Recipe for Joy by Robin Davis

Author:Robin Davis [Davis, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012030, Religion/Christian Life/Family, REL012120, Religion/Christian Life/Spiritual Growth, REL012130, Religion/Christian Life/Women's Issues
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

About a year after Ken and I were married, I developed a friendship with a young woman at the newspaper where I worked. It was an unlikely alliance that no doubt God had a hand in.

Kristy was fifteen years my junior and perpetually perky and upbeat, in a Katie Couric kind of way, traits I usually find suspect. She moved from news to features to specialize in slice-of-life stories, such as the impact on a family after the father died fighting in Iraq, or the effects on a young woman a year after her fiancé disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Kristy and I didn’t have much reason to interact, but one day she came to me and told me she was setting up a youth team of high school students for the paper. She wanted to get their input on story ideas and also to use them as an avenue to sources that might otherwise be difficult to access.

“Robin, you have kids in high school, don’t you?” she asked, stopping by my desk.

“No. Ben’s in eighth grade, and the twins are in sixth.”

“You have twins?”

“I do. They’re my stepdaughters.”

“You have stepchildren?” She was keenly interested.

Kristy, it turned out, was about to marry a man who had twin sons that were a year younger than Molly and Sarah, and a daughter a few years younger than the boys. It was like my situation, reversed.

Mike, her husband-to-be, was divorced, and the children’s mother was still on the scene, so their scenario wasn’t identical to mine. Still, we had so much in common, issues that few others in our lives could really grasp.

Kristy became my ally, my confidant. I could share with her the struggles I had with stepparenting and interactions with Grace’s family. She could listen with an understanding no one else possessed, and when she expressed her own challenges, it confirmed to me that I wasn’t alone.

“I accept that there are some things I don’t get by marrying Mike,” Kristy told me one day when we were having lunch together. “I don’t get to be his first love. I don’t get to have his first child with him. But I get to form my own paths with him, paths that have nothing to do with where he’s been or where I’ve been before now.”

There it was. Wisdom I had never put into words. I would never be Ken’s first love, either. We wouldn’t have that traditional first year of marriage where we could get to know each other through just living together, learning each other’s quirks and what buttons not to push—or to push when the situation warranted it—with no one but ourselves and each other to care for or about.

We started our marriage with Ben, Molly, and Sarah—not to mention an extra set of in-laws. I would always share space with Grace in each of their hearts. I would never have wife or mother space all to myself. But while I might not be the first or the only, I could choose to live in the present and not be covered in the shadow of the past.

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