At the risk of objectifying her into a list of attributes, here’s a sampler: She’s strong-willed and assertive. She’s deeply spiritual and broadly knowledgeable on Gospel topics—and not just the porridge fare of the last couple of decades, but esoteric, “Whoa…did he really preach that?” source material-type stuff. She is smart and tenacious about things that are important to her, and is a lightning-quick study on topics of interest. She’s the eldest of a bazillion children, so—at the cost of her adolescence—she mothers with élan, and that's backwards, in her sleep, while bedridden. (Red flag for the savvy reader: Dad doesn’t help enough around the house!) She’s tall, slender—by any reasonable, real-world standard for a mother of three—and beautiful (Norwegian/Russian ancestry; I forget the conversation, but a colleague of mine said recently, “Look who’s talking, you married a supermodel...”), and can probably out-bench me. She knits spectacular sweaters by hand and often without a pattern. She studied piano for about 15 years and is a Certified Nursing Assistant. She’s very conscientious about the food that comes into the home (focused on organic, locally-grown, etc.) and is probably the best non-union cook / handywoman / gardener I know: Her meals and like-a-rose-in-the-desert hobby farm are legendary in our neighborhood, and she's the one people say they want to be with when catastrophe strikes. Oh, and did I mention massage school?
I’m not entirely at ease with the foregoing paragraph. (And it’s important to note the recurring theme of utilitarianism and practicality there, as these are all-too-often the primary considerations that tether me to the marriage.) But I don’t think these praises flow from a need for “I’m the kind of guy who would marry a remarkable woman, therefore, my wife must be remarkable” self-validation. Not at all. That's not to say that I don't need validation, but the statements themselves, in isolation, are truthful and sincere. My purpose is to underscore my opinion that she is, well, remarkable. And most people who know her seem to agree: They remind me of it freely and frequently, usually in some form of reprimand. (Come to think of it, if things don’t work out for us, Killer Kalves may have the fringe benefit of luring a better and deserving partner to her; God knows she’s certainly deserving of better.) Her real problem is the “us” part – we simply don’t bring out the remarkableness in each other. [Author’s note of delight: As I wrote “remarkableness,” I didn’t expect it to pass spellcheck, but apparently it’s a real word!] Rather, we tend to squelch it.
Crap, now you know Act IV and we haven’t even covered the Prologue. So I’ll back up a bit: We had a whirlwind courtship, even (gasp!) by L.D.S. standards. We were both a few years out of B.Y.U.—she was working and I was in grad school—and wore as a badge of honor of sorts that we “survived” the Y with our respective bachelorhoods intact. (Which wasn’t for lack of opportunity: She had no lack of suitors, and I no lack of suiting.)
We were engaged within three months of meeting, were married four months after that, and—here’s the zinger—spent something this side of 30 days (a long weekend here, a holiday there) in each other’s actual presence before we Knelt The Big Kneel. It was, in short, a virtual courtship, long before the days of True, Facebook or Twitter, jet-fueled by what we both believed to be Signs & Spirit. (I’ll go ahead and say “believe,” although those beliefs have sure taken a buffeting.)
We didn’t know each other at the Y, which was odd, in that we later learned that we’d had several mutual acquaintances and friends, one of whom astutely observed, “The way you guys got married is probably the only way either of you could have gotten married to anyone. Given your track records, the luxury of a ‘normal’ dating process and engagement would have meant lots of psychoanalysis and lots better-fish-in-the-sea critiquing, followed by thanks-but-no-thanks. You had to get to the altar based on the ideal, because neither of you were ready for the reality.”
And unready for reality we were. Our first several months were a Millennium-Falcon-Hits-Warp-Speed blur of one massive, fundamental surprise blasting by after another:
“You think Saturday General Conference is optional?”
“You want to have how many kids? And pack them into a behemobile that gets how many MPG?”
“You’ve never read The Grapes of Wrath or Hamlet?”
