Be Good to Each Other

A few years ago, when I thought my world was coming to an end, my then-husband wondered aloud why he did not treat me as nicely as my father treated my mother. What I realized later was this: to treat someone that beautifully requires an interior quality so profound and pure that all one’s actions become a reflection of that goodness. This is not to say that change isn’t possible, that effort cannot improve a relationship, or even that difficult people can’t have a solid marriage, but really, this kind of lovely treatment of one another is a rare gift, and my parents are particularly blessed with it.


When I walked down the aisle the first time, my father whispered in my ear as he guided my arm to my soon-to-be husband’s. He said, “Be good to each other.” Such simple directions—the most uncomplicated marriage advice I have ever heard. Unfortunately, my first husband was unable to embrace those plain words and the marriage ended. Recently, my father and I paused at a café for java and had a long talk about the end of that relationship, and I commented about what I had observed between him and my mother that week. This Christmas, as I watched my parents speak gently with one another, my father cupped my mom’s face in his hand, and they bowed their heads toward one another, and murmured affectionate words. I held my breath as time stopped. It was a beautiful moment, the likes of which I witnessed often through my childhood, but that I never fully experienced until I courted my new husband: tenderness in its most innocent and sweetest light.

As we dawdled over coffee, my dad and I eventually grew to a deeper discussion of our own present marriages, my father and mother’s being their first and only. He elaborated on what he had learned as a young man in his early married years, and we laughed about how his errors paralleled some of the comedic ones my husband and I now experience as newlyweds at our age. Despite newness and trial though, we do triumph.

“I looked across the room at the Christmas party,” I said, “and saw my husband smiling at me. And he was proud—not ‘my wife is a trophy’ kind of proud, but proud to be married to me.” Suddenly, and even with my own spouse miles away, I could smell his cologne and feel the warmth of his body. I could almost hear him breathing the way he does when he bends his own forehead to touch mine in a wordless exchange of love. I paused in reverie. My father and I sat near the window of a Starbucks, the steam long having abandoned the cups in our hands, our thoughts drifting.

I thought about the goodness of my husband. When he speaks, he speaks gently. His voice still stops my heart and slows me down—it is the sound of love. This is not to say that we don’t have moments where we have overstepped boundaries in some way (Do NOT remove the carpet from his office! Do NOT!), but the overwhelming sensation I have for him is ultimately adoration. This Christmas, one and a half years after the start of our marriage, we drove our children from their father’s home to my in-laws far away. The kids were quiet, sleepy, and warm in their blankets against the dampness and chill of the fog outside. We cruised down the highway, picking out familiar landmarks silhouetted against the grey mist that curtained the countryside. I was overwhelmed by a familiar feeling—security, love for family despite obstacle or stress, and faith despite the unknown future. I told my husband later how much I enjoyed being part of his family—both the nuclear one we create and the extended one we share. We are good to each other.

Married... with Separate Sponges

My husband has funny habits. Of course, he thinks mine are funnier, but we know better.


He has some kind of phobia of cold, wet sponges. On occasion, finding one that is sopping and full of slimy bacteria as it rests in the kitchen sink, he will make some kind of “heeeeeeeeeeewwwww gross” noise, pull it out with two slender fingers, cringe as he squeezes it dry, and then fling it into the microwave for a good radiation treatment. I asked him once as he was dancing with revulsion at yet another soaked sponge why he could not bear it. “You’re a veteran of war,” I said, “Haven’t you seen grosser stuff?”

He has solved our sponge differences by buying his own set (no kidding), the bulk of which he hides above the fridge so that I can continue to gross out the household by leaving my wet sponge in the bottom of the sink while his sits lean, dry, and haughty on the rim by the sprayer. I did ask his youngest child about this, to which she snorted, “You’re just finding this out?” Periodically, just to make myself smile, I’ll clean the whole kitchen with his sponge.

There are rules and regulations for pots and pans as well. In his previous life, my lovely man had purchased his own pans and housed them on top of the fridge with a cloth towel between each pan. He had tired of coming down into the kitchen to see that one teenager or another had scrambled an egg and left the skillet all fried up and crusty for someone else to scour. Or maybe the kid had scratched it with a metal tool. My first thought when I heard about this was: Your kids scramble their own eggs! Only to be followed by: Really, you had your own set of pans in a married household. But, because I completely respect the idea of caring for things we wish to last, I developed a nice system for storing his pans neatly on their sides in a rack that does not allow them to touch and scratch. The other day, I held one up to the light and deliberated running it through the dishwasher instead of the usual hand washing, but then decided I better to be safe than sorry. I’d hate something to happen to the cast iron skillet that I have babied and kept seasoned and rust free for 15 years. Retribution via dishpan abuse isn’t pretty.

I have also been amused by toilet seat lid policy, which states that lids must be placed closed at all times except, of course, when in use. I had never thought about this. For me, dealing with the lid, the less I have to touch the toilet, the better. So I would leave it up, but doing so really bothered my spouse. One day, finding some kind of Wings of Blue Parachute Team sticker on the bottom of the lid like a warning (if you don’t lower the lid, you’re tandem jumping with me next weekend), I threw out the sticker and threatened to buy a pink fuzzy toilet seat cover for our bathroom. I did wind up acquiescing to lower the seat lid after use, but announced that I would not bother training the children to do this because frankly, I was happy enough that they both peed in the toilet, especially the youngest child. I think the kids have enough to worry about, so let their toilet be, well, their toilet. In the meantime, I focus my energies on true crimes such as wet towels on the floor and blue toothpaste on the ceiling.

