Life on The Farm: Letting Go

Today was a very low key and nappish day. I watched a couple of movies, read a little bit, took some naps, and Matt and I cooked the most delicious peanut noodles for dinner together. Such a delight. It was gray and windy out, so I didn't take a walk, but it sounded just perfectly perfect, with rain coming down intermittently and the wind blowing those dry leaves around. It's been so luxurious to just let go of everyday life and stress and just focus on the fine art of waiting. Speaking of letting go, I spent a lot of time today wondering how long it will be before all of those ripe red and yellow leaves fall, and how long it will still be beautiful, and if I'll be able to get any good outdoor newborn photos in the leaves. As in, which will drop first, my baby or the leaves?

I had some cramping today that I took as an opportunity to practice relaxing and breathing through. I've been doing the Hypnobabies home study course, borrowed from my wonderful doula back home in Jackson, and it has been a huge help in drilling relaxation tools into my brain. It's five weeks of what is mostly daily audio tracks that are listened to repeatedly, followed by review until you reach your birthing day. The woman's voice on the CDs is like the voice of the Angel of Calm, Comfort and Ease, and I can easily conjure it up in my head whenever I want to. It was actually incredibly helpful in letting the minor discomfort fade into the background and I wasn't even sure when it finally stopped. I guess I found my way to let it go. (See the theme here today? Because I just found it!)

As for what I still need to let go--the baby moved position again and it drives me nuts when he does that because I can't quite figure it out and it seems to be my fixation, having him in a good position for birth. I told Deborah yesterday that because I can't relax and let it go he'll probably be transverse and inside out when I go into labor. She laughed. It was silly. (A baby can't be inside out.) Now I feel limbs on my right instead of left side, yet it feels (I think?) like his body is still on the right. And his movements though frequent were not as large today as usual, which of course always worries me as well. He's moving now, and I'm stopping what I'm doing to obsess over figuring out exactly where every body part is and which way its facing.

The fact is I can't control it. I can't know it for sure, not having a Plexiglas window into the womb, and while I can do poses and exercises to encourage a good position, at the end of the day, I have to trust my baby to know what he's doing. I have to let it go. And on that note, I'll leave you with a photo essay. The first photo is of the trees behind our house this morning.

Life on The Farm: Day One

I promised a few people who were dying to keep tabs on me during my days here at The Farm (really, there are a few) that I would blog every day about my experience here. It’s not at all selfless--as I am heading into my greatest life transition to date I of course feel the burning need to write anyway.

I started writing a “Why The Farm?” blog a few weeks ago, but honestly, that question is just too big to deal with here. I was sprawling and rambling and citing support every which way like an old growth vine covered in heavy grapes in September. (How’s that for a fertility metaphor, eh?) There are just so many reasons, but these words basically cover all of them up in their blanket of wisdom:

I’ll leave it at that for now because you won’t really care about the details unless you’re a birth nerd, and if you are a birth nerd you’ll already know. If you would like to be a birth nerd and are looking for proper training, I’ll refer you to Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. It pretty much covers it. If you’re not much of a reader but care enough to spend an hour and a half, the popular documentary The Business of Being Born works too. You can watch it for free on YouTube. These are just starting points that will lead you into into a wide new school of thought about birth if you fall down the rabbit hole like I did.

Anyway, I am here. In this beautiful house in these beautiful woods, resting and centering myself, being cared for by some of the most experienced and respected midwives in the world, waiting reflectively for my baby boy to make his way fully into the real world from the mystery beyond it, and generally being incredibly spoiled to have the most ideal situation imaginable as my reality. And I’m going to share my thoughts and experiences, and soon, baby pictures and new mama thoughts. My filter will be pretty minimal, so if you’re disgusted or annoyed by side notes on my round ligaments and milk production, or bored by the mundane (like what I ate for lunch) you may want to just check out now. This is my diary and I’m just letting you read it if you want.

So where am I today? What did I do? How am I feeling? So nice of you to ask.

