Sister Wives

It occurs to me that nowadays, if a man is rich enough, he doesn’t have to be a Mormon to have plural wives.  Splitting hairs (and heirs) on the technicalities, if any guy can afford the divorce attorneys, alimony and child support that usually comes along with big-ticket divorce territory, today’s successful Latter Day (Non) Saint can have as many wives as Joseph Smith.

That’s what my ex did.  True, we all did not bunk together in one big ugly house.  And he did off-load both of us legally- and at bargain basement prices no less.

But we shared the same last name for many years- and the same father of our children forever.  And thus I always felt a special kinship with my predecessor.

His first wife.

Let’s call her Minnie.

Bill met Minnie at the University of Illinois.  It was inevitable.  He was 6’3″ and she was 5’10” and together, he told me, they were the tallest Jews on campus.

They graduated in 1959 and were wed about ten months before July 16, 1960.  I know this because that’s the birthday of their first daughter.  Bill had found himself- much to his dismay- a very young and very unprepared father.

(That didn’t stop him from repeating the experience two more times.  And two more daughters duly ensued.)

I had heard all about their courtship and marriage in 1975 when Bill was wooing me. And brother, did he kvetch about her.

I heard him gripe non-stop about how boring she was.

And how stupid. (He called her a “lunkhead.”)

How messy she was.  (Saddles in the living room!)

How she refused to “grow” with him.

Or go with him when he wanted to move them all to a bigger house in a tonier suburb.

Minnie was clearly the designated villain in the divorce piece.  It was all her fault.  And he didn’t just talk the talk.  In the twenty years that we were married, he NEVER spoke to her.

He wouldn’t even be in the same room with her if he could help it.

When their oldest daughter graduated from Boulder, I got elected to spend three days talking to Minnie at the graduation celebration festivities.  Bill’s stony silence and glowering looks were embarrassing and I wanted her to feel welcome. She was the mother of the graduate, after all.

And the situation never improved, as the girls grew up and got married. Hospital visits to see brand-new grandchildren and older kids’ birthday parties had to planned out like D Day.

At the very beginning of our relationship, I had no reason to doubt his account of her. And by the time we got married, I, too, thought that Minnie was the Anti-Christ.

Except that she wasn’t.

I only met her after we were married and was I surprised.  She looked like Jessica Walter- not Satan.

And she was nice.

As in Sunday School teacher nice.  (Which she happened to be, btw.)

Unfortunately for me, it turned out that Bill was, what we call in the trade, an “unreliable narrator.”  His version of what happened in his first marriage could have gone straight to the top of the “Fiction” side of the best-seller list.

But at twenty-four- and bedazzled by his good looks and little Mercedes- I was too dumb to know that.

Little by little, the awful truth about my husband’s first marriage- and why it went south- dawned on me.  Minnie had been “more sinned against than sinning.”  That’s why Bill couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her.

It wasn’t that she had done anything to him.  More like vice versa.

And when he did it to me, History repeated itself.

Now I was the new villainess in town.

But in the meantime, over the space of twenty-one years, Bill had reproduced five children by both of us- girl, girl, girl, girl… boy!  And I helped raise them all.

This led to some very Brigham Young-like complications.

Like the time that Patti, his second-in-line, had moved in with us.  She was sixteen and she adored her baby half-sister, Natasha- who was almost two at the time.  Patti used to French braid Natasha’s hair to match her own, throw her into her Jeep’s car seat and whisk her away for a day’s adventures.

Patti was tall and beautiful (she looks just like Princess Stephanie of Monaco) and she would get stopped all the time by strangers who wanted to know how old her little girl was.

“Uh, I don’t know.  Twenty-six months?  Twenty-five months?  I’m not sure,” was her usual teenaged reply.

Boy, did she get baffled double takes from people who thought she was a bad mother. Too bad Reality TV hadn’t been invented back then.  Think about what great programming I Am A Teenage Unwed Mother Who Has NO Idea How Old My Kid Is would make.

Or the time that Bill’s oldest grandson came over to play with his six year old uncle, Nick. They were playing together in Nick’s room when I heard a crash and an outcry.  I ran in to assess the damage.

One look and I went straight to the the top.

“That’s it!” I told Big Daddy.  “Andrew just threw Nick’s Lego and broke it.  Your grandson just made your son cry.  You’re done.  We’re turning off the tap.  No more kids for you.”

One thing has changed, though.

I was amused to hear that Bill has finally started talking to Minnie again after all these years.

My guess is that this was the price he had to pay with his “big kids” when Nick and I took off for Colorado and he found himself alone on Sunday nights.  I bet the girls made rapprochement with their mother a part of his rehabilitation.

That’s fine by me.

I’ve always liked her.

Peace.  All these blessings I seal upon you.

(That’s Mormon for “ciao, my friends.”)

Stay warm out there.