Making a Marriage

Eight years ago today Jonathan and I married each other on a hot sunny day in Seattle.  He wore a tux, I wore a big dress.  Our families and many dozens of friends celebrated with us.  The flowers were lovely, the food was divine, the wines were fantastic (all from Walla Walla, of course).  We vowed and sang and kissed and were photographed and took a ride in a fancy car.  We mixed our losses with our gains and shed tears of missing with those of joy.  There are things I would do differently today but that's because we're 8 years older now and we've changed a lot.  But that being said, we loved the day and love remembering it.

I had imagined I might never get married.  I wasn't opposed to it but I didn't feel like I had to get married.  I am not a a squishy romantic.  I grow weary of fluff & flourish quickly--I am sentimental and desire richness but not the flowery or the gushy.  I also didn't love dating, and dating is sort of a prerequisite for marriage.  I did date several guys through college & my early 20s and all but one were good men.  But I figured that if the confetti fell from above & prince charming emerged from the sparkle I would be right there and recognize what was in front of me.  In fact, I sort of hoped that it would happen that way--fast & clear & smashingly passionate--and that's pretty much exactly what ended up happening!

I love being married with Jonathan.  He is kind and loyal and gets to know the neighbors.  He remembers people and continues to call someone "my friend" years after they last saw each other.  He has absolutely THE greatest laugh in the world hands down--it should be a ring tone!  He loves to dance and doesn't hide his tears.  He is philosophical and he thinks.  He's artistic and abstract and he sometimes sets things down and loses them; he also makes mobiles and does origami and leaves data models all over the house.  He likes keeping papers out where he can see them and when I swish things into piles and hide them in the dryer before company comes he gets worried we'll forget about the credit card bill.  He tracks our finances on these spreadsheets that blow my mind.  He may not know how much money we have but he takes great delight in designing the spreadsheets.  He never misses the Stanley Cup or the World Cup and yells robustly at the television during games.  When I go out with my girflriends for the evening he stays home and sautes onion into perogies and drinks vodka and the house smells like a Russian kitchen when I get back.  He is occasionally irreverant and generally not overly serious.  He's funny in the mornings, which is a big plus, and he sings in the shower and pays my library fines and he kills all the spiders.

However, anyone who has ever been married can tell you that it takes more than that.  So I thought about it--what describes the spirit of us?--and came up with three things:

     1.  We're each responsible for cleaning our own bathrooms.
     2.  We value the life in each other.
     3.  We encourage each other to be in rich friendships.

I'm sure there are other ways to describe it, but so far the best of our relationship can be described by those three realities.  Everything pretty much lines up behind their essence.

Jonathan doesn't always sing in the shower and take out the trash.  We don't always feel in sync with each other and the occasional season has felt a little more like mid-winter's wait for the burst of hyacinth.  My nightmare version of marriage is when it looks more like a merger, when there's so much "us-ness" that you can't find the two people inside it.  But with Jonathan I don't have to worry about that.  I am not obliterated in our relationship.  If anything, our work with each other is more about attending to being found than to not being lost.  And I do go flippy when our relationship's best is experienced in 3D.

I've always said that love messes with our sense of timing, and I think I'll add the spatial realm to that as well.  Just when you think things are linear and known, there's this firework...sometimes pretty and celebratory but also fire-y and bound to disrupt the status quo.  And when life is chaotic and messy there can still be this internal calm.  Sometimes the best of times all go together and there are periods of playful rest.  And sometimes the worst of times all go together and the darkness is also bleak.  But when they do, they are not the final word.

In her reflections upon marriage and ontology, Madeline L'Engle writes:

A Russian priest, Father Anthony, told me,

"To say to anyone 'I love you' is tantamount to saying 'You shall live forever.'"

I am slowly beginning to learn something about immortality.

I don't entirely know what that all means but I am drawn to it.  What I love most about marriage is that it is life.  Being married is different from but not outside the hallmarks of any kind of life.  Dynamic, creative, and real at its best.  And in any event, not static.  Not even tied by time.  Eight is a number.  It represents a passage of time but it does not boundary or define what has been nor what will be.  And for both what it has been and what will be, I am grateful to be in it with Jonathan.  It's right.

Happy anniversary, love!
May you live forever!

___________________________________
©2011 Mindy Danylak

Mouldywarp

The other night it was pretty late and I was trying to fall asleep. I don't usually have to try -- my siblings and I have all been blessed with a remarkable ablity to conk out at the mere suggestion.  But I was laying there, not falling asleep, and Jonathan says, "ok, what are you thinking about?"  He knows I've been thinking a lot lately but it floors me how he can feel me thinking.  "Moles," I say, "I'm thinking about moles."  He busts up laughing.  They're not in my usual repertoire.  Yes, the little guys who pop out of the ground in my back yard in the middle of the night.  They left evidence of their tunnels last week.

I aspire to write something every month to post here, but July came and went and now it's into August and there's no July post.  Maybe it's because it's finally summer in Seattle and I'm starting to feel human again.  I was starting to feel like summer was ignoring me; and then when it rained a few days after the sun came out I was worried it was just gonna skip me like a joke I didn't get.  But now it's actually been over 60 for several days in a row and it feels miraculous.  I think I've almost forgotten how much I felt like a shadow all "spring."  Almost.

At any rate, this summer I've read a lot and celebrated a lot and and worked a lot and walked a lot and spread a lot of bark and am launching a new venture with a dear friend.  (More to come soon on that.)  I've spent countless hours thinking about memory and time and stories and family and landscaping and the economy and cooking for crowds and dream interpretation and communicating vision and web hosting -- and, yes, moles (did you know there are none in Ireland?) -- and frankly I sometimes just get tired of thinking.

So I'm considering all of that evidence of my own tunneling, sniffing my way along a process and a path, knowing that something new and noteworthy is about to pop up, that there's a whole lot of life under the surface in smaller yet vibrant spaces and that when the time is right there will be a different kind of evidence of me.  And that will have to do in lieu of a "regular" blog post.

In the meantime, I give you an excerpt (in italics below) to enjoy from Mary Karr's fantastic memoir, "Lit".  Her writing in this story shares the kind of energy I feel like I'm in these days...pithy, rich, reflective, basic, to the point, meandering, leaving some things unsaid but carrying much and being fully tuned in.  I also love the way they talk about God.  And that Mary Karr's healing involves a near-blind nun who has a weakness for cookies and a very wise heart.  If I were a nun I'd want to be like Sister Margaret.  The below is Mary's writing, not my own....it's not even necessarily relevant to what I've been thinking about, certainly not to moles, let alone to web hosting.  But sometimes in the tunneling we find other people's work & know that certain proteins in the roots are found in our own roots.

How do moles decide when to pop up?

***

The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises — a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff — all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain — forlorn childhood, this failed relationship — I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.

How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God?

Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster-making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?

I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl.

She laughs at this and says, I see you — she peers through those lenses — what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.

So you don’t judge me? I want to know.

For what? she said. I don’t even know you.

Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day.

She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you?

God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.