I Carry Your Heart (I Carry it in My Heart)

 

Two years ago today, I went on a date. I had no idea then that it would be THE date. The first date. The last person I would date. With the man I would marry. 

We knew each other growing up, went to the same junior high and high school, but lost touch after receiving our diplomas and tossing our caps. We were photos in the yearbook to each other, and a few shared memories.

We reconnected 21 years later, through the magic of Facebook, and more than a little nudging from my best friend, who also happened to be my husband’s prom date at one time. (Their one and only date).

I probably knew around the third date that he was the one. But, I also knew my history, my luck with love- or rather lack of—so I held my breath and waited for something to go wrong. It didn’t.

We were married a year ago today.

Love stories happen every day, all the time, magical stories of all kinds taking shape and ending with cake and frosting, a white dress and vows. Sometimes, it all begins to seem commonplace or even expected.

I am not saying our love is any more special than anyone else’s, and although our story is unique and I think romantic, there are a thousand more out there like it, or even more beautiful in their histories, their struggles, or what they have survived or overcome for love.

But what I can say for certain, without pause, and with all my heart is that we are lucky. Lucky to have connected after so many years, lucky to be so well matched, lucky to know that we both are in this for the long haul. Lucky to have found each other in a world that can be harder than it should be, and less like a fairy tale with each passing year. Life is hard, life is uncertain, and the pain and dreadfulness that people go through, survive, or sometimes perish from can make me weak in the knees to witness.

I had my own journey before meeting my husband Shea, and he had his. We both endured our share of pain, loneliness, and longing. We both readily agree that it was worth it—however trying, however painful—so long as we ended up here. I had given up on so much watching the world wiz by, thinking that I wasn’t destined for some of the better parts of it. But, here I am today, lucky in love. And I know it doesn’t happen for everyone, and I know there are no guarantees. I know that being single and wanting it can be one of the loneliest places in the world.

So tonight, as we slice into our wedding cake – the small top layer we have preserved in the freezer to share a piece each year on our anniversary- I will say thank you  to the universe, to fate, to Facebook, and my best friend Kim Linville, for making this happen. I will say a thank you in my heart for Shea’s heart, which is so giving and compassionate, and which beats in time to mine. 

I will close by sharing a poem that my dear friend Judith read for us at our wedding. It is one of my favorites, and I love that it was a part of our ceremony.

i carry your heart with me

by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
                                  i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

 

Read more...

The Waste of Worry

"Yes, I worry about the craziest things, but better me than someone less qualified." -Robert Brault 

If you have been reading my blog for more than a year, you know full well that I have been through some stressful times. The last two years have been a delightful break in all that—first finding love, then getting married, and finally setting up house. We weren’t worry-free, but so many of my dreams came true that it all seemed a little bit magical.

The past few months have been a little more stressful. Just life stress. Money, job changes/layoffs, family difficulties. But hey, I survived a lot of stress over the years, a lot worse things than we are facing now, right? I have faced and conquered life-altering stress. I have stared down my demons, admitted all of my past pain to a complete stranger (therapist). I endured hours and hours of therapy that at times felt like some torturous prison camp as my scars and old wounds were torn open, baring everything I had ever feared or lost. All this while being out of work, pretty much broke, and trying to recover from a huge betrayal/ break-up.

So, anything now should be a cake walk. It should. But as my husband and I both face a tough job market, big decisions, and dealing with some hurtful and tense family issues, I am wondering if I have learned anything from all I have gotten through. Why do I worry myself into panic attacks and extra helpings of migraines? Why do I lay awake at night fretting about things I can’t change until I am sweating, counting the hours passing on the clock on the nightstand—the glowing numbers seeming to fly by at breakneck speed?

I know that this does absolutely no good. Worrying won’t help any of it. It also doesn’t help me be a better person, a better worker, or a better wife. What it usually does is leaves me sleep-deprived, grouchy, and less apt to find the solutions to what is going on than I would be if I got some sleep and gave the worrying a rest.

It’s different now that I am married. Before, I worried for just myself, and it was a huge weight dealing with everything alone. But now, I worry for my husband—for both of us. I want to be the best wife I can, I want to help us build a future together, I want to make the right choices about jobs, where we live, and what to cook for dinner. I am under no pressure from my husband, who believes I am gifted at all of these things. And sometimes I even worry about THAT.

We have both been under pressure as money has been tight, and sometimes it seems like an accumulation of little things going wrong turns into an avalanche. At one point last week, a lot had happened and it seemed like our house was running under Murphy’s Law 24/7. One thing seemed to stack on top of another. There was a quiet tense moment, and then… we laughed. We had to. It all seemed almost absurd. It was a good moment, and helped us to remember that we are in this together, and we are so good for each other.

It is 12:18am as I am writing this, and the last hour has been devoted to worrying about my dreams of being a writer—and how I can ever fit that into everything we are trying to do. I don’t want to lose that, I want to make it happen. Then it hit me that I was worrying instead of writing. So here I am. It’s one small step to slow down the wheels turning in my head, to try and take away one piece of the never-ending puzzle that is this need to fret.

I am sure by 1:00am, something else will inhabit my thoughts…seriously low bank statements, pain that I wish I could take away for my husband, the 100 things I need to do for work before 11:00am tomorrow…but for now, for the next 42 minutes or so, I am going to try to give it a rest. To breathe. In and out. Slowly. And maybe, just maybe, get some sleep.

Artwork by Georgiana Chitac. View more of her beautiful work here.

Read more...

