Our Family: May 2015

The vision of life is not exactly what I had pictured it to be as I made my plans in high school. Growing up I envisioned certain aspects to look and feel how I hoped they would. We all do this. I remember observing people and how they interacted with others, how they carried themselves and how they provided, worked, and how they played. I observed different marriages and quietly took note of what I would take and use and what I would toss aside as I saw it unproductive or not in line with who I thought myself to be. In high school as many of us do, I knew everything because experience had not taught me all the things that I didn’t know I didn’t know. Much like how I was the perfect parent at one point in my life. I knew how kids should be taught and treated and disciplined, I knew what a father should do and how to do it… and then I actually had kids and discovered I knew nothing about it. I learned how to be the parent of Dallin who crazy enough came with his own personality and his own will. When he was 1 yr old I felt pretty darn good about being able to parent a 1 yr old Dallin, but then he turned 2 and I had to learn how to parent 2 yr old Dallin. That may sound like the same thing but many know that it clearly is not. Then comes my daughter. At this point in time I had already known how to raise a baby (for me at this stage, that mostly consisted of standing back in awe at how much my sweet wife already did with perfection and try to anticipate my instructions in hopes to be of some use) This little girl couldn’t be much different… except maybe that I didn’t have to duck and cover during diaper changing time with her anatomy difference (both thoughts turned out to be incorrect assumptions) Turns out a little girl is nothing like a little boy… who knew? Enter Evan, another boy… I know how to parent a little boy. Wrong again. Being Dallin’s dad is not the same as being Evan’s and so I learn about more things that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Such is life. I think all wisdom is just finding out about more things you don’t know and then collecting knowledge on the topic. My point here is not to be condescending to anyone that does not have the same experiences as I do. My trials and experiences are very different from anyone else. I will never know it from another’s perspective, and to be honest I don’t know if I want that. I will never know what it is like to not be able to have children, that was not my trial. I don’t know what its like to grow up in a 3^rd world country or deal with childhood illness firsthand. Even being a child with a single parent, I never knew what it was like to be the parent in that until being one myself. I don’t have the burden of enormous wealth (although I wouldn’t mind that “challenge”) these are not my experiences. Even very similar events will bring a very different experience and different emotions and reactions, I will never know what it is like for someone else to lose their wife or their baby girl…. I only know how it feels to me. The best we can do is to empathize with someone else's pain or hard times and try our best to help them through it. Well, that and try not to make it worse by saying dumb things… we all say a lot of dumb things.

Just when I figure something out, a new thing comes and teaches me yet another thing I don’t know how to do. Even as I sit here and look at this sweet little girl that has none of my genetics but who is my daughter all the same, sleep next to her beautiful mother that I get to call my wife, I can’t help but think that what I planned and what has come to be is not even in the same realm… and yet happiness is found here.

Having been a child of divorced parents from a young age I wanted something very different for my kids. I wanted something very different for myself. I remember watching my mom stress about things as a single parent that I never wanted to stress about. I planned and made choices that I thought would allow that to be. I married such an amazing woman that I would have never had to know such things. I remember many times in my marriage to Wendy thinking how lucky I was that she was not only my wife, but that she was my kid’s mom. She was so incredible at being their mom. There are many hard things about losing her but if there is one thing that made me angry and maybe even provoke a little mental pity party, it is that my kids would have to grow up without this amazing person that I picked out to be their mom. I hated that they can’t have her and know her in that way. I do feel incredibly blessed to have such an amazing and loving mother in the home again. Evan told me the other day when he was talking about Wendy and Lynnette that I was “really good at picking who to marry.” I can’t help but agree with his observations.