I’m settled in my very comfy temporary bedroom, where I foresee spending a lot of time for the next month. I started out the day by sleeping until I woke up at around 8:30, to hear Matt on the phone with his boss dealing with emergency #1 of what are sure to be a string over the month that he works from “home”. I used what little phone reception I could get to check in with a few people who had asked if we’d arrived safely.

Then my midwife Deborah came over and we settled into the comfy couch for a long talk about risks, benefits and uncertainty in birth related choices, both at home and in the hospital setting. Matt sat in a chair nearby and listened attentively, asking a question now and then as well. Then we rode with her over to the clinic for a quick check on the baby and routine labs. Baby boy is still head down, butt on my right side. I expressed concern over the ideal position being the left, but Deborah seemed mostly unconcerned. Babies turn during labor (not surprising, since there’s a lot of action going on around them at that point), and she’s seen plenty of births with right-side babies go just as fine and dandy as any others. Since she’s seen over a thousand of them, I guess I’ll go with her relaxed attitude about it. He’s head down and anterior, both of which are more important. He’s also very strong, though he measures a bit small. Takes after Dad. ;)

Then we walked home from the clinic and enjoyed the beautiful weather and falling leaves…as well as acorns, which fall and hit tin roofs around here with what is apparently the velocity of bullets. We discussed options for taking walks with the baby that wouldn’t involve a newborn sized hard hat and Matt pointed out which trees were the offenders. All I have to do is avoid walking under them.

Our house completely empty of groceries, we then hopped into the car for lunch and grocery shopping in Franklin (home to the stars, none of whom we spotted at Whole Foods, I’m disappointed to report). Lunch was a quick and really delicious affair at the P.F. Chang’s new “good food quickly” chain, Pei Wei. We so need one of these in Jackson! While packing both our Teriyaki and our Sweet and Sour leftovers in one Chinese takeout box, we speculated that this must be the way that the Chinese have invented so many varied and flavorful sauces over the millennia. If only my expert-on-all-things-Chinese brother Drew had been around to confirm.

Then I shopped while Matt unsuccessfully searched for a mechanic with time to take a look at our very unfortunately timed gas leak in our car. I got really tired and had a weepy hormonal breakdown. No worries though, I cry about once a day lately. It’s fine. I’ve accepted it. It’s how I’m processing.

Which brings me to the ‘how am I feeling?’ portion of your question. I think the baby dropped the other day as we were working like mad to close up the house and pack up the car. Since then I’ve been feeling movement lower, and unfortunately my feet have finally been a little swollen. Maybe I can breathe deeper? I was still breathing and eating pretty dang well for the most part, so I don’t think I appreciate this phase as much as most mamas do. I’m just annoyed with the swollen feet. But other than that I’m still pretty great. Other typical discomforts are minimal or nonexistent.

Emotionally? 99% of the time I’m all peace and bliss and excitement. Then there are random moments, usually when I wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, when I have an oh shit, I’m going to have to give birth. Really soon. moment of terror. I’ve never done it before. Birth seems like such a monumental task to be handed to such untrained, naïve newbies, yet that’s been Mother Nature’s plan since the beginning for some reason. So I go back to embracing that truth, and trusting that I will be surrounded and supported by some of the very best humans on the planet: my husband, my mom, my midwives (and possibly one of my dearest friends, too). And this baby isn’t staying in there forever. That’s just a fact.

We came home and Matt threw together a quick veg chili and biscuits for dinner while I wrote most of this.

And now I am sitting here finishing up, listening to a Sara Bareilles album that baby heartily approves of, judging by his dance party that only quiets when the music does. J Tomorrow’s schedule is looking very full. There’s a hammock on an enormous screen porch that’s begging to be used before the weather gets too cold. I have a ton of scrapbook supplies ready to be assembled into baby boy’s baby book. I’m thinking my favorite made-from-scratch lentil soup is in order for tomorrow’s dinner. We’ve set up a super sweet home theater with a silver bed sheet and our projector. And of course, I’ll have another blog to write. It will probably be more introspective and less of a play-by-play, and maybe also have some Farm pictures. If I can gather the wherewithal to take a walk on these swollen feet.

Until then! (Too tired to proofread this, so forgive my errors.)

