From the time I got that all clear with my first wife I had pretty much done my heavy parenting by then. My oldest son was about 15 and the other son about 12. After the divorce I still would cook about 3 or 4 days a week over there so I still maintained a real good relationship co-parenting. In fact so good that even after I was married to Gloria it was a bone of contention because for Gloria it looked to her like I was still married over there! We were still dividing up who was going to cook for the kids on what night.
Gloria and Vivian for the most part always got along well. A lot of it has been empathizing with one another about how miserable it can be at times to live with me. They are both pretty similar people. It makes me wonder what there is in me. You know I told you my first wife was so totally devoted to me. That’s really quite different in Gloria’s case, but the area of similarity they share is that they are both just very conscientious, compassionate people—brilliant. They are both very strong women.
As it turns out the best thing that ever happened to my first wife was to get a divorce, because she would never have developed into a powerhouse if we had stayed married. But as soon as we got out of the marriage, she became a powerhouse. She began the first abortion clinic in St. Louis, and says then and will say now that she is thankful to me for that. In fact, after we got married, I had to really push her to finish her schooling. I could see even then that she was so quick to want to give up her own career. We had no money, so it was a great sacrifice at the time, but I felt very strongly that she should finish her nursing degree. She has since told me how valuable that was.
Even before we divorced she had started into this abortion clinic. That four years we put in were very helpful to both of us because we both saw how we were playing traditional roles, and we were exploring. It was a great growth for both of us but very painful. We were married 14 years when we got the divorce finally, but it was really 10 years when I laid that bomb on her—“It ain’t father knows best from now on. I ain’t Robert Young and never have been.”
There were parts of it that I liked, but it was not the way I wanted to spend my life. It basically boiled down to time management—as cold as that sounds—it was like “who owns my life?” I was feeling that I’d have to steal 10 minutes to read something. My whole life was taken up in these obligations and commitments to other people. It was like I had given away my life without even realizing it. We tried for four years to sort out how we could have the closeness that we both needed from each other but also the separation. At times we got remarkably close to it. We almost worked it out.