A woman married herself after her ex got hitched to his fitness instructor, held the reception in a hot tub and is now even planning to renew her vows…to herself.
Maria Leonard Olsen woke up feeling depressed the day her ex-husband of 25 years got married to his blonde fitness instructor. She felt disillusioned that their long relationship had ended and that her adult children were at his ceremony elsewhere.
But instead of wallowing, Maria had other plans. She had decided to marry herself at a resort in the Colorado mountains in 2018. She sent formal wedding invitations to her three best friends, Anne, Cecily and Linda, and they agreed to join her at the ceremony in which Maria would vow to ‘become the best version of myself that I could be’.
“It was an emotionally challenging weekend. I no longer wanted to be married to my ex, but I grieved the loss of our marriage and the irretrievable fracture of our family unit,” says the 63-year-old author, attorney, podcaster and TEDx speaker.
But as she and her friends sat around the fire pit drinking coffee, she let them cheer her, and after an invigorating walk through the beautiful landscape, she prepared for her ceremony.
“My bridesmaids had given me an old beautiful vintage necklace in my favourite soft pink colour, a new handmade crown of flowers with ribbons serving as a veil, something borrowed was a small handmade purse I had gifted to one of them years ago and something blue with some lovely earrings.”
Instead of bouquets, they carried canvas pictures of Maria and her friends, and around the frames she had written what she loved about each of them.
An older man who was a fellow guest at the resort asked what the party was about and when he heard she was marrying herself, he offered to walk her down the aisle to the outdoor pavilion ceremony where Maria made her vows to herself.
“I promised I would love myself, that I would cultivate self-compassion and that I would be responsible for my own happiness,” she says.
“I vowed to remember the difference between being alone and being lonely and to have confidence in my ability to tolerate pain and move on.
“I said I would make the most of whatever time I had left in this world and that I would be intentional about how I spent each day. I told myself that I am enough just as I am and do not need anyone else to make me feel whole.”
The wedding reception was held in a hot tub. There was no champagne, as Maria was newly sober after many difficult years of alcoholism.
“My father, who raised me, was a violent alcoholic. He had been arrested for beating my mother,” says Maria.
“He would get really drunk when I was a teenager, and I’d come home from being out with friends. He’d be sitting in a dark room listening to music, and he would cry and say, ‘Angeline [Maria’s mother], why did you leave me?’ And I’d say, ‘Dad, I’m your daughter. I’m not Angeline.’ And I’d run upstairs and lock the door.
“My mom even gave me a rope ladder to escape out my window in case he came after me, which he never did.”
On one occasion, her father, who has since passed away, locked Maria out of the house. On another, he pulled a gun on her high school boyfriend.
From the age of 13, she started to use alcohol to escape.
“I was a straight A student all the way through university. I went to a top 10 law school. I was very successful. But every weekend, I was a blackout drunk,” she says.
She drank more heavily as the children got older and needed her less.
“I felt rather rudderless at that point. I had put all my eggs in the motherhood basket. I had taken 15 years off to raise my children, but they were teenagers, and they didn’t really want me so involved in their lives anymore. That fueled more drinking and it got earlier and earlier in the day,” says Maria.
“At my last rehab, my then husband said he didn’t want me to come home because I was no longer welcome there. He had had enough, so we were separated in the year I turned 50.”
Maria found herself living alone and sober for the first time in her adult life, and instead of wallowing in the past, she decided to try 50 new things to celebrate the milestone birthday.
The stakes were high, as friends and family were expecting a big celebration because Maria was used to big plans.
For her 40th birthday she had an ‘All About Maria’ party, where everyone dressed in costumes from the era they met her.
Baby group friends came dressed with baby bumps and maternity wear, while high school friends came in sports outfits or bell-bottoms from the 70s. Maria had costume changes on the hour wearing something from each decade of her life.
“So people kept asking what I was doing for my 50th, but I just wanted to crawl into a hole at that point,” she says.
Instead, she crawled out of her comfort zone, singing on stage, taking motorcycle driving lessons, going indoor skydiving and travelling all over the world.
It was a triumphant year, but after she got sober and married herself, Maria stumbled over further difficulties. She did a DNA test for fun and found out that the father who raised her was not her biological father.
Her biological father was in fact an actor she had seen on both the big and small screen in multiple movies. Her mother denied it at first.
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“I told her, ‘Mom, I did a DNA test,’ and she said, ‘Oh, those aren’t very accurate.’ And I said, ‘Mom, did you forget that I’m a lawyer who helped get a man off death row based on DNA evidence?’ And she burst into tears and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’.”
The discovery shook her sense of identity.
“My father, who raised me, was a proud white Irish English Catholic. I am named Maria after the Blessed Virgin Mother,” says Maria.
“I went to Catholic school from first grade through Jesuit college. I raised my children Catholic. I was a Eucharistic minister. I served on the board of the biggest Catholic church in Washington D.C.
“Then I discover that, Maria, the lifelong Catholic, is half Ashkenazi Jewish. My mother had a one-night stand with a Jewish man in 1962, when she was engaged to my dad.”
Maria met her biological dad and formed a relationship with him in the few years they had before he died.
But she says the vows she made to herself at her wedding ceremony helped her navigate these difficult times.
“At the difficult points in my life, the old stories come into my head, and I have to talk back to the negative inner voices,” she says.
“I have to remember and reinforce the vows that I made to myself. I hold those vows to be sacred, and I reinforce them over and over again. This is a lifelong endeavour.”
So now she is looking forward to planning her ten-year anniversary, where she will reunite with her three bridesmaids and renew the vows she made to herself on top of a mountain in Colorado.
Her life partner, Bill, will probably come, but he is under no illusions that they will marry one day.
“We’ve been together for 13 years and are very happy, but we are never getting married. Neither of us wants to,” says Maria.
“I don’t need anyone else to complete me. I can do that myself.”
Maria is author of “Before and After the DNA Test” due to be published in Bloomsbury in February, and “50 after 50: Reframing the Next Chapter of Your Life.”
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