Why do I write for teenagers?

As most people know, I have an MFA in writing for children and young adults. Most of us in this weird club with this highly specialized degree would agree that the question we get the most often is “Why do you write for teenagers?”

MFAs in writing are supposed to be serious business; often too serious, judging by the frequently mocking references to “MFA writing” in the serious literary community. So it seems counterintuitive to most folks to bother paying all that money and doing all that work to get fancy letters behind your name that are all about making up stories for obnoxious, self-centered kids. After all, that’s not very serious is it? So truly, why bother? The reasons are always multi-faceted for all of us, yet our primary reasons differ from person to person. My primary answer is that I write for myself, as many writers would say. But I realize that at the heart of my Self, that is, the adult adaptation of my soul, is teenage me. And dealing with that is the most serious (and often painful) business I could possibly invest myself in.

I’m lucky enough to have gotten to watch the development of significantly younger cousins and, most closely, my own brother, from infancy to adulthood. In my observation of these people, we are mostly born who we are. Yes, we significantly mature and develop our unique personal qualities. Or they can be adulterated by pain or abuse, walls can go up as a result of loss or trauma, deflections and disguises often become a part of our everyday survival. But inherent in those words—wall, deflect, disguise—is the indication that the something that lies beyond is what it has always been and always will be.

So what’s so special about adolescence, if I am who I’ve always been? I think it has to do with a kind of Self consciousness you lack as a young child. Young children look out a window, so to speak—they are watching and absorbing, molding themselves to fit their familial and cultural expectations with very little regard for themselves as an individual. Ask a typical five-year-old seriously who they think they are and they’ll likely simply tell you their name. That’s the only identifying factor that matters much at this age. They are who they are, but that is of little importance to them. But ask a teenager who they think they really are and you’ll get a deer in headlights look, a terror of being revealed.

Teens stop looking out the window and become, developmentally appropriately, what adults often condescendingly refer to as “navel gazers”. They start spending tons of time literally and figuratively looking at themselves, as they were born and shaped, in the mirror. What do people see when they see me? What do I see when I see me? Does it measure up? Is it good enough?

And I say, try though we may to bury it deeply, to hide it, ignore it, and laugh at it, the unique brand of pain that comes with facing those questions on a daily basis shapes everything about who we are and who we become in the six or seven decades of our lives after adolescence.

Yes, we grow up. We get more comfortable in our skin. If we’re lucky, we learn to accept compliments with grace, we put less stock in our physical appearance, we embrace our talents despite continued struggle to fully actualize them. But underneath that, underneath all of that, something remains.

Recently, my dear friend posted this picture from my senior prom on Facebook. Yep, that's me in back, the brunette with the 'I'm forcing this smile right now' look on her face :

I’m so glad she posted it, I’ve been looking for it for ages! I wanted it for my author website someday, and you better believe I'll put it there! But looking at it was even more painful than I’d anticipated. At first I resorted to the defense mechanisms I refer to above—I ‘jokingly’ referred to myself as a huge loser. It was classic deflecting, the ‘call yourself something first so nobody has a chance to think it before you acknowledge it yourself’ move. I showed the photo to my husband, Matt.

“Come here!” I called. “Here’s that picture I’ve been wanting to show you!”

“What picture?” he asked, coming into the room.

“The group picture from my senior prom when I couldn’t get a date,” I tried to joke, but I started crying before I could even finish the sentence. I let a second pass.

“Wow,” I said. “I guess that stuff never, ever goes away, does it?”

Did it matter that I am now a reasonably confident grown woman happily married to a man who adores me beyond all reasonable expectation I may have a right to, and pregnant with his baby? That I'm happier and more fulfilled than I've ever been? Nope. Not to teenage me. Not to the me that still lives right there in the middle, constantly whispering to my subconscious all of the reasons that I don’t measure up. Will anything ever change her mind? She made the first decisions about my self worth, and friends, those decisions stick around.

