Recently it was our 35th wedding anniversary. I know I don’t usually include my husband in
these blogs, as he may wish for some peace and quiet, but I don’t really see
how I could leave him out, as you typically don’t have these sorts of
events on your own. No, I’m wrong there. By the time my parents were married this long
they were definitely having them on their own.
They had drifted, like ancient Pangea, continents apart by then. She was in France and he was in South
America. It’s as good a reason as any
not to opine that your marriage is as solid as a rock. In fact, I blame geology
for the whole sorry mess.
If my old dad hadn’t been a geologist, in love with the
long, slow impermanence of the earth layering and folding, bending and sinking,
melting and drifting, he would have been home some of the time, instead of
standing around on mountain tops with his eyes on the distance. She told me once she got very quickly tired
of being alone and then, after years of waiting around she suddenly realized
she could go where she wanted and eat when she felt like it, and decided she
liked it. I COULD have pointed at my
brother and said, ‘Hello. We’re right
here,’ but I imagine that being alone with a couple of aliens you’ve produced
when your husband did swing into town, who now require food, shelter and
society, is as good as being alone, I don’t know.
It is customary to reflect on what keeps us together, you
know, love, companionship, support, and I’m sure these all play a part. But let’s face it, marriage is a pairing
between two completely different people.
It’s amazing they ever work at all.
One of you could come from a nice, stable home where it was understood
that you make your bed, and you lie in it.
The other one could be me. No one
ever made beds at my house. In fact for
much of my childhood I slept in campsites on a WW2 army cot, as part of my
mother’s ‘hey, I can go wherever I want!’ program.
I think it is being together that keeps us together. When you’re together you develop a space that
you both inhabit, and you fill it with things you both like; similar politics,
wine, rattan furniture for inside, though I’m wondering about the furniture
just now. And just off to one side you
have the place you don’t have in common filled with stuff only one of you
likes; antique dinky toys in my case, bits of wood that will come in handy one
day in his. And then every now and then one of you brings a part of yourself
into the common space that is unexpected and you have laughter.
I think, it’s things that happen or get said, that you
realize you would have missed if you’d not been together. It is the time in
Spain when my husband kicked his camp stove into a field when it wouldn’t light
and he couldn’t get breakfast, or when he looks at one of my desperate daubs
and says, because he’s an artist, ‘water is flat, you know’, or when I go to
the door of my son’s house to drop off a forgotten sock, and our youngest
grandchild flings open the door and looks past me and says crossly “Where’s
Grandpa??” because a man who has that kind of love from a child is worth a
lifetime of loyalty.
I’ll be honest, I was
a bad prospect with the kind of modeling I had of marriage, where I learned
that it’s just easier to pack your army camp cot and drive away. If I pulled a stunt like that my husband
would have stood by the car and said, ‘drive away where? You hate camping. Much better come inside and listen to my new
idea for lowering heating costs…it involves wooden buttresses…’
