Tangled

I've been thinking a lot about marriage lately.  Some of it good, some of it not so good.  It's interesting over the years to watch marriages around me either crumble or get stronger or some, just sort of plod along.  I know, it sounds like I'm describing something animate and real when I talk about marriages and here's the deal, I think they are animate and real.  They're like this living organism.  If you talk to Brene Brown, she'd tell you that LOVE is a living organism and it needs food and water and light to survive.

And of course, at the base of marriage is love right?  But honestly twenty years in, there is a lot more things involved.  It's like this crazy map of a million different emotions and memories and feelings and to be honest, it can get a lot messy.

I remember my parents having a bit of a rough patch (for years on an off) and when one of my sisters suggested that my mom just divorce my dad and be done with it, my mom said, Oh, I couldn't do that, it would make him too sad and he'd be too lonely.

I have thought over this for years and years.  At the time, my mom was on an extended visit to my sister (I think it lasted several months) where she was working stuff out. My dad was home working his stuff out.  My sister could not understand how anything could ever possibly be worked out.  It seemed a lost cause for her and to be frank we all had our moments where we wondered if these differences between them had become irreconcilable.  It's funny to try and puzzle out your parents marriage when really, I don't think I can puzzle out my own.  I'm not good at it and frankly, I can't understand it.  And to be perfectly honest, I don't think I can understand why anyone is married.

I know, that's rather cynical, and I'm not being cynical, I'm being observant.  I just don't understand how certain people get together and more importantly why they stay together?  Just after we married (and don't worry, I'll get back to my mother and father) I worked with two women who were in the process of their marriages dissolving.  One just discovered that her husband, who she had just started a company with, was having an affair with a new secretary they had hired.  She knew the whole summer I worked with her and she couldn't bring herself to confront him.  She just watched him and caught him in lie after lie and would come to work, a strong wise beautiful woman and say, But we have two children together, a house, a dog, and three cars?  Why? And tell us all the openings she gave him to tell her, but he never did.  I left without knowing if she ever confronted him or just let it go on so that her life as she knew it went on.  Then the other woman, she just plain old hated her husband.  He'd call her a few times a day and we all knew it because she'd just start screaming at him and swearing at him and yelling I bleeping HATE your bleeping guts as loud as she could.  Then she'd get off the phone and look at me and say, Honey, why the hell did you just get married?

Oh, yeah, great intro to marriage.  But here's the deal, I was skeptical about it to begin with.  My parents were in their decade long struggle before I even met John and so I knew about hard marriages and silence and discord.  But my parents, unlike these, was quiet and strained and filled with loving pain.  I knew it was a risk and I knew John (for four years to be exact) before I married him and I knew that I wasn't getting someone who was perfect, but he was my imperfect and I wanted him just the same.

That's why when my mom told my sister that she couldn't leave my dad because it would hurt him so much, I knew that at the bottom of all the wackiness in my parents marriage was love.  Not little temporary love, but BIG huge LOVE that had sort of gotten lost or not lost, but all the other complicated stuff had gotten in the way of it.  But at the base, and what kept them working together, was that big LOVE.  And through the years, they fed it and nurtured it.  My parents always hold hands to this day when they walk somewhere.  And this year, after my mother lost her only sister and sibling, and had a bit of a health crisis, we can see how deeply and dearly they love each other.  It's funny because I now see that it's all those complicated bits of children and history and hurts and fears that have bound my parents together even more than that initial first love.  They are bound by cords of memories and emotions and dreams and loss and hopes.

John and I have been married almost twenty-one years and there have been, I'm sad to say, a few years in there, when things were not so great.

I regret those years.

I regret the time we wasted being frustrated with each other and misunderstanding each other.  I regret that I didn't meet John's frustrations with openness and understanding and love.  I regret that I didn't see him, not the ideal I think I painted in my head of him, but the REAL him for years and years and years.  I regret I didn't stop when he came in from work and he would find me and grab me and kiss me.  Why didn't I just drop what ever the heck I was doing and kiss him back and just tell him how much I loved him?  See?  Regrets.  Blah.

