Episode 024 - Pants and Kilts and Dresses

Amy Haden-Knost talks about her military service during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, online dating, same sex marriage before Obergefell v. Hodges, and becoming a grandparent. My thanks to Amy for sharing her time with me, especially since I don’t think talking is her favorite pastime. This was the first interview I’ve done long distance, so it was fun figuring out a recording solution, and a backup solution for when that fails, which it did! But I still got the audio. I’m always grateful for learning opportunities.

Amy and her wife Renee (who is also my sister) rescue, transport, foster, and adopt Rottweilers throughout the southeast. It’s a cause that’s very dear to their hearts and to the hearts of the houseful of dogs (and cats), so if you’d like to support that work, please check out Florida Rottweiler Rescue Ranch and Sanctuary, in Dover, Florida, and consider supporting their mission.

And as always, thank you to Flora Folgar for her love, support, and voiceover talents.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

8:09: “Higher Up” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

11:50: “The Rise Of Heroes” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

15:05: “Acoustic Guitar 1” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com

18:22: “Black Knight  by Rafael Krux” - https://filmmusic.io/song/5617-black-knight-

22:03: “Can You Feel” by Nordgroove</a> from Fugue

26:17: “Alone Lonely (Instrumental”)  by Michael McQuaid from Fugue

29:23: “Call to Adventure” by Kevin MacLeod

33:41: “Blue (Instrumental)” by Rojj from Fugue

37:27: “Danse Macabre” by Kevin MacLeod

43:53: “Blue Ska” by Kevin MacLeod

Here’s the transcript:

In theory, everybody thinks that I’m the one that quote/unquote “wears the pants in the family” and all that other fun jazz because, well, I may look pretty good in a suit and tie or a shirt and tie. But that doesn’t mean I’m more manly, and honestly, in our type of relationship, that’s the whole idea is that there isn’t that male person in the relationship.

I mean honestly, she’s the one that says walking down the street, people are like, oh yeah, you’re gay. And they look at me. You’re gay. But she has to come out every single time. She passes. She passes as a straight woman. I mean, it’s one of those, she’ll even say it. She’s like, yeah, you totally pass as gay. That’s not a problem. People look at you and go, yeah, ding, you’re done. She’s like, where people look at me and go, so who’s your husband? And she’s like, actually, that’s my wife.

Renee’s telling me to go upstairs, so… See? I told you I don’t wear the pants in the family.

Well, actually, in this family, we’re pants and kilts, but then again, some of the big, burly, hairy dudes that we hang out with wear kilts as well, so that’s an OK thing. What’s more dainty and feminine than doing bench presses and back squats and deadlifts? And in all actuality, every woman should be doing that anyway, because it’s good for their muscular structure as well as their bone growth. Being sedentary is not good, ever. I mean, I hate that I have to work behind a desk and work with a computer all day. But that’s only 8 hours out of my day. After that, I usually leave, and we go to the gym, and we work out for at least an hour or so.

We do Weight Over Bar, Weight for Distance, well, Heavy Weight and Light Weight for Distance, Sheaf, Stone, whether it’s Open or Braemar, Hammer Throw, and then Caber. Caber is the small tree.

We’ve done the whole Ancestry DNA thing, and I’m like 93% British Isles, which covers England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in which I think 55 or 60% of it is Scottish and Irish. So yeah. I’m kind of heavy on that ethnicity. But yeah, we got into it because we decided, hey, there was a Celtic festival over in Gulfport, Mississippi, and we went, “Let’s go see what’s going on over there!” So we went, and we went and wandered around the festival, ate the foods, and had a couple beers, and we started watching some of the Highland Games, and I’m like was watching them do Weight Over Bar. And I was watching this, and I’m like, this is like a kettlebell snatch, but you let it go. I said, “I think I could do that.” And Renee’s like, “OK, then let’s get information and find out where the next one is.” And so the next one, because that was like in November, and the next one was in March in Dothan, Alabama. And so I was like, “OK, then we’re going to practice with whatever we can practice with.” And so we started, I took a couple kettlebells home, and I took just a sledgehammer to use as a hammer and went out to a baseball field and started throwing stuff and started figuring it out.

And then I competed that, in Dothan, and then afterwards, Renee’s like, “I want to do it too.” I went, “OK, then let’s both do it. It’s not a big deal.” And so the next competition was in April in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so we drove up there, and we both competed up there. And we’ve been just doing it since.

It’s fun. I mean, it really is fun, and it’s such a small group that are very supportive of one another, and around here, when we go to the games in the different areas, we see the same folks. And so it’s kind of like friends getting together. We’d all go out to dinner the night before, and then we meet on the field for competition the next day, and then have cold beer that night, the night afterwards.

We train together, so now, after doing this for about a year or so, we’ve actually gotten to the point where it’s like, OK, she’s trying to do Weight Over Bar, or I’m trying to do Weight Over Bar, and we don’t hit it, but the other person’s watching, go, “OK, it peaked at this point, so you need to take a step either forwards or backwards.” And so it’s like, “Oh, OK, cool.” And so we make the adjustment, take a big swing, and it makes it. And it’s like, “OK, there you go.”

I don’t really think about gender identity necessarily. It’s like, you have the 1950s stereotypes of what a mom’s supposed to be and what a dad’s supposed to be, but things progressed over the ages and the years, and I don’t think that is something that is a common thought now necessarily with gender roles. I mean, friends of mine at work, we were talking that being in a same sex relationship is common practice. You wouldn’t think this back in 1950 or 1960, but you see that every day now. You see Target commercials. You see airline commercials. So it’s not really a thing anymore. It’s one of those, you can be whatever you want to be, however you want to be it. You don’t have to be limited by what gender you were born.

I’ve got pictures of the whole class pictures of going through middle school and high school, and it’s like, no. No. I just… I mean, you can see picture after picture I am just who I am. I’ve heard about people, “I had a horrible childhood” or “I had a horrible time when I was in high school.” Yeah. I can’t relate, because I didn’t. And I know, most people would be like, “How is that possible?” It’s 100% possible, because I just didn’t have that situation.

I mean, I grew up right outside of D.C., and so it’s one of those, it was I would say fairly open, even my middle sister, which is 4 years older than me, her best friends were a whole bunch of gay guys. OK? She’d go clubbing with them and had a blast, and that was back in the ‘80s, which was way before anything blew up and exploded in reference to the same sex culture. I grew up there, and then I moved out to Colorado for 12 years. There wasn’t anything that somebody went, “Oh, by the way, you can’t be this way.” Or “you can’t be that way” or “you have to do this” or “you can’t do that.”

I pretty much wore whatever clothes I wanted to, except there were a couple occasions where my father was very, very stern with, “OK, this is a big event. You have to wear a dress,” and I went, “No, no! No, don’t make me! Don’t make me!” of course, because me and dresses were not a thing. And then I came home from school after getting class pictures in my dress and put on my jeans and t-shirt and my boots and went out and rode my motorcycle. So it all worked out. No harm, no foul. It was just the way it was. It was just me.

It didn’t matter who you were. Everybody played pickle with a baseball and hopefully you didn’t hit the window or hit each other. You played kickball in the park down the street. There was no, “Oh, well, girls get picked last” or “boys get picked first.” No. It’s everybody plays.I grew up in a really weird society, or maybe that was just my fog of consciousness of it. Maybe I just lived in that little bubble world or a cloudy day, the cloud over my head, and I just didn’t notice. It’s like, “OK, people are people. OK. We grow up, so that means we have to buy bigger clothes and bigger shoes. OK.”

I was actually stationed at the Air Force Academy. That was my first duty station, and then after being there for about 4 years, I got sent down to Peterson Air Force Base, which is on the south side of town. I was a contracting officer. So I got to buy supplies and services and did construction there. I bought their space simulation chamber for their physics department. And then I bought their lasers. It was a laser machine that actually helped the physics students learn about wavelengths. And then of course, I had stairs built on the terrazzo between the dining hall and the terrazzo with heating elements in them because they’re granite, and you can’t shovel granite. So they had to have heating elements underneath so when the snow and ice would come on, it would flip a switch, the heating elements would heat up the stone and remove the snow and ice.Those were like cool little moments at the Academy. But I mean, it was a lot of fun. I mean, I had a lot of fun doing my job, working and contracting, and then I went down to Peterson and did more advanced stuff. And then I also was one of the procurement agents for the Cheyenne Mountain facility as well, because that’s, Peterson kind of covered that too.

I was in the Air Force active duty for almost 10, and then I’ve been in the Reserves for just over 3. Air transportation. That’s like the official title. Pretty much anything that has to do with getting things on and off of airplanes, that’s what we do. Whether it’s people, cargo, special stuff, rolling stock, like if they had tanks or any type of vehicles that needed to get to a destination, we would load them up, and then the plane would take off. I drive a forklift. I can drive all the forklifts. I can drive Halvorsens, which are 25K loaders. Yeah, all that cool, fun stuff. 

And then I got out of the military in 2001. That was 15, almost 16 years. That was to raise my kids. And that was I was supposed to go on a 15-month “short tour” is what they refer to it as. A long tour would be a full PCS with family and everything. Short tours, in the active duty world, at least back then, I don’t know if they still do them, were just like little 12 or 15 month stints at an alternate location, kind of like a TDY, but it was a little more permanent. TDY is “temporary duty station,” so… And PCS is “permanent change of station.” So I was scheduled to go somewhere for about 15 months, and I went, “Eh, my kids are 2 and 4, and I really don’t trust their dad to actually raise them correctly.” And so I went, “OK. What are my options if I don’t go?” And they went, “Well, then you’ll need to get out.” And so I went, “OK, for my kids’ sake, I’ll get out.” So I did.

We were not married. We lived under the same roof, and we had kids together. One’s 20, and one’s 22. That was a long time ago. And now she’s a mom of her own, too. We are officially grandparents now. That’s crazy. And I actually held him the other day, and I went, “Oh my God, he’s so teeny tiny. What the hell?” I’m like, “How can a little human be so tiny?” And he, I mean honestly, at birth, he was as big as my first one. Same size exactly. I’m like, I’m holding him like, “Oh my gosh.” And I’m like, “Ooh, little tiny toes.” 

I’m like, I don’t… It’s a word, but it’s kind of weird, and I probably won’t feel that way until he says whatever. Because everybody’s like, “Oh, what are you going to be called?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” Well, that’s what Renee’s like, “Um, I’m just going to be Renee.” And I’m like, “You know what? He’s going to call you something, and you’re going to figure it out, and that’s going to be your name.”

You know, Nana is a banana. A Nana is what a small child calls a banana, and I do not want to be called a banana. So I’m like, you know what? If he utters the phrase ‘whatever’, I grew up with a Red Grandma and a White Grandma, because Red Grandma of course dyed her hair, so she had red hair, and the other one had white hair. It made total sense. So, again, it will be whatever is uttered out of his mouth. If he decides to just call me Amy, that’s fine.

Zero involvement, and Renee yells at me all the time. She’s like, “Oh my God.” But I know she was heavily involved in the whole AIDS thing in San Francisco, and she has people that were dying of it, and have died of it. That affected her a lot. It didn’t affect me at all. She goes, “You just turned a blind eye to everything. I just cannot believe you didn’t… like, you weren’t a part of any of that, and you didn’t know about any of that.” I’m like, “Nope. Sorry.” I mean, I didn’t know of anyone I grew up with or in the area or that I was friends with that had it, or have it now.

In high school, Renee of course, Renee and I have totally different views when it comes to high school and even middle school and growing up. She was “Errrr!” I mean, you know. Where I was just kind of like, OK, I was in band, and I played sports, and I had good grades, so yeah. And I hung out with the jocks. I hung out with the theater nerds, you know, the drama kids, the chorus kids, the band kids, even the rednecks. I was friends with everybody. It just didn’t matter. It’s like, if you were good people, I hung out with you. If you were bad people, I was going to tell you you were a bad person, and you need to shape up.

Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was slammed down and said, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. This is a hardcore policy,” it really wasn’t an issue. Nobody cared, and it wasn’t in the forefront of anyone’s mind. But as soon as that came to headlines that Clinton’s going to be, “Oh, no, we don’t have to ask this anymore. We’re not going to ask it; you don’t have to tell us. You just behave and watch your Ps and Qs.” Well, for the most part, we were all like, “OK, well if you’re not going to ask, and I’m not going to tell you, then I can kind of live my life as long as it doesn’t affect my job.” Where in all actuality, from being there in uniform at the time, it became a witch hunt. I mean, it was one of those, people were seeking out people doing wrong so they could go, “Oh no, no, no. He came out of his room!” or “She came out of her room!” It was more of that rather than, “Well, we’re not going to ask, so it doesn’t really matter.” And don’t even give them even an inkling of an idea that something may be happening, because someone’s going to go to OSI and go, “Hey, I saw Jane come out of Suzy’s room at 6 o’clock in the morning.” OK. And of course, now we’re wasting OSI money and time by investigating something that, “Oh, they were just studying together. Who cares?”

