Lara
This is Lara. She’s been my best friend and rock for the past twenty-two years, and I couldn’t imagine my life without her love, understanding, and grace.
No matter what we’ve gone through, she’s always had my back and is irreplaceable in every way. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the man I am today because of her.
- Kyle Dumas
Pat Leighton and I formed Team We on April 11, 1999. We were in a lap pool in Oakland, California. We were swimming in adjacent lanes. I was impressed with both her breast stroke and her breasts. So, I initiated a conversation when we each stopped at one end of the pool, just because. Step by step we got to know each other.
I was attracted to her beautiful smile, eyes, and light. The conversation revealed many similarities: we are the same age, both born in ‘48, both raised in the East Bay, and both had two sisters. Then again, we each loved swimming, the outdoors, walking and we’d each belonged to Oakland’s Athens Athletic Club as kids.
We lived separately until we’d had sixteen years of getting to know one another.
Pat
Two keys to our becoming a championship team: my commitment to men’s work—learning to live by standards; and her commitment to sobriety and to living by AA’s steps and traditions.
Every year brings us closer. We know each other better, learn about ourselves from the feedback we give each other, respect each other more, and increasingly support each other to win. No free agency for us, till death do us part.
– Michael Burns
It was the year 2000. Though I was divorced, we still raised a daughter together. I had gone on many dates and met many women but hadn’t found anyone I wanted a long-term relationship with.
Pam
Then, in 2020, a friend wanted me to meet someone named Pam. I said no. I’d recently ended a short relationship and was not interested in dating. But for the next month I was being driven crazy. “Come on, meet Pam!”
Apparently, she was going through the same scenario. So finally, when the hounding got to be too much, I chose a Starbucks near my place.
My plan was to buy her a coffee and leave thirty minutes later. Some plan… two hours later we were still at it!
Pam changed my world. She’s a nurse, a healer. She’s bnold, beautiful, and brilliant and her kindness spills over into everything. She has taught me how to love again, how to trust.
I’ve learned when not to speak, how to still love even when I want to yell at them and don’t.
Not wanting to meet her somehow made her my partner. My companion. The person I want to talk with, share with. The one who taught me to love again.
No matter what we’ve gone through, she’s always had my back and is irreplaceable in every way.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m the man I am today because of her.
– Sandy Peisner
. . .and Who Love Us!
En Español
Cuando uno se casa, hay una verdad universal que nadie te explica en la boda: tu esposa pasa a ser la “número uno oficial”. Y si no lo entiendes rápido, te lo explican… varias veces.
El problema no es tu esposa ni tu madre, sino aprender que son vínculos distintos que coexisten al mismo tiempo, cada uno con su propio lenguaje, su historia y su manera de ocupar espacio en tu vida. Y uno, con suerte o con torpeza, intenta no convertirse en un mal gestor emocional del hogar. Y entonces aprendes que el amor no se divide, se ajusta. No compite, se acomoda. Y tú te vuelves, sin pedirlo, en algo parecido a un director de orquesta: cada relación tiene su instrumento, su ritmo y su momento para brillar.
Error clásico de principiante: comparar la comida de tu esposa con la de tu madre. No lo hagas. Nunca. No porque una sea mejor que la otra, sino porque ambas pertenecen a universos emocionales distintos. Una cocina desde el amor buscando despertar la memoria y la nostalgia, la otra lo hace con esfuerzo estratégico para mantener la paz en la casa… y ambas merecen reconocimiento y aplauso obligatorio.
Luego están las hijas, si tienes suerte. Ahí el sistema colapsa: todas son “la número uno”. Cada una te exige presencia total en su propio momento.
Doris (Mom)
Es básicamente gestión diplomática en tiempo completo.
Lo curioso es que uno sobrevive porque aprende una regla básica: cada mujer en tu vida tiene su propio trono… y ninguno es plegable.
En mi caso, tengo suerte. Mi madre y mi esposa se quieren, lo cual me salva de muchas negociaciones internas tipo Naciones Unidas. Yo solo observo, sonrío y digo “sí, amor” en el momento correcto.
