For years, we tooled along with our ups and downs, coping as best we could and then one day I said to myself, “That’s it. I have no love left to love this man with.” But I hung in there because I said I would. Those were the days when one’s word was a matter of honor. I couldn’t help thinking though, “What a bleak future. Thirty, forty more years of just hanging in here!”
One morning, however, dawn broke within me. I realized that I wasn’t at the end of my capacity to love; I was on the threshold of a deeper capacity to love. It was morning in our life once more. And so we tooled merrily along again with the highs and lows of daily life until I came to that same edge. This time I thought, “This time, it’s the real end!” But I hung in
again for the same reason as before. It was a stark and bone-freezing emotional winter. But only until spring came. I finally understood that this edges were simply thresholds of an increasing capacity to love. I learned at last why Louis Evely said that “The purpose of marriage is to love all the love you are capable of.” And that takes a lifetime.
I felt like a little ant who thought the surface of the book was its universe and as it fell off the book onto the desk it thought that was the end. As it explored the top of the desk, it realized the universe was much bigger than it thought. Then it fell off the desk and plummeted to the floor. “Surely, this is the end!” it thought. As it started to explore the room, it couldn’t believe the enormity of this new world until it ran right into the threshold at the door. As it climbed over the threshold, it
found itself in the world outside. “Oh my, the universe is vast!” For the human heart that vast universe is Love!
Love must be refreshed.
I am fully convinced that the most insidious enemy of Married Love is FATIGUE. It is insidious because it has no face of its own like Sickness, In-laws, Sex, Money, Lack of Communication but it inflitrates everything. And what two people could work out with just a little effort looms large in the wake of fatigue. When one is exhausted, one sees life and the world with jaundiced eyes through dark glasses. Nothing can be solved. All things are irritants. All guns have hair-triggers. Every situation is explosive. All landscapes are bleak. We think there is something direly wrong with our marriage when the reality is we are simply, unmitigatedly, defeatedly tired!
Wisdom eventually comes so that eventually, whenever I began to hate life, I dropped everything and took a nap. Or I would go and read something soothing. I found receptacles for negative feelings and threw them into these receptacles. Running was one. Playing the piano with vigor was another - once I played it with so much vigor in great anger that I bruised all my fingertips. I also had my angry song: Peggy Lee’s “Pass Me By” which I would sing at the top of my lungs. That was somehow pleasanter than a primal scream.
Praying is a sure-fire help - I would just bend the Lord’s ear with complaints. Better still I said to Him, “Bend down, Lord, I need to ride piggyback.” Best of all, I asked the Father to sit on His rocking chair and I would climb on His lap, lean on His chest and suck my thumb and He would rock me gently, stroke my hair and rub my back. That was infinitely better than playing demolition games with Jack’s feelings.
Jack’s favorite tactic was to leave the house and go to the woods, staying there for as long as it took him to cool down. The kids used to say, “Mom is like a geyser - she goes off every hour on the hour. Dad is a volcano. He lies quiet for a very long time but when he explodes, he lays waste the country-side.” It helped us greatly to understand each other’s pattern
Jack’s original pattern was the silent treatment, driving all his negatives into his body and then suffer from stomach problems. So I took it upon myself to provoke him deliberately into an outburst so that the negatives would be out in the universe instead of bottled up inside him making him sick. Once, he went into the bathroom to get away from me and I followed him right in. He must have thought then, “No wonder they voted her the girl they least wanted to marry.”
Our anger was a big bugaboo in our marriage for a long time. The kids and I used to laughingly say that Jack had only one negative emotion - anger.When he was tired, he got angry. When he was confused, he got angry. When he was frustrated, he got angry. When he was hurt, he got angry. When he was sad, he got angry. One negative emotion fits all.
As time passed, I mellowed. Young Jack said, “Mom, you have gotten so mellow - what happened?”
“Well, I don’t know which of these two caused it. In 1972, I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit in October and had a hysterectomy in December.”
“Oh, it had to be both,” he said. “One alone couldn’t have done it.”
The trick is not to give up. The problem is that we quit before the miracle happens. It is so easy to give up, to take the path of least resistance. Just throw in the towel and make the pain stop. Why struggle? If I just put distance between the cause of my stress, my hassle, my pain and me, I can relax, breathe easy and start over. The hitch to that is that the easy way out is not necessarily the most loving way. I have been accused of a great many things but I never want to be accused of not truly loving because that would mean that I had chosen to not truly love.
My appearance, my metabolism, my basic, uncompensated-for personality, my gifts or lack thereof are what I am - things I was born with. Who I am is the sum total of the choices I make and I want to love fully - with all that I am, all of my life, no matter what. I will fail in this often for I am flawed but it will not be for lack of trying and this is what keeps me going, moment to moment.
In time, I have come to believe what Marianne Williamson says: "Relationships are assignments. The Holy Spirit knows who will make us grow the most and assigns us to each other." Jack was God¹s perfect instrument to smooth my rough edges off and vice versa. I¹m glad I came to see this. Without this insight, we might simply have broken each other into pieces instead of polishing each other into the precious stones God meant to create out of the pebbles that we were.
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