As I continued to look at that picture, I remembered viscerally how that and other similar situations felt all through my junior high and high school years. “The worst part,” I told Matt, “was knowing that if I didn’t get in the picture, I was calling attention to myself. I was making everyone feel awkward and sorry for me. But if I did, I completely stuck out and looked like a loser. I was screwed either way. I felt like that all. the. time.”

Though my sweet friend’s sweet boyfriend who didn’t go to our school graciously stepped out of the picture so that she could be my “other,” it didn’t really change anything. I was still the defective one. I knew that there were rumors that I was a lesbian, that I was a little too close to my girl friends. I also knew there was nothing I could do to change it, even though it was so not true.

I had crushes on boys all the time, but the second they showed what maybe even could have been a glimmer of interest in return I would nearly have a panic attack. One time I actually did have a panic attack, shaking uncontrollably on the bathroom floor after a boy I liked dared to put his arm around me. In hindsight, I can see the damage that was done to me in my childhood and the strange and opposite way I chose to deal with it—where most girls hurt in the way I was may have become promiscuous, I became completely closed off when it came to even beginner-level intimacy with boys. A therapist I saw a few times called it “fascinating and unique” as a coping mechanism. But to teenage me at the time, I just felt like a freak. I didn’t know what my problem was, all I knew was that boys didn’t like me. In typical cruel and simplistic teenage fashion, this led to a self-judgment that I wasn’t worth much. And I was probably ugly.

So as an adult, am I kinder to myself? Of course I am. I don’t really believe those things (intellectually) anymore. For me, getting out of my small town and exploring the world, daring myself and taking those dares, was the psychological equivalent of getting out of the small, mean box I’d put my Self in and looking at what was really real about who I was. As I progressed through my twenties I became increasingly confident and self-aware, more and more willing to take on scary things as exciting challenges and open myself up to others, and much more able to deal with rejection and meanness and efficiently leave it outside of the box where I keep my self-worth. Overall, I’m pretty proud of who I am and who I’ve become. My external expression of that person could use some work, my efficiency leaves something to be desired (to put it kindly), but that’s an essay for another day.

But still. Teenage me exists. She controls more than I’d like her to. When a photo from thirteen years ago demonstrates its power to bring me to tears, I can’t forget that. So I remember anew that the most important reason I write for teenagers is that I write for her.

I write for her because like most adults, I try to bury her and lock her away. But: I’m always aware that just a tiny slight of her hand can act like a railroad switch—cause an alteration in judgment that is oh-so-easy to just not notice in the moment, though it may change the whole trajectory of my life.

I may not be able to get rid of her, but I cling to a stubborn belief that I can love her and teach her, maybe even help her heal. I have to believe that I can get her to understand that she wasn’t a loser at her senior prom, and she wasn’t the only senior that didn’t get a date. She was actually the only one with the guts to do what she wanted to do and go anyway, in her shimmery blue and purple snakeskin print dress she’d optimistically purchased months before. She was the beginning of the person who said yes I’ll go to Spain for a year even though no I don’t speak Spanish or know anyone there. Yes, I’ll go to California and work at that camp for the summer, sight unseen. Yep, I’ll transfer schools my senior year of college rather than go back to the school that made me miserable. Sure, I'll volunteer to translate Spanish to the best of my ability for total strangers at the free medical clinic. Absolutely, I’ll get an MFA in writing for kids, because I know that’s what I was born to do, even if it does mean bucking every single piece of conventional writing wisdom and taking out monster loans to do it.

Teen me was seriously awesome. She made the very first of my biggest, bravest choices without precedent to reassure her that it would turn out okay, even amazing. I’m going to keep writing the stories I need to tell to help her understand how awesome she is, until she gets it through her head. Is it futile? Maybe, but I have to try. Because when she gets that, that’s the last piece of the puzzle. That’s when I really get that, not just on the surface, but all the way through to the middle. It would be the truest kind of freedom there is. And then who knows what I'll be able to do?

On Marriage: My Two Cents

“How often are you happy, Charlotte?”

Carrie and Miranda, heartbroken and disillusioned by their too-fallibly human men, ask this question of their other married friend in the Sex and the City movie.

“Every day,” she answers, almost guiltily, as if she has no right to her happiness in the face of her friends’ difficulties. “Not all the time every day,” she hastily amends, “but—every day.”

