mercurial scribe

It wasn’t so long ago that I was feeling very pessimistic about my marriage. A mix of financial hardship, little time together due to his new position at work and a certain stagnation in the romance department had left me feeling everything but the warm fuzzies. I felt alone, like I was failing as a wife and I couldn’t help our marriage.

Justin and I were really getting to the nitty-gritty of the bigger issues at work and really making some headway when the news that our Little One was coming came to us. Being of the logical sort, I’ve never bought into the “baby fixes everything” philosophy of marital problems, so after my initial shock and joy there was a grave concern:

Are we ready as a couple to deal with this new addition on top of everything else?

I’ll be honest: I hesitated. I didn’t know. Especially because the night I showed Justin the pee stick was positive, he went blanch and hardly spoke. He went into a week-long state of shell-shock and it had me mighty worried. Did he not want this kid? Was he wondering what the hell have we gotten ourselves into? Was he ONLY scared and not happy?

Now, I know my husband and there is a reason I affectionately call him “my emotional snail”. He takes months to process what will take me a day or two to sort out. It’s just his way. I try to respect that this is how he is and let him live and experience in his own time, but there are times that it pushes my patience to its limits. I’m left feeling all alone in the relationship while he sorts out how he feels, not even what he wants to do about it! This is not my definition of a good time. So by the time he’s figured out how he feels about the issue at hand, I’ve already moved on to two more issues that have cropped up while he figured out how he felt about issue #1! It’s a vicious circle that we have yet to fully learn to deconstruct though we’re working on it.

But about a week ago, Justin did something that made me smile the kind of smile that bubbles up from within you and bursts out, like a reactionary giggle to an unexpected comment. He smiled at me all dopey-like as he went to kiss me good-night and said, “My baby” (one of his pet names for me) only to correct himself with “No, my babies“. He kissed me on the forehead, whispered “I love you” then gently laid his lips on my slightly rounded belly and said “I love you too.”

Since then there have been numerous “Awww!” inducing moments he’s created talking about the baby, which has reassured me tremendously. But what really laid my fears about our marriage to rest was a long interesting conversation we had with my father in law.

My father-in-law is an interesting man after whom my husband is sometimes the spittin’ image. Since I adore my husband, it nearly goes without saying that my father-in-law and I are quite keen on each other and have enjoyed many a marathon conversation over the years. Tonight’s conversation began on the Little One and how s/he’ll change everything, evolving into a dialogue on how a marriage effects the whole family structure. Justin’s parents had a bloody separation of four years before finally having a pretty bitter divorce… only to now be “friends” and talk on the phone daily. There are some things that my father-in-law divulged on what he thinks went wrong in their marriage, how things could have been handled differently and where he feels they handled things well. Listening to him and all the crazy things both he and my mother-in-law put each other through, I couldn’t help but look at my husband and my marriage with fresh and grateful eyes. Our problems are real, yes; they are important and need tending to. BUT they are nothing compared to the things his parents and my own divorced parents have put each other through, which made me realize that our marriage is not in dire trouble: life is just rough right now in a way we haven’t experienced before. I’m no stranger to hardship, but it’s the troubles that I can’t find solutions to that drive me to obsessing about them, which I’m beginning to think is what I was doing.

Reviewing the evening, I feel a strong sense of calm about our new little family. There are things about Justin that will always drive me nuts: how wherever he takes off his shoes and socks is where they stay until he wears the shoes again or does laundry; how he will do only the dishes he dirtied and leave the pot that’s been soaking overnight for someone else to do; the fact that he hardly ever washes his hockey gear. These things will most likely always be a part of this man. But this man is also the one who stuck through psychotic nights full of hallucinations and panic attacks; the first person I want to call when something goes good, bad or awry; the man I can shoot the breeze with for hours and still love his presence; the only man I’ve ever known in the Biblical sense, the only man I ever want to know.

It’s strange how you can hear it a hundred times and yet it isn’t real until you experience it for yourself: marriage is hard work. It is sacrifice and compromise and one more lame argument about how I already offered four suggestions for dinner that you shot down, now you suggest something so I can shoot it down! But the thing is there’s a secret fun to knowing my husband so intimately. That he chews his tongue when he’s concentrating deeply. That he has a penchant for keeping anything “just in case”. The face he makes when I suggest a new layout for the living room and he can’t picture what it will look like. It’s like little treasures, part of this secret exclusive history and language we’ve developed. It’s those little lovelies that are the reward of faithful monogamy - the lifetime of memories and inside jokes, the bond that is so sacred and becomes so routine as to slip into the mundane. Yet in Jewish culture, there is a saying which I have come to love quite fiercely: the sacred lives in the mundane but you must learn to see it.

I think I believe that more with every new day.