Love on the Rocks

Love birds at the Grand Canyon in January 2019

Journaling about problems in one's marriage is hard enough, let alone BLOGGING about it. What to say when issues are private, but when you feel your world is crumbling? That is the dilemma I faced in May. This was a rough patch that was the roughest and longest it's been. It's the untold story of what ELSE was happening in our lives in May. Why things were absolutely more over-whelming than ever.

It began the day before Mother's Day and lasted through Friday, May 24. It stretched over and through Mother's Day, a ballet banquet, babysitting my niece, private lessons, camping, Quent's birthday, piano, ballet, AND voice recitals. All sorts of events that were supposed to be celebrations. All with family and extended family and congratulations and smiles, and through it all I wasn't sure I could make it THROUGH it all.

What transpired is not for this record. But I do want to record that life is hard sometimes. When we come out the other side and the history has been written with a happy ending, it is easy to forget the darkness and fear we felt in the living of life. Worse than mis-remembering for ourselves, however, is painting a false picture for our kids and their kids that we always had things figured out, that our lives were smooth sailing. It's not a true story, but it's not a very inspiring one either.

The facts are for 2 weeks, things were rough. I finally went in for counseling. 'Finally' in that this was not the first time I had wanted to GET counseling. And? It helped. I knew going in that the only person I could change was me. But I didn't see how I COULD change my perception that something was wrong and needed fixing. Blessedly, what I learned I needed to change was my willingness to speak. There are all kinds of things I'm not perfect at as a wife, but the thing I needed to do to find peace was to express my perspective and hold my ground. It may sound incredible that someone as wordy, even verbose, as I am has been afraid of speaking. I think my fear was that speaking wouldn't make things better. I've probably lived enough examples of seeing how speaking made it worse.

Here we are at a ballet banquet on May 14. Together. Smiling. Out of habit and out of hope.

I needed to speak not because my perspective was the only perspective, not because my words had any power to change the past, and I doubted they would have any power over the future either. And yet, there were things which needed to be spoken, feelings which needed to be heard to be considered. So finally on Friday, May 24, I held my ground and spoke my truth.

For Quent's part, he had been miserable during this time too. Neither of us like friction in our marriage. My words had the potential to make things worse. They were words of boundaries. They were definite about right and wrong. I didn't expect them to help. But perhaps I should have had more hope. The man I married IS a decent human being who never set out to hurt or disregard his wife. In our long drive and conversation, he listened to me, and I listened to him. We disagreed, but we heard each other. We DID agree that there were things we could both do better. We decided to keep trying because we loved each other and neither of us wanted things NOT to work.

So while many of these entries in May felt like a lovely facade over a cracking foundation, I'm so glad we held it together. We have fortified the foundation NOW, but even amidst the tremors, we held on. We went, we smiled, we clapped, we took pictures. We kept working on making something beautiful of life, perhaps just on faith that the future COULD be beautiful. And now there are these lovely memories to look back on, and maybe they are all the more lovely to know they are built on something imperfect, but worth saving.