Caterpillar Goo

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season! I certainly am. Time is flying and my days are packed. This week we have a conversation with my father, Rudy Haden, a man who has fascinated me ever since I was a wee lad. He's that special kind of quiet that invites others to project onto him whatever they want him to be. Getting him to open up about his past, present, and future, and what he thinks and feels about all 3 was a very special treat for me. I've known the man for 45 years and heard some stories when we talked that I have never heard before. He is my role model for what it means to be a man, a father, and husband, and though we are very different from each other, I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. Thanks, Dad!

Transcript:

I don’t move around very good. I’m in pain quite a bit. It comes and goes. It comes and goes. Some days it’s worse; some days it’s not. It doesn’t seem to depend on how much exercise I get. Some days it’s painful to exercise; sometimes it’s not.

I sit and try to meditate, and it does nothing for me, but when I’m really quiet, or when I’m just totally listening to music, it’s like somebody plants knowledge into my head. I know and I understand things, which I had no idea before. So my meditation is basically checking out and listening to music.

Early on in our marriage, I was in an apprenticeship program, tool and die maker. I had to really concentrate at work. And it’s not easy for me to relate to other people, but I really worked on the journeymen. I would constantly hang around them, and ask them questions, and ask them the best way to do stuff, and I got in as I guess a favorite pupil with about 3 or 4 of them.

So that when I’d come home, I was exhausted, and I would lay down on the floor and play a Beethoven record or something with earphones on, and Robbie would get so pissed off at me because she was making dinner and taking care of the kids, and I was checked out. She didn’t understand that that’s the way I did my meditation.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of churches. My parents were married in a… I can’t think of the religion right now. Reverend Grace. I remember the name of the preacher that married them, and that was there. The guy wore a collar, but he wasn’t a Catholic. But he was deaf. He ministered to the deaf people. He was deaf himself.

He was in the deaf community, and in the basement of his church is where they held all the deaf fraternity meetings.It was based on the Masons. Only it was all deaf men. It was called the Frat. That was what my mom and dad called it. The Frat. We’re going to the Frat. When they went to Frat, the women all sat outside in the waiting room. The kids played on the floor. And when the big meeting was over, they’d throw the doors open, and everybody would go in and have a big social event.

And then my mother’s side of the family was deep into the Reform Christian Church, and I went to a lot of Bible schools and Sunday schools and stuff in that until I was about 3rd or 4th grade. And then I felt like I needed to get hooked up with different churches, so I went to a Methodist church, I went to a holy roller church with a friend, and I went to a couple of Catholic services. As a teen. None of that stuff stuck with me. 

Just because there was so much religion on my mother’s side of the family, I don’t know, I just felt like I was supposed to do it. In order to be accepted by them, I should have a church, but I never could find one. And I came away from it having no respect for organized religion because the main thing they wanted, no matter what it was, they wanted money up front. Seemed like everything was driven by the collection plate. If you were a big donor, you got a lot of attention. If you weren’t, you didn’t get much. And that’s what really turned me off. 

My dad was born on the farm in Kansas, and he was sent to the Kansas State Home for the Deaf and Blind. My dad was born deaf, they think because in the early days when they had the traveling doctors going around the frontier and the farms and stuff, my grandmother evidently had a lot of morning sickness, and the doctor prescribed quinine. Well, later on they found that quinine did stuff to the unborn child. 

My mom came over on the boat from Holland witH her mother. And my mother, we don’t know if she was born that way, or it was some kind of sickness or something that she got in Holland or on the boat or what, but ever since she was a baby, she was deaf. Then my mother was, because she was deaf mute, she was sent off to the school in Colorado Springs.

The strange thing is that the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind insisted that deaf people learn to lip read and speak, and so my mother was pretty good at lip reading and speaking. And they were discouraged from using sign language, so if you compare the deaf people now that use sign language to the old people that use sign language, now it’s all really broad and all over the place, and the older people, their signs are all close in and secretive about it, where now they’re just flamboyant about it. Their signs are all over the place. 

And my dad, the Kansas School for the Deaf and Blind weren’t that way. They were teaching them to do stuff and sign language and be able to be self-sufficient. 

