Five Reasons I'm Still Married...

#5 We Pick Favorites, and They Are Each Other

This is the final installment! To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #4, click here. 

You’ve seen the marriage books that speak on how important it is to choose one another above all else. I’ve even read that, as a signal to the offspring and The Universe, my husband and I ought to greet one another (with a hug, a smooch, whatever) when we rejoin at the end of a work day before acknowledging the kids. Sort of like saying: Love all you little people, but let’s be real – (s)he’s my favorite.

We don’t always subscribe to the greet-each-other-first rule (cuz, let’s also be real: there are so many other bodies between the door and me), but we certainly are on board with the overall philosophy of picking each other as our favorite.

I think my point here is: don’t let anybody else edge in. 

Not your kids. Not your contractor. Not your favorite coworker. Not your mom. Not even your best friend.

In times when it has been easier and more convenient to chat up my deepest emotional vulnerabilities with my bestie, I’ve had to watch it… as safe and healthy as she is, I ought not let her fill that role (for long periods of time) at the expense of my husband missing out on it. 

Let me not be misunderstood: I am a huge believer in not having the one you’re married to fulfill every last every-loving function. What a mistake it would be to expect that of one person. For funniness, you may go to Aunt Martie. For spiritual depth, you may go to a different peep. For a shared personal interest in ventriloquism, you probably only got one fella. To be professionally challenged, you might know someone who specifically inspires you up. There’s probably someone in your life who you go to to be coddled and who you know will leave you feeling warm and fuzzy. (For more Friendship Bucket categories, click here.)

Spouse doesn’t need to love puppets and be your single warm-fuzzy benefactor.

But spouse does need to know about the conversations you have with those who do. I really believe in quality sharing about most everything, even when it’s not your partner’s thing. Farm out your needs according to those who can fulfill them, but then make sure your favorite isn't butted out altogether, that (s)he gets to participate somehow, too – even if that’s indirectly.

Make sure your favorite stays your favorite. 

Make sure nobody else edges in.

Make sure at the end of the day, he knows he stands above the rest.

Make sure at the end of the day, she knows she stands above the rest. 

Even if your favorite doesn’t get the first kiss when you come home… make sure your favorite knows you know (s)he ought to.

Five Reasons I'm Still Married...

#4 When We’re Acting Somewhat Nuts, We Call It

(read: When I'm Acting Somewhat Nuts, Scott Calls It)

These are being posted in installments. To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #3, click here. To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #4, click here. 

Examples of when I have a tendency to behave somewhat nuts: Anytime after 11:00 pm. Anytime before 6:00 am. The days I am hormonal. Right after reading a bunch of depressing, anxiety-provoking news. Smack dab in the middle of a mental health spiral. When I’m hangry. When I’m insecure. When I haven't exercised in a really long time. When there's not enough coffee in me.

I shall stop, cuz I know you have stuff to do.

Scott is WAAAAAAAYYYYY better at “calling it” than I am. When I get going and everything bad (about our kids' behaviors, about our property, about our decision-making, about our finances… about our marriage) seems so convincingly really bad – in other words when I’m acting somewhat nuts - he knows to cut bait. 

When I get like that, I’m like a centipede-unearther… I start seeking out rocks to look under just so I can shine light on the squirmy little nuisances beneath. Except that a) most of the rocks aren’t really there and b) therefore, most of the centipedes aren’t either. 

Now, I’m not saying he won’t let me vent.

Lord have mercy, that man is a saint for hearing out my venting.

It’s just that he’s got some sort of Sixth Sense for knowing the distinction between not-helpful-but-not-harmful venting and moving-towards-harmful venting. 

You know where that line is for me, usually? When I start picking away at our relationship.

It seems to be that rock of doubt is the one I’ll hyperfocus on the most (after 11pm, the week before my period, when I need a snack) – I’ll chisel around it, stick explosives in the cracks of it, take a jackhammer to it… in order to expose perceived problems beneath. When Scott’s Sixth Sense is flagged, when it becomes abundantly clear to him that we are on the cusp of saying damaging or hurtful things (disguised by what at the time seems responsible: "healthy processing"), Scott simply asks, “Would it be alright if we took a crack at this when we’re in a different space?” 

Well, maybe that’s not exactly what he says. Mostly, it’s more something like, “Tricia, I think we should stop talking and go to bed.” 

Smart man.

Cuz I almost always wake up less nuts. 

And less hellbent on uselessly dissecting every doubt I’ve ever had about our marriage. 

Take away: there is a time to talk about tough stuff and then there is a time to go to bed. 

When in doubt, Scott has taught me to err on the side of go to bed.

