My greatest invention will never be patented, licensed, or mass produced. It is my blended family. This [forthcoming] book is dedicated to all of them – my wife Dana, my daughters Eva, Sara and Bel, my ex-wife (and Eva’s mother) Margaret, as well as my daughters’ “bonus brother”, Jack. Invention, you see, lies not in the complexity of a new idea but in the simplicity of challenging old ones.
It was 2004, and my only daughter Eva had just turned three. Recently divorced, living and telecommuting in Fresno where Eva lived and where I was able to have half-time custody of her, I had hit an all time low. I was worrying so much about my situation that I was nearly useless at work. My inventing came to a near standstill because I was too distracted to connect problems with solutions. I felt like I was a failure because I hadn’t been able to stay married. I was sure I had let my daughter down because my family would now be a divorced family. I went to bed and refused to fall asleep because I knew that I would awake having had nightmares.
What an opportunity I had to reinvent myself. What an opportunity I had.
I decided to start dating again. I decided I wanted to meet a woman with a cultural background similar to my own, and with a degree in a subject about which I knew nothing. I thought I would enjoy the comfort of familiarity and the excitement of somebody who thought differently than I did.
I had no luck meeting such a person close to home, so I joined an online dating service. I was immediately drawn to a beautiful woman with the user name “docdana”. I read her profile, and my heart dropped (the sound you just heard was my heart dropping below the floor, since I was already feeling so low). “Are you willing to relocate?” “No,” she answered. “Are you willing to date somebody who is divorced?” Again, her profile said “no”. “Are you willing to date somebody with kids?” A final “no” stared back at me from my laptop.
Inventors learn to embrace their annoyance, commit to solving their problems. My big problem at that moment was that I did not know how I would find the right person when the right person was already staring back at me from my computer screen, telling me the three rules that meant I would never be with her.
Three strikes – and then the inventor genes kicked in. I felt a rush. Innovators know that identifying a “rule” that stands in our way is a huge breakthrough, because rules are not freestanding, immutable objects. Rules are just a snapshot of our assumptions at a specific point in time. I sure didn’t like the rules that “docdana” had, and I was going to approach this as an innovator.
Maybe she had it all wrong. Why wouldn’t she relocate? She said didn’t want to date a divorced man, but could she be convinced? She wouldn’t date anybody with children, but I love Eva – why wouldn’t she? I wrote her a note, striking the best balance I could between brevity, wit, and the quick, punchy sentences that would get my note noticed among the dozens this remarkable woman must receive daily. Maybe each of those “rules” was just a limitation created from a flawed underlying assumption.
To my wonder, she responded. We wrote back and forth, we talked by phone, and as quickly as I could, I arranged to visit her in person. We dated, fell in love, and married. We have since had two more children. Yes! Three flawed assumptions, three “rules” that were not really rules at all. Wouldn’t relocate? She was just assuming that she wouldn’t meet anybody worth relocating for. Wouldn’t date anybody with children? She was just assuming that she wouldn’t like the children – and wow, was that assumption going to change the minute she met my child. Would not marry somebody who had been divorced? She just had the wrong idea about how the family structure would play out.
It was so beautiful because it was completely driven by my subconscious – desire, attraction, intrigue, hope – and I didn’t let my analytical thinking stop me. We have the same ups and downs as other couples, but refusing to accepts limits in the inception of our relationship has cast a wonderful light of possibility over the rest of our relationship.
I knew how critical parental cooperation is to childhood development, and I was determined to keep a strong, healthy relationship with my first wife. As anybody who has been divorced with children will tell you, this is a tall order. My current and former wives could, in a different world, have been close friends. They had plenty in common. Unfortunately, their first interactions were rocky at best. Never giving up, I tried everything I could to warm the relationship. While the vast majority of the work and the credit for achieving that goal rest with those two incredible women, I take great pride in the fact that within a year or two my current and former wives became best friends. We parent Eva cooperatively, and we function as a healthy blended family.
My first wife has since remarried, we all welcomed her new husband into this healthy family ecosystem, and had a child. My two youngest daughters now have a “bonus brother” born not of blood but of a loving extended family. My oldest daughter has continuity of parenting, and a very engaged step-mother and step-father. And all of us enjoy a family life that, whatever it’s challenges, was birthed free of the constant acrimony, stress, and trouble that plagues so many blended families. Put simply, the four adults in this blended family are all friends, and that makes everything else much easier and better.
Inventions are all about challenging assumptions. As I discuss in my book, rules are simply a reflection of our assumptions at that moment in time. I knew three of Dana’s “rules” before I met her – she would not relocate, date a divorced man, or date a man with children. While she surely believed in the validity of these rules, it turned out that her underlying assumptions (perhaps, my ego hopes, that she would never meet a man worth doing any of those things for) were wrong. When the underlying assumptions changed, the rules no longer made sense and were quickly ignored. I knew the “rules” of post-divorce parenting – even the best intentioned parents could cooperate on parenting issues but the relationship would never be warm enough to truly feel more “family” than “blended”. Those rules, too, were built on a faulty assumption (perhaps that the bad feelings generated by a divorce would necessarily taint all that comes after). When I refused to accept that assumption (and my current and former wives joined me in rejecting it), the “rules” about blended families quickly crumbled.
We all live in a world of our own invention. Some inventions are closer to home, some can be built, some can be sold, some can be lived, but all are built on a stubborn refusal to blindly accept the validity of rules without looking at the underlying assumptions.
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