“Goes in swings and roundabouts”, Pt. 2
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8aFR, 8b, 8c, 8d & 8e
My previous post focussed on the years leading up to my first marriage (go to its bottom for more links) so now I’ll focus on my second, with next steps at bottom.
This is the last of a mini-series (8 a - e) introduced here. See also a series recap here and a series wrap-up here.
I met my wife exactly 31 yrs. ago this Hallowe’en. After my divorce in 1990 I considered returning to France. I was caught up in the excitement of the pending reunion of Europe — East met West after the fall of the Berlin Wall — but the company I was to represent in Paris went broke and I stayed in Calgary. I met her shortly after, and she too was contemplating returning to England after her divorce. But we wisely decided to meet again, if and after we decided to stay in Calgary separately. Did you know that just like there were “war brides” — British women who followed American soldiers back home — she was an “oil patch bride” following her geophysicist husband to Calgary?!
We wasted almost 5 yrs in a pseudo co-counselling community, until I took a job in Dallas just to “get her outa there”. While were both employed in Calgary, she couldn’t work stateside, so we decided to have a child then — we were almost 40 and basically lost our 1st child to said community — bless her heart, she followed me around to Houston, Walton-on-Thames, Redlands and back to Cambridge, rebuilding her life each time — I skipped from job2job but not her — but she also acquired conflict resolution diploma and an MA is sociology on male white privilege. She raised our daughter via so-called attachment parenting, w lot more physical contact incl. breast-feeding and allowing her to be noisy (not shutting her down) as we had co-counselling support from the proper community now.
Our naqba (wikipedia) was when Uncle Sam excused us — we couldn’t get green-carded at the tail end of the 7 yr. post-9/11 freeze — and we thus were torn out from a lovely place and our daughter never ever understood why. We realised too late that the psych implications of our move had never been addressed. We observed however that she was a regular teen with this switch that turns on aged 13 when they become immortal and invincible — in that interlude, “adults know nothing” — and then just as suddenly and inexplicably the switch turns off aged 18 to return to ‘normal’.
So we all ploughed into our careers, my wife worked her way into Anglia Ruskin Uni., I had a good run at consulting that allowed us to pay out the house, so that by the time oil crashed I was able to start a few ventures, while our house was safe and she paid the bills. All the while our daughter went on her teen spree, studied hard (high school demolished her but she recovered thru uni., just like me but that’s a whole other story), and built a good coterie of friends that kept her safe on the internet and from drugs & smoking if not alcohol.
One point of pride how smart she is, is her use of her mobile phone. She got so many minutes, I switched her to an unlimited data plan, which was affordable at a mere 25% surcharge. She told me she never used wifi, she stayed on data, because she knows when she enters a café, their open wifis allow hers to be scanned… as beautiful women are prone to be stalked! Telephone security on her data plan is much tighter, not directly for clients’ sake, but for their own sprawling networks that include, say, open banking.
So to wrap it all up here’s a recap, please go here for my next steps… I’ve been on “the wrong side of the tracks” all my life:
- we went around the world twice by the time I was ten years old, so when others had ‘wanderlust’ they were all teenagers, I was already over travelling
- I raised my sibs as a teenager — long story — so by the time I met women at uni. age — in my experience half went to study, half look for a life partner — I was already done with raising children
- I learned all kinds of languages, but when I got abroad, they only wanted to practice English with me
- at work I had to lie all the time and I didn’t let me do it, so I was always put out of work eventually
^I was raised Catholic in a lay state (France), then became Unitarian in the US (see end), but in UK they were Chrisitian not Humanist, so we joined Quakers where ‘God never talked to me’, so I now rejoined the faith I was raised in
- I had five women, Fabienne before / Elise & Ann in-between / Olga one night stand / Alyssa after two wives Kathryn & Sandra of 10 & 30 years respectively