Y sí… dicen que uno elige a su esposa por parecido con su madre. En mi caso, eso explicaría muchas cosas… pero prefiero no investigarlo demasiado.
In English
When you get married, there is a universal truth that no one explains to you at the wedding: your wife becomes the “official number one.” And if you don’t understand it quickly, they explain it to you… several times.
The problem is not your wife or your mother, but learning that they are different bonds that coexist at the same time, each one with its own language, its history and its way of occupying space in your life. And one, with luck or clumsiness, tries not to become a bad emotional manager of the home.
And then you learn that love doesn’t divide, it adjusts. It doesn’t compete, it accommodates. And you become, without asking for it, something similar to an orchestra conductor: each relationship has its instrument, its rhythm and its moment to shine.
Then there are daughters, if you’re lucky. There the system collapses: everyone is “number one.” Each one demands total presence from you in its own moment. It is basically full-time diplomatic management. The funny thing is that you survive because you learn a basic rule: every woman in your life has her own throne… and none of them are foldable.
Adriana (Wife)
In my case, I’m lucky. My mother and my wife love each other, which saves me from many United Nations-type internal negotiations. I just watch, smile and say “yes, love” at the right moment. And yes… they say that one chooses his wife because of his resemblance to his mother. In my case, that would explain a lot… but I prefer not to investigate it too much.
- Javier Hernandez
Karen
My wife is a consummate professional, but what’s special about her doesn’t show up on a resume.
She has seen me…across decades – my growth, my struggles, and my reinventions – and she’s still there. She doesn’t just love me at my best; she’s chosen me across my full arc. She shapes my deeper “why”, even if we express it differently.
Esther (Mum)
On the last day of her life, Esther MacDonald gathered her large and extended family for a meal in the private dining room at her seniors’ residence. She wore the burgundy dress with white pearls that she had picked out two years before. She always dressed well.
One month earlier Esther, who had many ailments, had been accepted into the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program. In a final act of caregiving, she told us she wanted to die before Christmas to save everyone from travelling home twice.
This gathering was a celebration of life while she was still in it. Esther Stead was born on a small farm in Prince Edward Island and grew up there during the Depression.
By 18, she left PEI to work in a bakery in Saint John, New Brunswick, where she met Ken MacDonald, the one and only love of her life. For their honeymoon, Esther and Ken took a cruise all the way from east Saint John to west Saint John. They shared a hot dog and Coke. Before long they had a baby boy, then another, then a baby girl.
Mum was a long-standing member of the Red Hat Society and an accomplished five-pin bowler. She loved nothing more than heading out for high tea with family and friends. What she didn’t like was bad food. The day before her death, during lunch at a high-end restaurant, Esther didn’t like her chicken. The waiter offered to bring her another. “No,” she said, adding wryly, “I won’t be eating here again.”
She is an Occupational Therapist while I do addiction therapy. She’s built a life alongside me.
She brings strength where I need grounding and meets me where I stand (or fall). She has stayed through massive excavation and evolution of my soul, not just in comfort.
She brings strength, intelligence, and independence, yet still choses us – again and again.
We don’t just share time, we share a deeper mission, and that is what makes her, and us, rare.
- Jeff and Karen Craven
One of my favorite stories is about how I Met my wife.
My girlfriend had broken up with me because, she said, we were too similar. Before her I’d had had a series of short-term relationships, ones I’d regarded as potentially becoming long term. Yet they hadn’t panned out either. I was tired of mucking around in relationships I didn’t know how to have—or at least how to be successful with.
Alice
I told my (men’s) team I was giving up—and I did. For the next three years I just went out and did the things I liked to do. I participated in leadership in Mentor, Discover, Inspire (MDI).
I went to all the concerts I wanted to see. And I made no plans for being in a relationship ever again. I met my wife at a friend‘s house after spending the night there. She was in the breakfast nook.
She had just moved into the house a couple of weeks before and over the course of our conversation we just really hit it off. For one thing, I learned that she liked music like I liked music.
After going to all those concerts alone, I thought it would be great to have a buddy to go with. So, I invited her to see Joe Craven with me the following week. She said, “Sure. I like Joe Craven.” Wow!
