did. And that’s when the fun began.”
Mary’s oldest girl stayed behind in Massachusetts to finish high school, but two weeks after their mother died, the other five—four girls and a boy, ranging in age from nine to sixteen—moved in with the Morellas in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of Washington. And Tony’s two-door automobile started looking awfully small. “All of a sudden it dawned on me,” he says, “and I called a friend of mine and got his huge station wagon and went out to the airport. And there were these waifs, coming off the plane, led by Connie. It was just an extraordinary experience.” Ursula Munroe, the youngest child, who is now a nurse, recalls that “once we got there, the first thing we all did was pull out our stationery and write letters to our friends back home.”
The Morellas’ modest home bulged at every seam. A recreation room and a study on the lower level had been chopped up into three bedrooms, and the laundry room was now a bathroom. The oldest Morella boy, Paul, was away at college most of the time, so there were seven kids in full-time residence, five girls and two boys. “The boys had a bath and the girls had a bath,” recalls Catherine Sanborn, the second oldest cousin along with her twin sister, Louise. “We wanted nothing to do with their bathroom, but when the girls’ room was busy we had to use the boys’, and it was horrible!”
“The transition was a lot smoother than I anticipated,” recalls Paul Morella, “but it was tough for everybody. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.” When he came home from college, he sometimes slept on a cushion underneath an air-conditioning unit. “I kind of liked it,” he says, “because it had white noise, and I wouldn’t hear all the ruckus that was going on. People got up at different times and had different patterns as far as breakfast was concerned. It was almost like shifts.” Mark Morella and his only male cousin both worked as janitors at a nearby church: “It gave us a place to go sometimes when we had to get away.”
Tony installed an industrial-strength washer and dryer in the garage, telling the salesman, �
��I want the longest warranty you can give me.” But Connie’s idea, assigning different kids to do the laundry each week, quickly broke down. Somebody was always complaining about shrunken jeans, lost socks, dirty blouses. So she bought each child a separate laundry basket, showed them how to operate the appliances, and put them on their own. “This meant”—she laughs—“that there were times in the middle of the night you’d hear ‘clunk, clunk, clunk.’ Those were the sneakers in the dryer.”
The Morellas had always been “frugal,” one of Connie’s favorite words, a habit learned from her mother, an Italian immigrant who worked much of her life in a Laundromat for minimal wages. Connie was a schoolteacher who went into politics and now serves in the U.S. Congress, representing the Maryland suburbs of Washington; Tony teaches law at American University. So while the family was always comfortable, it was never rich, and Paul Morella remembers that long before his cousins arrived, his mother was a master money manager: “When I was young, I was amazed at how many sandwiches she could squeeze out of a can of tuna fish. She would sometimes make them ahead of time, and freeze them, and I remember taking out my lunch at school and the bread was sort of warped, because it had been in the freezer. And there was this thin layer of what I guess was tuna fish. Maybe sometimes she just whispered the word ‘tuna’ over the bread.”
Ursula recalls a truck backing up to the house and unloading large quantities of frozen food, which the family bought wholesale: “It was the joke of the neighborhood.” When Connie went shopping by herself, she’d load up three carts. One day, she says, “a woman said to me, ‘You must be shopping for six months,’ and I smiled and said, ‘No, five days.’” How does one person handle three carts? “You push one ahead and park it,” she replied with a chuckle, “and then you can pull the other two along.”
Since one teenager can tie up a telephone single-handedly, a half dozen vying for a line can cause chaos. “Getting the phone on a Friday night was quite an assignment,” says Mark. “Within seconds someone else would pick it up and say, ‘Can you hurry?’ So I used to get on my bike and ride up to the corner to make my phone calls.”
Getting the car was harder than getting the phone. Connie thinks that nine trips to the Motor Vehicle Administration for driver’s licenses qualifies any parent for hazardous duty pay. “It never ended, you’re taking somebody every year,” she recalls. “And it took one of the girls four times to get that license! She couldn’t parallel-park, so each time we went, we took a smaller car. Finally she made it—in a Yugo we borrowed from a friend.”
Tony bought the kids an old used car, an “army green” Dodge Dart, and laid down one rule—they paid for gas. Maryland license plates contain three letters, and just by accident, the Dart’s tag said “IRV,” and that of course became its name. “I was mortified to drive around in that thing,” recalls Ursula, “but I grew to love it.” No one loved buying gas, however. “I remember buying one gallon, that’s all the money I had,” says Catherine. All the kids earned their own spending money, and at one point, so many of them were working at the local Roy Rogers restaurant that they could have staffed an entire shift by themselves. Ursula, however, opted for a greeting-card shop because her older sisters smelled so badly of grease when they came home.
Gas money was one thing, college money was something else, and Connie likes to say that the family suffered for years from “maltuition.” Tony tried to contact Mary’s former husband and “get some help out of him for college—it was getting pretty rough.” When persuasion didn’t work, Tony sued, and hired a prominent Boston law firm to handle the case. As he tells the story, the law firm was too genteel for its own good, and couldn’t find the guy to serve him with a subpoena. Finally Tony learned the father of his six wards was getting remarried and he told his lawyer, “He’s having a reception at five o’clock at the Ritz-Carlton; get a process server over there to meet him.” When the lawyer gulped in reply—“You really don’t mean that”—Tony shot back, “I certainly do.” But in the end, Tony says, the father fought the case “and never did contribute” to his children’s education.