How important is your happiness anyway?

So first there was one Seth Adam Smith's blog that went viral. Then there was this rebuttal (one of several). Then there was Very Angry Anti-Liberal Guy's rebuttal to the rebuttal (one of several). My friend Angie even wrote her own thoughtful take, and now I’m writing mine. The topic of the week, evidently, is marriage; and not just marriage, but conclusively deciding what marriage is and who it is for. And we are all up in arms.

But can we put down our guns for a minute? It seems like everyone wants to get the last word, to lay the smack down. Write THE “that’s what marriage is all about, Charlie Brown” blog. I admit, my egotistical impulse as I considered writing this was to do the same. But I will resist that desire because the more I think about it, the more I realize nobody has the last word on marriage.

There are as many kinds of marriages and partnerships as there are people, and we can only see other people’s marriages through the glass of our own picture windows. There is value in listening to (or reading) experiences completely unlike our own. Sure, we react to other people’s reflections on marriage based on those windows, and we react strongly. But maybe we should try to step back, and realize that others’ journeys are not about us. I know that’s what I had to do after reading Seth’s blog. Just because I got involved in a marriage that was a disaster precisely because I completely discounted my own importance does not invalidate this man's experience and journey. 

I may still strongly disagree with the way he expressed some things, because I find them personally hurtful and can see he doesn't have the experience to validate his words, but his story is not mine, it is his own. As are all of ours.

I know I’ve looked at some of my friends’ marriages from my little window, completely aghast at what seems to be their reality; yet they profess absolute contentment. I know that I could never live with their kind of marriage, but I’ve come to realize how little that matters. I am not them, and they are not me.

On the flip side, I’ve been blindsided by news of a breakup or secret trouble between two people I’d thought were “perfect for each other”. Which shows what I know; and that’s not much.

Whether you’ve been together a month, a lifetime, or somewhere in between, there is one constant: marriage, just like life, is always an uncertainty.

We don’t even know the full truth about our own marriages. There was a time in his former marriage when my now husband routinely claimed (and fully believed) that nobody had a better, stronger marriage than him. 

And I remember telling people the story of how I got together with my first husband, and how romantic they all thought it was. “When you know, you know,” I would tell them knowingly, truly believing I knew. 

I also remember years ago overhearing a friend of mine (who ultimately went through a divorce) having a heart-to-heart with another married friend of hers, both agreeing that divorce was “simply not an option” for either of them.

When we’re in the midst of something, we just can’t see the full truth. Try to paint a landscape while you’re standing in the middle of it.

I think probably that even if you do stay happily together for decades, only perspective gives you the gift of fully understanding, just like anything else in life, the various ups and downs in your marriage.

So if you are married or in a long-term committed relationship, you know that as my friend Myriam says (or her mom says. Or her mom’s mom says?): every marriage is a black box. Every married/committed person (I think) has many moments with their spouse where they look at each other and say “Can you even imagine what our (friends/parents/siblings/whoever) would say if they could see/hear this right now?” and burst out laughing. Then there are the not so funny bits that nobody knows or would ever guess, as well.

Marriage is full of quirks and shadowy corners, secret gears and scotch-tape, worn mechanisms that keep it ticking, for better or for worse. Nobody can fully see inside that box except the two people who built it. And when it breaks, they are the only ones who will ever be capable of fully understanding why, and even then they may opt out of thinking about it enough to arrive at that point.

So if you haven’t been through a divorce, but you have watched from the sidelines, picking teams and deciding who’s a victim and who’s the “Wal-Mart philosophy” villain—well, I don’t expect to change your mind. Judgers gonna judge.

But to look at someone else’s divorce and decree with smug disgust that this or that partner was “selfish” and just looking for someone who makes them transiently “happy” –that is the epitome of injustice.

Sure, people make mistakes, go about doing the right thing the wrong way, communicate poorly, behave immaturely and irrationally. Sometimes when a relationship goes awry, these things are very evident. But having lived through plenty of divorce in my family life, I know that in the vast majority of cases divorce is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, mega-painful, serious business. Years of therapy, tears, self-examination, and/or deliberation often ensue beforehand. (Maybe there are people who get divorced because of very simplistic reasons; I just don’t know any of them personally.)