I mean, truthfully, yes, I was personally investigated, but it got tossed out. And I mean, they asked my roommate, because I had a female roommate. They even asked… They brought her in and asked her questions, and then I had several of my friends go up,  volunteering to say, “Hey, I want to put in a statement.” And so, it’s like, pretty much at that point it got tossed out, because I had probably at least a half a dozen people go up and go, “Hey, I want to voluntarily put in a statement for this person.” And once they see all that come through, they’re like, “Yeah, no, we’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

I was very happy when that ended, though. It’s like, “OK. So you’re gay. So? And? Do you do a good job? OK. That’s all that matters.”

We’re almost 14 years later, so… But yeah, we actually met online way before all the cool dating sites like match.com and eHarmony. There was a wonderful little site that apparently I joined, and I was fairly new. It was actually specifically… It’s called ButchFemmeMatchmaker.com. As funny as that is, it was an actual real website way in the early 2000s before all of this other stuff has come out. And it matched more masculine and more feminine people together, if you… And you can pick and choose, say you were quote-unquote butch, which is the more of masculine visual. If you like other butches, you could say, “That’s what I’m interested in.” Or if you were more feminine, and you liked more feminine, then you could say, “I was interested in more feminine.” I mean, it just kind of curtailed you in your… You could refine your filters, quote-unquote.

And well, she messed up, because she was searching for new individuals that had joined the site to see if anybody intrigued her, and she forgot to put in a zip code. So she pulled up all of the new people on this website rather than just new people within a certain proximity of her. And of course, I popped up, and she just looked at my picture. I can even show you the picture. It cracks me up. She’s like, “That’s the one that got me.” I’m like, “OK, whatever. It doesn’t make any damn sense to me, but OK.”

And then she clicked on my image and went through the profile, and she went, “Dammit. Why you gotta be so far away?” And then she went back, and she revamped her search, and she did her own searches, but then she actually clicked on my link two more times. So she actually viewed my profile three times in the same night. I got home from work, and the cool part about this website was that if somebody had viewed your profile, you could see who had viewed your profile, even if they didn’t give you a comment or leave you a message. You could see who it was, and so you’re like, “OK, well who’s been checking me out?” I mean, it’s common sense. I look up, and I’m like, “Wow. Who are you?” So I clicked on her profile, and I read her profile. It was very, very honest, as was mine. And I was like, “You know? She seems like a really cool person. Hmm.” So I sent her a message, and I went, “Hey, I viewed your profile. You seem like a really neat person. I would love to chat with you more.” That’s it. Knowing she is 2600 miles away. It’s never going to happen, or at least the chances are like so far and few, I just, she seems like a cool person to chat with.

OK. And then all of a sudden, whoop! She sends me a message back, and I’m like, “Oh shit! She’s online! Oh damn, that was fast.” And we started chatting.

We chatted for probably 5 or 6 hours that night, just chatting on the web, just typing up words. That’s all it was. We were both very, very truthful, but I had not said my name, nor had I given her my phone number, and so, at the end of the conversation, I was like, “Well, I’d like to call you sometime.” And she goes, “OK,” and she gives me all of her phone numbers, so I picked up my cell phone and called her. 

She came across the country alone with the boys and the 3 cats.

My family’s kind of different. I’ve introduced her to my mom, and my mom’s actually come here to visit. But yeah, my parents are southern Baptists, and they don’t view this as a good thing. They hope that the good Lord will cure me of this.

Well, and the thing is, I was raised in a Catholic family. Even growing up Catholic, it was no big deal. It was just do what you do as long as you’re a good person. It didn’t matter. You know, be kind, be good. And then once my parents changed their faith and converted over to southern Baptist, they’ve been quite interesting folks, shall I say. There’s lots has gone on, so I don’t know if changing their faith pattern has modified their perceptions and their, the way they do things. I think it does. But as long as they’re not harmful to each other, I really don’t care.

But yeah, I remember when Renee introduced me to you all when I drove up with her and the boys, and apparently the first night there was that huge gathering, and it was, the chairs were set up in like a round circle she told me. And she’s like, it was so weird, because we all sat around in a round circle and talked. I was like, “OK.” And she says, “And I really wanted you to be there, but I really didn’t want this to be focused on Renee Day and oh my God, what crazy crap is Renee bringing into the family?” And I was like, “You know what? I’m fine. I’ll just hang out at the hotel and just chill. If I go swimming, I’ll go swimming. Don’t… It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. Whatever. You know, I’m not going to push this.” And then apparently she finally got your dad aside and went, “I brought a friend.” And he went, “OK, who is it?” And so they had a chat and talked about it, and that’s when I met you guys at the Pancake House. And then I remember being grilled by Meg and Kathleen. They were sitting across the table from me, and it was like the fire, question, question, question, question, question, and I’m like, “Oh, crap! I didn’t know I’d have a kevlar vest for this shit!” Oh yeah, it was one of those… It kind of… Afterwards, it’s like, Renee’s like, “Are you OK?” And I’m like, “I think so. I’m still in one piece. I think I’m OK.”

We had decided we really wanted to get married after being together for a year, but we couldn’t because there were only like two states, I think at that time, that legalized it. And we’re like, “You know, we really want to get married at home. We really want to get married where our friends and family, blah blah blah blah blah.” Normal normal. Normal stuff. And 5 years later, I went, “To hell with this.” And she went, “What?” I said, “Let’s go get married.” And she went, “What?” I went, “Let’s just do this. If we’re going to do it, let’s just do it.”

I had proposed after a year. So it was a very, like 5 year engagement later. I mean I was just, you know, because we had talked about it, we had talked about it. I was like, “I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting for Florida to get off their ass and do what they should do. Let’s just go get married, and then when Florida recognizes it, then Florida recognizes it.” And she went, “OK.” And so I went through every single state, because there were 6 or 7 states that allowed it. And I went to every single state and looked at their requirements, because D.C. actually allowed it, and we were thinking about going to D.C. to do it, but D.C., the problem was is time, being that our kids were all still young, we couldn’t leave them for like a week and a half. And with D.C., say, you went in and put in, requested your marriage license on Monday, there was a 3-day waiting period, so you had to wait 3 full days after that. So that meant you could pick up your marriage license on Friday and go get married, but you had to have that waiting period.

So, I mean, I went through each state that it was possible in, and I found Connecticut, believe it or not, there was no waiting period, there was no required blood test, and you did not have to have witnesses. So that means we didn’t have to bring anybody. The only thing you had to have was an officiant, and so I found a nice little lady up in Connecticut, and she was an officiant, but more so, just our photographer. She took some pretty darn good pictures afterwards. And we went to a little town in Darien, Connecticut. We show up, and I’m in a suit and tie, and Renee’s in her dress that she’s made, and we go to the Clerk of the Court, and the lady turns around and goes, “Oh, are you two getting married?” And what does my smart ass say? “Oh no, we dress like this all the time. We’re just here for like trash schedules.” And she looked at me and went… And of course Renee, at that point, elbow went right in the arm. I was like, “Ow! I’m sorry.” It was hard to resist.

So we got… I mean, we paid quote-unquote half down for our marriage license. You have to pay them like 20 bucks. And then when you bring it back after you get married, and you know, to get it actually officially certified and stamped and all that, then you pay them the rest of the fee. So it’s kind of like you have to pay a down payment on it, and then you pay it off when you get back. So we grabbed the marriage license, went down to a wonderful little park that we had explored the day before that our officiant suggested, and we found a cute little probably hundreds year old bridge in the backwoods area, and we went, “This is perfect.” And so that’s where we got married. And we went back, she took the marriage certificate back and signed it officially in front of them so they could witness it, and they stamped it and approved it and said, “There you go.” Done. And then we flew home a couple days later.

Yep, it was just me, Renee, and Mary. That’s it.Yeah. I mean, it was super easy, super fast. It’s one of those, Renee will gig me about the saying of the vows every time, because we originally had said we want the shortest possible, don’t make me talk a lot. OK. So I find the shortest possible. “Do you take… to be your lawfully wedded wife?” “Yes, I do.” “Do you…?” You know, very, very simple. We’ve already said that, and I’m like, “OK, we’re in like Flynn. Cool. We’re good to go.” And she went, “OK, Amy, repeat after me.” Renee stops, and she looks at me, and she went… she just started laughing, because I looked at Mary, and my eyes got like the deer in the headlight, and I went, “You mean I have to say more?” And she went, “Yeah, officially you do.” And I went, “Oh, damn. This is going to get rough. I thought I was in. I was done.” And she went, “Nope. You got more to say.” And I went, “Oh, crap.”

Actually, we didn’t have a lot of issues. I mean, even, you know, we’re down here in the Redneck Riviera, southern Alabama, whatever you want to call it. We’ve had two occasions that I kind of remember that I kind of laugh at and go, “OK.” There was one, we were going into Wal-Mart years and years and years ago when we actually shopped there on a regular basis. And there was an older white gentleman pushing a cart, and his wife was walking next to him holding her purse, and they were walking down the aisle, and Renee and I walk in. Of course, we’re a couple. We’re holding hands. It was no big deal. And we thought his head was about to pop off in like a total Exorcist moment, like totally cranking all the way around. And his wife turned around and took her purse and slapped him upside the head and went, “You need to look forward, sir!” I was like, “Oh, damn!” I mean, because it was very, very apparent what was happening.

And then, the second thing, oddly enough, we were in Mobile, because we hadn’t ever really gone to Mobile, so we drove over for a day just to kind of walk around downtown Mobile to see the sights and grab something to eat, just kind of relax and kind of be a tourist. We weren’t even holding hands. We were probably walking about two feet apart, just walking down the sidewalk, just chatting, talking. And this older black man, he was probably in his 60s, maybe early 70s, walking the opposite way. So he’s walking towards us. He just gets past us and goes, “All these goddamn gay people!” We both just kind of… Because we were just talking, and we weren’t holding hands. There was nothing that he would’ve seen. Just stopped and turned around, and he’s just shaking his head as he walked down the street. And we’re like, “I have no idea what the hell that was all about.” But that was actually really funny.

That’s really it. I mean, over 14 years, that’s like, OK. Everybody just kind of live and let live, and just don’t worry about it. But then again, we’re not the militant type. We’re not the ones that are jumping up and down on statues and flag waving and armband wearing and all the other stuff that you see on TV or you’ve seen on TV in the past. That’s not us. We just live our lives.

Episode 002 - Love and Divorce, Part 2

It's Rod talking about himself some more! His favorite subject. Flora's favorite part is our duet on "Last Christmas."

This episode was produced and edited by Flora Folgar, and mixed by Rod, featuring outro music from Aiden Folgar.

Here's the transcript:

Rod:  (con’t from Part 1) I thought if I continued to build my life back up again maybe someday there would be something there, but I didn’t think I’d be in a relationship, and I didn’t think anybody would love me.

Flora:    So what happened?

Rod:    I had a friend who… I met her through a mutual friend, and we kind of clicked as far as we would go do stuff with our kids together. We’d go hiking, or you know, we’d go play at the playground or whatever, and she and I became friends that way. And then over time, she was going through a divorce. At the point when my ex-wife said she wanted a divorce, this is the friend that I went to talk to about it, and so our friendship became stronger during that period. And when I moved out, had my own apartment, a couple of months later, she, against her better judgment, made a pass at me and we started dating. And I say against her better judgment because she also had that idea that you really shouldn’t date so soon after ending a major long term relationship, that it was just a bad idea, and it wouldn’t work. It was a complete shock to me that anybody was attracted to me. That helped begin to change my image of myself. I do remember that we were getting more and more flirty, and that being just a real pleasant surprise. I didn’t want to mess up the friendship and all that, and so I was reluctant to start something, and then she did it for me. I went along. How could I say no? She called me one night. Oh, there was a song, Thompson Square, “Are you gonna kiss me or not? Are we gonna do this or what?” Well she had been somewhere kind of drunk listening to that song and called me up and was like, “Are we gonna do this or not?” And I was like, “What?” And I was like, “Well OK, come on over!” And she’s like, “No, I don’t want you to see me all drunk like this. Some other time.” So like the next night, she came over, and she started something, and I remember that whole night going, “Are you kidding me? Like, is this for real?” I kept saying it, and she kept laughing at me, because I was like, “Is this real?” Partly I was shocked that she was interested, but I was really shocked that anyone was interested, because I just felt so beat down from the end of the marriage, and so… Like, I didn’t have anything to offer anybody, and she didn’t see it that way. And her not seeing it that way started making me see it differently too.