The Unexpected Lessons of Marriage

As my husband and I get closer to the one year mark in our marriage, I have been thinking about how quickly time passes, and how much has happened in such a short time. It is hard to believe that we have been married almost a year, and together almost two.

Rarely a day passes when I don’t think about all the times in my life that I have settled. I think that word could describe a lot of my life—settling for some friendships that weren’t good for me, settling for treatment from my parents- my father in particular- that I should never have accepted, and mostly settling for relationships where I wasn’t valued, respected, or even really loved.

I think about all those times now, because I am no longer settling and I realize what an incredible, life-changing feeling that is. I wish I could take hold of all the young amazing women out there and make them realize that you should never settle—not in your career, in your family, and especially not in your relationships. I gave up on finding love because I believed that I had outrageous ideas about what it meant, when really, somewhere along the line, I had whittled down my expectations to be so low, that being generally respected and treated well seemed a far-fetched fantasy.

It still amazes me that at work I could talk to a room full of board members, company officers, and management members, suggesting new ideas that I had come up with, stressing my opinions, and handling tough questions with ease, but in my own personal life, I could not take up for myself when someone was treating me like crap. But, I see it with a lot of women—I don’t know why we sell ourselves short, but we do.

I have also realized in the last year how strange and wonderful it can be to live with someone after more than twenty years of living on my own. I have learned to sacrifice and compromise, not in a bad way, just in a normal co-existing way. It hasn’t been easy as I am stubborn, impatient, and did I mention stubborn? Luckily, my husband meets me equally on all fronts, and has also had to adjust to an unfamiliar new way of life—but one that we both want and delight in.

After a lifetime of feeling that I really could only count on myself, to actually let someone in on the times I am weakest is odd and amazing. I cannot believe how much I am myself now, more than I ever have been—hiding nothing, expressing practically everything, and feeling no worries or self consciousness. It is liberating and a lot of times—amusing. One particular thing, that I can’t believe I am about to share, comes from the freeness of living on my own for so long, with only my animals to witness my antics.

I have this habit of…dancing. Not necessarily to music, not at appropriate times, not expectedly. It happens, oh, when I am standing with the refrigerator door open, trying to decide what to choose for a snack, or when I am loading the dishwasher. It is not pretty or choreographed dancing; it is some Elaine Benes-inspired shaking and spazzing that my husband says he now believes is completely out of my control. It just happens, and sometimes I catch myself, but most of the time Shea will jolt me out of my dancing by saying, “Right here”—to remind me that there is indeed another person in the room. Luckily he finds this endearing, and enjoys my embarrassment more and more each time.

But what this has taught me is how right we are for each other, and how truly comfortable and happy I am with Shea—and with myself in this relationship. It has been startling for me to realize that after twenty some odd years of dating, I have never felt so comfortable, so real, so much myself, and I have never really been myself. That’s scary to realize. For so long, I felt I had to be some ideal person/girlfriend/woman, and molded myself to fit what I thought that was, or what the person I was dating thought that was. It is astonishing that it never really dawned on me to be myself—and that maybe that was enough.

I am sure through all those faulty, short-lived, painful, and doomed relationships I had moments where the real me surfaced, but I know that even in longer term relationships, it never felt like this.

Having said that, we do argue- intensely- usually about the stupid things married couples do. I have never had the foundation I have now. Even within my family, I grew up believing that things were so shaky, that one person might leave at any moment—and more often I just felt forgotten in the struggle. Fighting or arguing scared the hell out of me because to me it meant loss and abandonment. This continued throughout all my relationships as a learned behavior. If a boyfriend and I were fighting, even if I was 100% right and it was something I should have fought or defended myself for, I was so reluctant to stand my ground for the fear of feeling it pulled out from under me. I gave in or panicked and back pedaled often just to make it stop. In the end, all I knew was nothing was really better, and I wasn’t being left or abandoned, but I felt incredibly alone.

In watching my friends go through ups and downs in their own marriages over the years, I have given advice, parceling out strong opinions and shock at how angry my friends could get over their husbands not handling a chore they had asked for, or forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. Then on the other side of the coin, I would talk to my guy friends about their frustrations with their wives, again lecturing them on overreacting and not appreciating what they had. It is so funny how little you know until you are married. For the most part, we both try to take care of each other, but the little annoyances and grievances are there, and I have thought about my advice many times and chuckled to myself. You just don’t know until you are in it how difficult it can be at times, especially since we both had our first marriage at 40 years old, after a long time of being set in our ways.

What I love though, is that we are able to patch things up, usually make each other laugh, and feel stronger after. I know this is our first year of marriage, and this is the “honeymoon” phase. But we have also had to deal with some huge issues- painful, stressful family issues that we shouldn’t have had to deal with- but we have. And I know in my heart that if we can get through this in our first year of marriage, with all of the other “normal” adjustments, we will be fine. For a very long time.

This morning, we went to church for the 11:00am service. I have been honest with my husband about my struggles with religion—what I believe and what I struggle to believe. For my own past pain, for the pain we have both endured in the last year with family issues, for the pain I see in the world, and in my friends lives…for the randomness of lives taken, and repeated tragedies befalling the dearest people… I can’t always make it make sense. I can’t always believe there is a reason or a plan.

But as I sat in a pew this morning listening to hymns sung quietly in the small church where I became Shea’s wife, I knew more than anything that I had no doubts about how solid our marriage is and will be-- no doubts about how beautiful and perfect that November day was when we got married.

And most of all, no doubts about the man sitting next to me.

Read more...