Tag: Marriage

13Dec

Sadness Concentrate

I wanted to write something upbeat and entertaining this afternoon—maybe a holiday gift guide (though there are already plenty floating around the ‘net) or a weekend anecdote. However, I can’t seem to shake a concentrated sadness, so I’m sitting down with a steaming mug of chai to hear it out and send it gently on its way.

A couple of my grade school friends had their first babies within the last year and have formed a moms’ support group based largely on the teachings of Michael & Debi Pearl. These teachings mandate that a wife acknowledge her husband as her lord (yes, really) and submit unquestioningly to his desires and opinions; if her hobbies, relationships, or spiritual life prevent her from meeting her husband’s every need, she must give them up (and obviously, a career is out of the question). These teachings also instruct parents to dominate their children through manipulation and violence in order to produce automatic obedience and have already resulted in at least two brutal deaths. Unbelievably, many parents are willing to accept this call to cruelty because it touts itself as godly.

I recently saw a glowing article in a conservative magazine of how my old friends get together regularly to read this poisonous ideology and discuss how to implement it within their growing families, and it sends my stomach into a tailspin. If my friends are devoutly following the Pearls’ teaching, then their infants already know the sting of a stick against their tender skin. I can’t help thinking about those sweet babies this afternoon, about how innocent they are to the fact that their mothers are studying up on how best to “break their wills.”

The subject of child abuse gives me an itchy trigger finger, but a diatribe from me isn’t going to set anything right, and it would only mask my authentic reaction… which is heartbreaking empathy. I know something about what those little ones are going to endure, and I have an idea of the regret my friends will experience when (if) they let themselves realize what horror they were willing to perpetrate simply because an author claimed it was God’s will. I can only imagine what my friends will go through as well in giving up their individuality in order to stroke their husbands’ egos until death do them part. There is so much pain in store for those families, but I’m in no position to convince them of it. All I can do is sit here with my sadness sipping chai before I send it off in search of stray miracles.

25Nov

Au Revoir

Dear husband,
I’m enmeshed in the seventh traffic snarl of the morning, though this one seems to be more of a Gordian Knot. No one has moved for the duration of my Vampire Weekend album, and several motorists are now rummaging in their trunks for survival rations. The bus driver from two cars behind has been walking up and down the ranks encouraging us to give up hope. If we don’t make it to the airport next week to pick you up, you’ll at least know where we are (A1 off-ramp in front of the Birra Moretti outlet, second guardrail down).

This has been an interesting morning, and not just due to our satanically early wake up time. The girls have plotted together to insure that at least one of them needs the bathroom at all times except when we are actually in one. Magellan’s engine light is on, its oil light is too, and the Italian traffic we have come to know and love has already added two hours to our return trip. I’ve put together a charming visual presentation of the morning so far, compliments of my cell phone camera:

While sitting in traffic is not among my favorite activities on the planet, it’s honestly not getting to me too much today. My thoughts are back at the airport with you, and every kilometer I’ve driven has felt like stretching a heavy-duty rubber band. That’s how it should be, I think, but it doesn’t change that heading home without you is a confusingly conscious effort.

I imagine you’re somewhere over the Alps right now, and I wonder about the likelihood of scoring a turkey dinner on a European airline. We’ll do our Thanksgiving after you get back, even if it’s just sneaking some bites of stuffing while we hang Christmas ornaments, but I can’t quite forget that today is the holiday itself. It’s part of my heritage no matter what country I’m in, no matter whether or not we can spend it together. So happy Thanksgiving, dear. I’m thankful that I still miss you before we’re even done kissing goodbye. I’m thankful that our car is more of a captive audience than a casualty of the traffic today. I’m thankful that I’ll get to spend the evening with friends and you with family and that we have about a billion forms of technology to keep us connected while you’re away, and finally, I’m thankful that my heritage allows me to spend this afternoon napping… even if has to happen on the A1 off-ramp in front of the Birra Moretti outlet, second guardrail down.

Love,
Me

27Oct

Does Nike Carry Antihistamines?

Five weeks ago, my husband convinced me to start running with him. Something about extra energy, sense of wellbeing, long-term health benefits, chance to wear cute workout clothes, no more excuses now that the girls were in school, yada yada yada. He had me at “extra energy.” It was an incredibly sweet gesture on his part as it meant doing his marathon training early in the morning so he could spend half of his lunch break at the park jogging in slow motion alongside a wife who is allergic to exercise. I think I managed 300 meters the first day before I had to stop and concentrate very, very hard on not dying. (Dan kindly refrained from cracking up.)