Flora:    How was that relationship different from your marriage, your ex-wife?

My ex-wife liked routine and schedule and predictability. So if we went out to eat, she wanted to go to the same restaurants and order the same food. And with that new girlfriend, we went places that I’d never been. We ate things I hadn’t eaten. We talked a lot and laughed a lot, and… I don’t want to make it sound like everything about my marriage was repressive or, you know, held me back in some way. A lot of what held me back was my own fear and my own self-esteem issues. Maybe as much as the personality of this new person being different than that of my ex-wife, it was also just a new situation which gave me the freedom and the permission to be a new person myself. And I think at the time, I put a lot of that on my new girlfriend, and she was this amazing person that was so different from my ex-wife, but I think it had more to do with I was walking through a new door into a new space, a new time in my life and had the freedom to become a new person, to become someone that I wanted to be instead of someone that I’d always been because that fit well with my ex-wife.

Flora:    Who did you want to be?

Rod:    I wanted to be… It’s funny, because every time I describe the women that I’ve found attractive, the women that I’ve dated, my first impression of these women that I’m drawn to is always that they are strong and confident, that they give the impression of being sure of themselves, and that’s appealing to me because that’s not who I was, and that’s who I wanted to be. And that’s who I’m becoming now. I’m a lot more comfortable with myself, both in like my physical body and in my personality, and in my willingness to do things that I’ve never allowed myself to do because I wasn’t good enough at them, like dancing, and writing, and public speaking, and stuff like that.

Flora:    All right, so you’ve mentioned that your ex-girlfriend suggested you date other people and start an open relationship, because you didn’t have enough experience after the divorce, and you got into a relationship with her really soon, so you started an open relationship. Give me some details. What was that like? Give me some experiences dating other women during the time that you were with your girlfriend.

Rod:    Because I was in this new time in my life where I thought the things that I was afraid of were the things that I should be doing, I jumped into it and thought, “Yeah, this is very uncomfortable, and I am very afraid of it, so I should do it.” And looking back now, it just, it was not something that fit me very well. I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I did enjoy that feeling of freedom. I had never dated, really. Like, I had a girlfriend in high school, but I hadn’t dated more than her, and then I didn’t date anybody before getting together with my future ex-wife, and I didn’t date anybody after that before getting into a relationship with my ex-girlfriend. So I’d never dated, so it was a new experience. And it was kind of fun, and it was kind of exciting, and I was proud of myself that I was able to be really open and comfortable talking about myself, talking with these women, relating, you know, relating to women in that way that I never had before.

Flora:    Can you give a specific example? Talk about a site that you used and a date. Tell me about a date.

Rod:    I was using OK Cupid, and then I used Tinder later. I liked OK Cupid better because it had profiles. To read a profile and in a message to that person respond to it and you know, comment on things that were in it. And be funny. That was my other go-to. I was funny. Smart and funny. There was one date where I thought it was going really well. That’s kind of how the theme went, I guess, is I always kind of thought it was going pretty well until it wasn’t. I got rejected. That was one where I was like, “I’m going to go for the goodnight kiss.” You know, we got to the car, and I was going to kiss her goodbye, and I chickened out. And then I texted her after that and was like, “Yeah, I was going to go for the kiss.” And she was like, “Yeah, good thing you didn’t, because it wouldn’t have happened.” So that one didn’t turn into a second date. Did I reject anybody? Not after a first date. Later, after I’d been dating for awhile, I kind of changed my approach. I was just doing it for the fun, you know. I wasn’t trying to find a relationship by that point. I just was, you know, turning on the app when I’m like, “It’s a Saturday night, and I got nothing to do. Maybe I can get a date.” And I got a date. She seemed to be really into me. And I thought, “Aha! This is my chance to go for casual sex,” because I hadn’t really done casual sex, so it seemed like I was pretty guaranteed that if I tried, I could see what casual sex was like. So we went on the first date, and she was very aggressive on the kiss at the end. And then we, the second date, we went to a movie, and she was all over me in the movie theater. And so the third date, I was going to cook her dinner, and so she was coming over to my place, and I was sure that third date was the charm, and I was going to make my move, but I realized that there was no chemistry. I wasn’t really… I wasn’t into her in any kind of way. And because of that, my desire for the casual sex was really low. I just didn’t want to. I wasn’t very physically attracted to her, I wasn’t attracted to her personality, and I thought, “Well, why am I doing this?” And I canceled that third date before she came over.

Flora:    OK. So this open relationship thing, did it become a problem eventually in your relationship? Were these women aware that you were in an open relationship?

Rod:    Yeah, I put it in the profile.

Flora:    So how did your ex-girlfriend take it? How did you guys… Were there jealousy issues?

Rod:    I thought she was real blase about it. On a philosophical level, I kept telling myself like, jealousy is fear. Jealousy is fear of loss. So it was a good thing to push those boundaries and you know, to learn to not be afraid. She had more jealousy over the whole thing than I would have guessed or that I could tell from looking at her until you know, she told me later that that was an issue for her.

Flora:    And you were jealous too?

Rod:    Yeah, jealousy was worse for me. Well, I don’t know about worse, but I definitely had an issue with jealousy. She asked me to put one of those “Find My Friends” apps on my phone so I’d know where she was. You know, just like as a safety thing, she wanted me to have this app, when I knew she was out with a guy, I found myself checking it and seeing where they were, and it was not healthy. You know, it was like, “Oh look, they’re out at the lake.” You know. It was not good. And it was super uncomfortable for me. I didn’t like it at all, and I thought that’s, well, I should just, I should push those boundaries and learn to adapt to it. But I think in the end what I learned was that I just am not built for that. I don’t want to split my time like that. I don’t want to split my attention. I like really diving in and getting to know to someone and investing time and energy, and it just seemed hard to do that with more than one person at a time. It wasn’t for me.

Flora:    Who decided to end the open relationship?

Rod:    I did. I told her I wasn’t doing that anymore. I told her if she wanted to keep doing it, she could, but I wasn’t going to do it anymore.

Flora:    How long were you guys doing it for?

Rod:    3 months, maybe. 3 months. Maybe 4 months.

Flora:    And so, when you said you didn’t want to do it anymore, what happened?

Rod:    By that time we were pretty close to the end of our relationship anyway. Things were pretty rocky between us. She kept dating. Then I broke up with her, and then I changed my mind and said I didn’t want to do that, and she agreed. And then she went out of town for awhile. She said you know, we would have this cooling off period, and we would think about it, and then we’d try again when she got back. And then when she got back, she dumped me. And that was the end of it.

Flora:    How long did the relationship last?

Rod:    10 months. 10 months, and probably 4 months of being pretty good. And the rest of it being red flags all over the place that I just kept turning my head away from and going, “I don’t see you.”

Flora:    How was that breakup? How did that breakup feel after pretty much a year after your breakup with your ex-wife? Were there similarities and differences?

Rod:    I took it pretty hard. I was kind of angry a little bit. I felt a little bit betrayed, because she said while she was gone that… Or she said when she got back, we would try again. And we didn’t try again. It was like the very next day after she got back that she said she was done. And she put it in terms of she was going to focus on her kids, and she wasn’t going to date anybody right now, and you know, I think she tried to make it that whole “it’s not you, it’s me” thing. And you know, that never feels good I guess. Well, I think in both cases, I decided it was all my fault, and if I could just do the right thing, it would be OK. You know, that the relationship would work. And it took a little while for me to realize that there are ways I just can’t change myself. I am who I am, and there are people that I cannot be. And that was a good thing. Figuring that out. I think there’s a lot of value to compromise in relationships and you know, trying to value what the other person wants and everything, but at a certain point, you just can’t be somebody else. You can’t be who you’re not in order to keep somebody in your life. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. Twice.

Flora:    What did you learn about yourself from that relationship?

Rod:    I learned that I was repeating similar patterns, putting myself second, thinking that to save the relationship all I had to do was change myself. If only I could be a good enough, strong enough person to make the changes necessary to make the relationship work, then it would be OK. There were ways that we were absolutely not compatible in the same way that my ex-wife and I were not compatible, and I went through the same thing of going, “No, that’s not true. This is a good thing, and I should do everything I can to make it work.” Instead of having learned from the marriage. No, there’s basic ways that people don’t work well together. And I went right back into, “All I gotta do is change myself, and it’ll be fine.”

Flora: And after that relationship ended, did you wait a year until the next one?

Rod:    Nope! By that point, my opinion had changed on that. From the time that my marriage ended and I moved out, I had changed so much, had changed the way I saw myself so much, and a lot of that change had come through dating. And my change in my understanding of what was possible for me, all of that change seemed to come through relationships, so by the time the relationship with her ended, and I decided open relationships were definitely not for me, I wanted to keep on dating and learning how I relate to different people. I think that was probably the wisest thing that she said to me when she wanted me to start doing open relationships was that I really needed to learn how I related to different people and to see a wide variety of people so that I could find out what it was I liked and what I didn’t like. And so I wanted to keep doing that after that relationship ended. 

Flora:    So how long after your last relationship did your next relationship begin?

Rod:    2 months.

Flora:    So usually, like you said before, people would say take 6 months, take a year between relationships, but you feel like you’ve learned more and you’ve grown more through relationships. So it doesn’t really matter the period of time between relationships. Yeah?

Rod:    Yeah, I think I had a harder time getting over my last relationship than I thought I would. So in retrospect, I shouldn’t have jumped in with both feet the way I did as quickly as I did. I should’ve kept on with the casual dating attitude, and you know, not been exclusive quite so quickly and taken more time to really get over that relationship after my ex-wife. I had gone into it not thinking that I would ever be in love again, and then was in love again and was trying to make it something long term, and got rejected, and was more hurt by that and more… I was still holding on to it when I got into the next relationship, and I should’ve taken more time to really let that end before I did it again.

Flora:    Why did you get into another relationship?

Rod:    I wasn’t really trying to, I just was taken by surprise the ways I connected with her and clicked with her in ways that I didn’t before. It was like, “Oh! You can be in a relationship with somebody that you have the same outlook, like the things that we wanted were the same. I had been through those 2 relationships where openness and communication were not highly valued by the other person and was beginning to realize that that’s one of the things that I really wanted. Openness, honesty, communication, talk about everything, have an attitude of growth. And I had realized that part of what had destroyed the previous relationships was I did not like silence. I liked talking about feelings. I wanted to say what I thought and felt, and I wanted to hear what the other person thought and felt, and I did not get that from either of the previous relationships. And all of a sudden I was in a relationship with somebody who wanted the same things that I did. And we very quickly got very close. And so it just seemed right, and it seemed natural that I should put my efforts into that. I asked her to be exclusive with me pretty quickly because the idea of dating other people, I thought it felt like I was splitting my attention, splitting my time, which I didn’t have all that much of to begin with. You know, every other week, I had my son full time, and I had found someone that felt so right, that I should be committing those time and resources to really exploring that and not messing around with other women and seeing if there was something else. 

Flora:    Now you’re in a new relationship. How long have you been with your current girlfriend?

Rod:    Almost 16 months.

Flora:    And how has your current relationship changed you?

Rod: I am so much more relaxed now, and I think that comes from being in a relationship with someone that I’m not trying to make it work by being somebody else. I am being myself all the time, and she still loves me. We’re just, I don’t know, we are a good fit. my current girlfriend, I absolutely love that she and I both just really crave that personal intimacy. I mean, we talk about everything. There aren’t limits set to what’s possible between the 2 of us. We talk about anything, and she has a sense of adventure that goes beyond going and doing stuff. I always, I never want to stagnate the way I did for so many years in my marriage where my life is about drinking and watching TV. I don’t want to do that. I want a life of growth and learning and exploration and change, and my current girlfriend absolutely syncs up with that beautifully in ways that neither of those other relationships did.

Flora:    What are you doing differently in your current relationship than you did in your marital relationship or the other relationships?

Rod:    Openness, honesty, and communication. Those are the 3 magic words for me right now, and not just in my relationship, but in life in general is just… I think I went through the other 2 relationships and especially my marriage trying to figure out what was going on in her mind. And frequently being completely wrong. But if there’s not that communication, it’s hard to know what’s really going on. Even when it’s hard and when it’s painful, or it’s embarrassing, or whatever, just be open, honest, direct, talk about everything, talk honestly about everything, and discover that doing that leads to a level of connection that’s really beautiful. And physical contact too. Like we hold hands and touch in small non-sexual ways all the time, and that means a lot to me.

