marriage is phenomenally difficult

I’ve been contemplating this post since reading Jamie Gladly’s “[tap tap] Is this thing on?” post in August 2011. It’s not been an easy post to write and publish. I keep re-reading and editing with the intention of posting and then saving a new draft instead. 

Jamie wrote,

“I think this is the longest I've gone without blogging since I started this blog almost five years ago. It's been a tough summer and I couldn't seem to write non-whiny posts. I've been intensely frustrated with my marriage but that's not blog material. (Sometimes in the Catholic blogosphere it seems that everybody is in shiny happy marriages where they're jointly striving for heaven and Communicating Effectively and nobody else is fighting unproductively about the same damn thing for ten years. And counting. Am I keeping it real or bringing things down if I say that sometimes it's really ferociously hard to be married?)”

To which I reply, "Keeping it real, Sister!" Sometimes it is ferociously difficult to be married, and we should be talking about it with our spouses and with each other. The fact that, on some level, we expect marriages to run smoothly on love is part of the reason marriage is phenomenally difficult. That expectation sets us up for frustration. Marriage isn’t all sunshine and roses. It’s cleaning up puke and ignoring body odor. It’s sometimes putting your needs on hold to meet your partner’s. Then, it’s asserting your needs and asking your partner to make sacrifices. Marriage is balancing on a tightrope in tandem.  

I'm not sure that I would want to try actually balancing on a skinny little tightrope way high above the ground with Adam. We don't generally manage to dance very well down here on the ground. I am, however, proud that he and I have managed to figure out how to make our crazy partnership work for us for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, living in one house or two.

A big part of what keeps me sane is having come to the conclusion that long-term love is a choice and an action, not an emotion. Twitterpated Bambi and Fauna love is nice when it comes, but it doesn't stay. Adam and I know that even though we have committed to love each other until death does us part, we may not like each other every day. The following words have, on occasion, crossed my lips,  “I love you unconditionally, but the conditional love just flew out the window.” And that's okay. Because it is the daily choices to act out our unconditional love that create space for twitterpation to flourish.

When it comes down to it, really, twitterpation is just the chemistry of attraction allowed to flourish until one's cup runneth over. There have been times in my married life where I've been mildly attracted to other men or realized that were circumstances different, I could see myself in a relationship with someone other than Adam. I'm sure Adam has had similar experiences with his female friends and colleagues. The simple presence of these emotions related to other people does not weaken our marriage because we choose not to act on them.

Another tool for sanity is the recognition that any individual argument is probably just the apparent part of a deeper issue. Our ongoing argument about cleaning is a prime example. Adam and I fought bitterly and repetitively for years before we finally realized that the core issue is the difference between tidying and deep cleaning. I like things to be tidy, and I try to put things away as I use them. I sweep the floors often, but I'm lax about cleaning otherwise. Adam rarely just tidies. If he's putting things away, then he also gets out the simple green and the scrub brush. The debris that Adam leaves behind when he makes coffee drives me crazy, but my habit of sweeping the visible bits of floor without moving the furniture baffles him. Since we stopped shouting (at least about this topic), we've been able to learn from each other, and we're both better. But it certainly hasn't been easy or painless.

Conventional wisdom says that children of divorce tend to be either commitment-phobic or commitment-maniacal. It's pretty clear that I'm the latter, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know if I could handle the niggling day-to-day frustrations of sharing my life with another person if I didn't have a long-term view. So, yeah, when it's working, it's wonderful, but making marriage work is phenomenally difficult.

with the sweet comes the bitter

After nineteen years of companionship, I put my best friend to sleep today. The pain and discomfort of her old age is over, but my pain has just begun.

She was part of everything I did from babies to grad school to knitting.

My desk will never be the same again.

The hardest part of love is the pain of loss. 

mantras for the writing life

I have read a lot of composition theory. When I think intellectually and reflectively about how writing works and what my process is, I come to a pleasant melange of the ideas of Peter Elbow and Donald Murray. For the most part, I build my writing life carefully and try to encourage my students to learn good writing habits.

