Chapter 1

When I married her mother, Jasmine was a cute, five-year old--a bit precocious and smart as hell--also inquisitive. She also introduced me to the world of the willful child.

I had a friend in my previous life who had two of the cutest little angels you could imagine. One was dark, the other light. The dark one was sultry from birth, the light one, angelic. How do children have personalities before they can even roll over? It’s a mystery to me, but personalities they did have.

They weren’t bad kids, they were just kids. I never saw either of them throw a tantrum, but the younger one, the dark one, Lisa, made it very clear to anyone watching that she was the one who would make the decisions regarding her and her activities.

Their father was forced to stop bathing them when Lisa made it clear that she wanted to do things that he could not envision doing with her. The safest way for him to proceed was to withdraw, as much as he missed their private sharing times in the bath. He would take his guitar into the bathroom and sing Spanish-sounding songs to them that he made up as he went. He only knew a handful of Spanish words, but he knew how they sounded, so he made nonsense lyrics with a Spanish flavor. His daughters loved it.

Jake would miss those communal gatherings, but told me that he dared not get in the same room with Lisa without a credible witness. He would ask me, “How do you deal with a willful girl-child”? This was back before they put parents in jail for any degree of corporal punishment, but it was clear to anyone who encountered Lisa that no degree of punishment of any sort would deter her from a chosen course. She would neither bend, nor break, on pain of death.

I think, to her, giving in was synonymous with death, so what did she have to lose by standing her ground? At the time, I was married to a woman who may have been very much like Lisa when she was young. A broken family, foster homes while Mommy recovered from nervous breakdowns, abusive step-fathers and extreme poverty had taken its toll on her. She was not unreasonable in most cases, but apparently had never taken the course on compromise. Once she had formed an opinion, any attempt at discussion represented a personal attack on her competence.

Loving someone with those problems can be very stressful. I loved her so much that any distress to her, caused her by anyone or any situation, was painful to me. Her happiness was more important to me than any other goal I had known. On the other hand, I was much like her in the sense of demanding the freedom to choose my own path in life. The difference between us was that I recognized the necessity for compromise, sometimes, and she absolutely rejected the concept.

The night I realized that our relationship was doomed was when I had managed to convince her to let me please her orally. At this point, we had been together for around six years and this was maybe the third time she had relented when I offered to give her this sort of pleasure. After I had brought her to a shuddering orgasm, she began crying.

It took several minutes to get her to explain. Finally, she muttered, “I don’t deserve to feel this good”, and curled up into a ball, totally closed off against the world--and me.

As time went on, it became more and more clear that my efforts to help her were in fact making her life worse. In her view, she was powerless and I was powerful. If I managed to help her when she couldn’t help herself, that was more evidence of her lack of power.

“When you love someone, let them go. If they never come back, they weren’t yours in the first place.” It took me three years to steel myself against the loss of her bright smile, quick wit, amazing talents and quirky intelligence. I let her go and wished her every success. From time to time, she needed a helping hand and I was always happy to provide one.

I was alone for many years, waiting at an open window for her to fly back, but she never chose to do so, although we remained close. It occurred to me that she had transformed me into a beloved family figure. It was ok to love me from afar, but she couldn’t deal with me as a partner.

The secretary at one of my consulting gigs had introduced me to the (pseudo?)science of Numerology. As a scientist, I never held much respect for any field that pretended to be able to predict personalities or future events, based on birth dates and the position of heavenly bodies.

My sons are identical twins. They are examples of “mirror image” twins that result in a perfect division of the egg that occurs late in the development of the egg. Later division is sometimes incomplete, resulting in conjoined twins.

My boys were perfectly formed, with one being left handed, the other preferring the right. The crowns of their hair were on opposite sides. These characteristics could be expected, but then one fell and broke his right arm, the other broke his left arm a few days later. When their teeth were to be straightened, the molds made of their very crooked teeth were so identical that the tops and bottoms could be interchanged, with perfect fit.

It should be obvious to one and all that their horoscopes would be identical. While it is true that they shared a fair amount of personality characteristics, the more dominant characteristics of their individual personalities was quite “individual”. Any attempt to predict their life path or personality based on time and date of birth failed to account for some very distinct variations.

One volunteered to go into the Navy. The other would have stood before a firing squad rather than subjugate himself to military rule. From a physical aspect, they were so identical that my father was never able to tell them apart. In the recent election, their votes canceled. Need I say more?

All of this is leading up to a discussion of Numerology. Although I was even more leery of ridiculous claims made for this endeavor, I did allow the secretary to submit my name and birth date to a friend of hers who was a professional Numerologist. The secretary would pay the considerable fee for the in-depth report that filled a large folder, just for the satisfaction of learning about me.

I never met the Numerologist and had only met the secretary a couple of times, but the report laid out my life as a history. “When you are 37, you will divorce your wife of many years and marry a much younger woman, who will be the love of your life.”

I was 39 and had two years previously divorced my wife of 16 years and was now with the love of my life. To say I was intrigued would be an understatement. Now there was a basis for understanding the difference in personalities for my mirror image twin sons. They had different names. The comments made in the Numerologist’s report fit their personalities better than any description I might have made, but having read her description, I had to accept the validity of it.

Now we come back to Jasmine and the personality quirks that she shared with my second ex. All of this put together made me feel as if I knew her a little better. I was still not much more equipped to deal with her, but at least I could now put her in the category of immovable object, as personified by my second wife. My options were extremely limited. Beyond simply dealing with whatever path she chose or leaving her mother, there were no visible options. I loved her mother very much and loved Jasmine, as well, in no small measure based on her similarities with my ex, who still holds a special place in my heart.