The road to love is paved with unforeseen obstacles, sappy
song lyrics, some distressingly deep potholes, and occasionally a set of counterfeit
eyebrows. Allow me to explain.
The first boy who drove me away from the safety and security
of my parent’s house alone in an actual car
was definitely too old for me. I knew
it, he knew it, and apparently his mother was vehemently convinced of it as
well. She spent enormous mental energy
coming up with reasons a fifteen year old girl should not be dating her
nineteen year old son. My favorite (and
perhaps her flimsiest) justification
is to follow and why he opted to tell me
his mother asked him this question, I will never know…. “Tell
me dear….why would you want to date a girl who doesn’t have any eyebrows?”
You see, back in the day, I was a redhead. My springtime pre-freckled skin displayed an
impressive pallor the likes of which is otherwise only associated with things
like a fresh slice of Wonder bread or maybe a tube of zinc-oxide nosecoat for
the beach. I was practically see-through.
My very blonde eyebrows followed suit and though they were indeed present, without
the benefit of stadium lighting my young brows were virtually undetectable to
the naked eye.
The eyebrow inquiry was a low blow but it didn’t really
matter as our fledgling relationship never made it into my sophomore year of
High School. But you might be pleased to
know that before we parted ways, I did seek out the opportunity to walk
casually through my boyfriend’s mother’s kitchen wearing a pair of homemade black
construction paper eyebrows.
Everyone who breathes has likely suffered the anguish
associated with learning to love.
Teenage crushes are painful without
interfering mothers and I would soon learn that making peace with my
eyebrows was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There were other boys and lots more drama as
I navigated the learning curve associated with broken heartedness. 36 years
later it still makes me cringe to reflect.
It is a truism that crying oneself to sleep is an adolescent rite of
passage.
After several more trials and errors, I met the boy who would
eventually become my husband. He was a
persistent sort and made several futile attempts to find a way to speak with me
before he actually mustered the courage to just dial the phone. Yes,
phones still required dialing in 1979. There were references made to our
matching hair color (he alleged that he made it a point to meet all the
redheads…); there were visits to the dairy bar at which I earned minimum wage
and where he ate entirely more ice cream than is advisable for a person of ANY
age. But since it was the late
seventies, my clearest memory of these initially fruitless attempts involved a
very loud and very jacked up green Pontiac Le Mans. It was after school and I was on foot with an
armload of textbooks; making the not-too-distant trek to my grandparent’s
house. Seizing the day, Jim (two years
my senior) cruised up alongside my teenage self in his impressively noisy
car. As if his V8 engine was not purring
loudly enough, the Led Zeppelin eight-track tape thumping menacingly from his
speakers surely and unforgettably rounded out the soundtrack for our
encounter. My heart rate was pounding in
my ears almost as loudly as his speakers.
I was panicked, thrilled, and desperately intrigued. But the spell was
broken when this stirringly mysterious boy gave voice to the cheesiest pickup
line in the history of the world. “Hey
Babe, wanna get lucky?”
Somehow despite that unfortunate line, we found ourselves
engaged to be married before I even left for college. Again, too young for such things; for heaven’s sake, even HIS
cerebral cortex had not yet fully matured.
We were inseparable, going everywhere together and even
dressing alike. Silly songs about
bushels and pecks and hugs around the neck were sung. We were disgustingly
sentimental, making up ridiculous names for one another. Worse yet, answering to them….
He was learning to program computers while I was learning to
be a nurse. His school was more than
hour away from my school and yet somehow he managed to hold down a fulltime job as
well. He slept almost not at all during
those years, faithfully driving back and forth to see me whenever he had the
opportunity. The “house mother” in the
lobby of my school would shake her head in disapproval and concern when she’d
find him sitting upright yet asleep on the couch waiting for me to finish
preening and come downstairs. “Oh, the poor
boy….” There was a lot of tsk
tsk-ing.
His mother hated it too, as you can imagine. Though she often expressed worry over his
lack of sleep she was more gracious than my former boyfriend’s mother and
thankfully never played the “no eyebrows” card to coerce him into healthier
patterns.
