Nowhere to go but up…
Posted on June 11, 2008
Filed Under marriage, milestones, My Better Half, Anxiety, challenges, apology, heartbreak, sadness |
I know I have left you all to linger on a sad, sad post. I apologize for the poignant pause but it’s the time of year that makes me crazy and somewhat resigned to sacrificing the blog in the interest of sanity. Truth is, I can’t quite figure out how to find time to actually contemplate sorrow or even write a post about resolution with all the end of school year parties and soccer parties to plan and birthday parties and baseball games to attend and Father’s Day to think of and field day rescheduling and yard work and house guests and the small task of looking for a job while panicking about what I’ll do with the kids all summer should I find one. And then it’s O’s 9th birthday this weekend which just seems entirely impossible. A fourth grader that belongs to me?
So there is the state of things…one big hassled frenzy, a breath taking whirlwind before the pause and linger of summer which should be spent poolside, sipping lemonade and reading mindless fiction but somehow, these next few months don’t seem to hold the promise of that quiet languor.
First there is the fact that, with nowhere left to go but up, My Better Half and I are attempting to make some changes. I wish I could call this team work but it feels more like each of us embarking on an individual and private effort to find some stable ground. It’s been shifting and tilting away from us for awhile and this is the moment, the crucial point at which we find ourselves searching for a way back to center.
While I’d like to think that people change, people who really, really want to change can find it in themselves to fight complacency, can recognize the tiny but significant ways they have failed each other and make the minute adjustments necessary for recovery and the sustained health of the marriage, I can’t quite shake the emphatic claim that MBH has made throughout the eleven years of our marriage. Until very, very recently he has been determined and resolute in his opinion that people don’t change, can’t change, won’t change. It was take it or leave it for so long and now, somehow, when leave it became a distinct possibility, he is no longer quite so certain that change is an impossibility.
And while no one sets out to find themselves here, staring at one another over a cup of coffee at a the Heartbreak Cafe, deciding whether or not to split the bill, share the tip and take separate ways at the fork in the road, I think it’s sadly common, almost banal. We aren’t the first people sipping at this bitter brew and we won’t be the last.
There is one jaded but clever waitress here, with her netted hair and her faded work uniform, who tells tales of the few who have decided to endure, who held hands awkwardly while on the way out to the parking lot, who climbed back into the very same beat-up, work horse of a marriage they arrived in and rode off together in some inexplicable state of stubborn devotion.
She says she never hears from these folks again. She tells it like it’s a good thing, this silence. She claims that only the lonely and the sorry send her postcards. The others, the few, that made it out together have each other. And that makes her glad.
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