It's All About Him (11 page)

My brother's death made me begin to think about my spirituality for the first time in many years. I began to think about life after death, and how some people believed that suicides couldn't go to heaven. But I also knew in my heart that the loving God I knew would never take away Ron's salvation because of a choice he had made in desperation. I thought about eternal life . . . and deliverance from sin . . . and loss.

I also began to admit to myself that our children weren't growing up with a real spiritual perspective. Ali was only eight months old, but Mattie was almost four. She needed to be in Sunday school. I had always felt strongly about the importance of raising my children in the church . . . and now here I was, so happy and busy with our houses, cars, planes, and toys that I hadn't even thought about church—or more importantly, our spiritual lives—in a very long time.

My brother's awful death, however, stopped me cold. What was life really about? Could strength and comfort come from God . . . or was that just nice Sunday school talk that couldn't really apply to the hard challenges of real life?

Those kinds of questions were too disturbing. I didn't know how to answer them. I just wanted to feel better. So I managed to submerge hard thoughts under the fast-running stream of our lives. They would pop up again later, like beach balls that you just can't hold under water . . . but for the time being I focused on more superficial things.

Drifting on a Pretty River

At the end of that year, for our fifteenth anniversary, Alan surprised me even more than he had before with the engagement ring on the night he proposed when we were young. This time it was not a small diamond, however. This was a five-and-a-half-carat emerald-cut diamond with forty smaller diamonds set in a wide yellow-gold band. It reached my knuckle and threw sparkled rainbows in the sunshine. If Alan had surprised me as an eighteen-year-old, now I found myself constantly amazed by his ability to make every situation seem perfect.

A week later, on Christmas morning, he led me out to one of the garages . . . and there was a gleaming black Mercedes convertible with a huge red bow around it. Next to it was a shiny miniature version of the same car with a matching bow . . . for the girls.

These lovely material things distracted me from the unseen beach-ball issues. I continued to push down anything in my consciousness that was painful or unpleasant, and skimmed along on the surface of my life, smiling lightly. Everything seemed perfect to outside observers. And while many things
were
good, all was not well in my inner core. I was drifting, without an anchor.

This didn't just affect
me
, of course. Since I had no real moorings, I was more dependent than ever on Alan's strength. His force of personality carried our marriage. We weren't two people pulling together, eyes ahead on the same goal, complementing each other's differences and strengthening each other.

Instead,my eyes were on Alan. Even though I had been more interested in a renewed relationship with God since Ron's suicide, I was still dependent—or I should say
codependent
—on Alan.

As the years went by, he'd bring it up now and then. He felt like we'd married so young and our relationship wasn't mature. He felt that I wasn't an equal partner, that I was too needy and relied on him too much. Deep down, I knew he was right. I couldn't have identified it at the time, but I feared not having his approval, just as I had so longed for my father's approval when I was a teenager.

Alan's personality didn't help my struggles. He wasn't shy about criticism. “Why do you have to always dress up when we go places?” he'd say. “Can't you just put on a flannel shirt and a baseball cap?”

Well, I didn't really like flannel shirts and baseball caps, but I didn't know that. I didn't know what I liked or didn't like. All I knew was what Alan liked!

So I'd put on a baseball cap and a big plaid shirt just to please him. I don't know if he was intentionally trying to be controlling, or if his desire for me to look different was really about me
acting
different and being less dependent. I resented his control at the same time that I'd bend over backward to comply with it.

At any rate, every once in a while, one-sided discussions would surface in our marriage. For my part, I'd affirm that everything was just fine, go into an ostrich head-in-the-sand denial mode, and on we'd go. As long as everything looked good on the outside, I hid from myself the fact that things weren't so perfect on the inside.

Hair Bows and Letting Go

Even with the children, I cared too much what image they were presenting to the world. I made sure that our little girls had their matching outfits and big bows and little smocked dresses that seemed to be the expected norm within our circle of friends. Everyone looked at us as the “star's family,” seeing if we were coiffed and dressed in the latest fashion. Subconsciously, I think I wanted people to look at Mattie and think,
Oh, look, Mattie's perfect, just like Denise, and Denise is such a good mother!

Mattie was not particularly helpful with this little illusion. She hated ribbons and frills. She'd grab hold of the cute bow in her shiny hair, throw it down on the ground, and be happy as could be. Just like me when I was little—as my daddy had reminded me so often over the years—she wanted to be a boy. She had a boy's bowl haircut, and only wanted to wear boy tennis shoes, jeans, and baggy shirts. She did not want dolls. She did not want tiny monogrammed purses. If I tried to accessorize her, she'd sneak away and take off the cute little pink outfits and put on boyish clothes that didn't match.

At the time, I was so insecure that I thought people would see mismatched Mattie and think I was a bad mother. Now, though, whenever I see a child wearing strange clothes that don't go together, I don't think that she has a bad mother. No, I think she's got a mother with a healthy enough sense of self-confidence that she can let the child dress herself—she's not hyper-concerned about what other people might think.

A Circle of Friends

In fall 1995, Mattie started kindergarten at a private school in Nashville. I was glad to connect with other women who had children Mattie's age. One of them, Jane Smith, sent out an invitation to all the moms of the lower school students, inviting us to be a part of a prayer group in her home. I thought that being a part of this group would be a great way to make new friends, so I joined.

Not only did I form some great, long-lasting friendships, but my time spent with these women was the beginning of my real spiritual growth. We studied Christian parenting books. We confided our concerns for each of our children and prayed for God's blessings and protection for them.

