Marriage Moats-What's in a Name?

Published: Thu, 04/07/11

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

Most of us are multidimensional.

One word does not stretch in enough directions to encompass all that we are, even a pentasyllabic one.

When I read the Hardy Boys books to my oldest son, we both knew that if someone had a hawk nose and beady eyes, he was bad. All bad. It made it handy when figuring out who the culprit was.

But in my life people are more of a mixture of redeeming qualities and dross. I am creative but pretty messy. My kindhearted mother was bipolar. Our sweet tempered twins are perennially late.

Although I long for the simplistic division of goodness and badness that showed up in the Disney movies of my childhood, it does not serve me in adult life.

The watershed point was when two men who were dear enough to our family for me to have gifted them with quilts, went to jail for child abuse. Our long history of friendship made it difficult to discount their worth as human beings, which worked when the villains in the newspaper were strangers.

Now that I am half a hundred I am less shocked when I see people's shadows. We all have them. I ache that so much of our energy goes into hiding them.

It is dreamy to share our brightness with each other.

"Love me! I deserve it!"

But marriage has a way of bringing a shaft of light into the shadowy corners of our souls. To have another person see our darkness, and not run screaming is perhaps the most precious experience we can have this side of the grave.

Photo by Andy Sullivan