I met Lynnette a year before we got married after a mutual friend emailed me about her amazing friend she thought I should meet. She lived up in Utah and had not really started the dating thing quite yet. I called a few times only to talk to her voicemail. I had a trip planned to go up for a family reunion and so I coordinated with her friend to go to lunch with them so she didn’t feel like she was thrown into the dating thing too quickly. The lunch ended up being dinner and it felt comfortable right from the start. We made plans to go out the following week and after dinner stayed up talking on a park bench until late that night. I had come to realize that while there were some great women that I had spent some time with since starting the dating 2.0 process, the most important element I was looking for was not a list of criteria but was more a feeling I needed to feel. Of course there were things that needed to be there in who she was but if those were not there I wouldn’t feel that feeling anyway. With Lynnette I loved who she was and how in spite of some very difficult trials she was able to make the choice to be happy still. It is something I still love about her. I felt love for her very quickly and I was excited that I was feeling that way as I had begun to think that I wasn’t capable of that kind of feeling or that it was something I would never feel again in such a way. I was very comfortable with the idea of where it might lead and knew that I needed to give her time to process things in her own way as she came to accept the new facts of her life as well. The long distance dating was not ideal but we seemed to navigate it well for the most part and made time for each other under busy circumstances. We figured that I probably wouldn’t be able to see her every day even if she lived here because of the demands of school. After a while I was able to convince her that being married to a doctor would be a cool thing… I might have failed to mention that I would be a student still for a few more years. I knew it would be a hard thing to ask her to move to another state and I knew rotations and residency would require a lot of hours at work and I wanted her to be sure about us. She has two young girls and so with my three it would be an instant five kids. No small task. I had known I loved her for some time, but love and details of life are not necessarily the same thing and both had to be considered. Marriage had been part of the conversation for a while and as we started looking at our schedules we quickly came to realize that in order to not pull kids out of school, study for boards, have a small wedding, move my house, then her house to another state, a small honeymoon and some time to settle in as a family we had a window in between boards and rotations of about 3 weeks to hit. So, on her next visit after a night out for dinner and whatever else I could find to make her think I would propose any moment, trying to throw her off a little, we found ourselves on another park bench looking out over the distant Las Vegas lights where I asked her to marry me. There were immediate fireworks… no, literally, a friend and his wife were hiding up the hill watching and they lit off some really impressive fireworks after I got off my knee. Lynnette jumped as it caught her off guard. To top off the night as we walked back to my van we were greeted by a gang of hooligans looking for trouble. It looked like a scene from West Side story… and it very well could have been the original cast because they were probably 70 years old and not happy about firework shinanigans by their neighborhood. I opened the door for my new fiancée and walked around to my side while trying to ignore the foul language spewing from these geriatric juveniles. As I drove off we couldn’t help but laugh at the scene. It makes for a funny story now anyway. My friends parked in another spot so they made a clean get away.

The next few weeks consisted of me studying for my board exam and Lynnette organizing a little get together for our wedding. We noticed really quickly that we are very blessed with some incredible family and friends in our lives and figured that unless we wanted to rent out a stadium, we had better draw the line at immediate family on our budget. And to all the guys that don’t really like going to weddings anyway… you are welcome. I took my board exam on Monday and we were married in Draper Temple on Tuesday. After a few days to ourselves we came home and started the process of merging two houses into one.

I saw firsthand how difficult merging two families could be as a kid. I never wanted to deal with that. It was really hard to imagine being able to love someone enough after Wendy to want to tackle that task with as well. There were many times after I started dating again that I felt it would be easier to not deal with that. We were content with the life we were creating for us. But much like that analogy of the frog that doesn’t jump out of a boiling pot when the heat is turned up slowly, I had become accustomed to just being us and I had forgotten how much better life could be with someone you love by your side. I was always excited to see my kids at the end of the day, but it was not until I had a teammate again that I could fully see how exhausting it is to do parenting by yourself. There was always that moment at the end of a brain sapping school day pulling into the garage knowing that as soon as I walk in that door these little humans that were so excited to see me would need more than what I felt was left in my tank to give them. The prospect of playtime and permission slips and bills and bedtime to cap it all off with a few hours of light reading about pharmacology was daunting most days. Now I had a partner to do that with and it felt good. Lynnette says that while crazy, parenting 5 kids with a loving spouse is easier than 2 kids by yourself, and I agree with that.

Admitting that I am happy is hard with the thought that others might perceive it as me over the fact that Wendy is gone. It is something that brought feelings of guilt for lack of a better word. I will never be over the fact that she is gone, it hurts every time I think about how much I miss them. Much the same is Lynnette’s pain. I know she is happy, and I know the love we have for one another and how much sharing in that means to us, but it does not make null the sting of past wounds.

There are some unique differences in how we got to be in a second marriage and while we try to understand each other and what we are feeling the truth is that we can’t completely relate. Yes, while at one time Lynnette felt that being a widow was going to be her reality with her husband’s heart problems, the fact is that she never went through that first hand and can only try to understand my views on losing Wendy. The same goes for me in that I can only imagine her pain. I have never had to deal with the betrayal of an unfaithful spouse and the painful process of redefining my life because of that. It is hard for me to understand why she would fight so hard to save a marriage to someone that hurt her in that way. For me Wendy’s death will always be painful and I would never want anyone to have to experience that ache, but the truth is that her death was filled with love for her and we know her love for us. That is not the separation that Lynnette experienced. My children will have a very different view as they understand that their mom did not choose to be away from them and I hope that Lynnette’s girls will be secure enough with who they are as they grow and mature and come to realize the choices their father made that changed their life in such a way.