“You’ve never read Jesus the Christ or cracked open even one Journal of Discourses?”
“You feel some type of cosmic injustice because the man’s simply expected to be the provider?”
“You were only studying for the LSAT out of curiosity?” (Before you smash your monitor: That one wasn’t directed at me.)
“You don’t like to save up in advance to buy anything?”
“You believe the earth’s age in the Bible is literal?”
“You’d be happy to live in one place the rest of your life?”
“You don’t know who [Che Guevara / Copernicus / Matisse / Bismarck / Louis Armstrong / Thomas Aquinas / Adam Smith / Anyone de Medici] is?”
“But is charity really a sacrifice if you practice it after you buy the Lexus?”
“Versailles isn’t pronounced vair-sall-us.”
“That was Paul the Apostle, not Alma the Younger.”
“A household ‘budget’ is knowing what you already spent?”
Finally, a trio for every couple trying to navigate the virgin/mother/whore Impossible Triangle: “You want to bring along lots of good books on the honeymoon?” / “You’re not okay with oral sex?” / “You want me to wear what?”
In fact, I’d say that these types of curveballs continued for our first several next several years together, albeit with decreasing frequency and gravity. (Although a dandy sailed through the strike zone just last week, while we were discussing Palin’s candidacy: “So you’d vote strictly on that one issue, absolutely, positively, 100% regardless of any and every other consideration?”) But during the early going, the barrage was such that it seemed the only things we had known about each other before marriage represented the sum of our commonalities, and that anything we didn’t know beforehand was categorically destined for the conflict-to-be-confronted-at-some-point file.
And we’ve worked to resolve them. We’ve softened positions and moved toward common ground on several, marquee matters. But on so many others, there’s a cat & mouse pattern that goes something like this:
- One of us (inspired by a friend, a message, an example, a recollection, or weariness with the status quo) will make an effort of some sort, even an iddy-biddy nudge in the right direction.
- The other notices, and decides how to respond, if at all.
- The initiator doesn’t feel the effort was appropriately or sufficiently acknowledged, and retreats.
- Both recognize The Pattern at play, both are frustrated, and both retrench into the respective positions.
A few months into our marriage, we saw the King’s Singers cover Phil Collins’ “Groovy Kind of Love”. As we sat there in the audience, I felt—felt so strongly that I want to say “I knew,” but that seems too self-fulfilling—that we wouldn’t ever have that kind of love, that soul-to-soul connection. We’d been told (see “Signs & Spirit,” above) that this was a good thing, and so I believed that we could learn to love each other in a functional, edifying and maybe even eternally serviceable way. But it wouldn’t be that kind of love, that warm, regenerative, refuge/escape-to (instead of escape-from), groovy love that, in the words of a poignantly relevant Cure song, makes her “eyes catch fire the way they should.”
Something in me wishes I could talk with her openly about everything—everything—that I anticipate covering through the course of these writings. (Don’t get me wrong: We do speak frankly about a whole array of serious stuff, including matters central to the themes of this blog. In fact, if there’s such a thing as speaking too frankly among spouses, I suppose we get into that territory from time to time.) Something in me thinks that if she were to see through my eyes and feel through my heart, we’d be better equipped to cope, heal and progress. But something else makes me think that what she’d discover, although not altogether foreign, would be too shocking, too frightening and too painful to justify her continued efforts.
One night, several weeks before we got married, I had a short dream in which a butterfly landed in on my hand. I touched it, played with it a bit, and in so doing, marred its wings and bent its antennae. After a time, it seemed to have had enough and did its best to flutter away, in confused and disoriented fits and starts, eventually disappearing into whatever the scenery was. I told her about this dream; I think it weighed on her; we moved ahead with our plans. So here we are, 10+ years and three precious children later. And behind every keystroke to feed this blog will be a thousand iterations of the questions, “Is there really greener grass? Would I give up my kids for it? What the hell am I thinking?”
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