(It’s 3 am and I’m sleepy as hell but can’t manage it, and when I’m tired I tend towards the verbose. So this wound up being a lot longer than I expected it to be and more detailed. I might regret that after a few hours of sleep.)

Last night Kevin fell asleep in Char’s room and Rachel seemed to want some time alone her mother so Alex and I took a walk. His attitude is still surly and defiant and I thought it would be a good time to talk to him. I needed him to understand that I get his upset and I don’t blame him for being disappointed that I wasn’t sitting around waiting for Char to walk into my life but the attitude has to stop.

Intellectually he knows that we had lives before he was born and that a large part of those lives were spent not even knowing the other existed, but he had this vision of us at our jobs and having fun with friends, waiting to stumble onto each other. He expected that there had been boyfriends and girlfriends in high school, but not that either of us had ever been in love with someone else. And especially neither of us had ever had sex with anyone else.

I had to ask him if he realistically expected that he would wind up as a thirty year old virgin, waiting for Ms. Right. That may have clarified the idea for him. But he was equally surprised to find out that I dated the same girl throughout junior high, high school, and college, and married her just weeks after graduation, and yet we did hold out for marriage. That’s what was expected of us, and one of us was determined to wait. (Yeah, just one of us, though I don’t think I complained too much.)

That might open a whole new door for conversation, what I expect of him in terms of dating and sex when he’s older. We didn’t pursue that very far, mostly because I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m going to like what he has to say about his experience so far. He’s six weeks from turning fourteen and I know he’s not the complete innocent I’d like him to be, but it didn’t feel like the right time to go down that road.

He had tons of questions. Did I get married just because I wanted sex? Was I happily married? Why did we get divorced and who wanted it first? Tricky questions that don’t necessarily have clear cut answers, and while those things have been spinning around in his head I wasn’t sure he wanted to know the truth. I think he wanted me to tell him I only got married because I was tired of waiting and that it became a miserable thing that I couldn’t wait to get out of.

I don’t think it was ever miserable. It wasn’t comfortable in the last four or five years but that was because we’d realized we wanted different things from each other. I could honestly tell Alex that I had never actually proposed to my ex; we’d been together so long that when my college graduation was looming she and her mother started making wedding plans because that was the next logical step. Surely that’s what I wanted, too. I never saw a reason not to. I did love her. I still loved her the day she handed me divorce papers, but he didn’t need to know that (neither did he need to know that she was, in the words of a friend, bat shit crazy and presented me with this news on Christmas Eve, like it was a gift.) There was a long list of reasons why ending the marriage was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t because we had stopped loving each other.

The reason that seemed safe to tell him, and one that was true, was that I seriously wanted kids and she realized she didn’t (at least not with me. I have no reasonable explanation for her later marrying some guy with custody of his six kids. Bat shit crazy may apply.) There were a dozen more reasons for sure, otherwise I doubt I would have felt as relieved as I did when I realized I really was getting out, but that was the biggest and the one I think he could relate to.

Whether he’s okay with it or not he at least accepts it and admits it’s not like I can go back and change anything. Would I if I could? I don’t know. Sex was a large part of why I went along with all the wedding plans and I don’t remember having that same drive of needing to spend my life with her that I felt with Char. Love is one thing, but I keep thinking that it was like two good friends deciding that getting married was better than not doing anything, so why not? We both wanted sex, but we lacked passion for each other. If you ask Char (and I have) she wouldn’t want me to pass up that part of my life. I might have gotten married because it was expected of me and I was horny enough to go along with it, but she understands it helped shape who I was when we both wanted to move past being people who worked together to something more.

Alex swayed from wanting to know more about my first marriage to wanting to know about how his mother and I got together. He knew she was an administrative assistant in the office I was working out of but we’d never told him how we got from that to a proposal to “Um, guess what? I might be, um, just a little bit, oh wow, pregnant.” I had a hard time explaining that the end of my first marriage might have played a small part in the start of my second.

