I often tell people that if Lou and I were ice cream, I’d be vanilla, and Lou would be Rocky Road. 

I’m very simple and plain in my way of doing things, whereas Lou is creative and gravitates toward things that are risky, mixed up and complicated. But the base of Rocky Road includes some swirls of vanilla, and so I’ll never place all of the blame of our “financial ruin” squarely on Lou. I helped to make the mess we were in, too. I never spoke up or asked Lou to set up our financial situation differently; and, I never questioned how we lived, or how the money we lived on was pumped into our household. 

And the fact of the matter is, I didn’t save any money from my technical writing days — because, by that time, those days were so long ago that even if I did, I’m sure I would’ve spent it on something selfish anyway.

I’m clearly not a numbers person. I like words better, and so it was much easier for me to accept things in my life as they were, and I never got involved in the enormous decisions Lou made about how to manage his considerable assets. I know things about Lou’s character, and he has always come up to proof for me.

He’s not perfect. But he is good.

And, I always know who he is.

Because he’s mine.

And while I wish I could stop you from judging my husband too harshly for the financial ditch we found ourselves in, I know you will. Because in the early days, I judged him too. It’s easy to do that on the backside of a terrible situation. I second-guessed; I believed that I would’ve done everything differently; and, I just assumed that if we’d done things my way, we would’ve never been in this situation. 

But my narrative about Lou got so boring after a while. I couldn’t go back in time and un-do things that had already been done. And, even if I could have, I might not have believed that I needed to un-do the things that were working so well for us for so long.  

Eventually, I got too tired to keep going over the details of how we got to this place in my own head. And even though I had a tinge of bitterness brewing beneath the surface, with some perspective, I did start to see that the same things that made Lou a clever genius when we were wealthy are the same things that made him look like a total heel when we were in the midst of this end-over-end fall from the top. Because of Lou, we had some amazing experiences, and we would’ve never had any of those experiences — or the financial perspectives we had — if Lou had always played it safe!

But now, because we both trusted in our trust too much…we were about to get a whole new set of life experiences. 

Boy is that a bitter reality to face — even if you try to bury the taste in a bowl of ice cream…