The kids have done very well. They are the best of friends and play and love and fight like they were always siblings. Lynnette and I communicate well, something very necessary as we come together and learn how to parent in a whole new way as a blended family. We both like that they are young and integrate well. They have all began to get accustomed to the new places in the family. Dallin is a great big brother and while he has his moments he is very patient and is rarely the source of any quarreling. He sets his alarm and gets the rest of them moving in the morning to the point that there is little to do for us as parents, he even makes “Dal-iscious eggs” on occasion. That’s a fried egg with cheese and peanut butter if you were wondering…. the other kids love it, but I think they have a more refined palette than me I guess. Eden seems to like having live- in friends 24/7 where a playmate is never far away. She is very high energy and usually has some great ideas for a new game or adventure. Most of her life has been spent as essentially an only child since her little sister is so much younger which I am sure is very different than her new family, but she doesn’t seem to mind the change. Kenna, likewise, a very strong personality who was used to being the only girl in a house with 3 boys (Dad included) has enjoyed having a sister to always play with. Kenna has talked about how much she wished Maylee was here so she could have a little sister so often over the past 4 years. While I know it is in no way a replacement, she does take to the role with Eliza quite well. She is a good little mama to her new little sis. She will even change her and fix her cereal for the parents. Evan is a happy kid who genuinely loves other people and friends. He is always ready to tease and joke at any given moment and his giggles are contagious. Most times his humor is very clever too. I think his, while still doing great, is probably the toughest in this transition. He is no longer the baby in the house and not quite old enough to be included in everything the older kids do either. If I am tossing Eliza in the air he wants to do the same thing. The only problem is he is a tank! Compared to Eliza who has her mom’s petite build, I can’t hold him quite like I used to and so we modify our play and wrestle and tease and there are still moments when I can tell he doesn’t quite understand why Eliza is on my shoulders on our way home from the park and he is walking next to me. Eliza had just turned 2 when we were married and was not used to having a dad in the house so I think she had to get used to the idea. The good thing is that she was 2 and so she will never really remember it being any different. She has become the family mascot it seems. Everything she says and everything she does is dinner table conversation worthy in the other kids minds. She has rock star status at times and so it makes for a fun family dynamic… that is until she has had enough of big kids prodding at her and trying to hold her. Overall it has felt like a family from the start. They have all done well together. We have all done well. We put the decision of what each of them would call us individually and so I am Dad and Lynnette is Mom. I didn’t want to make that decision for them and I know Lynnette felt the same way. I think in the kids desire to feel more normal they were excited to be calling someone mom again. In the midst of all the aunts and grandmas that love them and cared for their needs, I think there is something to be said about the personal relationship of the role of a mother in the home, a role that can never be substituted. They still talk about Wendy often, I would never change that. Lynnette lost her mom to cancer when she was 8 years old so her perspective is one that can sympathize with their needs there where maybe others would not as much.

I have been in my clinical clerkships in various specialties for the last year now. I enjoy interacting with people more than with books but it does make for a little less consistency from month to month right now. I think there are a few areas of medicine that resonates with me on several aspects so that narrows down what I want to be when I grow up. Amidst all the chaos of rotations and tests and maybe some negative opinions of the future of medicine there have been many moments that have given value in this career choice and an appreciation for getting involved in such a way with different people. I am enjoying the process and look forward to the next step in it as well. It is hard to imagine now how I would have been able to navigate rotations like I did with the last 2 years of school as they are very different creatures I am finding. Luckily I don’t have to figure that out. Lynnette has been doing great with all the new craziness added to her life as a mother of 5. I am grateful to her for stepping into that role, but more than that, I am grateful to feel the love that I feel and be able to share in this kind of relationship once more. There are many things that I don’t know how to do, what to say or how to go about. So many times when I am struck by the oddity that I can feel so much for two women and still strive to hold the unique feelings for both with a balance that neither one is taking from the other. Like so many times before I am finding new things that I don’t know how to do and so I get out of my comfort zone as I learn to be Dad to 2 more and learn how to be a husband again in a different way than I have ever had to before. Our story is uniquely our own and while there is much that we would never have chosen, there is also much that we are grateful to have learned and many blessings that have come holding happiness with them.