Five Reasons I'm Still Married...

#3  We Use a Number System

 These are being posted in installments. To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #2, click here. To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #4, click here.

It all started around the time that Scott and I realized that there is one very specific circumstance when we suck at liking each other. This: When we both feel we are owed TLC from the other, when we both expect to be served, to be on the receiving end of giving.

He’d return home from a taxing business trip thinking he’d be due some extra attention. I’d welcome him home from that same trip after single parenting like a boss thinking I was deserving of extra attention. We both wanted doted, appreciated, complimented for our separate hard work of the previous week. We also both expected to be gifted alone time, a break or two, permission to run away from our house and children and responsibilities screaming. And neither of us got any of it.

In this work trip instance, and in pretty much every other instance when we are each ragged and our expectations simultaneously clash up against one another’s, we are both not wrong.

Sometimes we are equally working damn hard. And sometimes we are equally deserving of being given to. And sometimes we are equally pissed the other ain’t giving it.

Maybe for you it’s when one of you is recovering from surgery at the same time one of you is coming out of a season of depression. Maybe one of you is completely sucked into a draining work project and the other is concurrently nursing an ailing parent. Maybe you are deflated from a diagnosis while your partner is deflated from the loss of a job. Maybe, like my example, you both simply had freaking taxing weeks more of the humdrum sort, one up several consecutive nights with puking kids, the other pulling the weight of consecutive help-with-homework nightmares.

We needed a system. And so, The Number System got born. 

It’s not complicated, insofar as it requires only that you can count to ten. It’s not easy, though, because any hint of disingenuousness will instantly dissolve its effects. Basically, we report in to each other regularly what our number is: 1-10. 1 is the worst state ever. 10 is the best state ever. When I report that I’m sitting at a 2, and he reports that he’s sitting at a 2 too, we hang on tight and push through together. On the other hand, when he’s a 2 and I’m an 8… it’s clear who steps it up. 

The other time this system isn’t easy (or necessarily useful) is when there is never a flip flop. If one is always reliably < 5 and one is always > 5, then there would never be a need to check in… that pattern sounds pretty fixed (and dareisay miserable). 

Thankfully, although sometimes it takes more months instead of hours, there is usually a healthy flipflop for me and my partner. Thankfully, also, we typically stay at a bottomed-out 1 or 2 at the same time for relatively short periods of time (you’ll know because there’s a haggard look to our faces and our property during these stints). 

I’m thankful for the Number System. It helps us know – in a lightning-quick way – how each of us is on the inside at any particular moment of our marriage. And it dictates the direction of the giving as a result, who's the tree casting the shade and who's sitting under it. Best of all, if done fairly and honestly, it dispells resentment from both parties when we both know we both can't give.  

Here's the thing: We can work with what we know. 

There's the famous idiom that a picture is worth a thousand words. I say a number is, too. 

Five Reasons I'm Still Married...

#2  We Convince Ourselves 

These are being posted in installments. 

To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #1, click here. To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #3, click here. 

Photo by Ali Morshedlou on Unsplash

I’d hope that you wouldn’t have to be around my husband and me long enough to know we have mad respect and mad love for one another. 

But not always. 

I mean, sometimes we’re just not feeling it. 

And I don’t mean, necessarily – although this definitely happens too – the times when we want to take each others' faces and put them in a blender. There’s I’m-so-mad-I-could-end-you.

And then there’s something worse: just not caring. 

If someone told you that in marriage you would never go through periods when you just didn’t feel much for your beloved, and you believed it... then, my friend, you got dooped.

My husband and I have decided to not really necessarily proclaim this out loud when it happens. (What would be the point in that? It’s depressing.) Instead, we just convince ourselves… 

When there’s no interest in what the other is saying or no inspiration to plan date nights or no desire to look at one another or try to connect with one another or smolder after one another – this, my friends, is the time to convince ourselves that, despite our temporary indifference, we are in fact in love. 

Pictures help. I’ll scroll back in my phone until I happen upon one where my husband and I are touching and look happy about it. Or maybe there’s a sticky note in a drawer somewhere from your partner that says “Love you, my Sugar Booger.” Find it. Sometimes I just stare at my kids’ faces (when they’re sleeping, of course… because, obviously, that’s when everything is better) until I remember that I created life with this person I call my husband and that must mean I love him. If you’ve got poems to work with, read em. If once she gifted you a lovely thing, get it out. If your favorite foods to eat together are spicy cheetos and pickles, go to the grocery store and then light a candle and consume them alone, for starters.

Conjure up the memories where smolder existed, or really any ones will do when you simply felt like you and your partner were offering something - anything - to one another. 