So we went! And that’s when I asked her if I could ask her out. And she said “Yes!”
It turned out that Alice had also given up. But she showed up like the girlfriend I’d always dreamed of but never thought it was possible I’d meet.
Somebody who would just accept me for who I was, and who would want to spend their life with me. A year later I proposed and the following year we got married.
All that was twenty years ago and we’ve been happily married ever since.
- Alice with Tom McCarter
One key to our relationship is that we never argue. Sure, we lose our temper with one other periodically, but we always make up within a minute—literally—because what we have is so precious that neither of us is willing to jeopardize it.
Long ago, Alice put us on a strict budget, and that allowed us to put money away. Now we are retired, we’ve moved into a really nice house, and she’s constantly looking for ways to improve the way we live.
We both enjoy gardening, and clearly we both enjoy music and going to concerts. Too much alike, the ex-girlfriend said? Ridiculous! Alice and I are alike in many ways, but not in many others. She supports me to do whatever it is I want to do and vice versa. I volunteer around in the community and on the men’s teams. She stays home and makes quilts. We’re happy. We’re happy! It may be a cliche, but the hell with it: I feel like one of the luckiest guys on the planet.
She was my grandmother, the matriarch of the Ranseth family.
I was with her when she passed, in April.
She was spunky. She was charming. There was an unmistakable sparkle in her eye.
Even after ninety-one years she continued to laugh and flirt, and I loved her.
Her own love story was with the man she called The Big Guy,my grandfather. They were together nearly sixty-eight years.
He’s been gone for a few years and now and and when she was diagnosed with lung cancer, Dora chose to face it on her own terms. With quiet strength and clarity, she declined treatment, accepting her path with grace.
Dora
She had lived a full life, and she was ready. In the end, she passed as she lived—peacefully, surrounded by those she loved.
- Dora with Joseph Ranseth
For some reason this month always reminds me of that Julio Iglesias song, For All The Girls I’ve Loved Before.
I did have a number of women travel in and out my door, as the song goes. As all men do, I built my collection.
There was a a Cindy, two Jills, a Danielle, a Kelley, an Esther, a Maureen, and a Shelly. There was even a beautiful-but-funky punk rocker who called herself Britain.
She took it so far as to paint the Union Jack on her nails, despite her real name being Laura.
Like Julio, I’m glad they came along, because I learned things from them. I even experienced what I thought was love.
There is one woman, however, whom I’ve known all my life, and who has not traveled in and out my door—certainly not as a member of my collection.
Linda
It is my older sister, Linda. She is my half-sister to be exact, but who’s counting? I’m certainly not.
We were separated by our mother’s first and third marriages. She’s a full-blown Italian, with dark hair, dark eyes, and Mediterranean olive skin.
She was already twenty when I came off the assembly line in 1962 and so Linda’s also my Godmother.
Linda graduated from Chico State with a teaching degree and went on to influence the lives of countless children and younger teachers.
She influenced me, too, as she took care of me when I was very small. She scolded me because I took candy off the toilet tank without flushing. She gave me my first bible—a children’s edition—which I loved though it has since been lost .
Linda taught me how to make a pot of vegetable soup with ground beef, which soothes and nourishes my body and soul to this day.
She also taught me cursive handwriting, which she is a master of. Her cursive is so distinctive and consistent it could be a professional font. She’s sent me countless greeting cards and gifts for holidays and birthdays over the years.
The love she and I have is what the Greeks called agape, a selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional love.
It’s a love that seeks the highest good in others, exemplified by God’s love for humanity.
In short, we are familia. We share the same love for each other that we have for the mother who brought us together. I now have a Linda in my collection, and she and I have a love that lasts forever.
Linda is now 83. I’m so lucky, and thankful, for having her not only in my family, but in my life. I’m dreading the day—though I know it will come—when I learn that Linda’s on the way to her final moments, or that the inevitable has already occurred. But who knows, maybe I’ll be first.
In any case, every man deserves to have a Linda in his collection.
Just ask her husband, Gary.
He stopped collecting when he married her in 1969.