Rod:    There are no limits placed on my relationship now. There’s no limits on what we can explore, what we can do, what we can try, where we can try it. There were frameworks in place for both of my previous relationships. There were limitations. We can go this far, but no farther. We can do this, but we’re not going to that. And there isn’t any of that in my current relationship. She gives me the space to explore what I’m capable of. In our relationship, in our emotional intimacy, and in our sex life, and in me pushing the boundaries of what I can do and what I’ve never done before. I have never danced. My ex-wife loved to dance. We went dancing a couple of times very early on, went to clubs to go dance. And I was really really uncomfortable. I could not get out of my head the image of myself as a terrible dancer. I’d been made fun of trying to dance when I first went off to college, my roommate made fun of me dancing, and every time I tried to dance, I would see him imitating me and laughing, and it just stopped me from doing it. And I thought, “I just can’t dance.” And so I could not give that to my ex-wife. My ex-girlfriend wasn’t into dancing. My current girlfriend is a beautiful dancer. I didn’t want to hold her back from that. I didn’t want her to not be able to do it because I wouldn’t go do it with her. And I always wanted to be that comfortable in my body and that confident. And so I went dancing with her, and I took the risk of her laughing at me, and she never did. And that was a great gift, and I don’t think it was that she thought I looked ridiculous and just didn’t laugh at me. She just accepted in the same way that she accepts who I am, she accepted how I moved. And I don’t think she really understood how uncomfortable and awkward I felt. And the more we did it, the less awkward and uncomfortable I felt until I actually started enjoying going dancing with her. And that’s a great metaphor for so much of what our relationship is, is there’s just… There’s not this layer of judgment or anger or disappointment. It’s just the 2 of us being who we are, comfortably, together, and enjoying each other in a very natural, honest way that I’ve never had before. And it’s amazing.

Flora:    Was there, because a lot of people when they come out of divorce, and then... not the second relationship after… the first relationship after the divorce doesn’t work out, they tend to be bitter. But you don’t seem to be bitter. You seem to be hopeful and open to love. Is that true?

Rod:    Yeah. I think in a lot of ways I, less so now, but early on after the divorce I was very bitter towards my ex-wife, but I don’t think that ever translated for me into bitter towards relationships or bitter towards women or bitter towards the idea of long term monogamy. So I don’t think I was ever, like… although I did, a couple of times I did say, “Fuck that. I’m never doing that again.” 

Flora:    Do you think you’ll ever get married again? Why or why not?

Rod:    Yeah, I think it’s still part of my makeup that that’s what long term monogamous relationship means to me. And I don’t really know why, like I don’t know that the legal tie together is important, you know. And maybe it’s not the legal part. Maybe it’s symbolic of saying it. “We’re together forever.” I think I would like to get married when my son is grown, and the divorce decree, the custody aspects of the divorce decree don’t apply anymore, and I don’t have to worry about dragging him out of his school or away from his friends, or you know, I think when all of that is over, I would jump right back into living with and being married to the woman that I love.

Flora:    Do you think marriages should be lifelong commitment? Why or why not?

Rod:    Well, yeah, that’s what marriage is. Marriage is a promise to stay together for the rest of your lives no matter what, through thick and thin. That’s what marriage is.

Flora:    Do you think divorce is a good thing? Why or why not?

Rod:    Yes.

Flora:    Why?

Rod:    Of all the ways that I am angry or bitter towards my ex-wife, through all of that, I can remember that she gave me the greatest gift of my life which was setting me free from that relationship that was so hard. There was so much tension and friction between us. It was incompatibility caused us both a lot of pain and stress and anxiety. And she set me free from that. She set me free to find out who I am, to find out what other kinds of relationships I could find. She set me free to find happiness in a way that i was unlikely to ever find in a relationship with her. I was never going to prioritize myself and my health and my creative growth or any of that, none of that. All of the things I am doing now, I would not, probably, would never have been able to do inside the framework of that marriage, that relationship.

Flora:    So if you say marriage should be a lifelong commitment, but divorce is a good thing, isn’t that a contradiction?

Rod:    I don’t think so, because I was 20 when I proposed. I didn’t know shit about who I was. I didn’t know shit about who she was. There was no way that I could have known that she and I would relate in the way we did at the moment that I was 20 and proposed to her. I was 20 and said, “Those people don’t know us. Those people don’t know what kind of magic we got. We’re a fairy tale. This is special.” And then spent 20 years trying to hold on to that idea that it was true. Despite everything. Despite the pain. Despite the difficulties. Despite the resentment.
 

Episode 003 - The Changing Channel

I hope your Thanksgiving was as good as ours, if you celebrate that sort of thing. Ours was filled with travel and family, new places and new people and new food. It was a joy!

This time, we have my first time conducting an interview, and my first time recording an interview. The interview took place a couple of months ago now, and there was a key equipment malfunction, so the audio quality isn't great. I hope you'll stick with it anyway, because it's a great story told by a woman with a big heart and a lot of courage.

Here's the transcript:

For recreation as a family, we would go to the airport and watch the planes come in. You could go into the airport. You could go anywhere in the airport. There was no security that I remember, so we would sit right up at the window where the planes were coming and going, and the passengers were coming and going, and I would observe people saying hello to each other as they arrived, or goodbye to each other as they left, and I would cry because I felt it in my heart that these people are sad because they’re saying goodbye to each other, or these people are happy because they’re saying hello to each other, and I would respond to whatever that emotion was. And this was beyond my understanding or my mother’s understanding. I would be tearful or sad, and she didn’t understand. She would want to know why I was so moody, and her question always was, “What’s wrong?” and I never had an answer. I just thought I was strange, because I had no explanation for it, and that was why it was so frustrating to both my mother and me when she would say, “What’s the matter?” Because she had a desire to fix it, whatever it was. And I could not give her an answer except, “I don’t know!”

I now know, many many many years later, that I was an empath as a child, and I still am. I feel other people’s emotions. As an adult, in some conversation or class, where somebody was talking about empathy and being an empath when I was like, “Oh! I get it. That’s what was going on when I had no understanding of it.I wasn’t an unpleasant, moody kid. There was a reason for it.” And it was OK. But I didn’t identify it as coming from anywhere outside of myself, which I do now.

Once I learned what the deal was, then I could control it and not accept all those feelings. You can say, “If this emotion is not mine, please let it go.” But it was a great relief to find out there wasn’t really something horribly wrong with me. And my mother went to her grave never understanding any of that, or wanting to.

I didn’t really open any doors to spirituality with any understanding until a teaching job took me to Colorado as a young woman, and I met a couple there. They took me under their wing, and they were pretty far into some spiritual stuff, and they started talking to me. And this couple told me some things to read, some books to read. I had become very fond of them. The woman was a secretary at the elementary school where I had a new job, and she and her husband and 3 boys sort of took me as the young, single teacher in the school, took me under their wing and had me at their house and talked to me about stuff. This stuff. And the first time they brought up the whole reincarnation thing, I remember going home being so disappointed because I really liked these people, and now they’re crazy! But 24 hours later, I went back to them, and I said, “OK, now tell me that again. How does that work?” And from there on, it was kind of an ongoing thing. Thing to read about. Thing to think about. Thing to wonder about. So it started in my early adulthood, but life happens, and it had to go on the back burner.

I went to see a reader, an older woman who lived out in the country, and she did psychic readings. I went out to this house out in the country, and she was an elderly woman, and she took me into a room where there was nothing but little candles all around in little saucers and stuff all around the room, and the room was otherwise dark. But the thing that was interesting was, in the middle of her reading for me in which I was asking questions about, “Will I ever get married, and will I have children?” which was my whole goal in life at the time, one of those candles exploded and went “Pop!” And she laughed, and she said, “Oh!” and I said, “Oh what?” And she said, “Oh nothing. You will be doing this at some time.” And I was like, “Yeah right!” Because there was nothing yet for me to think anything like that. I was just learning something new, and I wasn’t applying it to myself.

Remember I got married and inherited 2 kids and was teaching full time, and then I was pregnant. So stuff was going on that wasn’t related, but there was always a thread in some way. Always in the back of my mind, always kind of thinking there’s more to life than what we see. But I knew years ahead of time that when the children were grown, and I was retired, I would claim some time, and I would learn this stuff. I would find out what was what. And that’s what happened.

I started out with creative writing classes, which helped me sort of examine myself, who I was, what kind of writer I might be. And then the other I did, this was at the community college, was take pottery classes. And I did it for, you know, as long as I needed to do it, I guess, which was probably a couple of years. I gave pots away, I was just so happy with them. It was opening my heart in some way to do that. And what I loved, I think, what was the draw for me, was the hands in the dirt. The hands in the clay. There was some kind of connection made with something really basic.

Then I went into a period of “OK, I know I’m ready for something. I don’t what it is, and I don’t know where it is.” I guess I’m praying, but I’m not really praying to anybody, I’m just sending out in my mind, “Help me find my tribe. Help me find people who have these same questions, have the same thing going on.” And I couldn’t find anybody.

Well, time goes by, and then eventually I did find a place where people who were on spiritual paths were meeting and talking. It was within 7 miles of my house where I’d been waiting for something! But when the time was right, it came to me, and I started attending with groups. And that’s where the growth really happens, I think, is with like-minded people. And I found those like-minded people. I learned so much. I learned to channel from the people there who channeled. My friends who were channels taught me to channel, and I’ve since taught people to channel.

You are in control. It doesn’t just happen to you. You allow it to happen to you. You are not taken over by anybody, or it’s not mysterious once you are able to do it. It’s not such a big deal. I mean, it’s just what you can do. Like maybe you can play the piano, but I can channel. Different channels describe it differently. I have a good friend who is not a conscious channel, and he describes it as, he goes somewhere else and sits on a bench somewhere while the channeling is going on for him. When he comes out of this state, he’s not aware of what happened. I am too much of a control freak to let go to that degree. Nothing ever happens that I don’t want to happen or allow to happen.

But my guides tease me. Their humor is wonderful. They make fun of me. They laugh at me, because I repeat the same patterns and things sometimes. I have a wonderful relationship with my spirit guides. It’s fun. And one evening with my friends, I said, “I have someone. I have someone who wants to come through.” And I had channeled Mother Mary before, and I knew what she felt like, what that energy felt like. But this energy was different, and the message I got was, “We are four. Can you guess what four we are?” Playing games with my friends. It turned out that I was channeling Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Quan Yin, and Mother Theresa. All those energies at once. And it was Mary Magdalene who turned out to be the main spokesman, although the other energies are always there when that comes through. But she said, “We are four. We are the Merry Band of Holy Mothers.” And so that’s what I channeled for a long time was the Merry Band of Holy Mothers. Which showed a sense of humor, which much appealed to me, because humor is my path in many instances. But Mary Magdalene is fun. I called her a modern woman because she’s firm and opinionated and smart, is what you get from her energy. So I loved that, and I still love that.

And then my most recent thing that’s happened was I learned that I can channel what is called a Language of Light. I was driving by myself in the car back from a meeting, and I began speaking words that I didn’t understand, and I’m driving, and I’m also gesturing. And then it’s gone, and I’m left there going, “Well what the hell was that?” And it sounds like language when I speak it, and various people try to identify it and say, “Oh, that sounds like Hawaiian.” or “Oh, that sounds like whatever other language.” It’s none of those.

I channel an archangel, Zadkiel, and he was the one who came through to explain to me what was happening and that it’s a privilege, and it’s useful, and I have the privilege of having it and the ability to use it. And he explained that the Language of Light is not a language as we would think of language in which there are words, and the words have meaning. The Language of Light is vibration, energy, the vibration of sound and the energy of sound. Zadkiel has channeled many times saying, “Don’t try to identify it as a language you have heard. Don’t get hung up on words. Just open your heart to the vibration and receive it as it is given.” And that’s the best and only explanation I really have except that it comes from the highest, most divine source, and it is for the good.

Zadkiel has been with me, and I had a vision of him before I really knew what was going on. I think being by water has always been special for me, and we were at the lake. But I meditated, and then I lay down on the bed, and a great angelic figure came and was beside me on the bed. I think that was my first introduction to Zadkiel, and then I recognized him later as our connection got bigger. But he’s always been with me.

