I threw my paint brush down and demanded my mother explain why she didn’t like my fiancée.
It was summer between my junior and senior year in college. Mom and I were painting a bathroom in my parents’ house. She had just asked if I knew that a prominent man in our community had been engaged to someone else before breaking it off and eventually marrying his wife. I knew this was a veiled suggestion that I break off my engagement.
That was not going to happen. I had known from early on that Mom was not a fan of our relationship. However, starting in middle school, Dad had been pushing me toward getting married early in college. (“You should date an older girl who will graduate before you. Then she can get a job and support you until you’re out of college. Then you can graduate and get a job, and she can start having children.”)
Brad Bull
Although she wasn’t older than me, Dad adored my fiancée — for good reasons. She was brilliant, had an effervescent personality, glowed in beauty and radiated commitment to Christian service.
Still, there was so much about us that didn’t fit, and I was questioning the relationship. But one day during our sophomore year, she approached me with a sly smile and said, “I was just in your dad’s office. He threw his cowboy boots up on the corner of this desk, put his hands behind his head and said, ‘So! When ya gonna marry my son?’”
Father knows best. I discarded notions of breaking up.
Now, 10 months from the wedding, Mom was stirring up the doubts I desperately wanted to suppress. So, I slammed my paintbrush down in disgust.
Rather than the anger I expected in response to my disrespect, Mom looked at me with compassion. “Son, I love her. I love you. Because I love you both, I want what’s best for both of you, and I don’t think you’ve dated enough to know what you want.”
“Rather than the anger I expected in response to my disrespect, Mom looked at me with compassion.”
In the spirit of “True Love Waits,” Dad wanted to prevent premarital sex first and count on a connection emerging later. Mom considered solid connection an essential part of purity. Of course, Mom was right.
Thirty years later, incompatibility ran its course. Along the way, I often envied my friends who waited until they found a good match or got divorced very early. During my divorce process, I called multiple friends who divorced during or shortly after seminary and asked forgiveness for my private condemnation. To a person, their responses were a balm.
What was the source of my condemnation? Most prejudices were not tolerated in my home growing up. However, my father encouraged bigotry against four groups: Northerners, gay people, the obese and the divorced.
Divorce was a profound taboo. When my first wife and I got engaged, my father said, “Let me make this clear. We are only doing this one time.”
We wed two weeks after college graduation. When we returned from our honeymoon, my father took my wife to a spare bedroom and said, “You see this room? This will always be your room. If my son ever leaves you, he will not have a home to come home to; you always will.” He knew that message would be passed on to me. He would not suffer the indignity of having a divorced child.
Thus, the unravelling of my marriage terrified me on more levels than just losing the marriage. Eventually, friends had to say, “Dude. Move on.” So, I did.
But initially, that didn’t go over well. An extended family member wrote and asked me what they could do to help. I said: “I have been lonely for a long time. The best way you can help me is to be understanding when I start dating before the ink is dry on the divorce papers.”
“The unravelling of my marriage terrified me on more levels than just losing the marriage.”
The next day, I got a Tolstoyan email about as long as War and Peace. Not far in I read, “I have friends who got back together after seven years of separation.” I stopped reading and hit print. I took it to my counselor who groaned and grunted as she read it, then looked up and said, “Good call to stop reading this. This is terrible.”
Later I got a message from Mom asking what she could do to help. I replied: “The last time someone asked that, it didn’t go well. I need your unconditional love. I have plenty of people I can go to for advice. When I want your advice, I will ask. I need you to try to understand that I have been lonely a long time and will be dating before the ink is dry on the divorce papers.”
I usually don’t open email until I get to work, but the next morning, I glanced at my email on my phone. There was a message from Mom. I thought, Oh boy, here we go.
A moment and one sentence later I was crying tears of shocked joy. Mom had replied: “Want to go on a double date with me and your dad?”
Describing her 23-year-old self who had never even babysat, she continued: “Son, I feel like I did when we left the hospital after you were born. The nurse laid you in my arms. You had a dirty diaper, and I started crying because I didn’t know what to do. Once again, I don’t know what to do, so I’m just going to pray for you.”
After savoring those words, I wrote Mom that her words were the greatest gift she had ever given me. For context, this was the woman who had insisted on working three years past her planned retirement to pay for my family’s house while I pursued my Ph.D. with a double full-time course load and two part-time jobs.
A few months later, I emerged from a divorce court preliminary hearing. In the parking lot were my super conservative, church-twice-on-Sunday-and-once-on-Wednesday parents. In the back seat was a woman who lived near my parents. I slid into the back seat next to her. We all went out to eat and laughed and talked like high schoolers.
As the ink dried.
And grace flowed.
Brad Bull grew up in East Tennessee. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Carson-Newman University, a master of divinity degree in pastoral counseling from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in child and family studies from the University of Tennessee. He has served as a hospital chaplain, pastor, professor and therapist. He can be reached via his website DrBradBull.com.