It was a warm sunny Friday afternoon, one of those perfect fall days that we get here in the Carolinas. The kind of day convertibles were made for. With the top down on my Miata, my friend TeTe and I were enjoying the fresh air, enthusiastically singing along with the Dixie Chicks. It felt great to relax after spending all week unloading crepe myrtles and hydrangeas, pursuing my current career at a plant nursery.

I must admit to feeling a little sorry for myself, driving past beautifully landscaped lawns and grand old estates…my current living situation was a far cry from this neighborhood. My life was not turning out the way I had planned. Not at all.

As we passed by those stately historical homes, I wondered what the lives of their owners were like, imagining their perfect lives. On the wrap-around porch of one of the more graceful homes, sat a woman and several children. Surely they were waiting for daddy’s car to turn into the driveway. The mother, young and pretty, dressed nicely in a crisp, colorful sundress, and her two young daughters, dressed alike in the same, sitting on either side of her. A tow-headed little boy in his bright blue jumpsuit played on the lawn, running in circles around a puppy, playful sounds coming from both of them.

Envy filled me, and I said to TeTe, “Look at them. I bet they have the perfect life.”

I’ve never forgotten her answer. “You never know. She might be looking down at us, seeing two young women, singing and laughing, their hair flowing in the breeze, top down on the convertible, thinking how lucky those girls are to be free and happy and heading someplace fabulous on a Friday afternoon. Maybe she thinks our lives are perfect.”

At that moment, my life was anything but perfect. I was living in a half-way house after having lost my medical license and my marriage. Work was hard to find for an unemployed surgical resident; I’d been lucky to get a job in a local plant nursery, making little better than minimum wage. And as far as heading someplace fabulous on a beautiful Friday afternoon…we were headed to a twelve-step meeting. Not most people’s idea of fabulous.

I had heard the saying, “don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides,” but this was the first time it really made sense to me.

I learned several things that day.

Not to assume that I knew what was going on in others’ lives by how they “looked.” Maybe they were the perfect family and were just waiting for daddy to come home…but maybe daddy wasn’t coming home, or maybe mommy had a health problem. Maybe they were practically bankrupt. In all likelihood, they had their own struggles and worries that just weren’t apparent on the outside. I began to understand that the outside did not always show the truth of what was inside.

As I thought about her comment, I realized just how much emphasis I did place on the external. How most of my many insecurities were based on how things looked from the outside…how I looked from the outside. Was I too fat? Wearing the wrong clothes? Did I look nervous or uncomfortable? Was my job/car/date/hairstyle cool enough? What if I messed up? Embarrassed myself? Made a mistake?

I could see that in my effort to make the outside look good, I often neglected the more important inside. There had been times, too many times, when I had let my inside suffer in order to keep the outside looking good.

No matter how I felt inside, I had an overwhelming need to be seen by others as being okay, being “fine,” doing well. Even if it meant I starved myself to be thinner, or was in debt from spending too much on clothes or lied and acted like I knew something that I was clueless about. Ultimately I believe my inability to be true to my inside played a role in my drinking. What better way to ignore my inner discomfort than to have a drink or two or three?

I wish I could say that my beliefs and behavior changed right away. They didn’t. But my experience that afternoon was a beginning, an awareness, a glimpse at the importance of not being so quick to judge the external.

Gradually, I have been able to learn how to merge the two halves. How did that happen? With a combination of humbling life experiences, therapy and twelve-step programs, I have become less self-centered. It may sound counterintuitive, but as my pre-occupation with myself lessened, my ability to accept myself, and therefore others, increased. I’m still a work in progress, learning to be okay with my outside and true to my inside. And to look beyond others’ outsides to what lies beneath.

Not all the time and not even perfectly, but enough so that most of the time, I am comfortable in my own skin. I may not be perfect, but I’m just right for me.

I swore I wasn’t ever going to invite my sister to another one of my weddings. After all, she was the only common factor in all of my weddings. Okay, maybe not the only thing, but most everything else was different. Different months…different nationalities…different zodiac signs…As far as I was concerned, the failure of my previous marriages was her fault, and I had grave concerns about her presence at my third.

My first wedding was, well, I guess you could call it emergently spontaneous. We planned for months to get married on our trip to Greece. Unfortunately, we didn’t look into the rules and requirements of getting married in that particular country (I guess we weren’t very detail-oriented…we were in love, what can I say?) Around 10 in the morning of the day we were to fly out of the country, we went to the local Register of Deeds office to pick up a marriage license. As we were explaining our romantic adventure, the clerk began to look uncomfortable. She finally asked, “Excuse me, what county did you say you were getting married in?”