And then let those memories remind you that it's worth it. Convince yourself that it's worth it (if, in fact, it is).

Then, get to work offering something to one another (preferably, besides pickles). 

Five Reasons I’m Still Married...

# 1  We Don’t Fix Easy Things

These are being posted in installments. 

To see Five Reasons I'm Still Married #2, click here.

It’s so dang hard to raise kids, be adults, and be married at the same time. My husband and I often bemoan the fact that breaks between the crazy in our lives are so itty-bitty short that we rarely ever feel dug out… more perpetually shoveling. I use windshield imagery. Think driving on the interstate in the muggy south: insects just keep splatting on the glass. Just as we may wipe a couple juicy ones away with our wipers, several more plummet forward to take their place. Makes it sorta hard, in our marriage and in our lives, to ever see the way forward with any degree of clarity.

The big troubles – reports from teachers about your 4^thgrader’s dropping reading comprehension, bagging up your kid’s poop to have tested by the GI doc because of scary unresolved abdominal cramping, bickering with the insurance company about how much it’ll pay for hail storm damage, wondering based on your child’s anxiety around clowns how much you should be saving in addition to the college fund to the therapy fund – hit in such rapid succession.

You’d think that would mean that when a small trouble pops up, we would prize it as something, by comparison, easily fixable. “I may not have a bull’s eye plan for how to get my kid reading well again, but by golly I will NAIL changing that light bulb!” you may imagine yourself championing. 

What my husband and I have found, though, is that we are so zapped from clearing off the big bugs that keep clogging up our view that we let the smaller, less cumbersome insects (think gnats) remain on the windshield… we can get by with them there. 

So instead we laugh. 

Cuz if you can’t laugh about the big troubles whose solutions aren’t immediately within your control to solve, you may as well laugh over the small ones whose solutions you simply decide to fuck off. 

You know the threaded black plastic piece you twist on most modern lamps to click them on/off? Scott, my husband, has been missing the one on his bedside lamp for four years. Worst case: since the little metal rod left protruding in the black knob’s absence can’t be twisted by the bare hand, Scott simply chooses to read at bedtime in the dark. Best case: With us both in bed, I untwist the black knob on my bedside lamp and pass it over to him to use to turn his on. The same process reversed happens to then turn both our lamps off. 

WTF.

Or how bout this one: 

Recently our marriage’s most prized possession lost its most valuable part (read: our coffee machine’s carafe fell and broke). The kicker is that I was so in-the-moment-caffeine-desperate that I actually broke the “don’t fix easy things” rule by ordering a replacement carafe on amazon on my phone as I was still sweeping up the glass on my kitchen floor. It came two days later two sizes two small. So now every morning we tuck a knife or sometimes a wooden spoon under the too-small carafe to give it the umph it needs to put pressure on the thingy-thing that dispenses our brown magic. Our coffee machine every morning is jerry-rigged like something out of the house of the dad in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, or, alternately, a horror film. 

SERIOUSLY.

I won’t even tell you how many weeks I ninja-leapt over the laser trigger of our garage door because of the fact that my car garage door remote went defective. 

You see my point: There’s comedy here, and it actually can keep a marriage lively. Every time I insert a knife between the hot coils of my coffee maker and the glass of my dwarfed carafe, I can’t wait to tell my husband which utensil I used to pull off coffee that morning. When he and I pass over that lamp knob thingy in bed, we smirk at our ridiculousness. When I pulled an acrobatic feat to get out the garage daily for weeks… well, then I just cussed. But I still told my husband later each day what I should have been charging our neighbors to be witness to my Cirque de Sole performance. 

And we giggle. We giggle and giggle and giggle over the absurdity of not fixing the easy things. 

Or maybe we giggle, because we’re delirious. 

Why else, in a house with small kids, would you prop up a coffee pot with a sharp knife pointing out?

Lessons From a Fern

Down below, waiting.

Its stem not yet arched in form - without light, not even the color it yearns to be.

Only waiting, biding. Below.

Up above, moving.

Progress slow, coils loosened by the encouragement coolness and mist offer it.

Slowly moving, stretching out. Above.

Higher, taking form.

Each day a spurt forward beyond its ground-mates, the air the only reward sought.

Taking form, uniquely. Higher and higher.

Peaking, in maturity. 

Bold color, taking up more space: value added to its surroundings with each increase without knowledge of it.

Peaked. Present.

Important, worthy, and essential is what this natural wonder says with no sound. 
It hears neither criticism nor praise. 
Loving out. Loving in. 

Below, it waits

Above, it moves

Higher, it takes form

Mature, it peaks

Important, worthy, essential, it loves.