In the five weeks since, here is what I have discovered:

  1. My body is deeply committed to opposing this silly running venture. If my right side isn’t stabbing me, my left side takes over. If my sides are playing nice, my knees ache. If my knees are on their best behavior, my head is pretty much guaranteed to start throbbing, and when it goes on coffee break, there’s always a big toe or an eardrum or a spleen willing to act up. See? Allergic.
  2. Likewise, my brain is refusing to compute any information that might make me feel positive about the whole experience.
  3. Like how I’m up from 300 meters to 4 ½ kilometers.
  4. Or how my breaks now consist of walking rather than lying on the ground gasping like a chain-smoking fish.
  5. Or how I don’t need that second coffee every day anymore.
  6. No, my brain keeps up a steady stream of complaints about how hard running is, how painful it is, how intensely unlikeable it is, how I feel like poo, how I feel like I’ve been dipped in lead, how I feel like the slug of the earth, how I feel like biggest failure in world history, how much I want to stop, how much I want to pluck out my sides and cast them from me, how much I want to collapse and sleep forever, and how much I hate everything that ever existed, most of all those athletic wear commercials featuring sexy runners smoothly and effortlessly conquering the pavement.
  7. Something about increased blood flow disables the filter between my brain and my mouth.
  8. My husband deserves to be sainted.
27Sep

Non-Event

My husband and I come from very different backgrounds, so it has always amazed me how perfectly most of our opinions align. Early on, we discovered our matching views on money, church,  life purpose, Star Wars, education, making out, and how many children we wanted to have. We knew a lot of couples who disagreed or vacillated on family size, but we were united in our hope for two. Two children with whom to travel the world, play board games, and scream ourselves silly on rollercoasters (okay, that one might be just me), two children to be automatic friends to each other while providing space for other relationships, two children into whom we could invest time, attention, and personalized love while still pursuing our own careers and social lives. We both adored kids, but the prospect of a large family didn’t resonate with either of us. We had our magic number.

That’s why I was so surprised to find myself, shortly after Sophie’s birth, flushed with baby fever. Not just surprised, but alarmed. I was deep in the clutches of postpartum depression, and the demands of my two sweet girls were often more than my filigreed emotions could handle. Another pregnancy would literally have endangered our lives. Yet every time one of the girls snuggled up against me or I peeked in on a sisterly giggling fit, I was overwhelmed with the wish for more.

Sweet sisters 2
(Just look what I was up against!)

Eventually, the craze subsided. My mind climbed back into the light, I began to enjoy parenting again, and I was able to recognize that my motherly instinct—that mysterious part of some women’s brains that makes us sniff newborns’ heads and coo over diaper commercials—did not need to override my logic. I loved my Natalie and my Sophie, and I knew that in order to keep loving them well, I couldn’t lose myself to another baby. It wouldn’t be fair to them or to Dan, who was just starting to get his wife back. Our magic number hadn’t changed; we gave away the baby clothes and began living out the future we had hoped for…

…Which brings us to this year, behind a locked door where I clutched a pregnancy test wondering how in the world I was going to explain things to my husband. I didn’t even know how I felt, or rather, I couldn’t narrow down which of my conflicting emotions was predominant. One part of me was already picking out names and anticipating the exquisite joy of welcoming a new little one into the family. The other part of me was dreading the exhaustion, the C-section recovery, the financial strain, the enormous time taken away from the girls, and the million necessary adjustments to our life. I felt selfish for both my reluctance and my excitement, and confusion swirled my insides until I thought I might puke. Of course, I would be doing plenty of puking in the weeks to come; might as well get used to it.

Except that I wasn’t pregnant. Against all expectations, the test turned out negative. A test the next week was negative too, and at last, my body finally confirmed what they were saying. There would not be any morning sickness, hospital stays, baby blues, pumping paraphernalia, or minivan shopping. I would not have to explain to a single concerned Italian grandma that yes, I know how this happens. I would not risk hurting my friends whose hearts are being dragged through the devastating cycle of infertility. Our family would remain just as we’d hoped it would be. Yet a peculiar ache settled in the empty space between my arms like a phantom limb. I was relieved not to be pregnant, incredibly so, but was also caught off balance by how strongly I could miss someone who never existed.

I don’t know how to uncomplicated a non-event any more than this:

For three weeks, I was mama to a baby-who-wasn’t.

Today was our due date.

 

5Jul

Seven

For our first, we dined on calamari in Venice.

For our second, we chased rainbows at Niagara Falls.

For our third, we sunk our feet into wet grass at a huge outdoor concert in… (wait for it)… Scranton.

For our fourth, we played Battleship and sampled tapas in Philadelphia.

For our fifth, we napped on the beach on Marco Island.

For our sixth, we snuck away to a spa not ten minutes from our own front door.

And for our seventh, I’ve been carting the girls around Edinburgh to shops and farms and playgrounds while he’s spent the day at a conference. The romantic nature of our schedule may not be blowing your minds right now, but I love that he brought the girls and I along with him on what could have been a simple business trip. I love that we haven’t spent a single anniversary in the same city. I love that takeout features largely in our celebration plans tonight, and I love him.

30Mar

Latent Swashbuckler

As my last post made abundantly clear, courage is not something I come by easily. I assume God kept this in mind when he nudged single me toward single Dan seven years ago and then hid conspicuously behind a potted plant singing “Getting’ Jiggy Wit It” just loud enough for us to hear. At least, I fervently hope so. A girl could use a bit of divine reassurance upon realizing her husband considers mountain biking, racing through airports, and eating fist-sized octopi to be marital bonding activities.