It’s funny what newlyweds learn about each other that first married year. For example, I have some kind of problem fastening lids on anything (I did not notice—my spouse did) and dog hair upsets me terribly (the husky sheds twice a year and it’s gross). What’s funnier is the projected future reversal of habits, preferences, and aversions, because this always happens when people are married to each other for a long time. People trade things about themselves. In the first marriage, I broke spaghetti before tossing it in the pot and closed the kitchen cabinet doors after my husband. At the end of that ill-fated marriage, my husband habitually broke spaghetti noodles and ran after me to close the cabinet doors. His jaw would hit the floor to know that I cannot leave the bedroom without making the bed and that I clean my prep dishes as I cook so that the post-supper bust and scrub session is quick. Makes me wonder what I’ll be doing ten years from now… maybe hiding my skillet from the kids and hording sponges.

Marriage

Why do we marry, asks Elizabeth Gilbert in her recently released memoir, Committed. She explores marriage as a means of protection and survival or as an expression of class and rank in certain cultures. She discusses romantic love and the absence of it in certain marriages. And she documents her own path to re-marriage, a journey fueled by a complication in her husband’s status as a foreign visitor to the United States. She comes to terms with rituals and the need for formality, the permanence of a publicly made and witnessed promise. She rises to the final conclusion that I could have told her simply and from the start: we marry because it feels good to be loved and we want that love recognized. Yes, we can reap the benefits one receives as a married couple in society. And of course, if one has children, the bonds of marriage become the walls of the house in which those children are raised. But the best answer to this question of why do we choose a life partner has to be what I learned from Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Adam says, finally and after much frustration with the creature called Eve, that life is better outside the garden of paradise with her, than inside the beautiful garden without her.


I heard Twain’s above line at a theater production, a series of vignettes about love. Selected readings from Diaries bonded together each scene with comedic and finally the dramatic reality that love can end when life does. Sitting in the darkened theater, my husband’s profile lit with the jewel-toned lights cast from the stage, I was caught in a moment of tearfulness. Our marriage, still new and flecked with moments of hardship, is the relationship I choose because life with him is far better than living without him.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s own sentiments on love are quoted below as a direct reflection of why I married again despite the challenges of merging two families and any of the general troubles that might plague a marriage:

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.

Interestingly enough, Mrs. Browning married her love despite her controlling father’s objections. Wikipedia mentions that she lived happily ever after, if there is such a thing, especially considering her troubled health. She penned those beautiful words approximately 200 years ago when marriage meant assuming certain domestic roles from which women have found limiting both then and now. I find her choice thrilling and hopeful.

Second Woman

Some weeks ago, I had a conversation with someone who asked me, in reference to her husband’s prior wife whom I had seen recently, if the woman had looked pretty. We were rocking quietly on a porch with our backs to a surprisingly warm and bright beam of sun in the middle of winter. The air, heavy with heat in its concentrated ray, still cast a threat of coolness each time the swing of the rocker brought shadow across the edges of my knees. I thought about how hearts never age, how in second marriages, a ghost of the first one can still haunt. I looked at this woman, aging gracefully with a man who still after decades refers to her as his bride, and who has a completely devoted following of children, step-children, and grandchildren. I said to her, “She was just a woman.”

Define pretty. Define pretty after thirty some-odd years. Whatever your definition, what do you say to the woman who, although not responsible for driving the first wife out, still finds herself occasionally preoccupied with the lingering image of a rival female?

Last year, I had an interesting discussion with my boss about some kind of disagreement I was having with the woman that replaced me in my former home. Frustrated with the woman’s quick defenses, I had allowed an event to escalate to a place from which neither of us were willing to retreat without looking beaten.

“You know what her problem is, don’t you?” my boss had asked sagely in his thick foreign accent. “She is not first woman.”

First woman! Should I capitalize that? Brilliant! And no, I had never thought of this, ever.

“My mother was not first woman either,” elaborated my boss. “She was always competing. My father’s first wife had been dead for years. It did not matter. She felt second.”

There is a funny power to this realization that helped me gain a little perspective into the situation. I began, despite the complete horror that my ex-husband’s woman had played into once-upon-a-time, to feel a little bit sorry for her. No matter what she does, she is not the first woman. A justifiable consequence in her circumstances? Maybe. But it is what it is.

Ironically, things being the way they are and my own remarriage now a tangible state, I am not my new husband’s first woman either. But it does not really haunt me they way it haunts some others who wear shoes similar to mine. Maybe my plate is so full that I don’t have the time to allow those doubts to preoccupy me. Maybe, I am simply confident in my own role. Maybe, it has more to do with the fact that neither my husband nor I live in a house remotely associated with either of our past marriages. Maybe, not enough time has passed for me to draw further comparisons. My husband might disagree— after all, there is a kitchen table here with a history of wobbling and looking shamefully worn in his prior marriage. This year, I bolted, braced, screwed, and repainted that table into compliance. Replacing it would have cost less money. There might be something subconscious there.

I never will be able to forget the vulnerability of the beloved grandmother on her porch, a woman who past 70 years old can still do a split on a living room floor and then get up without grunting to go whip up the best pimento cheese I’ve ever had, and who still worries that once I had met the first wife, I would like her better. Before I left for the day, I sneaked a note onto her bedroom pillow. It said. “I love you. A lot.” What I meant was, “You win.”