…it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again. Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
God, grant me the grace of a normal day.
~Billy Coffey
Found these lines on Barnstorming, where I so often find beauty, reminders of what matters, and inspiration.
I have had marriage on my mind lately. My friend Aidan has generously invited me to join her Here Year, and this month’s theme is marriage. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to be more here in my marriage, and well as considering what impact presence has on both my relationship with my husband and my family.
Marriage, and mine in particular, is a topic I don’t often broach here. I read somewhere (and I wish I could remember where, so as to attribute it) that a marriage is “the most private of geographies” and I agree entirely with that. There is so, so much about the marriages of others that we don’t see, an entire subterranean world, and I have learned not to make assumptions from the small part of the landscape that I can see above the surface.
Matt and I will celebrate our fourteenth anniversary in September. Since we met, in January 1998, we have shared a broad swath of life, between the two of us and our immediate family: two graduate degrees, one house purchase, two pregnancies, two labors and deliveries, one heart transplant, one stem cell transplant, one kidney transplant, five jobs, two international trips with our children, and more tears, laughter, and mundane days than I can possibly remember or count. It’s that small stuff, the “grout between the tiles of life’s big experiences,” that makes a marriage. It’s that stuff that makes a life.
While I don’t think we can ever understand the marriages of others, I do think there are certain observable behaviors, habits, and tendencies that people who seem (again: seem – but that’s all I have to go on!) to be happily married demonstrate. Some of these Matt and I have and do, others we could improve on. So, here are my thoughts on the habits of the happily married:
Laughter – This is the biggest one by a mile as far as I can tell. I love being around couples who make each other laugh and who can guffaw at things big and small. This is correlated with an ability to keep life’s inevitable bumps in perspective, though that deserves its own post. I think it’s as simple as everyday life is more fun when you can laugh, and people who share that have a very solid bond. Matt and I can work on this one.
Perspective – If there’s one thing I know at almost-forty it is that life is full of regrets and compromises. Even those whose lives look exactly like they planned them find them to feel nothing like we expected. Guaranteed. Couples who can help each other remember this are doing something right and important. I think Matt and I are doing okay on this one.
Affection – Without exception, as far as I can see, people who touch each other like each other. These tiny moments – hugs hello and goodbye, pats on the back when walking by a chair, kisses at bedtime, a foot rub while watching a baseball game – add up to a stronger bond. Period. I’ve written at length about my own aversion to general smell/noise/touch/taste/sight stimulation, and Matt would like to have his feet rubbed 24/7, so we have a ways to go on this one.
Individuality – I guess there’s a reason Khalil Gibran is so beloved. That whole spaces in your togetherness thing is, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely apt. The couples I admire most are the ones who are two individuals who are choosing, over and over again, to be together. This requires that each person have something – or multiple things – that they love in the world, outside of themselves, each other, and their children. The night before our wedding, I told Matt and I felt as though we were two people choosing to walk next to each other as long as our paths converged. I’m still choosing that. To me, that’s romance.
I know these observations are general, and the real task is translating them into day to day choices, minute by minute actions, that add up to a strong and healthy marriage. But maybe identifying the macro themes is useful too. At least I hope it is.
What habits do you observe among those whose marriages you respect and esteem? If you’re married, do you recognize those same behaviors in your own marriage?
first trip to Storyland, June 2010
As I’ve written many times before, traditions are important to me. The family rituals that dot our calendar year function as a kind of scaffolding for our family life. They are that important to me. To us. I’m convinced that traditions and ritual provide comfort and stability Grace and Whit as well as marking a reassuring rhythm to the months of the year.
The challenge is how this belief in tradition can coexist with my equally firm yet somewhat opposed desire that my children have new experiences. I want them to see the world, and making this happen is something that by definition takes away from adherence to tradition. We have limited vacation time and means, and we have to make choices. Time is, after all, our only true zero sum resource. This year, for example, we aren’t going to Legoland. Letting go of that ritual was hard, but it was time, and the time it opened up allowed for a visit to another new place. Whit has told me a few times that he feels really sad that we aren’t going, but I explained that we are doing something else this year, and he is looking forward to that.
