In 2001, I married a man named Lou Zant.
He is 20 years older than me. (I know. It’s a big gap.) But he’s this totally inspiring and hilarious man who makes me feel happy, engaged and like anything is possible. He’s got a boyish charm and a full-on junior-high sense of humor that makes him annoyingly awesome in my eyes.
But he’s quite maddening, too.
I’ve spent a lot of time judging Lou because I don’t automatically understand his default settings for risk. Those settings scare me. But if I’m being honest with myself, for every time I’ve wished that Lou had done things the way I think we should’ve done them, I’ve got five more examples of times when I’ve been so thankful that he never changed his mind just to make me feel safer.
Lou Zant is a roller coaster ride that is equal parts thrill and danger. Lou seldom looks before he leaps — which is difficult for people like me who need safety cones near the edge of every potential drop off to feel comfortable, and, who spend a lot of mental energy running the worst case scenarios. But somehow, over the years, our differences have created a complimentary partnership in us. I understand that Lou is everything I’m not, and I know now that he’s everything I need in my life to be the best version of myself. I guess that’s because Lou has all of my nonnegotiables:
He loves God.
He loves me.
He is a lifelong learner.
And. Lou Zant is a person who never stops trying.
I love that so much about Lou…
Even now, after spending the past ten years in a crazy spiral of heartache and wandering, I sincerely like my husband. He’s still my favorite person. But I can’t lie to you. Lou has always been a challenge for me — which is probably why he’s continued to enamor me on some level. Let’s just say, he keeps me on my toes.
I know now that you can’t change people to be more like you want them to be, and that is triply true when it comes to Lou. He is who he is — and in that, I’ve finally found a form of safety. He is consistently risky and unconventional, and once I accepted this truth about him, I found myself willingly joining him on this spindly tight rope of our life — that almost never has a net!
By the time I married Lou, I was 30, and he was 50 — and Lou had already led a pretty full life. He’d built and sold four companies that each reached $100 million in sales in their first year — all in very different industries. (I like to say that Lou “knows a little bit about a lot of things.”) The fact is, I feel like I’ll never know everything there is to now about Lou’s life and his experiences. Even after being together for this long, I’m still discovering interesting things that Lou did back when I was battling chin acne in middle school, or crimping my hair and pulling it back into a scrunchy. With a 20-year head start, I’m positive I’ll never catch up with Lou.
But when I married Lou, I married into a life that was fully in progress.
Lou had already built up a big fortune, and he started a family with his first wife. By the time I started dating Lou, he had been divorced for several years, and he was living on this stunning island in Florida called Siesta Key. His house was built on a sugar-white, sandy beach, and it overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. From the first moment I met Lou, he was as easy to be around as a cocktail at sunset. The year that I met Lou, he had just sold one of his companies for very substantial amount of money, and he was enjoying semi-retirement and coaching his youngest son’s Little League team.
I was 26-years-old and working at the local newspaper, selling advertising to auto dealerships when I first met Lou. (Sexy times…) I lived in a tiny cottage behind a fancy house on Siesta Key, and in some ways, I was trying to figure out how to be an adult. Being around Lou was exciting, and his laid-back ways and sense of humor were so alluring. The things I remember the most about Lou when I first realized that I had a crush on him were that his hands were always the right temperature when he gave me a hug; he could make me laugh out loud without even trying; and, I loved how he looked in his reading glasses.
I often feel more mature than Lou — even back then — but I’ve always been certain that Lou knows so much more than me about everything, and that is so attractive to me.
But there were tricky things about joining a life already in progress. Lou’s two sons were at the center of his universe, and I never quite knew how to orbit the highly combustible galaxy that’s created when you try to blend lives from other worlds into a new family. I think I thought I could slip into Lou’s life and be some kind of hero to him and his sons. I’d be the one stepmom in the world who could make life better for the whole family!
Unfortunately, my ability to weave a great narrative in my mind was useless when it came to being a stepmother and wife. Looking back, I know I failed Lou and his sons (and myself) more times than I can count — but I also know that I did my very best. I really did try to choose my battles — which were almost always the wrong ones, I’m sad to say. But even in the trenches, I never lost track of the man who won my heart (even when I was completely losing parts of myself in my role as Lou’s wife and step mother to his kids.) But let me be clear about one thing:
For me, it was a heck of a lot easier to deal with trials and tribulations when I was wealthy.