Most of Jim’s wardrobe was in the back of his car and since
he’d been doing his own laundry for several years, the majority of his clothing
was rumpled and a distinct grey hue. I’m sure anyone taking a look inside his
parked car would have imagined a homeless person had taken up residence. My
devoted fiancé kept himself awake while driving back and forth on the highway with
a practiced routine. This routine
included the exercise of changing his clothing while at the wheel… As a health professional (or truly just any old person with a brain), I advise against this
practice. I have tried many times to imagine his procedure. His preference for manual shift cars conjures
an image whereby I can assume the clutch would have made this quite a delicate process. I’m sure there was loud music associated with
his apparel transformations as subwoofers have always been a necessary staple
in my husband’s cars. It is rather miraculous he was never pulled over for
swerving, in fact astounding that he survived several years of this ritual at all.
Our wedding took place after my college graduation. After four years, four months and fifteen
days of a very sweet relationship, one might think we would have known what we
were doing. One might assume the drama
was over. This was not so.
We loved each other, surely.
There was and still is no one I admire more. We knew how to have
fun. We liked many of the same
things. We had similar beliefs and
comparable backgrounds. We rather adored
each other and were hard-pressed to imagine there was anyone else in the world
better suited for a life partner.
We did most things right but we were young and naïve when it
came to real communication. Though the pastor who married us spoke cursorily
about money and duty, there was no premarital counseling class about how to say
what you mean and perhaps more importantly, how to listen to what you might not
ever want to hear.
Our time together was almost always wonderful. But if there was something serious to be deliberated,
we pretty much discovered a way to get around discussing it in a beneficial way. Having uncomfortable conversations was not
something either of us enjoyed so we tended to skirt issues that could turn
unpleasant for either of us. Sometimes
we used silence and sometimes we used sound. Neither requires talking. Turning up the
volume of the stereo loud enough, one can almost ignore the warning sirens in
one’s head. Sometimes one of us would
bake something and we’d companionably eat decadent desserts instead of dealing
with what was hard.
We worked two different shifts. This was not at all ideal; in fact it was a
terrible idea, particularly since my shift was during the night.
If I was sad, he’d almost always find a way to make me
laugh. We are still great at laughing; in
fact it got us into trouble with more than one marriage counselor. I don’t want to suggest that humor is a bad
thing because it isn’t. It is, in fact,
quite wonderful. But laughter in place
of talking about what is important can eventually make things much harder than need
be.
Sometimes we shunted our energies into caring about very
worthy causes unrelated to our relationship.
We took in young stray bachelors, feeding, cleaning, and doing laundry
for their sorry selves as though we were their parents. We could skirt an issue with practiced
diplomacy, putting all our eggs into our carefully crafted kindred spirit
basket. We were, after all, clearly made
for each other. Heck, we even LOOKED
alike.
Was being vulnerable and talking about things that bothered
us really that important? Apparently it
was. Being a pair who never argued
didn’t help our situation. At least
people who scream at one another get things out in the open in a noticeable
though sometimes publically embarrassing way.
But we preferred to sweep prickly topics under the rug. After all, being the good kindred spirits we
were, we didn’t like to upset one another.
So three years in, we welcomed a tiny bald bundle into what
appeared to be our idyllic home. We
loved our perfect son to distraction. We
were great at funneling adoration into that little boy yet our marriage
continued to unravel in the tiniest and sometimes most imperceptible ways. When we finally acknowledged there was a
problem, we attempted therapy and relocated to another town. I switched jobs. We moved into separate bedrooms and even
tortured ourselves with mediation because we liked each other entirely too much
to involve real lawyers. Bad choices
were made; most of them mine. Those
choices turned into patterns and the patterns soon caused us to feel as though
we were irretrievably strapped to the front of a speeding train. The train’s destination was unclear but the
promise of dark tunnels was certain.
After all our practiced sweeping under the rug and several
years more of failure to effectively communicate, there was very little left at
our house besides a big unfortunate lump under the rug and larger protuberances
clogging both of our hearts. So we did
what anyone would do in our situation.
We assumed it was the end.
This is the part of the story where two people have grown so
far apart, they decide the only resolution is divorce. There seemed, in our opinion, not much left
to salvage.
But in a wonderfully unexpected twist, things became clearer
when we took a physical step away from each other. We discovered that the misery of being apart
was remarkably more painful than the misery of being together. This, to me, was miraculous.
With more than a little trepidation that our newfound spell
of hope might dissipate, we joined forces and made a real attempt to count
ourselves within the small percentage of lost causes who can eventually claim a
happy ending. We bit the bullet and departed
for a weeklong crash course in communication.
