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?