See, in my dad’s side of the family, all the people learned sign language, the hearing and the non-hearing. So I had no idea whether they were hearing, any memory of whether they were hearing or not. On my mom’s side of the family, I had one uncle that learned the deaf sign language, learned the deaf alphabet, and he could do that. He was the only one that made any effort to sign to my mother. All her other brothers and sisters didn’t because she had been sent to school, and they were told that she was to learn to lip read, and so they would talk to her. But the thing of it is, it’s really easy to ignore somebody like that, because all you do is turn away. Turn around, they can’t see your signs. They can’t read your lips. So, whenever there was an argument or something, it was easy just to walk away from that.

My dad’s family had a big get-together once every summer. They came from all over the place. They were Kansas, Nebraska, western Colorado, and they’d have these big, long picnics on the weekend, and there were aunts and uncles and cousins. I didn’t even know all the cousins I had. But I never just seemed to fit in.

He worked in a factory. He started out in a printing shop, a paper cutter. Cutting stuff for the print shop. Then ended up in Shwayder Bros./Samsonite, cutting stuff for the suitcases and plastic tops of card tables and chairs. And my mom worked there on the assembly line putting stuff together. And my Uncle Jim and Aunt Julia also worked in the same factory. Shwayder Bros. hired a lot of, I guess what they called the handicapped people. 

Clarence, he was a rancher. He raised horses, and at one time he had a riding stable up on Lookout Mountain just above Denver. And they had 2 boys, and the youngest one, John, he had a pinto pony named Ruben. And they taught me how to ride. And I could put the bridle on Ruben, lead him over to the fence, they had a rail fence, and I’d climb up the rail fence and get on him. And I was, what, 5 years old.

John would go off hunting. He’d go out, he had a rifle, and he’d go out shooting magpies. I had no idea what magpies were. I was determined I was going to follow him one day and see where he was going, and I’d see these cow patties in various places, you know. So I thought cow patties were magpies, and cousin John shot them. I couldn’t have been 4 or 5 years old. And then he, one time he put his rifle in, we had a, there was a kind of a mud room entrance to the farmhouse, and he left his rifle leaned up against the thing, and he had a thing in the chamber, and I went up there and was messing with it, and I inadvertently pulled the trigger. And it shot a hole in the roof. My Uncle Clarence was really pissed off at John for doing that.

My bed was in this big room where the radio was. There was no TV in those days. It was during the war. World War II. I remember there was a big old tree in the backyard. When I wanted to get away, I’d just climb up in that tree and sit up there all by myself. Could see the whole neighborhood. 

I don’t remember when I realized that there was a hearing world and a deaf world. You never knew. I mean, you could talk to some people, and you had to sign to some people, and some people were talking and signing, and you know, there was no distinguishment. And a lot of the deaf people could read lips. I don’t know when I realized that. I suppose it happened to me some time in high school when, you know how high school gets. How clannish and cliquish it is, and some kids are favored by the teachers, and some aren’t. I realized I was different. During high school, I was really aware of it because people would kind of shy away from me. If I tried to be friendly with somebody, they wouldn’t necessarily because I was a child of dummies. That’s what deaf people were called in those days. They were deaf and dumb. The deaf and dumb part came from deaf and dumb, couldn’t speak. But the dummy part carried on as not being intelligent.

And then in high school, I don’t ever, in junior high or any of those, I don’t ever remember having a parent-teacher conversation. Nobody ever, none of my teachers ever contacted my parents, even when I wouldn’t do my homework or my grades were down. There was nothing. They just passed me along. And in high school, I signed up to take a Spanish class, and I was discouraged. I should take English. I was going to sign up to take some math classes, and I was discouraged. I was to take a general math class where the big thing was to learn how to write a check and keep a bank account and pay your taxes. There was none of that geometry stuff. I didn’t get hooked on that stuff until my senior year in high school. I finally got into an algebra class. 

And I hated high school. I just didn’t fit. Didn’t know how to talk to girls. I had no experience with girls. When friends come over, it was really awkward. If somebody came home with me, it was really, really awkward because of my parents. My parents would try to be friendly with them, but they didn’t know how to deal with it. And so they just dealt with me away from my house.

