Friday, February 24, 2012

An Ode to Marriage and a Baby Rant


An Ode to Marriage and a Baby Rant

On March 1st I will have been married for one and a half years. Me, married. Wow. There are days I can hardly believe it and I feel like singing the Barbara Streisand song, “I Finally Found Someone” … the only difference is I know that a random “finding” is not what happened. It is a gift, given to me by the hand of a loving Father.

Now, for the snippy part. For all of you who have cursed my marriage with your own disenchantment, with phrases such as:

“Oh sure, your kissing and cuddling now, but just give it a few years.”

“Its all down hill from here.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t want to sit that close in a few years.”

Or my favorite, “Yeah, well just wait till the love dies and you’re stuck with each other.”

To you I say, “No thank you, you can keep your kind words and I’ll just wait and see how this turns out without your bitter vitriol.”


Now I understand that getting married at 44 is a little different than getting married at 24. Since at 24 you’re basically still a half baked potato with no idea who you really are and what kind of person you should marry, but let me give you a reminder message:


Being single sucked.


Oh I know
,
I can hear the gasps from all of you whose fondest wish is to be single again. Let me give you a refresher course on the vaunted singleness that you miss so much.

Excuse: You get to decide what to do with all your time. No one else has a right to dictate your time.

Reminder: Yes, all your time is yours. Every. Single. Minute. This is especially true on your way home from work while you are talking to one of your girlfriends, you know, the one who is never available to do anything with you because her family takes most of her time. No harm, no foul, her family should take up her time. However, there is nothing more alone feeling than having your friend drive up into her driveway and say “hi there buddy, how was school!” with an aside to you that she has to go now because she is home. So are you, but it’s just you and all your precious free time. Now, lest I sound too pathetic, I enjoyed an enormously busy and full single life, but that didn’t mean that all that free time you so envy did not weigh heavy on my spirit.

Excuse: Nobody gets to tell you what to do with your money.

Reminder: Yup, its all you, all the time. Every single decision is yours, every single financial emergency, and every single financial mistake, every single bill, every single decision, every single worry about being laid off, every single budget or math error - all yours. Yippee! I would have given a kidney to have someone there to help with those decisions. I occasionally had enough money to buy something I wanted. You could have had it back for the price of some sound financial advice I didn’t have to pay for.

Excuse: I never get to do what I want to do.

Reminder: Oh waah! I won’t call you a big baby, but I’ll think it. Try to remember all those times that plans fell through because your married friends had things come up at the last minute. Try to remember all the dinners and movies you had alone because no one was available to join you. Try to remember that financially you were so limited that you couldn’t entertain if you wanted to.

For the ladies. Let me remind you how wholly wicked singleness is during PMS. Never have I felt so alone and pathetic as when I would lie awake at 1am and long for someone to touch.  Sucky, sucky, sucky.

Excuse:  Things are so boring.  It was so much more exciting when I was dating.

Reminder: Oh yeah, because going out and meeting some stranger at Caribou was soooo fun. Spending hours shopping (which I hate anyway), make-up, hair, all for a total stranger. Perking up like a puppy every time the coffee shop door opened, trying to decide whether to buy something before he gets there and then trying to be entertaining to a stranger. When you do decide to date each other, then comes the inevitable conversation about sex. Remember that fun one?

Me: “No I’m not going to sleep with you, I’m waiting until I get married.”
Him: in stunned amazement “What?!”
Me: “No seriously.”
Him: “Well we have to at least sleep in the same bed together, how will we know if we are compatible sleepers?”
Me: “What?!”

This was an actual conversation during my supper fun dating seasons. The next guy couldn’t figure out why I stopped him every time he tried to grope me. “No seriously, my breasts are off limits. (As he reached for me again) Am I stuttering here?”

And remember the will he/won’t he call thing when you finally think maybe? Agony.

Dating is neither for the faint of heart, nor the sane.

Let me tell you what my life is like now:

I have never in my life felt greater love than from my husband. I even understand the love of my Jesus better because my husband loves me so well.

We share in this messy, awful, wonderful, blissful life. The hard stuff is no longer mine alone and the joys are doubled because they are shared.

Sitting together in silence doing our separate things is one of the sweetest ways of being loved. Just being together.

Every single day there is someone waiting for me at the end. That alone is worth any imagined loss of singlehood.

I thought I was busy as a single, but I have never been busier in my whole life, but the difference is that we are together and the busyness is shared. We are also there to say when enough is enough.

When I lie awake at 1am, I put my hand on his arm and magically a place on his shoulder appears for me.

I can no longer walk without his hand in mine. I have lost the ability to open my own doors. I do not miss these capabilities in the slightest.

Our life together is not perfect, there are many challenges, but we look them dead in the eye and we do it together.

We go “fox hunting” often. The little foxes that spoil the vine are not allowed to run rampant through the vineyard of our marriage.

But most importantly:

“I love you” has become the melody of my days and the symphony of my nights.

And really, what more is there to say than that? 

2 comments:

  1. Very nice, Jen! But just wait until... ;)
    Seriously, you have been a student of marriage for as long as I've known you. Congrats and keep up the good work!

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  2. Thanks D! You and Ang, lived through most of that singleness with me, and I couldn't have done it without my friends!

    ReplyDelete