I know you’ve read my memoirs, so I know you have read about a spirit called DeLight. And she was a delight. But her name was DeLight, which means “from the light,” which is where she was from! The light! And she was a spirit who had never incarnated on earth, and so she came to me for preparation to be incarnated. She came to me and to my group. It was like a group project to deal with DeLight, and she was with me for a period of several months. And I channeled her many, many, many times. And she became a beloved child of mine, almost. And there was a lot of humor around DeLight and channeling DeLight. And she made me do things that I would never do on my own. She liked to dress me and put things in my hair. And so I would go out with flowers in my hair. If I’d go to a group, they who knew DeLight now because I channeled her so many times, they’d go, “Ah, DeLight dressed you today!” You know, I’d have bright colors, and up until the time of DeLight, I was pretty conservative and age-aware of what somebody my age might need to look like, and after DeLight, I just never cared anymore. If it pleased me, I’d wear it. That’s why I’m wearing red Converse now.

So DeLight brought so much richness through humor. She was like a 4-year-old. She was very unruly and open, and I was to teach her how to behave. And she would approach somebody, now she’s in my body, so it’s me, it appears to be me, but she would approach somebody, and she was always kind and joyful, but she would say, “I like your necklace! Can I have it?” And they would go, “No, but you can look at it.” You know. And then she’d get raucous, and then she’d say, “Shh!” And she called me Mama. She would say, “Mama says, ‘Shh!’” and then she’d get really quiet, and then she’d just explode or jump up or do something crazy. And she was with us, and then we knew she was ready to go. And she did. I had several of those kinds of channelings that come and stay for awhile and do whatever it is they need to do, and then they leave. It’s sad when they leave, because they’ve become part of you, of your heart. I will never forget DeLight. She did a lot for me. She loosened me up.

In the beginning, when I first began being connected, I found feathers all the time. And one time, you know the house in Richardson, in the hallway down the middle of the house, I found a feather in the middle of that hallway, which had no explanation for being there. And I found an actual arrowhead in the front room one time. And these are just gifts of connection. These are just “hello!” or “I’m here.” They’re just, “ha ha!” And out here, I told you I’ve been meditating out under the trees, and I found a feather on the seat of my chair. And yes, it could have fallen, you know, from a tree, from a bird, but it was so specifically placed. And then another time I found one right by the back door, which is where I go in and out to go to my sacred space, and you know, they’re just a comfort. A “hi!”

Those of us who channel have been getting messages for at least the last 5 years I’ve been part of it, and probably longer than that, of receiving messages from Spirit that what we are in now in the world was coming. And we got message after message about chaos. There will be chaos, but chaos indicates change, and chaos is necessary. This is necessary because in the end, things will be entirely different and better. Just stand in the chaos, shine your light, don’t keep asking what do I need to know, to do, what can I do to make things better. Nothing. Just be there while the chaos goes around you. And you will have, you may not know it, but you will have a calming effect.

Many, many, many more people are openly doing what I’m doing.We’re here, we can help. And when you start, you think, “I should be doing something. I should be teaching groups. I should…” This was me. “I should be reaching out. I should be healing people. I should be…” And that message is always, “It isn’t necessary for you to do. It is necessary for you to be who you are.” 

So I would say there’s more and more and more awareness. But there’s another side to it, which is, we are not accepted by everybody as anything but nuts. Just nuts. And I’m hearing stories about holistic practitioners, doctors, practitioners like me, I guess, but I don’t have a platform that puts me way out there, which there are people who are big time spiritualists. But I’m hearing now that there are unexplained deaths among practicing holistic doctors who are preaching against big pharmaceuticals, against big medicine, against the food we eat, against the way we treat food, the way it’s grown, etc., etc., etc. There’s a lot controversy now, whereas our side of it is to simplify. And the messages I get for the last few years have been there’s going to be a big change in the food industry, for instance. We spend huge amounts of money shipping food far distances at great cost when the trend will be toward local production of healthy food. Has it happened? No. Is it happening? Yes. Now we’re seeing things about city gardens, individuals and communities that are making gardens and making the produce available to the residents, and so on. It’s very small, but it’s a start. And we’re bringing up consciousness about where your food comes from, what poisons have been put in it or on it, and so I don’t expect to see the changes that are coming in my lifetime, in this lifetime, but I can see that they are coming. And I think that in many levels, there is change now occurring in business. There’s more awareness at the top of businesses about the right way to do things and the wrong way to do things. The right way to lead and the wrong way to lead. You just hear small stories about change, and that’s what we’re hearing. And it’s all starting to happen, but it’s a long process. And it’s been going the wrong direction for years and years and years.

Whether I’ve done what I’m supposed to do, I don’t know. Will I have to come back and do it all over again? I don’t know.

For a long time, I was getting visions or flashes, before I was really connected, but I would get scenes in my head which I knew were in Ireland, and I knew it was me. It was like watching a movie, kind of, in which I was a young girl, probably 15. I knew it was me. I knew it was in Ireland, and I knew that I had been hired by a family to care for the children. And I knew that it did not have a good end. It was in the time of the Potato Famine, when people in Ireland were starving. I can’t give you a year because I haven’t studied it. But I know that’s what I was seeing. And we died. The children and I. I saw a scene of me lying in a white dress on the ground somewhere with dead children around me. We had died.

And that was my vision. It’s interesting now because in this lifetime, food has been a big part of my life, and getting enough food has been a big part of my life since early childhood. I’ve been chubby. And I thought that my feelings of hunger are different from other people’s feelings of hunger because through all my years, I could eat a good meal, and within half an hour feel hungry again. And I knew that didn’t make physical sense, but it was the feeling, and I would want to eat more. So it wasn’t until the last very few years that all of that has come into my consciousness of the connection between that life in Ireland, at least that one, and who knows how many others that had food issues in them. I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. But what I learned from having conversations about this and having somebody wiser than me help me see that we didn’t have enough food, so I have a drive to have enough food, have more than enough food. And I have a drive to take care of kids. Well. What happened in this lifetime? I chose to care for a whole bunch of other people’s children. And I was driven to take good care of them and to fix them if I could. And that was with foster care. So those themes can recur in other lifetimes. And it wasn’t really until I had that understanding, which as I say was in the most recent years, that I even came close to solving the obesity problem.

I’m learning who I really am, and liking who I really am, and loving who I really am as a spiritual person with some awareness and a wonderful connectedness that I’m so grateful for always. I have some difficult things to cope with in my life right now, but things just changed drastically, and it’s taken me awhile to swim back up to the top and look around and say, “You know what? It’s OK.” And that’s where I am now.

Part of the story is that we had to move suddenly. Things changed very suddenly, and we moved away from my wonderful, safe place and my wonderful connections and connected friends and people that I enjoyed so much because if you’re in a group of people, of like-minded people, it’s so wonderful because you don’t have to explain anything to them. They already know. You can just talk. And so your relationships get close. You find like-minded people that mean a lot to you. And we needed to leave that place, and that changed everything for me, because I lost all that support and joy.

And my instinctual thought was, “I need to recreate what I had, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m in a different place, but I’m going to find those like-minded people, I’m going to recreate what I had, and it’s going to be wonderful.” Well, that hasn’t happened, and I suffered a long time over, “Why isn’t it happening? Why can’t I do this? Why is nothing working? Why? Why? Why?” And it’s taken, you know, a year or more for me to finally listen enough to understand that that’s not what is meant to be. That was then, this is now, and I won’t recreate what I had, and I don’t need to, and I shouldn’t. And what I’m finding is, it’s on a very low-key, one-on-one connection, one person at a time. And I don’t know quite where it’s going from that, but I’m finding a lot more resources in myself and a lot more meaning in my connection with Spirit. Instead of being so connected with people who are connected with Spirit, now my connection is me and Spirit. I don’t have to stop being who I am. I don’t have to stop doing what I can do. But it will be different.

I never lost my spiritual connection, but I lost the abundance of it. I lost the total presence of it. It was always there, and I could always connect, but there were periods of time when I didn’t because I was distracted and coping. And not remembering that my best coping lies in my spiritual life. So I kind of got things backward, or screwed up somehow, because I have this great source that I sort of lost track of. And now I’m in that coming back to it and really forming it into something different. And that’s where I am now. I know that my passion is to teach people who are coming into this realm new, who are coming to spirituality as beginners, because I remember being a beginner, and I remember how it was when things opened and opened. And I found that I can teach people who are ready and wish to channel, and I just think that’s a wonderful thing, and I would like a way to use that. It just hasn’t shown itself yet. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t.

My husband had a stroke. And that changed everything, because he is now a disabled person, which changed my life. Probably not as deeply as it changed his life, but changed my life. We had a pretty traditional married relationship. We are now in our 50th year of marriage, and he was the husband, and I was the wife. I was not a non-participating wife, but we had roles, the things that he took care of, and the things that I took care of, which was kind of traditional. But I didn’t always fit in the traditional role because I hate housekeeping, and I don’t cook. But other than that… And I always had an equal say in things, but just in day-to-day things, he took care of this stuff, and I took care of that stuff. He took care of the cars. He took care of the maintenance. He took care of the manly stuff. I took care of the other stuff. I took care of the kids. I took care of the whatever needed taking care of. Because I’m a caretaker.

I want him to feel like in my eyes he’s still the man I married, but he knows. He knows that that’s not entirely true, but in the important things, it’s true. He didn’t lose his intellect. He lost his physical abilities. Having lost so much of his humanity. Not spiritually, but his human life is much restricted now, and his sense of self has changed. And I want to help him hang on to that. I don’t want to push him or say, “you need to do this” or “you need to do that” because he knows exactly what he’s doing for his own good. I think he’s stayed through this stroke and so on for my sake. I think if he had gone, it would’ve been fine with him, but he knew I wasn’t ready for that, and so he’s here doing the very best he can, and it’s lessons for both of us, real lessons on how to be in the world and where to find comfort, and where to find inspiration, and how to keep on keeping on under really difficult situations.

It’s interesting, because when we met, I had just learned about reincarnation, because I’d just gotten to Colorado, met that couple, they told me about it, and I got hooked into it. Well, then I met Rudy, and our courtship and marriage was very quick in time because there was recognition. And so we went from A to Z really fast, and met on February 4th and married on March 30th. I knew it was going fast, and I thought, “I have to tell him that I’m crazy. And he’s going to think I’m crazy, and that’ll be it. I have to tell him what I’m doing, what I’m into, what I’m searching for.” And so I did, trembling in my shoes, thinking this is the end of a good thing for me. And, you know how quiet he is, and he said, “Oh. Yeah. Well, I knew that. I just didn’t know I knew it.” End of discussion.

And here’s what I know in my heart, is that he has done it all before. He’s a very old soul. He came into this lifetime to see me through it. That is my belief. And I’ll stick to it. He’s just… And we’ve used this metaphor: I’m the balloon, up in the air, all around, whatever, uncontrolled sometimes, and he holds the string and keeps me grounded, and that’s been his mission, and he’s done it very well. He listens when I talk. He doesn’t talk much about it. But he already somewhere in him knows this stuff. He knows it backward and forward, and he doesn’t need to practice it or participate in it other than through me. 

And so, when this happened, all of a sudden things were different. I’m now the only driver. He now has to depend on me, which is a huge change for him. It’s difficult. I don’t know how to explain it other than that, but that’s what happened. And so, all of a sudden, I’m in a new place, in a new marriage, trying to figure things out. Who am I? What is my job? Am I doing it well enough? And I do worry about that. You know, should I do more? Should I do less? Blah blah blah. And we’re working it out, but it’s very hard to see someone you love and have loved for so long be in pain, have the things that used to come easily don’t even come any more. Can’t do stuff. It’s hard.

Of course it’s changed our relationship, because he can’t see himself now the way I still see him. And no matter how much I tell him how much I love him and, you know, the things that husbands and wives say to each other, I don’t think he receives it as much as I want to give it. He sees a truth. And the truth is that we cannot sleep together. We cannot even lie together, really. You know, he has to be in a certain position in bed, so there’s an intimacy that is lost, and I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about intimacy that is lost. And I mourn that. We kiss. We say how much we love each other. And again, his having to depend on me for sometimes the most personal things that he would certainly want to keep to himself, I have to be a part of sometimes. And that’s hard on him and me.

But here’s the thing: we have a very solid base. And we’re doing OK with it. You wish it could be different, more like it used to be, a more equal relationship. But I still depend on him to be holding my string. I still depend on him to be my rock. We talk more openly about how old we are and what’s coming, and not knowing when it’s coming, but knowing it’s coming. When you get to be 78 and 80 years old, you have to know. But I think his faith and my faith that we will go somewhere, you know, we won’t just end and that’s it. We’ll be OK. But on an earthly plane in the 3rd dimension, it’s hard to think about it and talk about it. There’s some squeamishness about it, and I think we need to start bringing that forward more, even in a humorous way, that it’s part of our life.