I really got big into leatherwork because I had an Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Landon was… he taught Print Shop, Leather Shop, and Woodworking. And I took all those courses. Originally I thought I was going to be an Industrial Arts teacher, then I thought about getting a degree to be able to become a forest ranger, but there was no way. I couldn’t figure out how in the hell I was going to go to college to do that. Although it was a lot easier to go to college in those days than it is now. The costs weren’t so damn much. 

 And I was really into skiing, through the Boy Scouts. Some of us in the neighborhood learned to ski. It was scary in the beginning until I learned to parallel ski. Once I got out of the snowplow thing. I got fairly good at parallel. I never was Olympic quality, but I could do alright. I just loved the freedom. Just felt free. Riding up to the top of the mountain and letting go. And then after I got out of the Navy, I really went into it for a couple of years. In fact, that’s how I met Ruth, my first wife. We met through a friend, and she was really impressed with my skiing. I took her skiing every weekend. She was really into that. And then somehow we ended up getting married.

I really got into skiing, and it was a really good friend that we skied with a lot. And he said he was going to join the Navy. At that time when you turned 18, you were eligible for the draft, so I turned 18 in 1955, and that was right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that period. His argument was, “If we join the Navy before we turn 18, we get out on our 21st birthday. Plus the Navy will send us to school.” He laid it out, you know, that we were going to end up getting drafted for 2 years anyway, and there was this opportunity, and I felt, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” It wasn’t all that analytical, it was it felt right. And so I did it. So we joined the Navy. We took tests and everything, and both of us qualified as machinists.

Yeah, I was out in ‘58. I rejoined in ‘61. I was out for 3 years.

I remember going and applying for this one job, and the guy interviewed me and said, “No, you’re too young. You couldn’t do all that.” And then that was the end of the interview. He didn’t believe me. And at the same time, I was going to night school, it was late ‘50s and early ‘60s recession. And you’d work for 3 months, and you’d get laid off. And you’d work for 3 months and get laid off. 

And then when I had such a hard time with all the on again, off again jobs, and I don’t know how I found out the Navy came up with a need for my particular skill. When I got out the first time, I was a second class petty officer, and they… I found out that I could go back in as a second class petty officer, got assigned to a ship in San Diego. We started, originally it was all those old diesel boats, and we worked on those all the time. And then the nuclear subs started to come in. Some of us were cleared to work on the nuclear subs.

So then I was going to make a career out of it. And I just remember getting a call, the piping over the com. And I just remember, “Petty Officer First Class Haden, report to the quarterdeck!” And I thought, “Oh crap! What have I done now?” I go up there, and a guy hands me, you know, he served me with separation papers, and I opened them up and looked at them, and it was, you know, legal language about… I showed the officer, and I said, “I don’t know what to do about this.” And he said, “Well, the first thing you ought to do is get a hold of the chaplain.” 

I knew things weren’t really good with us, but I didn’t think they were that bad. It was a real slap in the face getting served. I was just dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to do now? What?” I had to ask some officer who was probably a lieutenant junior grade or something and was probably 23 years old or something, you know, “What do I do now?”

So I made an appointment with the chaplain and talked to him, and then he got her and me into counseling. And it broke down and went to divorce. It was really traumatic. I had no idea what to do. I was at a loss. And that chaplain gave me options what to do. “Well, you can just not contest it and let her have the kids and stay in the Navy.” And I thought, “Crap, I’ve seen too many of those guys. I ain’t going to be one of them. I want a relationship with my children.” He just gave me all these different options to think about. If it’s something physical, like a computer or a computer program or a piece of machinery or a car or building or something like that, I’m very analytical. But when it comes to feelings and interactions with people, I’m more intuitive. One of my big things that I’ve known over the years is that when a door opens, you look to see whether you want to go through that door or not, whether it feels right or not, and that’s pretty much the way I’ve gone. From being a piecemeal machinist to a maintenance machinist to a tool and die maker to a numerical control programmer to a software developer, and that’s where I was until I retired. But all of those were, a door opened and I went through. There was no analytical thing about it. Did it feel right? Yeah, that felt like it was a good thing to do. 