But that which I experience in the midst of a project and what I know in the abstract to be true often look very different. Thus it is that I find myself repeating like a breath prayer not the wisdom of composition theory, but the wisdom of popular literature through the ages.

Here are my mantras:

1. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. -The Shewings of Julian of Norwich

2. -It wil all work out in the end.
    -How will it?
    -I don't know. It's a mystery.
-Shakespeare in Love

3. Have you eaten your rice? Then wash your bowl. -Zen anecdote

4. Make. Great. Art. -Neil Gaiman

How do you get through a tough project?

neither here nor there

I am always nervous the day before I fly. Until that moment when the plane levels off at cruising altitude little tiny butterflies tickle my gut. 

At the same time, as I approach the airport, the sight of other people's planes arriving and departing over my head amazes me. I stand in awe of the human ingenuity that allows us to travel this way. 

Over the years, I've agglomerated rituals to calm the pre-flight flutters. I rehearse my mental list of oft-forgotten things ad infinitum, knowing that I will realize which one is missing and grab it at the last moment. I pause to sit on my suitcase as my Russian sisters have taught me. I bid farewell to the land I'm leaving through the gap between jetway and airplane. (I've given up tossing a coin onto the tarmac for fear the TSA will question my motives.) As the plane begins to taxi and then gathers speed to jump aloft, I breathe the word 'safe' over and over again and imagine my little mantra reaching out in expanding circles to reach my row, my cabin, my plane, and then all the planes nearby.

On this trip, I was struck by the extreme liminality of travel by plane. Certainly all travel is the traversing of a threshold between origin and destination. But a horse, a car, even a train, can be made to stop at any given point on the trajectory. In motion, they occupy a transitory space between, but simply by ceasing to move, the traveler immediately finds her self located in some specific where. 

The traveler by plane, however, does not have the option to stop the vehicle. To travel by plain is to give oneself over to the authority of pilot and air traffic controller, to agree to remain in the space that is no where until arrival at the destination. 

Often though, this destination is still an other space. Today, I crossed an ocean, and even though I am decidedly present in this here, it is an exotic space to me. In a foreign language, in an unusual state of aloneness, in a new city, adventure is mine.  

things fall together

This week, I had one of those moments where you seem to be getting the same message from very different messengers. Do you know what I mean? Some might say the universe is trying to tell me something. I think this is one of the ways the still small voice gets through to me.

After I wrote "caltrops," I happened upon a list of tips for being a more productive writer. Rarely do I meet a new idea when I encounter such lists, but I peruse them anyway because it's good to be reminded. This time, the idea that sparkled on the screen for me was "declutter your space."

"Hmmmmm," I thought, "it is easier to work in a clutter-free space."

Did I follow this advice? No, friends, I did not. I continued to add layers to the clutter on my desk, on my dresser, and on the shelves at home.

Then, Tsh Oxenrider's recent post about decluttering drawers and shelves popped into my reader. I could not ignore the advice any longer.

Still not ready to tackle my desk, I went for the low-hanging fruit in the bedroom. Here is my dresser before:

Woeful heap of clothes quickly approaching the slope of repose.

And here it is after:

I disappeared the clothes and found all these cool things!

My old stuffed animal friends are happy to not be smothered now, and they make me smile every time I walk by.

This transformation took maybe 40 minutes, but I'm so much happier in my room, and the momentum from this modest success propelled me through tidying the kitchen and living room before we threw an impromptu birthday party for Adam this weekend. I might actually make time for my desk this week just to regain the bliss of having created order from chaos.

My most pressing research project is also less like caltrops this week. There is still much to be done before the deadline, but the orderly structure has emerged, and I'm putting the details together apace.

The sock is also coming along quite well:

caltrops

My darling husband calls this the caltrop stage of knitting:

When starting at the top of a hat or the center of a circle or the toe of a sock (as I am above), the first few rounds are difficult to manage. With too little fabric and too few stitches, the needles don't wait patiently until the knitter gets around to their stitches. They twist and turn and poke the hands in unexpected places.

