It's All About Him (12 page)

Steamboat was snow-covered, beautiful . . . and absolutely desolate for me. My friends were wonderful, but all I could think about was Alan's looming departure.

As we were heading home and the plane barreled down the runway in Steamboat Springs, there was a huge rumble and thud. Maybe it was an engine misfiring. All I knew was that I'd never heard anything like it in all my years of flying, and we were just about to take off, the most critical time in the flight. I thought that the plane was going to crash.

I SLOWLY CLIMBED THE CURVING STAIRCASE TO OUR MASTER BEDROOM SUITE AND PUT MY SUITCASE DOWN.

MOST OF ALAN'S THINGS WERE GONE.

I CRAWLED BETWEEN THE COOL, CRISP SHEETS IN OUR QUEEN-SIZED BED. ALONE.

Oddly enough, though, I didn't feel any fear at all. All I could think was that at least death would release me from this terrible emotional pain. For the first time in my life, I could begin to understand a little of what my brother Ron may have felt like before he took his own life. I wasn't suicidal—I knew I could not leave our children—but I felt absolutely overwhelmed by desperation and misery. I could understand how people can become dependent on alcohol or drugs. Anything to relieve the relentless pain.

Our flight from Steamboat made it into the air, and we arrived safely back in Nashville. I slowly climbed the curving staircase to our master bedroom suite and put my suitcase down. Most of Alan's things were gone. I crawled between the cool, crisp sheets in our queen-sized bed. Alone.

Alan came back the next day . . . but only to retrieve a few clothes and to visit with the girls. And then I watched the only man I'd ever loved drive down the long road that led out of our dream home, away from the life we'd built together.

Alan soon realized that the lake house was too far away for him to visit regularly with the girls, so he rented a house close to the kids' school. He'd pick them up and take them out for ice cream, a movie, the park. As always, when he wasn't out of town, he wanted to be with the girls as much as possible. Both of us wanted to keep our emotions at bay and make life seem “normal.” Whatever that was.

When we told Mattie and Ali that Daddy was going to live somewhere else,Mattie shook her head back and forth, tears on her round cheeks.

“But nothing's wrong!” she cried. “Why? Why?”

That was my question too.No marriage was perfect. Why did he expect so much? Why could he not just be happy with the way things were?

I also realized that I had known, down deep, Alan was right. Our relationship wasn't all it could be. But I hadn't wanted to face that fact, and so I'd buried it inside me somewhere. Now I thought back over our years together. Where did we go wrong?

Certainly the celebrity lifestyle had had its challenges, but we had weathered them pretty well. Alan was on the road a lot, and it always surprised me how some women threw themselves at him. Some enamored fans would go to any extreme to get his attention. I couldn't believe how aggressive they were. I'd tease him about it. “Baby, I don't remember women reacting to you like that when you were working second shift at the Newnan Kmart.”

He'd just laugh. But he had to admit that all the attention made him feel good. His job was not unlike any other traveling job—there are always temptations, no matter who you are. When I had taken my flight attendant job, our families had wondered about the same issues for me.

The Quest to Feel Special

But regarding Alan, the swirls of rumors, innuendo, and viable concerns disturbed me.He had had a life on the road, and I wasn't part of it. We had agreed that my being home with our girls would help create a more “normal” childhood for them. Although that was wonderful, it wasn't always tremendously stimulating. Like many stay-at-home mothers, many nights I'd think back over the hours and wonder,
What did I really accomplish today?

I had done important things, for sure: pushing one little daughter on a swing, helping another with an art project, fixing dinner, calling a friend who'd lost her dad. But people in the world aren't particularly impressed with such seemingly small accomplishments, and sometimes I felt that I didn't have a whole lot of purpose or worth in other people's eyes. I didn't have some product or creation or tangible accomplishment to show for my time.

Meanwhile, Alan was growing professionally, constantly making new music, thriving in his songwriting and singing life, striving toward new creative goals. He'd been releasing albums and receiving awards, recognition, and plenty of praise in his music, as well as getting all kinds of personal attention in the celebrity spotlight.

LIFE REVOLVED AROUND WHAT ALAN DID—NOT BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HE WANTED, BUT BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I WANTED.

IF SOMEONE HAD ASKED ME MY FAVORITE FOOD, OR MUSIC, OR MOVIE, I WOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN.

BUT I KNEW ALAN'S.

If Alan was growing in his work and getting plenty of personal affirmation, I felt like I was shrinking. After all, most of my identity was rooted in pretty superficial things: how I looked and what people thought of me—or what I thought they thought of me. I didn't have the deep roots of security that come from knowing real significance in a personal relationship with God.

And as I'd drifted from faith over the years, the only anchor in my life was Alan. Tethered to him, I had a sense of who I was. By his side, I was a woman to be envied. Life revolved around what Alan did—not because that's what he wanted, but because that's what I wanted. If someone had asked me my favorite food, or music, or movie, I wouldn't have known. But I knew Alan's.

Over the years, he had become my foundation. So when he left, there was nothing left for me to depend on. My house had been built on shifting sands, and now in the storms of fear, anger, pain, and confusion, I felt like everything was going to collapse.

Another awful thing about the break in our marriage was that it wasn't just our private problem. It was public. Tabloids ran all kinds of painful headlines; reporters we'd never met speculated on our most personal thoughts. Ironically, I'd just been featured in a book that profiled “intimate interviews with the wives of today's hottest country superstars.” I had to catch the publication before it came out and write an addendum to the chapter that profiled our story. There was a new chapter to our chapter, so to speak.

