When people learn I’ve been married over thirty years they often pause and turn to look me up and down as though I am a chipped statue from the last century. They either congratulate me like I’ve lived through a bout of bird flu or look at me with pity as though I’ve been living in a bubble. I’m accustomed to but don’t like either response. Life has a relentless ability to twist, hammer, pound, pamper, surprise, teach, lecture all humans and I believe being married is a twist to the plot that adds certain story lines but doesn’t coddle, protect, save or destroy any more or less than being single.
Still, being married thirty years means I’ve lived a while and at a certain point most people begin to do a little backward glancing to say, “Wow, have I learned anything?” To be bluntly truthful, when I first asked myself this question absolutely nothing rushed in for me to congratulate myself for accomplishing. It took a while before I willingly claimed the homely children who often are too blunt and cruel but I see their value and I no longer want to live without them. My five children are:
1. The person I married is not the one I got. He started changing the morning after the wedding. He kept changing through becoming a father, buying a house, his career and he’s not stopping. Some things seemed to have stabilized from young man to real man, but life (and me) continues to pound and reshape him.
2. I carefully pick my fights. That comes from two angles. I no longer avoid an issue to ‘keep the peace’ as my grandmother taught me and I no longer ‘confront the jerk’ like so many others suggest. Instead I think, consider, weigh the importance and do a little training before getting in the ring or I don’t get in the ring at all.
3. Kindness counts. It counts as courtesy to strangers as I drive and my physical safety is within their power and it counts with a man whose anger and hurt buttons I have down to an art as finely tuned and elegant as Russian egg painting.
4. I’m a separate person. I had the little girl belief that the cleaving of marriage would tie us in mind, spirit, body and what we wanted to do next weekend. Not a one turned out true and in the end I’m pleased it’s so.
5. Sometimes time heals wounds. Since I’m a writer I feel capable of messing up anyone’s perfect writing with my opinions. Perhaps it is a continuing flaw of mine that can only reduce old wounds to still present scar tissue. It is slight, sometimes totally unnoticeable but it is also a gentle reminder of what I learned. Scar tissue is my respected teacher reminding me of strength, resolve, continuing forgiveness in small degrees and self-knowledge.
I have a good marriage. It amply supplies me with love and happiness. He is a good and true man who has had the graciousness to stay with me. But a long lived marriage is not a monastery or moral virtue only because time has passed. It is simply a way of walking down the path of life. Sometimes holding hands and sometimes very alonejust like everyone else.
Article © Rebecca Guevara 2005. She is a freelance writer whose first novel, The Trading of Ken, has just been published and can be seen at http://www.rebeccaguevara.com. She is also a community activist and speaker. She can be reached at rebeccaguevara@comcast.net.