Some Things Take Time

Yesterday was my mother and father in laws' anniversary. They have been married for over half of a decade, a span of time that stretches over a period that dates to before my birth. They have known one another and been one another's best friend longer than I have been in my body on this planet.

My husband is a very fortunate man. He was raised in the cocoon of love and respect that his parents built for he and his sisters. I am virtually an orphan, adopted by a family too deep into its' own issues to care for or welcome an outsider, even in infancy. I assumed all families -and marriages- would function in the same way. My first marriage ended when I was just 20 with the death of our infant to SIDS. My husband chose to buy himself a motorcycle and divorce me, riding out of my life with a 17 year old wife and baby on the way. I did not expect our marriage to weather a storm like the death of a child; I had married a man twice my age to try to find stability and without the ballast of responsibility our ship of matrimony sank.

I tried marriage again in my 20's, smitten by a man who seemed the epitome of tolerance and goodnaturedness. All I can say is that I found someone who completely recreated my home life as a child, we presented the perfect home just as to the outside world my childhood home was filled with love and satiety. The mask concealed the same sicknesses that drove my father and my mother and in my own way I drew them out. I will not speak of what occurred in our home except to say that to this day I have vivid dreams of waking up in my bed being upended with rage; I ride in an automobile and flinch when the driver seems agitated, steeling myself for the spiderweb of glass that my head will cause when the anger finally finds its closest target and smashes my temple to the side window. Catholic and unable to conceive of a partnership that forgave but did not grovel or submit, I -the saint! The one who never left him!- I was asked for a divorce nearly eight years later. Despite my best efforts to endure for the sake of endurance, to be able to say "yes, I have been a part of your life for as long as I can remember" for the sake of shared history, I was alone again at 30.

I didn't exactly jump into my husband's arms, but I did find him sensible and smart and funny and familiar, like a song from my infancy that I know on some kind of cellular level. We knew when we met that we shared a connection. I did not trust myself to be enough for him, and many friends were introduced to him, casually giving him pieces of my daily life to try to understand a person that life had taught me was unlovable over the long haul.

It's been almost nine years now and we are still madly in love. He still makes my heart skip when he says my name, his touch is more comforting than anything I have ever encountered. I sleep deeply and satisfyingly when I am near him and miracle of miracles! He swears that I am enough, that my ideas and my actions and the way I go about being a mom and a wife and a friend is something he admires. We have been through illness, very grave illness, and we have buried his sister, the only member of his family beyond his parents that I felt comfortable enough to telephone and speak with. We have two sons, one adopted only weeks after our nuptials from my ex-husband and another who made his way into my womb the first month of our marriage and appeared in our world in early January of 1996.

Mom and Dad -- after all, they are the first real family I've known -- are the kind of people that laugh at everything. They joke about one another, they laugh about the stock market, they reminisce about 'the hard times' with a smile, not a sigh or grimace. They made it through some terribly painful times: betrayals, poverty, illness, death, career disappointments and pressures, you name it, they really did walk through it. They managed to do it as a team, never critical of the effort or execution of one another, always seeing the good and the possible even in the worst and seemingly impossible of circumstances. I get to be a part of this family. I know of about one-fifth of their story firsthand and I am profoundly grateful that they have been as accepting, as open, as kind to me as they have.

Mom and Dad lost a lot of money in the recent stock crash. Dad is still recovering from a cancer scare a few years back. He and Mom walk every day and they notice the smallest things and celebrate every single occasion that even remotely calls for a party. They are best friends, they are one another's family, they are dancers to a magical, silent song only they hear, each step and each act building effortlessly upon the other's movements. They too lost a child, but that pain did not overturn some delicate balance they had struck or nullify a contract they had made. They reside in one another, they live in their photos and their memories and one another's care. Their pain and need is not a burden. Their laughter is never forced. They have simply chosen to look for the best --purposefully--- and simply do not focus on what they cannot change or what they disapprove of.

Fifty two years ago, a young man and woman from Brooklyn, New York decided to make a life together. They did more than that, far, far more than that. They created an oasis of charity and tolerance that they will tell you is simply easier to live in than a world of disappointment and mistrust. They have accepted me as though I was one of their own, something I cherish even more because I have never experienced it. At first I thought they must be lacking fun behind my back, but these people really exist! I am learning, after almost nine years, to trust in their example. I am becoming less fearful of the window smashing, the bed being upended, the clothes being cut to pieces. I am not afraid in my heart of hearts that my life will shatter again and I will be alone, bereft, with no one to help me pick up the pieces. This is something they could not teach me, they had to show me.

There are families that always expect greatness and never want more than your best. There are places that people can build that are havens from the competition of the workplace and the dishonesty of the culture. They are created when two people decide that, no matter what, they are bound by more than an agreement but by a guiding principle: that what does not destroy us, only makes us laugh harder.

the Curmudgeon