And then when the divorce happened, I had already... You know, I was committed for another 4 years. And the padre, the chaplain, said, “You know, you could file for custody. If you get custody, you could get an honorable discharge for hardship.” And I just felt like, “Am I good enough to be a father to those kids?” And I just had the feeling, “Yeah, you can do this, but it ain’t going to happen anyway, but what the hell. Go for it.” And I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen. And I thought, “Oh crap. Now what do I do?” At that time, Harold had just gotten a divorce, and he was a single father with 2 kids. He had this big house. And he said, “You could come live with me, and we’ll help each other out.” And so we did. 

And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time, more than resistant to it, I was confused by it, scared of it. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do with the kids that I love so much? I had heard so many terrible things about split families, you know, kids bouncing back and forth and back and forth, loyalties, mothers saying bad things about the father and the father saying bad things about the mother, that at one point I thought that if I ever have to get divorced, then I’ll just let go of the kids, not be in their life. Well that was dumb-headed. I realize that now. Just so many things happened there that I had no clue. I had no idea what I was doing. Just taking it a day at a time.

And then when I got out of the Navy the second time, because I worked on nuclear submarines, I had a top, not a Top Secret, but a Secret clearance, so when I came out, I went to Rocky Flats, which was the big nuclear plant. They made triggers for the atomic bomb. And I applied there, and they said, “Well, it’s probably going to take about 6 months to get your clearance through the FBI.” 3 weeks later, I got a call says, “You’re hired.” 

I was a maintenance machinist. We just went around fixing pumps and stuff, generators. And they opened up an apprenticeship, and I was close to 40 years old. The cutoff date was 40. And I took the test, I went into the interviews and took all the tests and everything they gave us, and there were 2 of us that were picked for the apprenticeship, and I went into that. So I went into the tool and die shop, and that’s where they made all the tooling and everything for the equipment, the nuclear stuff. It was all classified stuff.

Well, when I got… finished my apprenticeship, I became a journeyman, and I worked nights. But during that time, they brought in a milling machine that was numerically controlled, and all those old journeymen, they had no clue about that thing, so I really jumped on that, and I learned all about how to manually program it. And so whenever they wanted to put something on there, why, I was assigned to do it. They had other numerically controlled machines all through the plant. Well, there was an opening there for a programmer, and I applied for it and got it. And in the meantime, during that time I had taken some nighttime college courses on FORTRAN and drafting programs through The University of Colorado.

You know, you get out of marriage and everything, and all you’ve got is work and little kids, and you just figure you need something else. That dating thing was not analytical. That was totally gut. I kept seeing it in the paper and throwing it away, seeing it in the paper and throwing it away. And I read it and thought, “Aw, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I was ready to give up on that because I had 2 or 3 bad dates. I remember going and walking down the steps into her garden level apartment. And opening that door, and thought, “OK, this is a good one.” And we went out, and the rest is history.

It was such a whirlwind. We were going to get married at 6 months or something. I didn’t think it was right to get married right away. The divorce wouldn’t even be final until March. So then we thought, “OK, in the summer. No, let’s get married in June. How about Spring Break?” And I thought, “My God, this is soon!” But I’ve been following her lead for years. I just know that it sure as hell worked out. Here we are, almost 50 years later. 

When Mom and I met, she was determined that she had found me and that I was the guy, and she was going to marry me, and I had just 2 years ago gotten out of a marriage. I didn’t even know who the hell I was. I had 2 little kids, was living with my brother in his basement, and your Mom was determined we were going to get married, and she was going to have 2 kids. And then we got married, and she was determined she was going to have her own kid. And then she had her own kid, and then she determined that she wanted another one. In those days, it was all the hippie thing, you know. You replenish yourself. So I’d already, I was the husband and a wife, and we had a boy and a girl, so when I got married again, I said, “OK. One more, for Robbie.” But then she was Empty Arm Syndrome or something, and she was determined she was going to have you. And so we had you. Best thing in the world.