So next time you are tempted, like Really Angry Guy, to dismiss 50% of the population as selfish and looking for instant gratification, please think again. I also intensely resent the implication that I did not “choose wisely” because I am divorced. I chose as wisely as I could with the experience and resources available to me at that point in my life. Before deciding about other people’s marriages, consider the reality that you do not and never will have all the pieces of the puzzle.

Nor is the puzzle any of your business, really. Mind your own marriage. Mind your own life. Life is a school, and God (or the Universe, if you prefer) deliberately gave you control over only one student: yourself.

Which brings me to my thoughts on serving others while caring for oneself.

Ironically, it seems the crowd that thinks they are so important as to have the power to make judgments about the marriages and divorces of those around them are the same ones crowing about how great it is that they have made themselves completely unimportant in the scheme of their own family lives. Bewildering, no?

Here’s the truth as I see it from my own picture window: caring for each other is important. Learning to give up your selfish behavior and patterns, your childish emotional reactions, and desires to achieve your own goals before all else is part and parcel of the marriage deal.

But if you aren’t being honest with yourself about what you need (which is different from what you want, as we all teach our toddlers), if you aren’t constantly on a journey to increase your self-understanding—you aren’t going to be able to truly give anyone else what they need. You aren’t going to be able to truly understand someone else the way we all yearn to be understood.

Those of us who protested the original blog post were not trying to attack poor Seth; we were simply pointing out the uncomfortable reality that unsurprisingly, many deny: the hardest work you have to do in life is dealing with your own self, as you are.

As I was pondering people’s incredibly defensive reactions to the current crop of blogs on this topic, Matt and I asked each other: Do you feel like you have to sacrifice a lot for me? Do you feel like our marriage is really hard? Do you feel like this marriage is not about you?

At first I said no, I really don’t. I feel like I sacrifice nothing. I feel like my marriage is a joy and a blessing. Hearing Matt’s voice when I don’t expect it still makes my heart jump into my throat. Sometimes I watch him sleep and cry from the sheer force of how much I love him.

Frankly, it made me a little worried. Was it bad, I asked him, that I felt that way? Did it mean I was doing something wrong?

But then he pointed out to me how ironic my answers were:

Did I not subject myself to an incredible amount of judgment, much of it extremely harsh and from people I cared about very much, to be with him?

Did I not leave my family, friends, and the children who occupy a very large place in my heart in California in order to be an eternally foreign northerner in Mississippi?

Did I not willingly give up the joy of being the first woman to make my beloved a father? Did I not know that I may never be able to equal that gift, and that living with that reality may break my heart a little bit every day?

And do I not willingly sacrifice half of our “carefree newlywed” life to do the emotionally taxing work of navigating my step-parenting role with his son?

Do I not give up little luxuries, on a daily basis, for the sake of an innocent child though I had no part in bringing him into this world?

Do we not have tense and sometimes painful discussions about finances, family, where to spend holidays?

Do we not fight sometimes?

Do we not have ongoing points of unresolved tension that rear their ugly heads when they are the least welcome?

Of course I did, I do, and we do.

I guess it just comes down to perspective. So I feel like the challenges of this marriage are nothing, are pure joy. I’m not trying to make myself sound super-awesome in comparison to everybody else; I’m trying to make it clear that what I have is pure gold--in comparison to what I had before: a bogged down, miserable existence of trying to be the oxygen for a man, my best friend, who didn’t know how to breathe on his own. Believing I could, and should, be that loving sustenance. Sure, I felt stuck, depressed, sad, lonely, frustrated, overwhelmed. But hey, it wasn’t about me, right? I had married him in front of God and those witnesses, and it was my responsibility to make it work. To force it to work. To find the way.

Had I read Seth’s blog at that point in my life, I very easily could have taken it dangerously to heart. I might have remembered my own trepidation before my own wedding, and found comfort in his father’s advice: it didn’t matter that I was uncertain about the marriage, because it wasn’t about me. Our families and friends wanted us together, he was great with kids, he wanted me with him, and that, apparently, should suffice.