He said, “Just call somebody to pick me up. Tell ‘em I’ve kicked the bucket, the old man kicked the bucket” or something, you know, humorous. And I think that’s where we need to go more of than me worrying in the middle of the night, “Is he all right? Oh my God!” But you know, that’s not productive at all, and yet it’s still there for me, and I need to work on that. Because I’m torn. I don’t want him to continue to suffer for years and years and years, but I don’t want to be alone for years and years and years. And who’s to say he’s the first to go? If I’m the first to go, then that complicates things a lot. But we have wonderful children who have stepped up and stepped in, so we’re very, very blessed in that way.

In some ways, I’m still hypervigilant. I still get up in the middle of the night and go down and look at him, he’s in another room down the hall, and look until I get a sign that he is breathing. And he’s not aware of it as far as I know, that I do that. But my anxiety gets to the point where I just need to do that, and then I’ll be OK. And not all the time. We have really good days and really bad days, so it’s kind of difficult. But I think there’s a purpose for both of us. There are things that I need to learn. There are things that he is needing to learn. I can’t name them all, but I think we’re learning. I think we’re receiving lessons. His is his ability to allow me to care for him. And me, my ability to care for him, you know, in a very personal way sometimes.

Sometimes he says “thank you” to me, and humbly. And I don’t know how to feel about that because I know he’s grateful, but I wouldn’t do any… Of course I’m going to do this. I’m going to do what I can do to make his life bearable, and some days we have a really good time together, and other days it’s hard. But it’s not anything unusual or that everybody suffers through some time. I don’t feel like it’s punishment for anything or any of that.

My guilt, I know it doesn’t make sense to feel guilty, but on the morning… We don’t know exactly when he had the stroke, but we were in separate beds at that time, for various reasons like snoring and different time tables, and so his comfortable schedule puts him in bed late in the morning and up late at night. Mine is exactly the opposite. And so, I was up and ready to leave the house, almost out the door before he was able to get my attention that something was terribly wrong. And he just barely got my attention, or I would’ve been out of the house for 2 or 3 hours. My guilt, which doesn’t make sense, is, there’s an hour, or possibly two, time after a stroke when the outcome can be really, really good. And we missed that window totally. But obviously, this was how it was supposed to come down, and so here we are. I know that, but there’s still that, “Golly. Think of how much better things could’ve been if we had just been alert to something.” You know. “Well, if I’m intuitive, why didn’t I know?” is part of it. Which is, again, it doesn’t make sense. And I know it. And I don’t think he feels that way. He’s not really talked of that, anyway. But I imagine he would go, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” But that’s me, you know?

But I don’t wallow in it, or anything. It is what it is.

It’s still hard for me to ask, but I’m getting better and better, and I think that’s part of the lesson is to be vulnerable in that way. And so my asking my kids to do things for me is a really big deal. And you’ve all been totally wonderful about responding, but it’s still hard for me to say, because I’m the mom and you’re the kids. But to know we have kids who will respond no matter what is wonderful.

I ask for help. I ask for calm. I ask for whatever I need, and then I expect to receive it, and I do. I have trouble at night because I’m a worrier. And there are things to worry about in my life right now, and I haven’t conquered entirely and as much as I’d like with the “all is well.” I believe all is well, no matter what is happening. I believe it’s not random, and it’s intentional, and it’s necessary. But there’s an emotional part of me that has trouble calming down to “all is well” in the middle of the night. So sometimes I get up and work on it and try to connect and say, “Look, help me! This is no good!”

One of the energies that I channeled when we were living in Richardson came to me and identified herself as Rose. She said, “I am Rose!” And I said, “Well, who are you?” Well, Rose is my Joy Guide. Her whole thing was simply to make me express joy. And she does it, she did it, by coming through in a group and just raising cane. She would come through, and she would say, “Hey! It’s Rose! Say ‘Hello, Rose!’” And the group would say, “Hello, Rose!” And lots of them already knew her. And I have people that I hear from from Dallas who still refer to Rose and how much she meant to them because she would make them stand up, stamp their feet, clap their hands, yell, and, you know, dance and do, you know, crazy things that were not of my own nature. Until she showed up. I couldn’t be as silly as Rose. And when we moved to Austin, I lost Rose. I didn’t call for her, and she didn’t appear. But recently, as I am starting to get myself back into a good place, she’s showing up. She hasn’t come through in any raucous way, but I hear her, and she’s there. And there will be an occasion at some point where Rose appears, and that’s a good thing.

Now that might sound like a crazy story to somebody, but to me, it’s my truth. And I love it.
 

Episode 002 - Love and Divorce, Part 1

We're back for another round! Audio levels are better this week, the intro music is shorter, and Flora's in the house this time! She's so cute. I love her voice. My favorite moment of the episode is her saying, "Making babies!" Listen for it!

This episode was produced and edited by Flora Folgar, and mixed by me, Rod Haden. Be warned, I do say "s***" a few times, but if a man can't use profanity when talking about his divorce, then just what the hell is it for, anyway?

Here's the transcript, without our adorable banter in the intro and outro:

Flora: You’re my first interview. Yay! OK. This will focus on your marriage and divorce,share with us your age, how long you were married, how long are you divorced.

Rod: I am 45 years old; I was married for 20 years; and I’ve been divorced 2 years.

Flora: OK. Now let’s go back, let’s start from the beginning, all the way back to when you were a baby in your crib. That’s right, that’s how long this interview is going to be.

Rod: I wasn’t married as a baby in my crib.

Flora: But we must start from the beginning. No. Maybe we’ll start from the teenage years. All right, when you were a teen, what was your view on marriage? Did you think you were definitely going to get married and have children?

Rod: I did definitely think I was getting married and have children. I don’t know that I thought a whole lot about what it would be like, but it was kind of like my attitudes on college. I just… it didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t. I just that’s what people did.

Flora: Before getting married, what did you think a husband’s role was, and what was a wife’s role?

Rod: My attitudes probably came from the model of my parents. My dad went to work, and my mom stayed home. There were a couple times where she had a job, and I think they were times like when he had gotten laid off from his job, she got a job. But for the most part, she stayed home, took care of the house and kids, and he went to work and earned the money. They were foster parents when I was a kid, so my whole childhood, from the time I was 6 until when I moved out to go to college, they took in babies. There were 38 of them, I think, 38, and they were almost all of them under the age of 2, so my mom was very busy with babies. So their roles were, he worked, and she took care of the house and kids. So I thought that was pretty normal. I don’t know… I know when I became a stay-at-home dad, it appealed to me a lot to flip that traditional role, and I know that when I was in college, I wrote a paper about it. The book that I read, it was a study, and it was kind of outdated, because it talked about househusbands, which is not a word you ever hear anymore. It’s usually stay-at-home dad or primary parent or you know, something like that. But it was about househusbands and about their attitudes towards what they did and how it affected their understanding of their masculinity and all that kind of stuff, and I wrote a paper on it that I found and read years later and thought, “Wow, I was thinking about this stuff long before it actually happened.” But I think as a teenager, that’s just how it was for everybody that I knew that the dad worked and the mom didn’t. How many girlfriends did you have before you got married, and do you think it’s important to have a couple of relationships before choosing to marry someone? Why or why not?

Rod: I had one girlfriend before getting into a relationship with the woman who would eventually become my wife. And that was in high school and then she was away at college and I was still living at home with my parents, so it was a long distance relationship. It was never a very real relationship. There was no real intimacy or emotional closeness or anything like that, so really, the woman that I married was the first woman that I had a real relationship with real intimacy. She was the woman that I lost my virginity to, that I gave my virginity to. I didn’t lose it, I guess. I don’t know. What was the second part? Is it important? Yes. I think it would have been good for my understanding of what a relationship could be or should be if I’d had more experience, if I’d dated more people and learned how I relate to people differently. What happened because I didn’t.. I had never dated anybody was I was too focused on what would make her happy, and not focused enough on give and take, the interplay, what would make us happy, compromise and that kind of thing, because I was very much afraid of losing her, and I think that’s why proposed to her so young and got married so young. I proposed to her at 20, and we were married at 23.

Flora: So you feel like if you had prior relationships, you would not have handled it the same way, meaning focusing on how to make her happy?

Rod: Yeah, I think I would have seen red flags in our relationship more clearly if I had more experience. My model for a relationship was the marriage of my parents, and it was long term and committed. So I thought that’s what a relationship was, even before we were married, that it was all about you stick together first, and then work on the problems. It never occurred to me that the problems would be enough to end the relationship. Looking back on the kind of problems we had from very early on, they were the same problems that persisted through 20 years of marriage and should have been a reason for us not to get together in the first place. And people told us we were too young, and we didn’t listen. And I should have. But there’s not should’ve for that kind of thing, because that was the course of my life and those were the lessons I learned, and you know, of course I don’t regret the fact that that marriage produced my son, who’s the best thing that ever… the best thing that ever came out of my life is him.

Flora: Tell me about how you met your ex-wife and your first year together as boyfriend and girlfriend.

Rod: We met in college. She lived on the floor above me in the dorm, and we had French class together. And we pretty much hated each other from the beginning. There’s another red flag for you. She was the only person in French class that had not taken French in high school. so the professor took me aside and said that I should help her with her pronunciation. I was pretty pompous, I guess, so when I did things like that, she took it pretty badly. She thought I was pompous. I thought she was a bitch, and the professor thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Flora: Match made in heaven.

Rod: So he kind of pitted us against each other. And over the course of that year, we started to kind of become friends, like if I missed class I would ask her what the French homework was or whatever, and vice versa. She’d come down. And then that started us actually talking and realizing we kind of liked each other. And she’d come down and hang out in my dorm room with me and my roommate who was much more… actually, both of my roommates were much more ladies’ men than I was. They dated and played around and had lots of sex. And one of those roommates tried really hard to flirt with her, and she wasn’t all that interested, but she would come and hang out with us and drink and talk and everything. And that’s what we bonded over. Hanging out in the dorm room, drinking and talking. I think when I first saw her, I thought she was pretty intimidating, like I thought she had herself together and was strong and confident. I remember her walking down the hall, she was all dressed up. There was a kind of communal kitchen, and she was making dinner for her boyfriend, and I remember the sound of her heels walking down the hall and thinking, that woman is hot shit. What was the rest of it? The first…?

Flora: The first year as boyfriend and girlfriend. Just tell me how it was. What was it like? What were you feeling?

Rod: The first year, I guess that would’ve been from 19 to 20. Oh, our first kiss. That was, she worked 3 part-time jobs while going to school on financial aid and scholarships and stuff. She was and remains a very serious, driven woman. And so one of her jobs was she worked at a sandwich shop that was real near the dorms, and she worked until 2 in the morning, and there was one night when my roommate and I had thrown a party, and I invited her to come, and she said she was working, and I said, “Well, maybe you could come by afterwards for a margarita and a massage.” Which I guess was me flirting with her. I guess that was me hitting on her, but I didn’t really think of it at the time. I just thought I was kind of kidding, like I thought she’d be like, “No way.” But I found out later she thought that was pretty smooth, so she came over at 2 or 3 in the morning, and got her margarita and her massage, and we were sitting on the couch talking, and she said, “What would you do if I kissed you.” And I said, “I would kiss you back.” And so we did, and that was our first kiss, and that’s when we started dated and getting, you know. That was the beginning of that first year. It was kind of a stressful year, but it was a good year because it was the beginning of kind of the story of our marriage, or the way I understood our marriage. It was the beginning of “us against them.” By this time, we were out of the dorm, and my roommate and I had gotten an apartment together, and…

Flora: What do you mean by “us against them.”

Rod: Well this is the beginning of it. My roommate had some kind of, some kind of family issue. But he just kind of disappeared. He withdrew. He moved out of the apartment and went back to where his parents lived, and he and I had talked about subletting, that my ex-wife was going to move in with us. I mean, move into the apartment, and she would take over the lease. But the landlord wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t care, so we were going to pay his portion of the rent, and he said, “Nah, don’t worry about it, we’ll settle up when the lease is up.” Well, a couple months later, he started acting like he wanted to move back in, and it turned into a very adversarial thing. We put locks on the doors and all that. He would just walk in on us with no warning and once walked in while we were having sex, and you know, it turned into an adversarial thing. And it was her and me against him. And there were problems with her family. They didn’t like her living with me. She had been living with her grandmother. You know, there was a whole thing, but there was just… it felt kind of like the 2 of us against the world, like we were doing our own thing despite what other people did or thought, and it felt like we were a team. And I liked that a lot.