After I worked at Rocky Flats for 7 years, I got laid off because they were cutting back, cutting back on nuclear bombs and everything. So they had to cut back on the staff, and they ended up closing Rocky Flats because it was so contaminated. For a long time, I had to go in and be monitored by medical once a year because I was exposed to americium and some other chemicals I don’t remember. I’d go in, and they’d take blood. I was exposed, but I was never contaminated, so I was alright. 

I knew that if I was just a piecemeal machinist, I’d be doing that 3 months on, 3 months off thing for the rest of my life and never getting out of debt. And so I just followed the path. I knew that I had, because the layoff from Rocky Flats, the Bomb Factory, I was back in that mode of working in small shops for short periods of time. And I knew that I was going to get into numerical control. I wanted to. But my goal was the eastern boundary of Colorado, anything west, and the southern boundary of Colorado, anything north. And all I kept getting was this crap in Texas! And they kept offering to bring us down here for a weekend, for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and put us up. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. It’s an opportunity to get out and spend the weekend on somebody else’s dime.” And I came down here, and I was interested. They were interested in me.

Because I worked so hard at it. I spent a lot of time self-educating. The computer has been the best damn thing in my life. Although I got a lot of enjoyment out of my kids. Just enjoying watching you do things and try things and being assistant coach for your soccer team and watching Rik at swim meets. I was a timer and a stroke judge, and I also shot the gun. Starter. It was either sit in that stupid tent, or else go out and participate. Mom just really enjoyed sitting there, and I enjoyed watching how the thing worked and keeping track of Rik’s times.

Yeah. I got involved in Scouts because of you. They fill out those papers, and I’d very carefully fill them out so that I didn’t raise any flags to where they’d want me to do something, and then when you guys went into Webelos, I said, “OK, I can do it for a year,” and the next thing I knew, I was a Scoutmaster. I seemed to get all the misfits. We had some strange kids in our troop. 

One of my favorite memories is that Ford Escort you had, when I taught you how to put new brakes on it. We went through one wheel together, and then I showed you how to do it, and then I said, “OK, you’re on your own now.” And then watched you do it on your own. It was big. 

Ruth was a very outgoing person. Early on, her dad was a senior forest ranger, and it entailed being lots of parties and groups and cocktail parties. And it’s pretty much the same with Mom now, Robbie. I’m just also-ran. I just tag along. We go into groups, and she’s willing to talk to anybody, and I have a hard, hard time. Especially with people I don’t know. I can open up like to you. I can have a conversation with you, or I can have a conversation with Rik. You get into a group of people like Rik’s New Years or Christmas when he has people over, I have a hard time talking to those people. Some of them I can talk to because I know them, but I can’t talk very long. I don’t know what to say. My brain just does not work that way. I’m very very shy. I had a hard time in my jobs too. I just never really fit into those kind of groups.

But the thing of it is, my brother Harold went through the same experience, and he didn’t have any trouble. My cousin Jimmy and my cousin Elaine. Man, Elaine was really into it. I mean, she could talk sign language with the fastest of them. And I couldn’t. I could tell that people automatically slowed down when they talked to me, and I would say, “What?” a lot, and they would spell it out, and then I would understand what the sign was. But deaf people don’t like to spell things out. And so, it was easy for me to check out because if you’re not looking at somebody and reading their signs, you’re not conversing with them. So you’re looking over here. They’re signing, and you’re not paying attention. And it’s a cop out, and I realize it now, 70 years later.

If I had nothing in common with, I’m at a loss. Walk up, you know, Robbie can talk to store clerks and have conversations, and I don’t know what the hell to say other than, “Have a good day.” I don’t know how to deal with those kinds of situations.

My mom was good at it. And my dad too, just talking to people. My dad carried a little pad of paper and a pencil in his shirt pocket, and he had no qualms at whipping that sucker out and writing, talking to people. And my mom would talk to them and try to read their lips. Biggest problem she had was that once people learned that she was reading their lips, they would exaggerate everything, and she couldn’t understand it.