But the reality was I did my ex-husband no favors by making it all about him. The work he needed to do the most, he could never do with me by his side. The work I needed to do could not be done with him in my life, either. (I would elaborate for clarity, but I respect him too much to do so.) We tearfully recognized this two years ago today and hugged each other goodbye. After signing divorce papers 6 months later we hugged again, briefly paying homage to the good parts of our marriage. He’s a good man and I wish nothing but good things for him, and I hope he wishes the same for me.

So don’t tell me I have a “Wal-Mart philosophy” and “gave up when I decided I wanted a new one”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes something is so broken, it truly can’t be fixed, no matter what you do. But as the saying goes, you live, you learn. That marriage wasn’t a failure, because it taught me the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life to date.

When I first saw the Sex and the City movie, it was at a very difficult point in that first marriage. I look back and see it as the beginning of the end—a process that took three agonizing years.

When I heard Charlotte’s words, in that scene I quoted above, I immediately felt an empty hollowness in my chest. Was it really supposed to be like that? I wondered. Could you really be in a marriage with so much love that it brought you joy every day? I resented the implication.

Happiness, I thought, was ephemeral. Nice when it came along, but never lasting more than a day, maximum, at a time. Feeling “happiness” was not what life was meant to be about. (I still believe that, by the way.)

Now I can see that I confused that happy emotion with a happy state of being, which I never had in that marriage—why? Because it was never about me. And that crushed my soul.

We do matter in our own marriages. Yes, we do deserve some things as (I believe) children of God created to love and be loved. We all deserve to be with someone we love, someone we want to be married to and/or spend our lives with, someone who helps us grow rather than holds us back; whatever that looks like for each one of us. Almost everyone I know who ended up divorced got married too young, before they knew who they really were and what they needed, myself included. So I’ll say this: what we do NOT deserve is to punish ourselves for a lifetime because we made the wrong decision for forever when we were 23.

If, like I did, we make the mistake of ignoring our Selves, that is the worst disservice to those we claim to love.

Even on days like yesterday, when my stepson wet the bed and is in a tantrum-ish mood, the cat peed on the floor, the other cat might have worms, the laundry isn’t doing itself, obligations continue to be unfulfilled, the house is an unmitigated disaster, I have PMS (which means, obviously, I am again Not Pregnant, Queen of the One-Line Test), fear and stress over money and work hours demands instant attention, I keep spilling everything from my soup to the contents of my purse, and crying over nothing—even on these days when I feel anything but happy, I am happy.

I am happy because when I ask my husband to come back from dropping off his son to help me with dinner (a trial run for our Thanksgiving food, due on his parents’ table where I promised it at six, the complexity of which was overwhelming me in my hellishly hot kitchen) and he says he can’t because he has to go back to work, and I’m so frustrated I’m about to cry (again) he stops walking out the door, turns around, and wraps his arms around me tight. I turn to kiss him and am thankful that in the midst of the chaos, this is my life now. I did this. I brought this to myself by loving my ex-husband in the way he needed to be loved, hard as it was, and by letting myself understand that I matter.

I have this man who is in love with me, who I am in love with, no matter what. It fills my heart to bursting, even if I do have to chop my own garlic while the onions burn and he has to go back to work so he can provide for all of us as best he can, which we both know still won’t be enough to make ends meet.

“Thank you,” I whisper to him. “Thank you for never making marriage feel like work. Even when it is.”

And he kisses me again (and I almost stab him forgetting there’s a knife in my hand) and now I know that’s the kind of happy Charlotte was talking about all along.

But this isn’t the last word. I know very well that my experience and my life is NOT the be-all end-all, and I am not the pinnacle of wisdom and brilliance. But I’m appreciating this conversation and learning much of value from it. I look forward to reading more contributions and hope it continues for awhile.

Thank you for caring enough to read what I have to say.

(Oh, also, this quote, because it’s simple and true. “Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational." ~Hugh Mackay)