Was she deaf? It was not another county, it was another country. Patiently we began explaining again, only this time she interrupted, saying, “You can’t do that.”

What did she mean…we couldn’t do it? After all this planning? She then explained that the marriage license was good only in this state. We could get married in another county in North Carolina, but not another country, not with this license. We discovered the process to get married in Greece was complicated. To begin with, it required a passport and certified copies of our birth certificates. That part didn’t sound too bad until she got to the part about the birth certificates needing to be translated into Greek! In addition, an affidavit of marriage was required, signed under oath before a Consular Officer in either Athens or Thessalonica, again in both English and Greek. And that wasn’t all. A wedding notice had to be placed in one of their local newspapers in the Greek language and a copy of the notice brought to the Town Hall before we could even apply for a marriage license.

Last but not least, these documents needed to be endorsed with an official Apostille Stamp (whatever that is…) if we were citizens of a country which was party to the Hague convention. Hell, none of us, the clerk included, even knew what the Hague convention was, but we knew there was no way we could get all of that stuff done before our flight left at 5:45 that day.

We walked out of the clerk’s office stunned. What to do? The clerk suggested we have the Justice of the Peace perform the ceremony. Only we needed to hurry up and make a decision as there were only a few slots left in the Justice’s schedule. These were the days before cell phones, so we went to the local pay phone and made some calls. It was hard to find people available on such short notice in the middle of the day. Several quarters later, we got in touch with his best friend and my sister and they agreed to meet us outside the courthouse at 3 that afternoon. That would be cutting it close to our flight departure, but it was the earliest they could meet us. Fortunately, the Justice still had that time slot open.

And so, my first wedding was at the courthouse. This was not my dream wedding. I did not feel anything like a princess in my aqua blue cotton skirt set and beige aerosole flats. My sister was wearing a jean skirt and t-shirt, having run out of her house dressed just as she was. The best man was in a tank top and running shorts. A serious triathlete, he had been in a major bicycle accident the week before and had road rash all along his left side and couldn’t wear anything else without everything sticking to him and causing severe pain. My husband was in jeans and a t-shirt. At least they were his best jeans. We were quite the stunning wedding party. That was number one.

Number two. This time I was older, smarter, better prepared. My fiancé and I even went through pre-marital counseling. What could possibly go wrong?

Once again, my sister was there. This time as a fancy maid of honor since this was my traditional wedding. Everyone should have at least one. I wore the big poofy white dress complete with lace and beads and pearls. A long train. An adorable little white hat with netting and pearls. My bridesmaids wore lovely cocktail length purple silk dresses with heart-shaped cutout backs draped with pearls just like my dress. My husband was dashing in his black tuxedo and…tennis shoes. How cute. He always was one of a kind.

There was only one scary moment. Throwing a temper tantrum as only a four year-old can, the precious little blonde-haired blue-eyed monster…I mean, ring bearer, decided that he didn’t want to wear the black shoes that came with his tux. He screamed loudly and ran whenever his mother approached him with them. Someone was quickly sent shopping for a pair of tennis shoes. Hey, if they were good enough for the groom, they were good enough for the ring bearer, right? At least the ring bearer’s tennis shoes were black…my husband’s were bright white.

The remainder of that day was a blur. This time I did feel like a princess. It was everything I had always dreamed my wedding day would be. So what went wrong? My sister. That bearer of marital strife. The diva of divorce.

Maybe it’s time to come clean about my sister. To accept that just maybe my marital problems were not really her fault. That she really was not the diva of divorce. Hell, she hadn’t ever even been divorced. By the time I was getting married for the third time she had been in a committed relationship with the same partner for over ten years. A happily committed long-term monogamous relationship. It was beginning to look as if maybe she wasn’t jinxing my marriages. So what could it be?

I needed to figure it out because there I was coming up on number three. Third time is a lucky charm, right?

My husband-to-be and I had both been down this road before. He had been married…gasp…even more times than I had. We both knew some people thought we were fools to be trying it again. Several years older and hopefully a lot wiser since our previous marriages ended, we no longer needed another person to make us happy. Instead, we were already happy, and what we wanted was someone to share our lives. So should we…or shouldn’t we?

Well, of course we did. A lot of brainstorming took place planning this wedding, trying to individualize and make significant an act that we had been through before with results that were not what we had hoped. We wanted this ceremony to be reflective of ourselves and the hope that this relationship had given each of us.

My fiancé went with me to pick out my dress…a flowing off-white sheath that made me feel like a beautiful woman…and notice I said woman. Not a cute girl, or a hot babe, or even a princess…but a grown woman.

