Marriage Moats-Wait for It

Published: Sat, 05/11/13

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

I am running on empty. Normally the phlebotomists who have taken my blood pressure remark about the low numbers. But if for some reason a health care aide with cuffs had walked in my back door this week and slapped one on my bicep I bet her eyebrows would wrinkle in disapproval. The tensions swirling around inside me feel like the cartoons where the coyote ricochets off every surface before shooting out the window.

Perhaps it is a conglomerate of the awful story on the news, guilt about the antsy boy when I subbed whom I could not win over with stories and songs, and the stack of financial papers I signed that tether us to ten more years of debt with five zeros. There are other issues, like the job our son is starting where he hooks up wealthy clients to a zip line a hundred feet above an Alaskan bay teeming with humpback whales so they can get a juicier look than is afforded on a National Geographic documentary. No possibility for things to go awry there. Or the expectations piling up from kids graduating from high school and college, as well as a family wedding in the next twenty days. Do I bring Ben? Or shall I stick him in the lobby with an Ipad and chips? The memory has not faded of our ungraceful exit from the play last week, which I felt confident he would sit through because there were pirates. Perhaps if the parrot had looked more like an angry bird he would have lasted.

My problems are pygmies compared to those of the three women in Ohio, or the amputees in Boston, or my friend who paces in the ICU watching her bleeding child. But they are enough to rattle me.

Marriage can be stressful. Two people yoked together still pull in diverging directions, at incongruous speeds. Last night John and I tried to come to a decision about summer plans and as he delivered a protracted monologue about his opinion I strategized how I could ignore him to do precisely what I wanted.

Yet when I wait for it, there are moments of redemption. My twins slipped the phone out of my pocket to slide a "Best Mom" label inside the cover. The music spilling out of the speakers is Pia Jesu by Jackie Evancho whose voice is like liquid silver. There are moist raspberries and bulging strawberries on the counter, whose sweetness is almost naughty. I can segregate the troubles from the treats as if there is no connection. Or I can believe that the sweetnesses arrive like cookie crumbs, dropped by Someone who wants me to find my out of the forest.

Photo by Joy Feerrar

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