Failing can be source of strength

It recently was my turn to teach my child the valuable lesson that you can’t succeed in everything, and that you learn and get stronger from failure.

We hit the rough patch when my son, who has played on a baseball team for two years, didn’t make the cut for the traveling team. Making it even more difficult was finding out all of his friends had made the team.

He handled the news very well, at least outwardly. On the other hand, I shed quite a few tears in private that day.

Like most parents, I focused on the positive with my son and urged him to hold his head high. I emphasized that there is nothing to be ashamed of and that his pals will still look at him the same.

Now can I convince myself fully of what I am trying to impart? Can I walk the walk? I, like many people who are old enough to have had some failures in life, have divorced and have felt the stigma of a collapsed marriage.

Deciding whether to get divorced was one of the most excruciating processes I ever faced. No one in my family had divorced, and I was extremely concerned about the effects on my children.

A wise colleague recommended I seek counseling, but this wasn’t easily received. Wait a minute, I thought. On top of divorce, I had to go for counseling? What would my friends and family say? Would I be branded as weak, noncommittal and damaged?

I did actually slip a notch, or so I thought at the time, when my mother decided to pass familial responsibilities that I had done as the oldest child to my sister and brother-in-law. They were married, more settled. A better fit. In hindsight, they probably were.

Once I had adjusted and considered dating again as a divorcee, there was the quandary of whether and when to tell a date I had failed at marriage.

Few people walk around raising their hand announcing, “I’ve been married before.” It is pretty tough to identify who has been remarried. I looked for this demographic while trying to find the audience for my recently launched magazine, reMarriage.

You can buy marketing lists of people according to their age, sex, household income, race, profession, politics, shopping habits and, I would bet, their bra size. I still can’t find one list of remarried people. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a count of “remarrieds” in a census since the early ’90s.

I eventually commissioned a survey that determined there are at least 103 million people in the United States who are considering remarriage or are already remarried.

Nearly everyone knows one of them — they’re a relative, friend or colleague. But who and where are these people?

Peter K. Gerlach, author and founder of the nonprofit Break the Cycle project and member of the National Stepfamily Resource Center Experts Council, wished me luck and success on the magazine, adding, “You face an uphill challenge, for in my experience, most U.S. couples want to deny or ignore the ’re’ in remarriage, and what it means.”

Other experts have stated that remarried couples often are reluctant to seek counseling, even though their divorce rate - about 60 percent - is higher than the divorce rate for first marriages.

Aren’t you supposed to come back from a failure better, wiser and stronger?

Experts say the top two reasons for the failure of a remarriage are financial problems and issues related to children. One counselor told me that people who have the money for counseling don’t have the time or vice versa.

I wonder how much of a role stigma plays. Even now as I am very happily remarried, I sometimes still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I explain that I was previously married.

But since my son can return to play in this fall league season with the very teammates he will not be able to join in next spring’s “real” baseball season, I can hold my head up high, too.

• Paula Bisacre, founder of Remarriage LLC, is the publisher and executive editor of reMarriage magazine (www. remarriagemagazine.com), a quarterly publication that provides practical solutions for the growing remarriage community. She can be reached at publisher@remarriagemagazine.com.