Another thing we do every year is go to Storyland at the end of the school year. This year, we went ziplining in the New Hampshire woods. We maintained our tradition while changing its shape. We stayed at the same hotel that we always do. We went to the same restaurant for dinner. We visited the same water park. The energy of celebration and rejoicing in simply being together was absolutely the same. We were all reassured, I’m certain of it, that our ritual could shift but still have tremendous meaning.
Can you spin it so you have it both ways, in that each calendar year we have a new adventure, that that’s the tradition? Maybe so. These don’t have to be big expensive trips, by the way. We went to Jerusalem and to the Galapagos, yes, but I would also put our family trip to Washington up alongside those international forays. What I’m after for Grace and Whit are new experiences which show them this broad, beautiful world as well as remind them how small they are within it. There’s something both daunting and reassuring about realizing how small we are in the enormous swath of time and geography, and I personally think we all realize it eventually. I just want them to do so earlier rather than later.
So now, I think about places I want to go, consider how to mold the rituals we still have so that they allow for these experiences, try to balance familiarity with new adventure. Just as with everything else in this life, the only thing we can count on is change. I know our traditions provide a comforting handhold in the slipstream of time for Grace and Whit (and for me), but I also need to make sure they change as necessary.
ziplining in New Hampshire, June 2014
But I do know this. I have a great life partner in Sheryl, and whatever happens as I move forward, it will be fun. And as Madonna said, “I won’t let success fuck up my fun,” because I put less and less value on success. It’s the process that counts. it’s the people I get to connect with, most of whom will never be famous or want to be It’s the intention that gives the action value, not the results. Most actors (and many people) start out to please others. The trick is to truly value satisfying yourself. Working from that place, being in fellowships without an agenda, brings satisfied excitement; that, today, is fun.
A while back, Diana Nyad, a sixty-four-year-old woman, after two decades of trying, swam from Cuba to America. At her same age, my mother lost her battle with breast cancer. Life is unpredictable and has very different plans for all of us. There will be heroism and tragedy; each new day has the promise of both. Learning to live in (and accept) that dichotomy provides the adrenaline to always move ahead and be grateful for what we have. It can power us all to great things if we recognize it. It can be the source of our greatest possibility, to know and feel with every level of our own consciousness that we are alive. That this, right here, right now, is our life. It is not our parents’ or our children’s, not our husband’s or our wives’. It is not made more or less valuable by our job or how much we have in the ban. Our life is ours. It is the only one we will ever have. And we should love it.
– Rob Lowe, Love Life
Several weeks ago I read a wonderful piece by Wendy Bradford post about the small notes she and her children leave each other. It made me smile, because this is a way that Grace, Whit, Matt, and I communicate too. The themes of the notes have changed over time, but we have always written small missives to each other.
There are the notes in the lunchboxes, yes. I don’t write them every day, but I always do when I’m traveling for work and sometimes otherwise, too. I have a pad of little jokes that I sometimes put in their lunches, too. I’m not sure when they’ll be embarrassed to have a note from their mother in their lunch, but not yet, so I’ll keep going. Last week I wrote the last lunchbox notes for 3rd and 5th grade and, yes, tears came to my eyes as I did so.
Some afternoons I have a babysitter who picks the children up from school and brings them home. Often, they come home to find my office door shut, if I’m on a conference call or talking to a client. Almost every day, Whit writes a note with a question and slips it under my door. There’s always a place for me to respond, whether it’s “yes” and “no” with little boxes next to them or a blank line for me to fill in. These always make me laugh.
There are the apology notes, which often come from Grace these days. She will get mad about something, pout, and later, write me a note apologizing and explaining. What I have to learn to do is not to react in the moment, and to trust that the resolution will come. The truth is I worry someday (and soon) it won’t come, and that fear animates a lot of my reactions. Whit writes them sometimes too, including the time he told me that he loved me more than Legos and books combined (and made a Lego flower to go with the note).
And then there are the love notes. These are, of course, my favorites. Grace writes poems and cards, though the frequency of these is dropping (something I wrote about in This is Childhood: Book & Journal: Those Precious Early Years
One of my fiercest wishes as my children get older and move into the challenging tween and teen seasons is that they keep talking to me. These notes seem one way to keep that alive, and while they’re minor, each represents the desire to say something, to connect, to be heard, and for that I am grateful. As I keep learning over and over, life is in the small things. These tiny missives, angry, apologetic, loving, or funny, are small and big. I hope Grace and Whit keep writing them.
