“So, you knew my husband....” but you don't know me.

Hardly a day goes by without some meeting about the businesses I’ve been suddenly thrust into.  They are usually meetings with men.  I don’t mean with my brother-in-law.  I mean with other associated people who did business with my husband.

I discovered I have been known or thought of not as me, but as an appendage to Lance.  Hey, I’m happy to have been his other half, but...obviously these men knew me only in the capacity of being his family, his wife, his lover, but not as an individual who may actually have had a life of her own, separate from Lance, as an individual. I’m reduced to feeling like I need to whip out some knitting needles or something when we have our meetings.  “Excuse me, Donna Reed died awhile back.  Remember?”

In their eyes, I’m the traditional “little woman” who couldn’t possibly have a clue what an investment IRA account is...even though I have been contributing to mine for years because I happen to have worked throughout most of our married life, including the past 17 years as a small business owner.  

Do I really need to sit across from a man, just two years older than I, who feels he needs to “illustrate” on a legal pad a series of three boxes representing our IRAs...Lance’s, mine, and the third (drawn in the middle no less) to represent the new merging of our two accounts now?  Me either.  But he did.  Groan.

Did I need him to say, “Lance has a favorite charity.”?  Good grief, I was with him for 30 years and I don’t know what charities he/we support?  Knit one, pearl one.  So, I look up over my reading glasses and said, “I also have a favorite charity I support.”  The look on his face was to die for.  It was all I could do to keep from snickering, and I’m not much of a snickerer.

"Oh, you have your own charity you support?"  He says as though this is a foreign concept.  

Finally I get to tell him some of who I am, why I support Children of the Night.  After all, he does still want me as a customer now doesn’t he?  

I may be a tad rough on him as I look back on this, but it is 2009...which means his talking down to me as well as taking up an hour and a half of my (also valuable) time (for what should have been a twenty minute meeting) was...pitiful. 

Yet some of the worst things he said were his parting words casually thrown out as I stood up, ”Are you healthy?”  Well... yes, but then so was my husband until he wasn’t.    

But the real corker came after I had answered that question, when, as his parting statement to me he said, “Well, you look good.”  And this has what to do with you investing my IRAs?  

  ~~~

The next story is about me going to pick up a watch of Lance’s , one I want to wear so it was necessary to have some of the links removed.  It was a little emotional for me because of the nature of the errand.  The one thing which made it a little easier was knowing the jeweler for over a decade, and in fact, having been a partner with him for that long, until I closed my business.

I walk in and ask, “So, how are you?”  This seemed to have opened opened his personal floodgates, “Oh... not too good.  I’m being sued.”  He wanted to go beyond pleasantries.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear this.”  Which I thought was appropriate, and would end it, especially knowing the fragile state I am in...or the one he would soon ascribe to me.

"How are you Sheila?  You must feel horrible. "

Could I then be expected to answer anything else other than, "Yes, I feel horrible."?  Even if it was not one of the worst days I had experienced,  I could feel his expectation that I had to meet, therefore turning my day into his reality.  It didn't matter if I was actually feeling sort of good before I walked through those doors, he needed for me to feel horrible to validate his perception of how he would feel.  In fact, how he did feel.

He didn't hear me say, "Oh, I feel pretty good today."  

Instead he went on and on about every worse case scenario his mind chad come up with over the past 72 hours, since he had heard about the lawsuit.  Obviously something I do too (going over the worst that could happen), but for about as long as it takes to go there and see it does nothing productive for me to worry about.  What will be will always unfold and reveal itself in good time.

“I couldn’t tell anyone about this, I have nobody to talk to.  I think if I told my wife she might divorce me.”

Surely he is kidding.  I know his wife, and his children...she would divorce you because of some seemingly unfounded lawsuit.  Oh brother, you are in more serious trouble than a lawsuit.  What do you say to this?  Nothing.  I just listened as he let spill every detail...obviously he needed someone to listen, and because I walked through his door, I was it.

When he finally finished all of the confusing details, I digested it, and wondered if I, having been married to an attorney, was why he told me all of this.  I mean, he only knows me through our past jewelry dealings...but I gave him the same advice my husband would have done, “Don’t volunteer anything you know.   It is up to them to prove you guilty, not for you to prove your innocence.”  A concept most of us seem willing to ignore these days, whether it be a condemnation of a new President, to some serious allegations about the mental stability of a political party.  Sweeping views not stopping to see how many different individual views might get swept up in the generalizations. I'm guilty of it too.  The banker is having his meetings by rote...formulaic based on his past perceptions. It's time for all of us to rethink our perceptions.

If we reach into the bag of world problems and pull any one out, will we see the guilt finger we ascribe pointing at it?  I think most of us have to say "yes".  And not because we thought it through fully, but because we let the mass of talking heads convince us, whether on tv or in the many blog posts reviling something or someone.  The noise of it all gets to be too much.  It's easier to get swept up in the debris of the mass than to stand out as an individual.  It's safer.

The same thing happened with my jeweler, it’s just I happened to come along and I listened to him.  If we all listened more and talked less I wonder how many individuals we would discover?  I am one.  The banker now knows.

Should my friend be talking this over at home with his wife? Yes, but I am forced to see him as an individual now, something his wife doesn't see anymore.

How do I react to people now?  Do I also assail people with the assumption of who they appear to be versus who they are outside of the given situation?  Yes, only now I will be more aware of individuals...time to put away those proverbial knitting needles and stand up.

Widowhood, I keep hoping I'll look fat in it, but I don't. The world just isn't black and white.