mawidge

Mawidge…mawidge is what bwings us togewer today…
Mawidge, the bwessed awwangement, that dweam wiffim a dweam…

On August 20, 2006, I first made contact via email with the man who would, three months and four days later, become my husband. To say that we have our work cut out for us is an understatement of mass proportions. I’ve heard a million times about how the first year of marriage is the hardest, but I had no idea. It’s not just hard. It’s a lot of work.

Here’s a little something from my last blog:

Be prepared. About two weeks after the wedding, it will finally sink in, and you will wonder, Oh My God. What Have I Done? This is normal. Just be warned that it will happen.

That’s a paraphrase of some advice my mother-in-law gave me on Thanksgiving (day before the wedding). She had married my father-in-law at the end of October. It still hit her, too — even thought they have been together for seventeen years.

There’s a sense of mourning, of lost freedom, and the clunking sound of expectations falling into line with reality rather than floating up in the air with hopes. It is hard. In some respects, the shell-shock that being newly-married provides is not unlike the first weeks of parenthood. You can be warned. You can intellectually think you know what you’re in for. But nothing, nothing, nothing prepares you for the first month. Did I mention that it’s hard?

When I gave birth to my daughter, I knew that I didn’t know her. I’ve been able to watch her without preconceived notions of the person she’s becoming. In marriage, you’re hitching your future to a person who largely already is who s/he will become. The catch is that no matter how much you know, you never fully know another adult. (My father says that after 41-1/2 years of marriage, my mother still surprises him on a regular basis.) For me, the “getting to know my husband more” phase has largely involved letting go of hopes for who I thought he was — adjusting my expectations with reality. For him, it seems that he’s working it the other direction. Immediately after I moved to Santa Fe, he started to have a series of fears (some justified, mostly not) of who I might become — fears triggered by past relationships, memories of his childhood, etc. So, he’s not as good as I’d hoped he’d be. And I’m not as bad as he feared I would be (at least I hope not).

It’s growth. Growing pains suck.

So, as you can see, it’s work. Hard work. But it’s so worth it.

For what it’s worth, here are the ideals we’re trying to live up to — as promised to each other in our vows on November 24, 2006:

We aren’t asking much, are we?

(Yes, we wrote those. The very act of writing the vows required enacting them. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write vows about loving each other while you’re fighting about the wording? Ha.)

Point is, marriage is a new thing to me. While I’ve lived with someone before (for 2 years), it’s simply not the same. I’ve had 5+ years of living solo since then, until October 2006, when I moved to Santa Fe to be with Mike. Living with another adult — another mid-30s adult who’s also established much of his own routine — is a challenging experience.

Hence, the category, marital bliss. I may gripe from time to time. I may give a dose of reality from time to time. But more often than anything else, I hope to use this category to learn to love my husband, out loud.