Fortunately, knitting quickly advances from the caltrop jumble to something more like this:

(this would be the beginning of a rainbow striped sock for those of you who are wondering)

I'm in the caltrop stage of a research project, and it feels like I've been here forever. 

Actually, it feels like each time I've reached the point where everything should be stable and I should be able to start making swift progress, things twist and poke me in unexpected places again. 

The way that we talk about the writing process makes it seem linear: prompt, brainstorm, outline, research, draft, revision, editing, final copy. 

In reality, writing, especially large research projects of the sort I am consumed by these days, is iterative: prompt, brainstorm, outline, research, outline, draft, revision, research, draft, research, outline, draft, revision editing, new draft. lather, rinse, repeat.

If there's one thing knitting has taught me, it's that getting through the caltrop stage requires patience and perseverance. Each new stitch adds more stability to the fabric and helps to create order from the jumble in my hands. I need to take that lesson to my writing. 

Knitting is so much easier. 

I should go write something.

I'll just do one more round on this sock....

gun language

We've become more involved in 1812 and French & Indian reenactments in the last couple of years, and Adam needs an appropriate gun. Since he decided to build a flintlock himself, the house abounds with books, diagrams, and gun bits, and I am learning a lot. Characteristically, mostly what I'm learning is etymology.

Did you know that the three principal parts of a flintlock are the lock, stock, and barrel? I always pictured that idiom as referring to a locked wooden barrel full of some sort of commercial stock, molasses perhaps. Come to think of it, though, I'm not sure where on a barrel one would put a lock.

On a flintlock, the barrel is, of course, the metal part through which the ball travels, while the stock is the wooden part that the shooter actually holds and braces against his body when firing.

Linguistically, the most interesting part is the lock.

Men who carried flintlocks also carried their ammunition balls rolled into small paper packets with black powder. To load, you rip the packet open and some of the powder goes into the pan while the rest goes into the barrel of the gun with the paper and the ball.

Dealing with the powder in the pan is where the language gets interesting. A flintlock fires when the flint comes forward and strikes the frizzen, dropping sparks into the pan which then ignites the powder in the barrel and sends the ball flying. If you're thinking this is a complicated mechanism, you're right, and there are a couple of ways that things can go wrong. (Really, there are probably more than a couple, but right now I'm only interested in the ones that have produced idioms.)

The first is failure to fire. I'm not sure how the spark gets from the pan into the barrel, but when whatever is supposed to happen here fails to happen, we have a flash in the pan, a dramatic but ultimately unsatisfying spark that dies quickly.

The second way things can go wrong is firing at the wrong moment. When ready to fire, the soldier or hunter uses his thumb to pull the hammer all the way back or cock it. However, in order to push the frizzen forward to put powder in the pan, he has to pull the hammer back halfway. If the flintlock goes off while in this half-cocked position, chances are the person holding it is not ready, and the ball will fly in an unexpected direction.

Until I asked Adam to explain how this new thing inhabiting our house works, I had not realized how many of these everyday expressions come from the language used to talk about guns. Expressions like these continue to be spoken today because we hear how they are used, and we learn when their use is appropriate. We don't necessarily need to know the origin of the idiom in order to use it correctly. 

However, in order for phrases like this to become idioms in the first place, a critical mass of speakers in the speech community have to share the point of reference. These phrases are evidence of a time when every house had at least one flintlock, when hunting game or slaughtering one's own animals were the way to acquire food, when life on the frontier meant that every house had to be able to defend itself. This was a time when the majority of Americans lived intimately with their guns.

The newest idioms I can think of come from our technology. We might say that someone is out of juice or fully charged, not to mention the spread of abbreviated communication like FWIW, LOL, brb. I've been trying to think of mainstream idioms that come from newer styles of firearms, and I'm drawing a blank. Our guns are not the integral part of our lives that they once were.

Picture from: Marshall, Brian. "How Flintlock Guns Work" How Stuff Works, 2002. http://www.howstuffworks.com/flintlock2.htm