When I look back on things, I realize that our wealth lulled me into a comfort zone that made me too complacent to do more than just complain about my problems. Being a stepmom was a super thankless role for me, and I’m sure all of my friends and family knew how miserable I was at times. But. When I was wearing a fabulous black label Elie Tahari sundress, and my hair was super healthy and golden-blonde thanks to monthly visits to Miho — the world’s most talented colorist! — I had a tendency to get over the upsets in my daily grind a little easier. I shoved certain things down because I was able to bluff my way through life differently when I was financially set, versus when I became vulnerably raw and totally exposed.
But the fact is, Lou gave me a pretty decadent life. We lived in amazing homes, and I had gorgeous clothes — with matching designer shoes and handbags — and, Lou and I traveled a lot. We also ate out more often than we ate in — because I’ve never been very clever in the kitchen. Lou golfed six days a week, and I loved joining him on the golf course for a “turn dog” at the ninth hole, and I was always willing to partake of the Sunday buffet. (I was very good at showing up for fanciness!) And while I think I was still a nice person, I know I became super entitled.
I had my own money, too. I stopped selling advertising well before I married Lou, and I started my own pretty successful freelance writing company. I had a few really big contracts as a writer in the biotech industry, and it felt good to be earning money with my writing skills. But a couple years into my marriage, I developed an imbalanced work ethic where I was taking on more writing than I could honestly handle. I became obsessed with my clients and their needs, and very often, that meant I would skip weekend trips in the winter to our vacation condo in the mountains, or I’d stay up in my office all night, working on user guides and technical manuals.
Here’s a full blown confession: I used my work to help me cope with my role as a stepmom.
I usually felt like a third wheel with my stepsons on those ski trips, or when they we’re spending time with Lou at our beach house. I didn’t know how to blend in… And I know that I was almost always the cause of my own problems. I’m not naturally easy going like Lou, and back then, things like un-fluffed pillows on our sofa, and crumbs on the countertops in the kitchen could completely set me off. (I’m still not a big fan of either issue.)
Please understand that I have deep regrets about how I handled myself in the early parts of my marriage. My way of doing things was costly to my relationship with Lou, and most certainly hurt my relationship with my stepsons. But I did the best I could to figure out how to share my husband with these two other people who deserved his love, too, and I know that my obsessive standards for perfection very often came between me and my family.
Things finally came to a head with my writing company when all of my contracts were up for renewal. Lou sat me down and told me he’d like me to consider ending my contracts. He strongly suggested that I take time off to write the novel I’d always said I wanted to write — which was mostly just something I think all writers tell people they want to do at some point in their careers. But Lou reasoned that we had more than enough money to live on, and it was time for me to start being present to the life he had built for us — and that included being available to go on family trips.
He made a lot of valid points… Which I hated to admit.
But part of me was afraid to let go of my contracts because they were defining a lot of my self-worth at that time. However, another part of me was intrigued by the idea of taking some of that self-imposed pressure off of my shoulders. Writing has always been my passion, but there were times that the burn out of technical writing was making me lose my love for words. I liked the money I was making, but the writing was wearing me down more than I wanted to admit. Lou was gentle with me, but he was also very clear that he wanted me to lighten up and join him in our life together.
So. I let go of my clients, and I fully stepped into my life as a “woman of leisure.”
At first, it was disorienting to lean into the fact that I didn’t “need” to work. A few years before we got married, Lou set up his trust to disburse money into his account every month, and the amounts he drew down were always more than we needed. So I never felt worried about money. For a long time, Lou had a secretary who paid all of our bills, and we always had plenty of money each month to do the things we wanted to do. Lou was faithful with his money; he tithed and gave generously, but I don’t remember ever fretting about our finances.
I believed that we were set for life…
Random Memory: Back in the day, we had this very special tea tin that I catch myself missing from time to time… Lou always kept a few thousand dollars in $100 bills in this cornflower blue tea tin in one of our kitchen cupboards. It was stashed in the way back — so his sons wouldn’t find it — and whenever I needed an emergency blouse or pair of shoes, I’d pop open the can, pull out a few bills, and go shopping. The can was always full of hundreds because Lou replenished it from time to time. (The blue tin was so awesome!)
I vividly remember the day that Lou and I pulled the last $100 out of the tea tin.
