Last night, after a hectic weekend decorating for and overseeing Homecoming, Greg and I came home late from the school’s Christmas party and collapsed on the sofa. He was reading, and I was just staring at the Christmas tree, which is fake and spins—something I find splendid. Greg was insistent, “Please read and settle down,” and I said, “I am settling down. I just want to sit here and think about how happy I have been this week and a half in our marriage.” He said, “Week and a half? We have been married five hundred and twenty [pause for mental math] . . . almost a thousand weeks, not a week and a half.” To which I replied, “Yes, and I have been very happy this week and a half.” He looked at me like I was insane, and then, he thought about it. He said, “Let’s see: no miscarriages, no terminal illnesses, no family members dying recently, no denial of our constitutional rights [ala the fostering fiasco], no forced moves. Yep, it’s been a good week and a half.”
And I was wondering what it is about me that can revel in a good week and a half of marriage, celebrating it for the treasure it is; unfortunately, I think it may also be the same thing that can cause me to go into a death spiral during the bad weeks and a half, and that is the revelation that this is, like it or not, as good as it gets. It is what it is. Type your own cliché here, if need be, because there are plenty; my Grandma’s favorite was borrowed from her cook, Ellen: “That’s all in it.” Grandma would laughingly tell me so when I complained about sleepless nights or told horror stories of Toddlers Gone Wild in Cracker Barrel. And she was right—it’s all there, the good and the bad, the happy and horrific.
During our 18 years, I have memories of things that I would rather erase; some are specific: the tear-filled mornings getting ready for work in the time after April was returned to her birth family, lost to us, we thought, forever; the two babies we lost who would be teenagers now, and who are on some days obviously, painfully missing; the bone marrow biopsy in medically-primitive Georgia, a horror Greg doesn’t like to recall even now; our unplanned return to Waycross; the failed adoption of a baby girl whom we brought home from the hospital at birth, then lost to last minute legal wrangling. Others are more typical—the humdrum minutiae of everyday marriages: failed attempts to ask politely for everyone to push your chair in, how hard can it be?; the daily taking for granted of one another—he will be there for me, I know, so I do not thank him when he is. This is “in it” as Grandma would say: we all fall short; we will all have things that we regret doing, saying, or going through.
But there are other times that we will never regret sharing, times that no one but we will ever understand: when April came back (forever!) from her relatives New York, and she ran through the house, shrieking her glee; when our returning plane touched down from Seattle, Washington, and we were home again; when Abby was and is here and healthy and well; and, finally, when we read the New Yorker cartoon about the chickens with self-respect and laughed forever. We know, having lost much, what we have. Appreciation of the minutiae: these times of bored predictability—of Saturday routines involving cleaning garages rather than sitting in hospitals—that’s “in it” as well.
And so, I think, the insanity of being grateful for ten good days of marriage in a row is, all things considered, a positive: it says that I know these days for what they are—part of the ebb and the flow, the bitter and the sweet. A bad week does not a marriage ruin, nor a good week a marriage make—but having someone with you who, having endured the horrific, will now sit with you and enjoy the happy–even in the face of horrors to come–and just watch that Christmas tree spin—well, sometimes, that may just be present enough.
cynicalchristianlikeyou 