Best thing I ever did was get hooked up with your mom. She’s given me so much love and stability. We still have our rough edges. Mostly it’s me not talking to her enough. That’s because she’s lost all her friends in Dallas. It’s become more important to her to be more interactive with me. I have to cope with it. One of the things is, this iPhone here, I couldn’t live without it. See that? 10:30? This one here. 10:30. It’s my alarm clock. It means “Get up and talk.” When I get up out of bed, it’s time to get up out of bed, because I slept in as long as she will tolerate, and I have to talk. Sometimes I just go on down the hall, saying, “I’m walking, and I’m talking. I’m walking, and I’m talking.” And then we’ll get in a conversation, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. This one here says, “Get up for PT” which is physical therapy, “and talk, and have a happy face.” Because she’s convinced that those girls will work harder with me if I have a happy face with them. The therapists. So that’s how I’m learning to cope with that stuff.

Big thing that we have is that she’s the balloon, and I hold onto her string. I keep her grounded. But every now and then, I have to kind of float with her. To keep me in the world. Not let me crawl in a hole. To give me love.  And it works. It works for us.

In Richardson after the stroke, I was pretty much isolated, just me and Robbie and my therapists, and the therapy ran out. Robbie over the years before that had been talking about someday we need to move to Austin to be with our kids and grandkids, you know. And then when I was in in-house rehab, I just realized that maybe that’s what we ought to do. And then it was a whirlwind.

I had nothing more there. She had all her friends and her contacts and her woo woo stuff was all up in that whole area up there. When we came down here, she had a, she’s still having a rough time, but she had a really rough time in the beginning, mostly with the driving thing. Over the years, I’ve had to map things out for her. And I still do that. I map out where she wants to go. I’m really proud of her, because she’s got to where she’s really moving around a lot.

Big events in my week are physical therapy, and now that’s about to stop and I have to do it on my own. I have to force myself to do it. It’s too easy to blow off. Mom will say, “Let’s go to lunch,” and I blow the rest of the afternoon off, which means I don’t do the exercises I should. I’ve got to do it, got to get myself on a regimen. You know the old saying, “Use it or lose it?” With me it’s really true. If I don’t do it, I’ll lose it. My walking is worse than it was 6 months ago. Although I try. I just don’t seem to be able to get the rhythm good enough, fast enough. And Robbie’s really patient with me. She just walks along at a slow crawl, either behind me or by my side.

She does a lot for me. She’s walking a narrow line about doing stuff for me and not doing stuff for me. She has to decide what I really need her to do and what I can do on my own. I try to do my own laundry, but she’s pretty much grabbed a hold of that. When she hears me kicking the bucket down the hall, she runs out and grabs it and does it, but she leaves the shirts and pants for me to hang up, which I can do. I can fold the other stuff, too, but she has a need to do something. So it’s a fine line on what she wants to do and what she wants me to do.

I’ve had a couple of times since I stroked. I thought my family would be better off without me, but then I realized that’s not true. Robbie would not be better off without me, even though she has to do so much of the physical part of it. I still keep track of the finances and when things need to be paid, the mortgage and utilities, and I give her moral support. I keep reminding her that she needs friends, and she needs to make them. She’s found a couple of lady friends that she really likes that she has coffee with on Wednesdays but I really wish she could find a clan. I just have to keep reminding her that she needs to look and not give up on it. So I can’t give up. I still got to hold that string.

The biggest thing is that she got all her talking and communication with all those people she had up north, and now she depends on me to do it, and it’s difficult for me. I try hard to do it, but it doesn’t satisfy her needs. People project onto me that I’m stuck up and antisocial. It’s not true. I just don’t know how to be social. It sounds like a cop out, you don’t know how. Of course you should know how. I read all kinds of books on how to do it. I can’t do it.

I don’t know if I can pinpoint things. It’s just a path. Some of it’s rocky and some of it’s grassy and easy going, and some of it’s a struggle to climb up, but I’m just on this path. Hadens are resilient. I don’t know whether it’s in genes or whatever the hell it is. It’s there. My next goal is make it to 85. Try to talk to my wife whenever I can. Enjoy my kids and grandchildren. I’m satisfied with my life.

 I don’t know how you’ll make sense out of any of that.

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.
 

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.
 

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…

Rod's first experience with live storytelling, in which he recalls camping in a downpour and kayaking with a heron, and remembers that life-changing trip to Belize, long before he learned to settle for the safe and the comfortable. Our first story of transformation.