Being Relearned...by Denise Hildreth Jones

     Our prompt this month was to write a blog based on our spouses having to live with "creative lunatics." Not that hard since I fall into both the creative and lunatic category. In fact, when I just sat my husband down and asked him what his thoughts were on the topic he simply asked, "Do all creative people have an inability to remember where their keys are?"
(I am secretly hoping that is a creative issue and not an age issue...)

The interesting fact is my husband and I just celebrated our one year anniversary. I was married for thirteen years before him. Thirteen years that I had hoped would turn into thirty and then sixty. Turns out it was only thirteen. And at the age of 38 I found myself without children and single...again. It was an interesting season for me. Actually, it was a beautiful season for me, and a season of rediscovering my heart. That season birthed two books in me. One was "Flying Solo." A book I never wanted to write and one I wish people didn't feel the need to read. But yet, found it healing for both me and readers. It is the actual journals from the first year after my divorce, beginning on the actual day I went to court to hear the judge declare my marriage over.

The other book  I wrote was my first fiction novel following my divorce. After a divorce you wonder if you'll ever write again. It's like a death. You wonder if there will ever be anything that moves in the soul of you for the rest of your life. Thankfully, something did. And it was "Hurricanes in Paradise" which was a novel based on four single women who are single at different stages and for different reasons, divorce, widowhood and never married.

So when I met my precious future husband I wasn't expecting him...Nor the package he came with. Five beautiful children. I remember telling my counselor one day who was walking me through the healing of my divorce and telling him, "I don't want to be relearned."

He said, "When you meet that right person you're going to love being relearned."
"But what if he doesn't want to read my books."
He said, "The man who falls in love with you will want to read your books."

And he has and he does. In fact, he is currently reading "Flying solo". Which for him, reading about the heartbreak of another man in my life has been an interesting journey for us to travel together. He dog ears pages and comes home and asks me questions, and in the process he is learning me.

I asked him, while we were sitting on the porch a few minutes ago, (because I completely forgot this was due...) if he had anything to say. He said, "When I read one of your stories I encounter a piece of you that I don't usually encounter. It's like there is this compartment in your brain that your books give me access too."

Then he added, "And I'm glad you have a outlet for all that creativity in your brain, because I'm thinking it keeps you from using it on the house. i.e., moving the furniture around every week."

While, I don't do that, I do spend a great deal of time in the closet. (Well, not quite as much as I did the first six months.) I told him after we got married, "If I'm in the closet leave me. I'll be out eventually." For a woman who spent almost 40 years without children in her own little world of makeup characters, to encounter such real characters all the time can send you to the closet. I was speaking one day and shared that story and a lady told me I should make my closet a bunker with food and a porta-potty!

Thankfully, I've been given a wonderful man who handles my mood swings, deadlines and even endures reading my books. As we have begun life together I have found the life we live creeping into my new stories. And this richness of the life I am now privileged to live creeping into my heart. Who could want for more...

Philly and Denise Hildreth Jones make their home in Franklin, Tn with her five bonus children. They like bike rides, little league games, family dinners and Sweet CeCe's icecream. And every now and then she finds the time to write a few books.
Her latest novel, "The First Gardner" will be in stores August 1st.
www.denisehildrethjones.com