When Mother’s ‘friend’ is actually her ex-husband, be careful
Explaining it to kids is tricky, but necessary
Most parents have a skeleton or two in the closet. Mine just happens be an ex-husband. Long before I met my current one, Karl, there was Matt, a funny and bighearted guy from Ossining, New York. We were together for five years, most of them spent in couples counseling, yet miraculously parted as friends. More than a decade later, Matt and I still get together for lunch or to poke around at estate sales. When my mother died, Matt was one of the first people I called.
Karl knows all about our friendship and has even met Matt, a profoundly uncomfortable moment for everyone involved. My 6-year-old son has met Matt, too. To Leo, he’s just “Mama’s friend Matt,” not someone with whom I once shared a home and bank account. Leo’s just processing the death of our beloved cat Raymond; the concept of my marriage and divorce to a man other than his father seems, in comparison, as complicated as quantum mechanics.
In her book, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essayist Sloane Crosley writes about finding, on the eve of her 16th birthday, an engagement ring at the bottom of her mother’s jewelry box. Crosley remembers her mother cavalierly saying, Oh, that’s from Richard – her first husband. “I wondered what else she might not be telling me,” Crosley pondered. “Was my mother a spy? A fly-by-night dominatrix?”
In the parade of parental transgressions, this is one of omission. It’s not that I’ve been trying to hide evidence of a previous life, it’s simply that the subject has never come up. Unlike the inevitable “where do babies come from?” it’s doubtful that Leo will one day question Matt’s relationship to me – and to us.
Like a vacuum cleaner crammed in the back of a closet, Matt has been taking up valuable space, which has weighed me down with each passing year. Yet every time I saw a moment to come clean – when, for example, Leo asked me about the ring with which Karl proposed – I always choked. When, I wondered, is the right moment to tell Leo that I once was Mrs. Someone Else? And, while we’re at it, how, exactly, do I begin to explain the changing winds that some marriages weather – or don’t – to a child of 6?
“Well don’t ask me, because we flubbed that one up,” says a longtime friend. She waited until their two kids were in junior high school to break the news that their father had been married previously. “You waited my whole life to tell me?” cried their daughter when my friend dropped the D-bomb.
According to a report from the Pew Research center, 40 percent of marriages involve one spouse who’s been married before. A starter marriage, my mother called it, rebranding my deeply unhappy years with Matt as a practice run; a quick lap around the nuptial track. Yet, even with so many of us remarrying, there doesn’t seem to be a tidy script for how and when to tell Leo my story. Even if there is a happy ending.
“I don’t see this as a onetime conversation,” says Maribeth Hilliard Hager. A Washington-based child, adolescent, and adult psychotherapist, Hager suggests giving Leo the “right developmental dose” and letting the story evolve as he continues to mature. “At 6, kids are very fairytale-ish,” she says, explaining that they tend to want the “how did you two meet” origins stories. “Maybe you can say something like, ‘Before Daddy, I was married. And you’ve met him and Daddy knows him, too.’”
On paper, Hager’s advice sounds just fine. But in practice, I’m not so sure this is the way I want things to go down, which is what I tell her. It feels like an origins ambush. “Okay,” she tries again. “I picture this conversation happening in a car, maybe on the way to a wedding.” She might have a point about weddings offering opportunity for deep discussions. The last time we were all on the way to one, it was of our dear friends Sean and Christopher. Of course, that elicited a very different line of conversation.
What are the dangers, I wonder, of never telling Leo, of letting him continue to think of Matt as just my friend? I’m positive Karl, who isn’t crazy about my continuing relationship with Matt, would be just fine if I said nothing. My father, too, wondered why Leo needed to know the whole truth. So did some of my friends. “’Mom’s friend Matt’ sounds fine to me,” said one.
Max Wachtel, a forensics psychologist in Aurora, Colorado, and author of “The One Rule for Boys: How Empathy and Emotional Understanding Will Improve Just About Everything for Your Son,” disagrees. “If I were you, I’d tell Leo about your previous marriage,” he emails. “It will then just be another in a long list of things he knows about you (which is good).”
I’ve known Wachtel for more than a decade, ever since he agreed to analyze the random doodles of people close to me for an article I was writing. (He was more than slightly concerned about Karl’s sharp and angular robots.) The fact that Wachtel understands psychopaths as well as boys (he’s one of about five civilians who’s worked inside the Federal Supermax Prison, interviewing, for example, gang members before trial) made him a good barometer for the perils of nondisclosure.
“If Leo finds out the truth about Matt later, and he will, his reaction could range anywhere from ‘Hmm, I don’t care’ to ‘How could you betray me? Get out of my life, I hate you.’” Wachtel predicts. If I tell him now, however, “He’ll be like, ‘Okay. Where’s my toy?’”
This sure does sound like something Leo would say. These days, his biggest concerns are saving enough money to build a factory he has dubbed Legend – which, depending on the day you ask him, will produce radios, speakers, or possibly oscillating fans – and how old he has to be before Karl and I will allow him to plug stuff in.
And, putting Leo’s reaction aside, I want to keep my story intact. By not telling Leo about Matt, it’s like denying a significant piece of my past. However sad and traumatic, it’s part of who I am; it’s something, that, one of these days, will be integrated into Leo’s story as well.
“There’s this idea that we don’t talk about it because we can’t talk about it,” Hager says. “There is a lot of value in modeling for Leo that we can have relationships with important people and that those relationships can change but those people can still be part of our lives.”
In the end, Hager tells me, it’s really a tale about another marriage. “For kids, it’s all about them,” she says. “’How does this affect me? Are you and daddy okay? Is our family still intact?’” After 12 overwhelmingly happy years together, the answers are obvious, even to a six-year-old.