“Until this point in my life,” I wrote, “I have had no major crises of any kind other than the sudden death of my brother Ron. This separation [has been] the most devastating experience I have ever gone through.” I went on to write that I just couldn't imagine being faced with the possibility of being divorced from the only man I had ever loved—the man I had been with for more than two decades.

Alan was in pain too. His stomach was in a knot, and he lost twenty-five pounds in a few weeks. But he didn't want to settle anymore for an uneven partnership. I had become so needy and dependent, and he wanted something more. He wanted a woman who would be an equal partner, someone he could respect and admire.

I'm not saying that the break in our marriage was all about
my
shortfalls. Alan is the first to admit that he made bad choices. He had come to a point in his life, too, where he was realizing that all the material things in the world did not buy happiness. Everyone knows that . . . but it's another thing altogether to experience it. Alan had realized his greatest goals of music success, stardom, and enormous wealth and fame. But it didn't fill his heart.

One day he stood in front of our 25,000-square-foot mansion, looking over the perfect house and the perfectly manicured grounds and the perfect garages full of cars and boats and airplanes . . . and he whispered, “I'm still not happy.”

In some ways I became the focal point of Alan's unhappiness. If all the long-sought pleasures of career success, stardom, and wealth weren't making him happy, then it must be the deficits in his marriage that were the root cause of his dissatisfaction.

But it's not up to me to analyze Alan's mind-set back then— or even now. After all, this is my story, and it was right about this point in it that I was finding a new beginning.

I started taking baby steps toward a new way of thinking that eventually led to a new kind of happiness. I already knew that no amount of material stuff could bring contentment. I'd seen sad people frantically acquiring more and more jewels, houses, clothes, cars, vacation properties, booze, drugs, food . . . and still feeling empty inside. And I was realizing, too, that no human relationship—even if it seems “perfect”—can really satisfy the deepest longings of a person's soul.

This was radical for me.

After all, I'd been on a lifelong quest to feel good about myself based on who I was with. When I was a young girl, I'd try to get close to a certain uncle whenever he was visiting. He was a war hero who'd received a Congressional Medal of Honor, and when I was sitting next to him at the dinner table, I felt special because he was special. I remembered how I longed for attention from my parents. No matter how much they gave, I always wanted more hugs, more applause, more assurances that I was their most amazing child. When I got a little older, I always had a boyfriend by my side until Alan came into the picture . . . and ever since then, how I felt about myself had depended on how I thought Alan felt about me.

No more. Little, tiny, tender shoots of new growth were peeking out of my soul. The devastation of Alan's departure was leading to a new beginning, new freedom, and the utter security of a new love I had looked for all my life.

Chapter 14
LETTING GO

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There's light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free!

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face;
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

Helen H. Lemmel,
“Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”

S
ometimes on golden fall afternoons I walk down to the huge S oak tree that has guarded the river at the edge of our property for more than five hundred years. It was there before Tennessee became a state, long before the United States of America even existed.

Around the time Christopher Columbus sailed his wooden ships toward the New World, an acorn the size of a thimble sent a tiny green shoot into the soil we now call ours. Rains came and watered the small sprout. Shawnee Indians floated down the river in long canoes. Hunters killed deer near the riverbank and scraped their hides with hard, white flints we sometimes find buried in the soil today.

The sapling grew, sending its roots deeper and deeper into the earth. Its branches became home to birds and squirrels. Its trunk widened over the decades. Centuries passed, and its upper branches reached toward heaven. Wild storms tossed it; the blazing sun scorched it; the raging river flooded it. But still the tree stood firm.

Sometimes when I look up at that massive oak, I can't help but think of how Jesus talked about trees. He slept under the stars and lived most of His life outside, so it makes sense that He'd tie spiritual truths to nature's everyday sights.

MAYBE IT TOOK ALAN'S LEAVING TO REALLY RIVET MY ATTENTION ON THE ONE WHO WOULD NEVER LEAVE ME. I HAD ONLY THE TINIEST MUSTARD SEED OF FAITH . . . BUT IN THE END, GOD USED IT TO BUILD A STABLE HOME FOR ALL OF US.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” Jesus said. “Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”
¹

Today, when I stare up at the blue skies above the great tree, I think back to the point in my life when my husband left and the storm winds blew. I wasn't much of a tree; I was more like a twig. I had just begun to put my roots back down in the faith of my youth. I was just beginning to turn my eyes to Jesus, to consider what was really important in life. I had been distracted for many years by the passing pleasures and pressures of this world, but now I was coming home, so to speak.

Maybe it took Alan's leaving to really rivet my attention on the One who would never leave me. I had only the tiniest mustard seed of faith . . . but in the end, God used it to build a stable home for all of us.

Putting My Roots Down Deep

During the early days of our separation, I continued life's normal routines. Mattie and Ali went to school; baby Dani was a wonderful comfort. But my strongest means of support and growth came from my relationships with the women in my weekly Bible study.

Jane, the friend from the girls' school who hosted the study, was our organizer. Raised in Memphis, she was (and is) the epitome of Southern graciousness. We jokingly called her “Mother Jane”; she was the mother duck who kept the rest of us in line when we waddled off-topic. We'd meet in Jane's cozy family room, sitting in a circle, some of us dressed for the day, and some in sweats and no makeup. The casualness and security came from the long-standing bond that we had with each other. We went through a study called
Breaking Free,
authored by the wonderful Bible teacher Beth Moore.