Michael

“Hi there. Tell me about yourself.”

He held his cardboard sign, folding slightly in on itself because of the crease in the middle, in a half-hearted manner; nobody passing could really read the words in their entirety. I had squinted just hard enough to see a portion of it in black sharpie: “Down on Luck.”

Probably in his thirties, the man hid his tan, leathered face with a hoodie, and his leveled eyes stared forward. His face was blank and lifeless. And it wasn’t looking at me.

Silence met my request for information.

At the front of the line stopped at a stoplight, I had rolled down my minivan window. And I didn’t know when it was going to turn green. I also wasn’t giving up.

“Hi, sir. Did you hear me?”

We were no more than 10 feet apart.

After a short pause, he finally broke his forward gaze and looked up, not exactly in my eyes but in my general direction, with a pithy expression, tipping his cardboard up with one hand: “I’m holding this sign.” Then, back forward again.

I couldn’t tell at the time if his words were meant as a point of clarification (I’m telling you about myself… this is my life right now. Are you antagonizing me?) or dismissive disdain (You annoy me…I don’t have time for this. Go. Away.)

Assuming the first, and feeling regrettable of the cheerful naivety he must have heard in my voice, I responded, “I guess that’s all I need to know, isn’t it.”

Then, “I’d like to ask: What do you need, sir?”

At this point, if I’d been ignorant of the signals before, it was impossible to ignore them now: tan man was not having it. Not having one bit of it.

Because by the time I deposited this question into our lousy interaction, he had returned to the straight-faced gaze at nothing in front of him, and all I could hear was my engine running.

The light was still red. I was still hanging out of my window. And, even though he was done, I was not.

“I sense your frustration, but I am just responding to your sign. I can’t read it, and I do not know what you need.”

More silence.

It was eerie for me to be in the presence of someone and ignored so blatantly that way. It would be safe to say that I was shaken, maybe even miffed.

Covering up my impatience, I mustered as much calmness as I could: “Sir, I do not know why you are frustrated with me. I am extending myself to you.”

And that’s when he pivoted.

He turned toward me - still a distance away – and engaged for the first time. Huffily, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just really tired, and I have a terrible headache.” This man was still ill-mannered and grumpy as hell, mind you, but at least he let me know why. At least he became human.

Gesturing, I said, “Well, come on over. I meant it: I would like to help.”

He folded his sign and took the several steps it took to get to my window.

When he got there, he’d softened further, reiterating: “I’m sorry, honey, I just feel terrible and my head is killing me.”

By this point, I had my head down in my purse, digging for the McDonalds gift cards I usually keep there. I was feeling grateful that he responded to me, yet all at once flustered by it. The “honey” had made me uncomfortable, and I would be lying if I said his new proximity didn’t, too.

Besides, the damn light was surely about to turn green.

When I couldn’t find the gift cards, I repeated, still head in purse, “Tell me what you need.”

Seeing my digging, he said, “Anything, honey. Whatever you want.”

Finally, I found a bill. “I’d like to give you a twenty. Is that ok?”

As I passed it over, he said, “Yes, yes. Thank you. And I’m sorry again. I just am having a real bad day.”

With that, he thrusted his weathered hand forward, looked me right in the eyes with his tired ones, and said “My name is Michael.”

At this point, I’m tearing up, what with the unsettling experience of being rudely ignored, followed by the frantic digging in my purse without having a plan for what to give, topped off by an unexpected, heartful introduction: it had been a rather eventful 22 seconds.

Wet-eyed, I shook his hand and said, “I’m so glad you let me know your name. I’m Tricia.”

At last look, as I was finally cleared to move through that intersection, I saw Michael pacing back to his station with his head down.

It was then that I lost it. I cried in the van all the way to pick up my daughter from preschool, who was wearing, like all the other girls in her class, a cute outfit and a bow in her hair that cost approximately $5.99. And then, I felt a rise in my chest about two hundred more times that day: while I was watching my kindergartener kick around a soccer ball at his team’s practice on a groomed, green field, while I prepared organic Costco chicken nuggets for my family for dinner (no filet, but still...), while I wrote a check in the hundreds to reserve a spot for one of my kids’ summer activities, while I laid in bed underneath my warm comforter next to someone I love and who loves me.

My eyes that day were, more than ever, fully zoomed in to my not-Down-On-Luck-ness.

I will not forget Michael and his pissiness. I will not forget Michael and his refreshing humanism. I will not forget Michael’s throbbing head, the feel of his rough hand.

I will never know his story or what he did with the bill I gave him. And that is OK, not the point.

The point is this: I am changed for having connected with Michael.

And I'm thankful for it.