We went away to a place of very expensive intense marital therapy and
make no mistake, it was hell. We took testing to discover our pitfalls. We learned to sit with our backs against each
other and listen without interrupting. We learned to say what we mean and holy buckets, to truly mean what we say.
We learned to listen to the point of
exhaustion and though we did not think we could stand to hear another painful word,
we learned to swallow our own retort and tenderly ask each other, “Is there
more?” We learned that there was a whole
box of practical things we hadn’t even tried and that all of those tools
involved being truthful, being vulnerable, laying all our garbage on the line
despite the hurt, and finally learning to hear one another’s deepest pain.
Our bonus, four years later, was a beautiful baby girl. Our family was complete. My baby girl is nearing 20 years of age now
and there are so many things I want to tell her about finding the right person
with whom to share her life. But from
experience, I know that my time of influence has nearly passed. She’s been watching me for almost two decades
and her observations and opinions are essentially formed. It is a little scary to think that the
children we bear are seeing it all. They
take their cues from us, watching us interact with each other on a day to day
basis when the basement is flooding, an income is lost, or when the mashed
potatoes are cooking over on the stove.
They watch the way we choose to love and the ways we sometimes let
frustration override our best intentions about caring for one another. And so I pray. I pray for my children and I pray for their
someday spouses; something I have done since my children were in utero.
 |
May, 2014. And here is one answer to those prayers - our first official
family photo with my beautiful new daughter-in-law Rebecca. |
It has been a wild
thirty-six year ride and believe it or not, Jim and I are now certain the best
is yet to come. Because we’ve discovered
that real storybook endings don’t look at all like pumpkins turning into
carriages. There are no glass slippers
and this is an excellent thing since I can barely tolerate a pair of leather
pumps. The romantic excitement of
falling in love is in fact a poor cousin to the blessing of waking up every day
next to the person who has promised to love you and upon whom you finally
realize you can depend for a lifetime.
Sometimes being in love is less about a two page letter from a new admirer
and more about a two second look that passes between fifty-something year old
partners over a piece of burnt toast. It
is less about sending expensive flowers and more about dancing in the kitchen
to a song that only the two of you can hear.
All the poetry in the world can’t measure up to the
contentment one discovers on the other side of managing to stay together
through the muck. It does get easier and
it definitely gets better. We need to start telling newlyweds to expect the
worst because hard times are coming. If
we cared, we would tell them to anticipate that there will be days these handsome
young men will not even LIKE their wives, let alone want to spend another minute
looking at them. Mistakes will be made and those mistakes will be excruciating.
There will be weeks she will want to
toss that annoying guy out on his ear and never look back. The very mannerisms she found so adorable in
those first weeks of dating are the things that take her to the brink of
insanity when she faces them every day.
But during those difficult years, if they learn to hear one
another and remember the promises they made when they were young and optimistic,
their elusive love will return in a new and much more genuine way. Investing decades in a mutually caring
relationship is smarter than investing in any 401K. Adopting a few basic habits and doing the
hard work will pay dividends in trust and constancy because money doesn’t buy happiness,
but a little daily effort can buy a truly irreplaceable partner.
There’s no rocket science here; the tools are simple. Wake up every day and choose to love your
spouse. If he is being a pain in the
neck, has failed to read your mind AGAIN,
has forgotten to bring home the milk you asked him to pick up FOUR TIMES and is
sitting in front of the television snoring with a snack on his chest, love him
anyway. Ask yourself what you can do
that very day to show him you are putting his needs above your own. It sounds counterintuitive in this age of ME
but it is positively the way to loving and being loved. Because if you’ve done the work the two of
you need to do, when he wakes from his ESPN stupor with unsightly cheese dip on
his nose, he will be asking himself the same questions. “Am I putting her needs above my own?” When he answers that question, there is
pretty much nothing that can sabotage the foundation the two of you are
building. It’s messy sometimes but it is
worth the sweat.
I’ve always been a fairy tale kind of woman. I thought I needed the knight on the white
horse. But it turns out knights and noble
steeds have nothing on the man I married. Who knew it could be so fulfilling, FUN even, to fall into the rhythms of aging
with someone who loves me? A person who
can tolerate my irrational outbursts, a man who can overlook my favorite
sweatpants, who shares decades of wonderful and terrible memories, and who has
chosen, after all this time, to be with me.
I’m sure Jim would like for me to clarify that he never fell asleep in the cheese dip. And from the very fullness of my heart, I
would like to say that my construction paper eyebrows and I never imagined we’d
have it so good.
