Target Will Keep Us Together

As Wes and I approach our second anniversary, I decided to write a little meditation on pants and marriage, and communication.

Sometimes I think he does it on purpose.  I'm almost positive he does it on purpose.

On an average day, work pants and pajama pants can be found on just about any handy surface.  Dining room chair backs, sofa back, across the bed, balled up under the bed, over the fan, balled up on the floor in the back of the closet.  Pretty much anywhere you might imagine although not ever where you might expect pants to be.

It was frustrating for reasons I couldn't fully articulate but surely he knows this annoys the hell out of me?  I mean, we've been living together for over three years now.  

A few months ago, we would have to have a Discussion about this.  It would have been about the pants, but not really about the pants.  You know.

Maybe we have both gotten a little wiser since then.  This time, we did not have to waste time with a Discussion about the damn pants.  This time I bought a four dollar door hook from Target and stared him down when he prepared to fling his pants to God knows where.

Then we had a conversation that neither one of us could pretend was about pants.

Sometimes Marriage Sucks

Photo by Love Joleen

I haven't been writing much.  As far as reasons go, feel free to take your pick.

• It's been a difficult season mentally and emotionally
• My spirits were at an all-time low
• The vessel just seemed so empty.

I have been thinking a lot about why I feel the way that I do these days and I think I can trace it back to the holiday season, specifically, our burning bowl ceremony.

I wrote "2012 was a hard year for us and we want 2013 to be better.  We wanted to focus on moving forward, onward and upward.  Naming the things that have been holding us each back, separately and together, and watching them turn to so much smoke and ash was the first step towards freedom."

As it turns out, there are a whole bunch of other steps after the first one.  All of them seem to require a considerable amount of mental, emotional, and physical effort.  For example, one of the things I put on my list was my fear of not being a good enough wife.  To truly face that issue, and let it go, has meant confronting the things that conspire to make me feel that way.

I had a really long list.  Needless to say, It hasn't been pretty.

Added to that, Wes and I have been struggling to reconcile our expectations of marriage with our reality.  Weirdly enough, I think we both have the same idea in mind when we think wife-a being who is 80% Claire Huxtable, 10% fifties caricature, and 10% porn star.  It should go without saying that I am no Claire Huxtable.

This completely imaginary and ridiculous standard causes problems.  I feel guilty for not measuring up and he feels annoyed because I don't measure up which in turn annoys the ever living shit out of me because COME ON!  It's a vicious cycle that would probably end, or turn into something equally nasty, if one of us would just knuckle under, put on the damn pearls and get to vacuuming.

But I can't.  And I won't.  

I know a lot of this comes out of our current difficult circumstances.  I imagine our expectations wouldn't seem so ridiculous if our realities were a little less grim.  Nothing else is easy right now but what is easy is to blame one another.  It's easy to do that because it works so nicely with the idea that if one of us sucked less at x, y, z our whole lives would be better.  It's got to be somebody's fault you know.  It's always easier to take if it's someone else's fault.

But, it's not my fault and I'm done accepting blame for things I didn't do just to keep the peace.  I did not get married to cheerfully work myself into the ground.  I did not get married because I had an overwhelming desire to take on the care and feeding of another person.  I did not get married to take the place of someone's mother.  

I got married because I believed we had a partnership.  I got married because I believed we were equals.  I got married because I believed we were committed to working together to build a life worth living together.

And love.  

Love itself has seemed embattled lately.