Since I hadn't yet found a church home, Jane invited me to visit hers. We started attending regularly. Mattie had school friends in her Sunday school class, so she enjoyed it. I also found a Sunday school class with a very gifted teacher, Robert Wolgemuth. I was drawn to the Scripture like never before. For the first time in my life, the Bible came alive for me. It was relevant. Personal. True. I began to look forward to Sunday mornings. The Gospel was presented in a way that I could apply it to my everyday life. Finally, my spiritual life was beginning to get back on track.

Dream Home

By this time, we had found a 140-acre horse farm on one of the most beautiful roads in Tennessee. The property itself wasn't particularly scenic, though, since it was rimmed by rusty, barbed-wire fences, and the pastures were full of weeds, sickly trees, and lots of manure. Eighteen years'worth of sawdust from the barn had been dumped beside the gentle river that wound past the acreage. It was a mess.

JUST AS IN HIS SONGWRITING AND PERFORMING LIFE, HIS CREATIVITY AND ENERGY SEEMED BOUNDLESS. EVERYTHING HE TOUCHED TURNED TO GOLD.

But Alan could see past all that to our new, long-term home. We bought it. It took a year just to clean it up, a year when Alan would walk the property every day he was in town, dreaming about its potential.

We built a quaint log cabin at the back of our land, overlooking the Harpeth River, and a red-roofed barn with a large apartment upstairs for guests. Then we built Alan's nineteen-car garage, an enclosed tennis court and basketball gym, and our gleaming white mansion with its curving stairways, breezy porches, and golden ceilings.An elaborate playhouse for the girls was outfitted far better than the houses in which Alan and I grew up. We put in lakes, outdoor fireplaces, gazebos, a white-sand beach, bridges, and waterfalls. There was a two-mile dirt racetrack for dune buggies and a grass runway for Alan's little red plane that he liked to fly now and then. The only thing we could not outbuild on the property was a
natural
wonder: a massive five-hundred-year-old oak tree, its roots sunk deep into the rich soil next to the winding river.

We called our estate “Sweetbriar.” And as our enormous, stately home took shape, we met with designers to choose furniture, fabrics, custom chandeliers, intricate Italian tile, and exquisite carpentry for its interiors. Alan had a vision for every detail, down to the exact shade of gilt paint in the vaulted ceilings. Just as in his songwriting and performing life, his creativity and energy seemed boundless. Everything he touched turned to gold.

Baby Number Three

We moved in to our new home just six weeks before our third baby was due. Her nursery was fit for a princess. Mattie and Ali had waited eagerly for her arrival, not understanding why we couldn't just go to the hospital and get their baby sister out of Mommy's tummy. Once I did go into labor, Alan and I didn't waste any time before we headed to the hospital, remembering that we had almost waited too late with Ali. Still, we were at the hospital less than two hours before Dani Grace was born. (She was named Dani in honor of my daddy and my twin brother. ) She was so beautiful, a perfect blessing. Surprisingly, she was exactly the same birth weight and height as Mattie had been.

Out of concern for our privacy, the hospital had decided to put up a temporary wall at the end of our hall so that no one could find our VIP birthing suite or our new baby. It amazed me how much everything had changed since Mattie's birth seven years earlier. The hospital was not going to take a chance that we would have any uninvited visitors. In fact, they posted a security guard by the temporary “wall” with a list of people we were expecting, and only those on the list were escorted back to our hidden suite. We were treated like royalty, not just at the hospital, but wherever we went. I had a fairy-tale life with my celebrity husband and my three beautiful daughters—one that I could not have imagined back when I was a young girl in Newnan, Georgia.

But then, when Dani was only three months old, a new surprise came from Alan. This surprise was not as welcome as the many he had given me over the long course of our marriage: he told me he was moving out.

Chapter 13
WHEN DREAMS DIE

Where did we go wrong
I wish I knew
It haunts me all the time
Now wherever I go and
Whatever I do
You're always on my mind

So tonight if you turn your radio on
You might hear a sad, sad song
About someone who lost everything they had
It may sound like me
But I'm a little bluer than that

Mark Irwin and Irene Kelley,
“A Little Bluer Than That”

I
stared at Alan. We were sitting in our huge bedroom suite beside the fireplace.

“Denise, I just can't go on like this,” he said. “I just don't know how we can make it right. I'm not sure our relationship will ever be what it should be. That's not fair to either of us.”

He was saying some of the same things he'd brought up periodically over the course of our marriage. He wasn't happy. We had married so young; were we really the best for each other? Or were we just stuck in a rut that we didn't know how to get out of? But then he added something he'd never said before.

“We need to separate. I'll be here for Christmas, for the girls, and then I'm going to the lake.”

My stomach flipped. He was serious enough about this to move out of our home, away from our children.

It was right before Thanksgiving, 1997. Alan and I had been married almost eighteen years. We had come through so much together. We had three beautiful daughters. Mattie was seven, and Ali was four; Dani was just three months old.

Dani would smile a big baby smile when I smiled at her. But I couldn't smile much. Mostly I just cried. What should have been the happiest time in my life had become a bad dream. I was so angry and hurt that I could not really talk to Alan, except in the shortest sentences possible to make plans about the girls.

Relentless Pain

We somehow made it through Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was a terrible strain. We went through the motions of acting normal for the kids. During the holidays one of my girlfriends, trying to help, suggested that we get a group of friends together and take off for Steamboat Springs, Colorado.