But that's what the not so great years have taught me.  I stop now.  I stop and hug him and tell him how much I love him.  I just plane old like him.  Sure he makes me crazy now and then, but that's usually because I'm making myself crazy and I haven't taken enough time to just be by myself.  He'll tell me that.  You need a minute to yourself, Mary.  Go.  Get your crap together (though he never says it like that because, well, he'd have crap thrown at his head!).  We're figuring stuff out.  One night I was super tired and he was tired and we were both being a little stupid.  So I went to bed really really mad.  I fell asleep thinking all sorts of grrrrr thoughts.  I dreamed this horrible dream where one of our babies had gotten horribly hurt and the only person I wanted was John.  I woke up to find him sleeping beside me, curled around me, and I thought, Oh, why do I let these stupidnesses get in-between us?  He's my best thing and I keep forgetting that and shoving him away or getting hurt by his tiredness or his sometimes thoughtlessness.  Why do I forget that he loves me, poor man?  And he's trying so hard to do it well.  And he succeeds so often and I just forget to tell him.  I forget to thank him.  Why do I take him for granted?

And that my friends, I think is the root of all good marriages and the seed of how marriages go bad.  Taking our best things for granted.  When you are first madly in love and there is just the two of you and not even a mortgage, all you've got is LOVE and time and fun.  But years and children and responsibilities and mistakes and hurts and howls and fears and heartbreaks and set backs and health challenges and stubborn pride, well, they get tangled up.  And if we're not careful, they wrap around us so much that we can't even see our best other person, they're just tangled up in all the weight of life.  They're part of the hardness.  And sometimes, some people want an out of that.  They think that if we just cut it all off, all that messiness and that weight and those hurts and hardnesses, well, they'll be free to start again.  But here's the dealio--and trust me, I've been there--by cutting off that weight, you're also cutting off some of your bestness.  Some of the greatest things in your life are tangled up in that weight.

So, if you can, stop for a minute or two and start untangling all that weight and look for your best things in the mess.  It's there and I promise, you'll probably find it's your other half.  And maybe they're really super tangled up and you might have to be patient for a minute or two with them because when you're all tangled up, your cranky and tired and you can't see anything good at all.  But love and openness and thanks and admiration and joy and interest and time, well, they heal all sorts of things.  They're actually magical.  And miraculous.  I've seen it with my own eyes and I've felt it in my own heart.

And sometimes, well, even if you want to work it out and untangle each other, why they're done and they cut and saw you right off and you're left quite alone with only half yourself and half your memories and a whole heart filled with all sorts of aches.  I've seen this happen too and well, it's pretty stinky and horrible.  But here's the deal, I've also seen that life, well, it has this way of healing us.  If we're open to it.  Even the badest hurts, well, there is a balm for us.  Maybe another marriage or maybe not, but there is always love and it's always waiting for us.  Maybe it's in the face of our neighbor who loves us like family or it's our own children who fill in those holes.  Maybe it's us who help fill in someone else's holes.  What I know for sure is that all of us--married, divorced, widowed, never married--well, we've all got holes in our hearts and we need filling.  And that's perhaps what the whole point of this existence is--to get out of our own way and see whats around us.  Whether it's a husband or wife or a child or a parent or a friend or a child or a neighbor--it's stopping and untangling long enough to see and if we can . . . healing them and filling in their holes.

There is this wonderful line in one of my favorite yoga videos, "You just need to get out of your own way . . . "

I'm trying.  I'm trying.  And in that trying, I have hope . . . of myself, for John, for my kids, my family and most of all for you.

My best thing and me at Ikea . . . the best place!

**And if you want a beautiful yoga video to start with (even if you've never ever done a second of yoga in your life)--Rainbeau Mars "Sacred Sweat" or "Pure Power"  They're hard to find but worth their weight in gold.

Or if you want to try something right now, Youtube "Fightmaster Yoga" my favorite favorite ones.  She's brilliant.  I'll link my favorite practices tomorrow.