It may not have happened if my ex had not gifted me with divorce papers on Christmas Eve. I had hit the feeling of relief already by New Years Eve and went to the office party alone. I figured I’d stay for a while and get drunk if I could. Char was there with a blind date and at some point we both wound up outside on the patio trying to escape the noise. It was around ten o’clock and we sat outside and talked, and it was surprisingly comfortable. When the noise inside got louder we realized it was nearly midnight and she stood up and mumbled something about going inside to find her date because hell, you start the new year with a kiss. I told her that you only did that if you wanted to end the next year with the person you started it with, and considering he hadn’t even looked for her in nearly two hours, did she really want to end the year with him?

If she had wanted to, we could hear people inside counting down and she’d never be able to find him in time. So yeah, I did it. When the horns and poppers started going off I kissed her. I was still technically married and didn’t have a right to, but I had that feeling that I wouldn’t mind one bit if I ended the next New Years Eve with her. And she kissed me back, really kissed me, so I was sure I hadn’t ticked her off.

It couldn’t be that simple though. I would have liked for it to have been. She didn’t mind being my NYE kiss and wasn’t opposed to the idea that in a year we might be at the same party and be there together. But, she didn’t want to be the first woman I dated post-divorce. And she didn’t want to be the only woman I dated post-divorce. Before she would even think about even just one date, she wanted me to see other people. How many?

If I dated twenty five different women, she would go out to dinner with me (and this is where I seriously disappointed my son, who in spite of wishing that his mother had been the only woman ever in my bed, assumed that I had slept with all 25. I did not. Not even one of them.) At first I was annoyed because it made no sense to me. Why 25? Why even one? Why risk that I might fall for someone else? She stuck to it. If I didn’t date 25 different women, she wasn’t going out with me. Period.

I whined about this to Dack. I didn’t know 25 women to begin with. He picked up the phone and called one of the women he dated off and on and asked her to be my first date, just lunch somewhere public. She was in the building’s secretarial pool, and after that lunch date she spread the word: Murf is on a mission. He needs 24 more dates and he wants them to be over with as quickly as possible so that Charlie Simms will give him a chance.

She lined up 20 dates for me, and they all knew why. And at some point Dack told my soon to be ex what I was up to, and she set me up with four more. When I asked her why she shrugged it off and said she wanted me to be happy, she knew Char and didn’t see a reason why we wouldn’t fit together. She suspected we would.

In a little over a month I went out with as many women as she said she wanted me to. She didn’t believe it at first, not until Dack backed me up. And I don’t think she ever knew how I managed it (not until now. They were all pity dates agreed to by women who wanted to see me get the girl. I’m not too proud to admit that.) She agreed to the dinner date, and then another after that. She stuck by me through the hassles of the divorce and the application for an annulment, yet wouldn’t help me pick out furniture for my apartment (and without help I admit, I wound up with just a mattress on the floor, a couple of lamps, and my laptop.) I thought it was resistance into getting that far into my life, turns out she didn’t want to help furnish an apartment she hoped I wouldn’t be in for too long. I stayed in that apartment for a lot longer than either of us expected or wanted me to, because one of us held back for almost 10 months. She didn’t whine too much about that.

A year after that first kiss we were at the office NYE party together. We made sure that when midnight was close we were right next to each other. I know she expected me to kiss her, but I don’t think she expected me to propose.

A couple of weeks later we realized the rabbit hadn’t passed out from excitement, it was dead. We’d planned on getting married during summer, but that changed everything. I wasn’t willing to wait any longer than we had to, and two weeks after that we got married. Alex is not upset that he was born just seven months later, most of the time he thinks it’s funny.

When he was quizzing me about how Char and I met, and how we fell for each other, it wasn’t quite as funny. He had a very adult reaction to it: do I regret that I didn’t get to spend a few years alone with her, enjoying kid-less life before starting a family?

Absolutely not. By the time we realized she was pregnant I’d spent over a year falling for her (and without embarrassment I’ll freely admit that I fell so deeply that I still sweat mushy things), and that he came earlier than we would have planned was like icing on the cake.

All in all I think Alex is now (mostly) okay with knowing that I have a first wife, because he’s done the math and realizes I’ve been married longer this time around and he’s starting to understand just how important his mother is to me. He won’t really get it completely until he’s grown but that’s all right. He only has to accept it for now.