Flora: So talking about that, my next question is, did you feel loved during that first year? What did she do to make you feel loved, and what did you do to make her feel loved?

Rod: Well, I was 20 when I lost my virginity, so it was like FINALLY! And that made me feel loved. Sex was good. And besides that, there was again a kind of “us against them, us against the circumstances” kind of thing. Like I couldn’t afford to keep going to college after the first year, so I ended up working a job as a security guard, so we didn’t see each other all that much. But she would go to school, she would work her part-time jobs, and then she would stay up all night on the phone with me while I was a security guard sitting at the desk in an office building, and we’d talk on the phone all night long. I don’t know when she ever slept. I don’t know how she did it. But at the time it was great. That felt like love, that she committed that to me. And we would meet on the subway platforms. As she was coming in to go to school or work, and I was going back home after working, she was taking one train line, and I was taking the other, so we’d meet at the station where the 2 lines crossed and, you know, have a little moment, a little kiss or something before we went our separate ways, and that felt like love. And we were writing letters to each other, and that felt like love.

Flora: How old were you guys at that time?

Rod: 20 and 21 probably. She’s 4 months younger than I am, so we were about the same age through the whole thing, but we were probably 20 and 21 during that time.

Rod: There’s always been a lot of drama in her family, and one of the ways that I expressed love was to be there for that and be supportive and her family was from western Massachusetts and we were living in Boston, so we would take the bus out there every month or 2 we would be going out there to see her family, to have dinners with her family, to just participate in her family dynamic, which was from the beginning extremely different from mine and hard for me really to understand. She had a completely different history than I did. Her family related to each other very differently than I did. To me, from the outside, it looked very antagonistic, that they were not nice to each other and not nice to her, and she kind of dealt with all of that by being a caretaker. She took care of people. She took care of her mom. And I participated in that and helped and was supportive and listened and, you know, when she talked about it. And that was love.

Flora: All right. How did you know that she was the one you wanted to marry? How long did it take to figure that out?

Rod: We started dating in October and on Christmas a year later, so 14 months later, I proposed. I put an engagement ring in her Christmas stocking, and on Christmas Eve she said, “Well maybe we could open just one present each.” So that was the one that she opened.

Flora: So how did you know that she was the one you wanted to marry?

Rod: Because she was willing to have sex with me I guess. I don’t know. See it’s hard to recall at the time. It’s easy to be cynical now after everything else that happened. I felt like we had something special. There was… it seemed to me like there was a real fairy tale quality to the first year, and that’s where another… like more experience in dating would have been good for me because I didn’t understand that that was typical, like there’s a period of euphoria and everything for couples that get together that has nothing to do with compatibility or how you’re going to handle problems down the road. And it’s all the endorphins and everything because you’re all over each other, just that in love period, if you extrapolate too much out of it, it could be dangerous. But I was in that and thinking, “This is the best thing ever, and we have something special that other people don’t have.” And it was really that us against the world, like she was a very, and always has been and always will be, a very solid, very capable person, someone who makes plans, who has contingencies, you know. And I didn’t have any of all that. So I thought that we complemented each other very well. She had aspects that I didn’t have; I had aspects that she didn’t have; and that we fit together well.

Flora: So talking about that, because she is a planner, my next question: did you talk about finances and household duties and how many kids you were going to have before getting married?

Rod: I don’t think so. We moved in together pretty quickly, I think within 6 months of starting, we had moved in together. I don’t think we talked a whole lot about roles and division of labor. We certainly didn’t talk about money, because we didn’t have any.

Flora: Kids?

Rod: Yeah, we talked about kids from early on, and she was absolutely adamant that she didn’t want to have kids. She was never going to have kids. She said that from the beginning.

Flora: You?

Rod: And I didn’t believe her. And my mom picked up on that. She had expressed concern over the fact that she didn’t want kids, and I just said, “She’ll change her mind.”

Flora: Did you want children, and how many?

Rod: Yeah, I wanted kids. I wanted 2 kids. I wanted kids from the very beginning because that was how I’d grown up. My mom was the responsible one for all those foster kids, but I participated. You know, I changed diapers and gave bottles and played, and it felt like a real natural thing to me. Plus, that’s again, just like going to college and getting married, that’s just what you do. That’s how I saw a normal life progressing.

Flora: So the first 2 years as newlyweds, what was it like?

Rod: We had been together for 3 years by the time we got married, so some of that honeymoon stuff had worn off. There was from early on, probably even that first year that we were living together, signs that we were not deeply compatible. Like, what was important to her was not important to me at all. And it was order that was important to her. She did not like the feeling of being out of control, and what made her feel in control was control of her environment, and that meant a clean home. She liked to have a regular schedule. She wanted to have a clean home, clean bathrooms, clean kitchen, clean floors, you know. And it was from the very beginnings of our relationship straight through the end of it always my intention to be better about it. I was always going to get better. I was always down on myself for not being better at it, but I just couldn’t make that a priority. It wasn’t a priority to me. There was always something I’d rather be doing than cleaning. And so I did, and then I would beat myself up for it and be like, “Why can’t I be like this for her?” And that went on for 20 years. By the time we were married, all of that magic and us against the world, a lot of that had faded. She was very certain, she was determined to break the cycle of her family history. She was not going to be like her mother. She was going to change, and so I spent 20 years being supportive of her as she dealt with those family dynamics and put all my hope into, “It’s going to get better. It’s going to get better.” And you know, we had our ups and down, and sometimes it was better, and sometimes it wasn’t. But over the long term, all of those red flags from the beginning, and all of those reasons that we could have thought, “This is not going to work for us,” ultimately didn’t work for us.

She was very supportive of me, and I think we were both supportive of each other as far as what we were trying to accomplish at the time. She was moving forward in her career. She graduated the same year we got married and began the process of building and growing a career. By that point, I was back in school and working full time, and it was extremely stressful. I don’t know why we did all of that so fast, why we piled all that on there. I was working full time and going to school full time. She was working full time, going to school full time, getting ready for graduation, we were planning a wedding. And that was a cause for friction, too, planning the wedding. But for all the school stuff and the work stuff, we were a team going through really difficult stuff. And on top of it, all of the stress of relating to her family. It was a hard time. I was drinking Pepto Bismol straight from the bottle for a good solid year through that.

Flora: So the first 2 years of marriage seems very very challenging. Were there any things that you felt synced with and just flowed? But I guess supporting each other through all of that. And when it was challenging, you guys were still there for each other. Was that where you synced?

Rod: Yeah, it was like we were doing it together.

Flora: OK.

Rod: But there was still, you know, lots of fights about separation of duties, sharing of labor, and most of that was that I was not doing my share.

Flora: Was there anything… because you voiced what she was unhappy about. Were there anything that you were unhappy about?

Rod: I don’t know that I felt this way in the very beginning, maybe I did. I felt like the emotional weight of our relationship was all on my shoulders. The practical day-to-day weight was all on her shoulders.

Flora: So were you happy about the part that you were taking care of? The emotional side?

Rod: Yeah, until, you know, over time, and I’m sure that’s how it happened for her too, over time resentments grew about, “This is what I do, and it’s all my responsibility, and you don’t appreciate it.” Like I didn’t get credit for what I did, and I’m sure she felt the same thing. The household stuff, and the practical stuff, and the responsibility stuff was all on her shoulders, and I’m sure she felt like I didn’t appreciate that.

Flora: All right, let’s move on to sex.

Rod: OK.

Flora: Fun topic. How was sex, and you don’t have to go into details obviously, how was sex the first time, and how did it change as the marriage went on?

Rod: I think sex was… as a teenage boy, you think about it all the time, and you imagine what it’s like, and you want to have it. And for me, there wasn’t really any opportunity to have it, so it had built up into this big thing in my mind. So I had a lot of anxiety about it when we finally did have sex, as I remember, the first time was good, and it was fun, and I think we both enjoyed ourselves. I had a lot of anxiety about my body, or… I don’t know if I should talk about details, but there was something in particular about my body that was unusual that I was sure she would notice, and I had some nervousness about that. Like, what would she think when she saw it, and you know, would she think it was weird, and all that kind of stuff. And after the first time we had sex, I said, “So did you notice?” And she was like, “Notice what?” Like, it wasn’t on her mind at all even though it was on my mind the whole time. She was super concerned about pregnancy. She was very concerned about taking steps to prevent pregnancy, and all of that stuff kind of took away some of the spontaneity of sex. I mean, she had redundant preventive measures in place. Birth control pills and condoms and spermicide, and the condoms I think even had spermicidal lubricant. I mean, it was a lot of stuff,but I do remember, the first year, we had a lot of sex, and we would have, you know, weekends where we would just stay in bed for 24 hours straight and have fun.

Flora: And how did it change as the marriage went on? Did it become less frequent? Quality-wise, how did it change? Quantity-wise, how did it change?

Rod: It became routine. It became something that I wanted more than she did. And some of that, you know… There’s aspects of this story that are not mine to tell. It’s stuff about her that’s not my story to tell, but there were periods in our marriage where we were not having sex, and that was a point of resentment for me.

Flora: How long was the period when you went without sex during this time that you’re talking about?

Rod: There’s a couple different times, maybe 2 or 3 times in our marriage where we were not having sex at all, and I want to say like that first time, it was probably, I don’t know, probably a good solid year. And maybe we did now and then during… but pretty much no sex for a year, and there was a later period in our marriage where maybe, you know, 6 months or whatever. I don’t really remember exactly the details, but yeah, that was… part of the deal was, “we just can’t right now,” and I had to accept that, and it was difficult and put strain on our marriage.

Flora: During the marriage did either one of you think of being with anyone else while you were still married?

Rod: I don’t think so as far as cheating goes. There was a period in the mid to late ‘90s when the internet was starting to become a thing, and we were participating in a chat room. It was one of those things where I came home from work, and she was like, “Oh, you gotta check this out! I found this thing!” And she’d been playing around in it that evening, and it was a chat room. And it was called “The Tunnel of Love,” and it was a place, you know, where most of the people were there were going to have cybersex, but she and I kind of discovered a circle of friends there, regulars there that weren’t so much into cybersex as they were just hanging out in this virtual space and goofing on everybody else and laughing and joking and talking with each other and everything. And it was fun. But there was one guy in there that she had sort of an ongoing cybersex relationship with, and I think she felt it more as an infidelity than I did, because I remember she, you know, made a big deal of telling me about it afterwards and, like, she would never let that happen again and all this stuff, and I kind of had mixed feelings about it because I thought, well, it’s kind of what people do there. You know, I’d fooled… I’d goofed around with cybersex, but it’s… cybersex is so dumb. It’s just so dumb. It’s, I don’t know. Maybe if you have the right partner it can be fun, but it’s just so goofy. So whenever I did it, it was just kind of silly and funny, but I think she kind of got serious with one guy, and she was emailing with him and had developed kind of a friendship with him. And I guess the fact that it was sort of behind my back, sort of hidden, made her feel like it was cheating. And she swore that would never happen again, and she cut it off and everything. And I never really thought of it as cheating, but I think she did. Other than that, I don’t think there was any… I certainly never… never would have. It was important to me not to cheat and not to be seen as possible that I could have cheated. And I don’t think I ever had any situation after that chat room thing where I thought she might have or could have or whatever. I think we were both committed to each other and not cheating.

Flora: All right. So let’s move on from sex to making babies. So you mentioned that she did not want any children. How did you convince her?

Rod: I don’t know that I convinced her. I think I just waited long enough until she started thinking about it. We were 35, and I think, you know, it was probably largely just that biological, and maybe it’s not biological, maybe it’s psychological. I don’t know. But you know, women talk about the ticking clock, and the biological clock, and all that. At some point, she and I had been through ups and downs in our marriage. We had just really gotten through, and were really solid after a bad patch where she had left me, and we ended up getting into couples therapy, and we worked really hard over the next couple of years in bringing our marriage back from the brink. And I remember the lessons from that were, just be nice to each other. You know, when we had disagreements and we fought, we would be really nasty to each other, and the lessons out of couples therapy was, you know, all the I statement stuff that is pretty common, but also just be nice. And that helped a lot.

Flora: You said she left you. How long did she leave you for?

Rod: A couple of days. She didn’t stay gone very long. She came back because she was worried about me, and if I was eating, and you know, stuff like that. But…

Flora: So then how did the conversation begin that you guys were ready for a child?