The beach had always been a place of healing and peace for both of us, making it an easy choice to get married on the beach down from our house. We asked a close friend, Martha, also a therapist, to become a notary public, so that she could marry us. The three of us had several sessions, exploring not only what kind of wedding we wanted but what kind of relationship we wanted, how we wanted to support and love each other…and ourselves. From these sessions developed our ceremony.

And so, on a hot sunny July morning, we were married. The crowd gathered around a wicker archway decorated with ribbons entwined with flowers as Martha called everyone together. I walked out onto the beach from a more southern beach access while my husband-to-be entered a more northern access and we walked towards each other, meeting in the middle at the archway, a walk symbolic of our coming together from different places, of our willingness to meet in the middle, of our status as equals in this relationship.

And my sister? Of course she was there.

Has the third time been a lucky charm? You bet.

I swore that the next time I found damp smelly clothes, left in the washer for way too many days; I was going to kill him. When I noticed one of my favorite photos lying on the table without its frame – and finding that frame downstairs in his room, sporting a picture of his new girlfriend, I decided that if I couldn’t kill him, then at least he should be grounded forever. Who was I talking about? My teen-age stepson, Christopher the alien.

Wait a minute. How did I get so anal? When did I become so rigid? This from the woman who swore that she would never be as meticulous as her mother. Who said she would be more understanding about her own kids. What was the big deal with just putting the clothes through another cycle and throwing them in the dryer myself? So what about him using those special guest towels? After all, they were only towels, easily replaceable at any Target or Belks.

And yet, with every annoyance, came escalating feelings and reactions. I began to express these feelings to my poor husband…under the guise of hearing “Brenda’s” voice in my head, Brenda being my mother. I would say, “While I know it’s not really a big deal, Brenda thinks that Chris shouldn’t eat all but the last spoonful of ice cream and put the container back in the freezer.”

In the beginning, it was great. I could put all of my so-called negative thoughts on Brenda. She could be the bad guy. Which was probably how I had envisioned her for most of my life. The strict one…the rule maker.

But over time, I came to empathize with Brenda, began to see things from her viewpoint. Not that maybe she wasn’t a little too rigid at times, but you know, I could understand where she was coming from. How sometimes the everyday stresses just get to you, and whatever patience and tolerance you may be trying to maintain just fly out the window. In keeping with that train of thought, I decided to try an experiment. I put myself in Brenda’s shoes, imagining what she felt like when I was my stepson’s age.

What an eye-opener.

At the time of these adolescent tribulations, I was turning forty. I thought back to the years around Brenda’s fortieth birthday. And shuddered, realizing that it was a miracle that we had all survived those years. That she had actually been doing a damn good job of keeping things together.

Those were the last years of my dad’s drinking. The bad ones, the ones that led up to him hitting bottom and getting sober. It was around that time that my sister ran away. Things were crazy at home, and she had gone to live with a friend’s family. For a while we didn’t know where she was. My brother had discovered his rebellious side and was pushing every limit.

Forget about using the guest towels or not mowing the yard, he was sneaking out at night, wrecking cars and getting DUIs. And for me, I had discovered boys and drinking, not a good combination. Too many nights I would stay out late, either not calling home or calling whenever I thought about it…which was usually about two in the morning.

I compared our situations. Here I was, happily married to a sober husband, working four days a week in my dream profession, with all of my needs and most of my wants being met, my only problem being smelly laundry, used guest towels and mostly empty ice cream containers. While she had lived the above scenario…a drunken husband, three teen-age children spiraling out of control, managing the household while working full-time in children’s clothing store for minimum wage. Certainly not the job of her dreams, she had given that up when she became pregnant with me and quit nursing school.

No wonder Brenda was a little compulsive about the towels or the dusting or whatever concrete thing she could focus on. They were probably the only things she felt she had any control over. Everything, or at least everyone else, in her life was completely out of control. Yet somehow she carried on. The house was clean, there was food to eat and the bills were paid. The yard was mowed and the clothes were washed, dried and even folded.

Somehow in the midst of all of the madness, she found the strength to return to school, finally achieving her goal in nursing.

No matter how much the world swirled around her, she was doing the best she could to keep things going and make them better. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but looking back on it, I do now.

Even with this realization, I still occasionally find myself going nuts over unimportant things; I just don’t blame it on Brenda anymore.

I wish I could say with certainty that realizing this made me a better stepmother. I think it did. And I’m pretty sure it made life easier for my husband.

But I know it made me a better daughter.