Dan’s sense of adventure and gift for tenacity (sounds better than stubbornness, right?) have formed the perfect antidote to my sense of being a delicate flower and my gift for hanging out safely indoors for weeks on end. He brings out the latent swashbuckler in me, and I recognize this as a good thing. Usually.

A little less so two Sundays ago. It was the first full day of our settimana bianca—a week in the mountains nearly as important to Italian culture as a week at the beach in August (and involving nearly as much sunbathing). Some dear friends were chaperoning the girls’ naps, so Dan and I grabbed our snowboards and headed up the lift… straight into a cloudbank. Notably, we had forgotten a map.

“No problem,” said my undaunted husband. “We’ll just had straight across until we find an obvious trail.”

“Straight across the mountain?” squeaked his rather daunted wife. “Without a map? Inside a cloud that fancies itself opaque?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Because I am a gutless invertebrate, I didn’t say.

Twenty minutes later found me clinging to the snowy mountainside with the tips of my boots while trying to keep a grip on my board. Above and below me were sheer nothingness—emphasis on the sheer. In fact, the only things I could see were the perpendicular slope directly beneath my feet and Dan’s vague outline ahead. The rest of my vision had been smothered in whiteout. I hadn’t heard anything for a quarter of an hour besides my own footsteps and that landlocked fish flopping around inside my chest, and panic was turning my tired muscles to jelly. Granted, the circumstances didn’t really warrant panic… but I was raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, and my imagination is nothing if not skilled.

We inched along the mountainside twenty minutes more, then another twenty minutes, then yet another twenty, and I really have no idea what I’m saying because time was swallowed up in fog along with the rest of the world. All I know is that each step was an exercise in panic-squashing bravery. And we took a lot of steps.

Want to see?

Danger Mountain

Why yes, we did cross the width of an entire mountain. In steep snow. Through blinding fog. Carrying our boards. Terrified of losing civilization forevermore and/or tumbling down a precipice onto razor-sharp rocks (this one might have been just me). With no idea that at pretty much any point, we could have snowboarded down easily.

Once we finally got a feel for our surroundings and made it to the bottom, my floppety heart decided it had racked up enough [imaginary] near-death experiences for the week. I was ready to race Dan to the cable car and spend the rest of our vacation communing with our hotel room. But then he got me laughing about our ridiculous mountain trek, and then he got me on my board again, and before I knew it, we were wrapping up a fantastic week on the slopes.

Our last morning, we found ourselves at the same starting point staring into yet another cloud.

“We have to get to the opposite side one way or another,” he said.

“Mmm.”

“And it would be so much easier to just snowboard across the top than to walk with our boards at the bottom.”

“Mmm.”

“And even if it is foggy, we at least know what we’re doing this time.”

“Sort of.”

“Just as long as we don’t lose momentum.”

“Or look down.” Or think about Little House on the Prairie. Or use my memory in any capacity whatsoever.

“So, you up for it?” asked that irrepressible husband of mine.

From behind a ski lift pole drifted an unmistakable “Na na na na na na na.”

Cable car parents

“Sure,” I answered. “Why not?”

7Oct

Desperate Intentions

Another one of my friends just announced her divorce. That makes two in the last month, and I am suddenly out of breathable air.

I have no judgement for all my friends whose marriages have ripped in two… only a desperate sadness that applies as much to me as it does to them. I guess in my mind, we’ve always been in this together. Not just Dan and I, but every person who’s taken the brave step into lifelong commitment. Love strong enough to inspire vows is a marvel, and I adore the thought that at least one person treasures each of my married friends even more than I do. Other couples’ contentment is an airborne love potion for me. It sharpens my focus on my own marriage, on the immense value my husband holds, and I find myself snuggling deeper into security by association. If they can hold tightly to their bond over the years, so can we.

This is why, when yet another Facebook status changes to “single,” I feel like someone has shoved the word into my throat. I taste the tears, the painful timbre of shouted words, and the flat gray of hopelessness. As absurd and egotistical as it may seem, I feel as though I have been divorced as well, at least to a tiny extent. The solidity of my marriage is dependent on no one else’s; this, I know. Yet when another couple’s faith crumbles… it plants the suspicion that I’m wrong about committed love, its adaptability, its storehouse of second chances for happiness. Maybe love truly can grow brittle enough to be unmanageable.

I do my best to pluck these thoughts out the moment they sprout. Logic helps — the sturdy facts that I am myself, Dan is himself, and our marriage is simply ours. No one else’s handwritten vows. No one else’s wedding picture hanging above our bed. No one else’s arguments to slog through. No one else holding me as I fall asleep each night. Besides this, we have the strong relationships of our parents and grandparents to lean into when the wind picks up, as well as the support of so many dear friends. I am grateful beyond words for the trust that pulses every day through our clasped hands. Even if that cannot immunize me against the pain of others’ separation, it is enough to turn that heartache inward and use it to cling even more intentionally to my own brave and hopeful promise.

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