Let's hope it's just one more symptom of my currently jaded if ever improving state, but I definitely should not attend any more weddings for the foreseeable future. Not only did I make a mental list of all the things I'd rather be doing instead of making yet more small talk with my husband's college acquaintances (1. eat powdered glass 2. take a punch to the face 3. watch this Indiana Jones marathon in the hotel room... ooo...) but I found myself getting all derisive during the vows. I know! Awful. Curmudgeon and a grump.
The bride and groom, both attorneys in their thirties, got into the inevitable 'I promise to laugh at all your jokes and never take you for granted after a hard day and always tell you when you have spinach in your teeth' and it was all I could do not to mutter portentously, WINTER IS COMING, MOTHERF***ERS!
Believe me, I know that weddings are about celebrating the ideal and stating your best intentions before family and friends. I believe in that. But the part of me - that 98% of me, really - that is still battered from the past two years feels like the 'laugh at all your jokes' theme misses the important stuff. Give me 'I'll be your foundation when everything else has fallen away', give me 'I'll be your safe harbor in the storm, and you'll be mine.' The bones of a marriage show when everything goes to hell and you truly only have each other. We get married, quite exactly, for companionship in the good times and salvation in the bad. Marriage is not primarily for a bad day, but for the worst day. We choose our someone to rely on in hard times. Can you imagine marrying someone who you knew, with absolute certainty, would abandon you in a crisis?
So the idea of modern pressures being the test of a marriage, it feels so incomplete. An adolescent notion of what badness is. Comfort and companionship in the day to day is necessary, certainly. But it takes a lifelong commitment to survive a crisis, the big bad - anything less breaks under the strain.
We promise each other forever before our friends and family as a celebration of the love we feel in that moment - but also as a commitment to stay strong, stay loyal, when the worst day comes and all we have to cling to is each other. I want to hear an acknowledgment of that in wedding vows, that binding ourselves together for life necessarily means shared joy and shared pain, a safe harbor of our own making. Life is hard and winter is coming, but by god I'll face it with you in my arms.
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I love this. My husband's aunt gave her daughter some of the best advice when she was dating . . . its easy to likeable (or loveable) in the easy times; the person you marry should be someone you like even in the worst of times. Sometimes I think that if we all -- before we walk down the aisle -- could get a preview of the WORST times in our lives, when life just keeps throwing shit our way -- and see how our prospective partner behaves in that moment, we'd know whether he/she is "the one." Less people might walk down the aisle, but I bet there'd also be less failed marriages.
ReplyDeleteI won't lie -- these last two years have thrown my husband and I a whole lot of unexpecteds, and truthfully, we haven't taken them all on as a team. A LOT of times I think we've each dealt privately with our own pain, afraid to share it with the other one for fear of bursting their bubble (a lot of times, its felt like he's been optimistic when I'm at my most worried and vice versa, which WORKS well b/c there's always one of us able to keep on keeping on even when the other is feeling a little down, but at the same time, its made it harder for us to share with each other how we are feeling - the one that's struggling doesn't want to burst the other's bubble so to speak.). I think working as a "team" will forever be a challenge for us - we are both fiercely indepedent people. I also tend to be the one that worries the most - which is my personality, but sometimes I wish he'd bear a little more of the worry, but I wouldn't trade his optimism for anything either.
Marriage is just f'in hard. So so hard. Weddings are all optimism and happiness and cheer. Marriage on the other hand, is a whole lot of work.
Through your worst times, do you feel like you've operated as a team? through the medical stuff? the worrying, etc? HOW?
We made it through the worst medical stuff (NICU and all the emergency surgeries) as a team, for sure. I get calmer as things get more dire - I was super calm during the whole Life Flight/birth fiasco - and A and I both tend to focus on the facts at hand and possible solutions in a crisis. The aftermath has been harder. After the immediate danger is over, I get hit with all the emotions while A doesn't acknowledge his at all.
ReplyDeleteThe pressure to keep B healthy, to increase his weight gain as he became harder and harder to feed, it almost broke me. I knew that staying home with B for the semester would be bad for me and for my marriage, but he just wouldn't eat unless it was to nurse and he was so underweight already. I didn't have a choice and in the end I do think it saved him from needing a G-tube and from developing long term feeding issues. What I didn't expect was that A's own stress issues would conflict with my own (he still won't really admit that the NICU had any lasting effect on him). So suddenly we were each alone dealing with our stress, as he got more and more negative and distant and I was just crumbling under the strain of nursing in difficult conditions, with no sleep and almost absolute isolation. It really, really sucked.
We're still working out a new way to interact. We've got crisis mode down, now we need to figure out how to be a team while facing the unrelenting pressure of raising a medically complex kid. We have so many people butting in - therapists, nurses, doctors, the medical team, family - it makes it harder. I'm so jealous of people with non-medical kids, they only have to navigate two opinions on most days.
I think we're getting there, but our happiness is inextricably tied to how B is doing. If he's eating well and keeping things down, we're happier and communicating better. If he's refusing food or throwing up, or worse, eating large volumes but still not growing, we get snappish with each other and withdrawn. Bad days feel like things will be bad forever, good days make me hope that some day we'll be able to ride out the bumps. Or, god, see the bumps get smaller and smaller until our road looks like everyone else's.