Rod: Well, we got through the bad period, and went… you know, worked really hard on our marriage and got to the point where she said, “I think we’re ready. I think we’re financially in a good position to do it. I think our relationship is solid. We are ready. If we’re going to have kids, now’s the time.” So we went on vacation in Mexico, and when we came back, we started trying. And it took 4 months, I think, for her to get pregnant.

Flora: How did you guys feel when you got the news that she’s pregnant?

Rod: Thrilled. I was thrilled. I mean, it’s scary. Like, you know, the thought of being responsible for somebody else for a change. But for me it felt like I’d been waiting for it my whole life. Like, it seemed like that was my destiny, and… The time that we started dating to the time we had a kid was like 15 years, which is a long time. So it was, for me, it felt like, “Finally!”

Flora: So how did having your son change your marriage? Tell me about the good stuff, the bad stuff, after becoming a parent.

Rod: Well, again, it was back to kind of, her and me against the world in some ways. The pregnancy was difficult for her. She’s small, and I’m large, and so, from the beginning, the Ob/Gyn was like, “I hope you’ve considered the fact that this is going to be a big baby.” She used to joke, a long time ago, she would tell people she married me to get tall genes in the family, because she’s short, and everybody in her family is short, and I’m tall. But then when she was pregnant, she said, “This better not be a big baby.” And it was a big baby, and she had different health problems through the pregnancy that made it hard for her. The first 5 years of my son’s life, we did really well. Like, there was the difficulty in the beginning, when he was an infant, and especially a newborn. That’s a really hard time for any parents, and it puts stress on any marriage.

Rod: It took a lot of work, and she took all of that very personally, very emotionally. It was, you know… she felt like a failure as a woman because one, she had to have a C-section because he was a big baby, and he was transverse breech, and it was part of the experience as a woman that she didn’t get to have. And then the breastfeeding was very difficult, so she felt like that was a failure as a woman, you know. So she took all of that very personally. She had a lot of emotional stress over it. But after that, when we really got into a rhythm where I was the stay-at-home dad… I think I was good at it. I think I was really good at it. And I think I did well with him, and it got into a rhythm, and it was us being a team. She would go to work, and I would take care of him. I was working part-time, one as a copywriter, I would do that from home, so I had found ways to supplement the income. I was also working, I had a part-time job that I did on the weekends, so you know, she had her time with him, got to do all her mom stuff on the weekends. It was very much a team operation, I think. And I think we both felt that way about it, that we were in it together again and doing really well at it. Doing good.

Flora: So when did you think things started falling apart in your marriage?

Rod: Things fell apart when he got into school. I mean, during that period, we still had problems with I wasn’t doing enough, like I wasn’t doing enough of the housework. I spent a lot of the time during the week going places and doing stuff with him. He and I went all over the place. We did play dates with a dads group, and you know, when he was napping, I was working on the copywriting stuff, and the housework just still, after all those years, was not that big a priority for me. You know, I guess maybe that was a resentment for her that I was home and not doing the home stuff, so she felt like she had to do it when she got home. I wouldn’t always have dinner waiting for her when she got home, so she felt like sometimes she’d have to come home from work and then cook dinner. And from my perspective of, you know, I was working too. I was taking care of the kid. And I was doing the copywriting, so it was like, yeah, but I worked all day too, and now I gotta make dinner. You know. So there was friction and resentment there. But where it really went bad was when my son got into kindergarten, which freed up a lot of time for me. And she and I agreed that I would continue to be stay-at-home even though he was in school, and it would be a great opportunity for me to pursue creative pursuits, to do more writing, creative writing, and that I would be able to take care of the house better while he was in school. And I… none of that happened. I went into a depression that lasted for a couple of years until the marriage ended because I didn’t have a clear idea of where my life was going. For some reason, I never did commit to doing the writing. I had no idea how I was going to enter the workforce, because I’d been out of it for 7 years. I didn’t know how I would get back into it. I didn’t know how I would represent those parenting years on a résumé, my job before that, my full-time job was not so much a career as a job, so I didn’t know that it would make me more marketable in the workplace, so I was afraid of the changes that were coming, and I reacted to that fear by just going into a depression and not doing anything about it. And I would take him to school and come back and go back to bed. I watched a lot of Netflix, and I just went into… it was a depression. I went into just, like, hibernation. Just waiting to see what the next thing would be. And that lasted for a couple of years until she finally I think got sick of it and said she wanted a divorce.

Flora: How did you guys handle all these challenges? I mean, I know you talked about going to marital therapy, individual therapy. How else did you deal with these challenges? Did you try to change yourself? What did you do?

Rod: I went through a lot of beating myself up over the fact that I couldn’t be better for her. Why couldn’t I be better for her? And it wasn’t healthy for me, you know, resenting myself, resenting her for having expectations of me that I couldn’t live up to, resenting myself for not living up to them. Resenting her for not valuing the contributions that I did make. And I was drinking. A lot. I was numbing myself, really, to the pain of a marriage that was just not working. I wasn’t happy. I don’t know if the alcohol caused depression, or if the depression led me to drink, or they just went well together, but yeah, I was drinking a lot, and that helped drag the marriage on even longer just being numb. We, right before the end, when she said she wanted a divorce, right before that, we talked about getting back into couples therapy, because we remembered that, you know, years before when we’d done it, it had helped a lot, and it had helped us get back to being more partners, and just being kind to each other again. So we talked about doing it, and instead of that session being positive and helpful, I surprised myself and her by using it as an opportunity to unload all of my resentments. There is a lot that had gone on over those 20 years that was about her family, and I didn’t feel like everything that I had done to support her was very valued by her, and I went into that couples therapy session and said all of that. Like we sat down, and the therapist said, “So what’s going on?” And I looked at her, and she didn’t say anything, and the therapist didn’t say anything, so I started talking, and it was 15 straight minutes of me just unloading. She cried the whole time, and the therapist told me that I was really mean. And it didn’t go well, and we left it… I was pretty angry at the therapist for not… she didn’t manage the situation. She didn’t take any leadership in guiding the discussion. She just sat there and listened to me unload and then gave me shit about what I said. And then when we left, my ex-wife said that she really liked her, and she thought she might do one-on-one therapy with her, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not a good sign. She wants to do one-on-one therapy with this woman who clearly hates me and thinks everything’s my fault.” Which I’m sure wasn’t the case. But we never went back as a couple to that therapist or any other, and within a month or 2 of that appointment, my ex-wife told me she wanted a divorce.

Flora: How long since she told you she wanted a divorce, how long did you work on your marriage after that?

Rod: I guess I talked her into trying longer. I told her that I could change. I could change. We can do this. Give me another chance. And from her saying she wanted a divorce to her saying, “Yeah, it’s not gonna happen” was 3 months, I think. I think it was January to April. And I think by April it was clear that the marriage was not salvageable. It was not going to come back from the brink. It was really over. And from that point it was working the details of how we were going to split up. What happened in April that made me stop trying to fix it was her finally being straight up direct and honest, telling me that even though she’d said, yeah, we can try and fix it, she didn’t want to. She had a lot of anger towards me, and it was then that she finally really showed me how much she had and unleashed it on me, and that was an eye opener of, “Oh! She hates my guts! This is not going to work.” And I had a lot of resentment because I thought for those 3 months, she had lied to me. I thought we were working. I thought we were trying to fix it. And I found out that she was just riding it out until came to the same conclusion that it wasn’t going to work. And she got tired of waiting and unloaded on me.

Flora: Why did you want the marriage to work?

Rod: Because we’d been doing it for 20 years. It was what I knew. It was a promise that I made. She… that was another reason that I thought, “Oh. Yeah.” in April, that this is not going to work, was there was something I said about, “But we promised each other,” and she said, “Not that marriage vow shit again.” And I was like, “Oh. We are not on the same page as far as this whole, ‘I promise to stay together for the rest of our lives and you know, work through the problems, whatever they are.’” I believed that. I believed the, “We promised to stay together and work through it, whatever it is, always and forever until we’re dead.” I made that promise, and I believed it. And I thought she did. Until April. And then it was clear that was not the case.

Flora: How do you let go of the past and heal not only a broken heart but a broken dream of spending forever with someone? How do you let all that go?

Rod: It was not easy. I did a lot of angry walking. I walked at night. After we put my son to bed, we would fight. And I think we did a pretty good job of keeping it away from him. Like I don’t think he knew how bad it was, how much we hated each other at that point. But after he went to bed, we would unload on each other, and it was bad. And so to avoid that, I would just leave, and I would go walk and listen to music. Angry, fast music and angry, fast walking. And I would do it every night, for a couple of hours, hoping that she would be in bed asleep when I got home. And a lot of times she wasn’t, and we would start fighting again. Or she would start, you know, texting me or calling me while I was out walking to start fights again, and it was really, really bad. But that kind of, at least for me, that intensity of anger and sadness and resentment and regret, and it just, all of that, the intensity of it isn’t sustainable, and at some point, you just have to start to let it go and start looking forward. And I think when those questions began to be answered for me that had sent me into a depression in the first place, those questions of, “Is this going to work out? How is it going to work out? Am I going to be able to find a job? How am I going to manage the next phase of my life?” At the time it was about not being the stay-at-home dad anymore when he went to school, but at the point of the end of the marriage, it was, “what’s the next step after the marriage?” And when, you know, I spent a couple of months of sending résumés out and not getting anything and worrying about how am I going to move out of this house where there’s nothing but bad feeling? How am I going to do that? And when I got a couple of job offers and really started the process of finding an apartment and making the arrangements and all of that, and then had the job and had the apartment and realized, “This is my life, and it’s MY life, and I’m in charge of it.” And, like, having a space of my own. I went from living with my parents to living in a dorm to living in an apartment to living with her. I had never in my life lived alone. And having an apartment where there was nobody to give a shit if I didn’t wash the… if I didn’t clean the bathroom. There was nobody who would be like, “That doesn’t go there. It goes here.” It was all mine. It was my space. I was in charge of it, and I could do anything I wanted with it. She and I split custody, so it was half and half. It was every other week. So one week I’d be the dad, and one week I’d be the bachelor, and having that freedom and having that agency over my life that I’d never had before was what really started me thinking, “This could be a really good thing for me. This could be not the end of my life, but the beginning of my life.”

Flora: What did you learn about yourself through the marriage and divorce?

Rod: I learned that I had a pretty deep capacity for putting myself second. The marriage was all about her and her family, and I spent 20 years of that marriage just putting myself second. What she needed, what she wanted was most important, and it came first. I really deeply internalized it and thought of myself as a bad person because I couldn’t live up to those expectations. You know, I beat myself up about it and had really serious self-esteem issues over it. So I guess what I learned through the divorce was my life could be about me and what I wanted. And it was possible to find relationships that fit better. She and I were not compatible and never had been, and 20 years of being with someone with whom I wasn’t compatible put a lot of stress not just on our relationship but on me personally. And one, discovering that I could continue to live, that I could be in charge of my life, and also that I could find relationships that fit better and didn’t cause so much pain, that weren’t so hard. That was huge.

Flora: Were you afraid to fall in love again? Did you think you would find someone to love again?

Rod: I totally believed the things that I heard about relationships after divorce, that it’s very much like you shouldn’t date for a year after getting into AA. And I believed all that, and that was totally my intention was, “I am not doing that again.” Because I didn’t have a positive view of long term monogamous relationships at that point. You know, I was completely colored by the last, you know, the last couple years of the marriage and the time of ending the marriage and all of that anger and resentment. I thought, “Marriage is the worst thing! Why would anybody do that to themselves?”

Flora: Did you think anyone would love you again? Did you think you would love anyone again?

Rod: I guess, like, in an abstract, some day kind of way, I thought maybe. But in the right now, I didn’t want to try. I didn’t think… I had a very negative view of myself, and I was still… I was at the beginning of the process of changing that view of myself. And so, at that moment, no, I thought, there was nothing there to love. There was nothing in me to love. I was a mess. I’d screwed up the most important thing to me. I was in the middle of a lot of fear about… there was hope about my life, like, you know, having the new opportunity, the new space, the new everything, but I was also living in terror about how the actual divorce would go, how the custody arrangements would go. I thought, and I think unreasonably now, having gone through it and having talked to a lawyer through all of that and everything, unreasonably I was afraid that because I was a man, I would have very little power or leverage in the divorce. I’d have very little right to him, and if she chose to, she could easily get full custody of him. And I was very much afraid that she would, because she was so angry at me through that period of ending the marriage that I thought she would take my son away from me. So I was terrified, thought if I continued to build my life back up again maybe someday there would be something there, but I didn’t think I’d be in a relationship, and I didn’t think anybody would love me.

Flora: So what happened?

Rod: I had a friend who…