The real challenge was not food and phones and laundry, it was emotions. Asked if he felt cheated at times, deprived of his parents’ attention, Paul replied, “To be brutally honest, I’d have to say yes. There were times when I felt like saying, ‘Hey, look at me.’” One Father’s Day, he adds, his sister Laura sent Tony a card signed, “Your only daughter.” It was her way of reminding him that “there’s blood and there’s blood, so let’s be aware.” And Tony was aware: “I would find an opportunity to take her off, to hold her hand and say, ‘You’re my baby daughter, you’re my girl.’ I still say it to her because it was hard on her. She’d been our total focus among the girls and all of a sudden she’s got five sisters.”
The transition was even harder for the newcomers. “The biggest adjustment was realizing this was really home now, we weren’t visitors,” recalls Catherine. “We couldn’t say, we’re just here a little while, and go back home later. At times we felt like we were intruding on what they had. They never made us feel that way, but we just felt it anyway.”
Things improved after Mark burned a hole in his pillow smoking, and his cousins covered for him when Tony got home, assuring their uncle that what he was smelling was overdone grilled cheese. “Later we told Mark, ‘You owe us big time,’ but it really bonded us together,” laughs Catherine. There was always a line, however, between the cousins and the “real children.” After Mark cracked up the family car while Connie and Tony were away on a trip, Catherine remembers thinking, “Thank God it was Mark and not one of us.”
Perhaps the biggest source of tension was the cousins’ father. The elder Morellas “never even discussed him” with their nieces and nephew. “We just lost him,” says Tony. “I don’t know to this day if the kids had any contact with him.” The most angry family member was the mother of Connie and Mary, who harbored deep resentments against her ex-son-in-law and communicated them to her grandchildren. “My grandmother was very Italian, very old-fashioned,” remembers Catherine, and she was convinced that her daughter’s divorce had somehow contributed to her illness. “That added to the tension.” Ursula understands why her father was never mentioned in the Morella household, but his absence left his children with a stain of insecurity. “I had this feeling that my situation was precarious in some ways,” she remembers. “I didn’t have anything to fall back on, so I always had to tread lightly on things.”
As the girls went away to college and started getting married, each one in turn asked Tony—not her father—to give her away. “I really feel closer to him than my own dad,” explains Catherine. “He cared about me when I really needed a dad.” Her words reflect the critical role Tony played. As Connie points out, the six cousins were her family, not his, and she offered to take them in without consulting him. But he treated the newcomers with a warmhearted, low-keyed affection that filled a deep need in their lives. As Catherine puts it, “If we had problems, or celebrations, Uncle Tony was the one who was always there. For him to take us all in was an outstanding thing to do.” Tony was particularly touched by his role in his nieces’ weddings, and he can still remember how each young woman would clasp his arm as they stood together at the back of the church: “I could feel her trembling, and each time I said to myself, what a joy, and what a stupid idiot this guy was to give that up.”
Catherine now says that she “used to be bitter” about her father’s absence, but feels less that way now. “It really was his loss and his choice.” By the time Ursula, the youngest girl, was getting married, her father had gotten back in touch with his children, but she asked him not to come to her wedding. “I didn’t want to upset my aunt and uncle,” she recalls. “He wasn’t very happy about it but he respected my wishes.”
Today, with a daughter of her own, Ursula feels closer to her father than ever before. “He’s had to make an effort,” she says, “to prove to us he’s really serious about having a
relationship with us. As he’s been getting older, I think he regrets the way he handled some things.”
The Morellas have few regrets. Tony likes to call his six extra children a “gift from God” and Connie’s experience has helped her become one of Congress’s leading experts on family and women’s issues. One lesson she has learned at some cost—blended families need help. “You need help from your spouse, you need help from other family members, and if you don’t have any of that, you need help from special neighbors and friends that you can call on for peace of mind,” she says. “People should realize that women sometimes carry tremendous burdens and knapsacks of guilt, because we want to be everyplace and do everything. And frankly my advice is, you can’t be Wonder Woman. Don’t expect that you’re going to be the fashion expert and have the perfect office and the perfect home and entertain beautifully and take care of children and do a great job at your profession. You’re going to have to establish priorities. And the family and the children come first. You can’t do everything.”
Those “waifs” who trooped off that plane twenty-three years ago are now all married with children of their own—twelve in all. And they’ve learned well the lesson that “you need help from family members.” Four of the five sisters live in New England and stay in close touch, helping out with each other’s kids and sharing a special bond forged by their unusual upbringing. After their grandmother, Connie and Mary’s mother, died last year, her house was sold and the cousins inherited a slice of the small profit. The five women decided there was only one way to spend the money and honor their grandmother. So they left their husbands and kids at home and went to Italy together.
Ellen Terry: Only Child of Four Parents
From This Day Forward Page 32
