one of the ways that my husband and i knew we were right for each other was because we both had this itch for something more. we could talk for hours about our fantasies: living in hawaii, buying a beautiful plot of land, growing our own food, building our own house. . . the dream went on and on and on.
and both of us loved it. we loved the dreaming, and we loved that we could so harmoniously paint this beautiful picture of exactly what we wanted, together. there were no fights about whether or not to include this or that. just blissful agreement.
but unfortunately this state of bliss didn't last long. in our first years of marriage there was a time when our prospects didn't look so good. newly wed and newly strapped with a baby, we fell into the pictures of what a family looked like from all around us. he started a business, i got a good stable job, we put the kid in daycare, we bought a house, and we waited for that sense of the great american dream to settle in.
but, it didn't.
instead, it all felt terribly wrong. he became increasingly frustrated with how long it took for a new business to actually start making some money. i hated my good job, yet felt chained to it and had no interest in any other possibilities. and our daughter, let's just say daycare wasn't at all where she wanted to be.
everyone else had made it look so easy. no one else seemed to be jumping out of their skin. but, as much as we used all those appearances to persuade ourselves that life was really grand and wonderful, we just couldn't be convinced.
and so, something of a mid-life crises showed up there at the end of our twenties. well, more likely it was me that had the crisis and some spilled on to him, but either way, there is no denying crisis was in the house.
during that period of time, i questioned everything. i questioned whether i loved him, whether i wanted to be married, whether i'd just rather be with someone else. i questioned motherhood, whether i even had it in me to be a good mother, whether it might be easier to be a mother only part-time. i opened that dark closet of skeletons. i'll just be straight; i jumped in the damn closet.
and luckily, before i made a choice that wouldn't be so easy to turn back from, i slowed down. in the pause, all those dreams that my husband and i had hatched, way back when our relationship was new and our love was the most real thing in the world, those dreams started tapping me on the shoulder. at first in whispers, and then, as i got further and further away from the pull of the closet, the whispers got louder, until it was absolutely undeniable. the time to go for it was now.
fortunately, he too was hearing the call, and so we dusted our bruised and battered relationship off, got our gorgeous little daughter packed up, and hit the road, full of hope that in a new place we could make those dreams happen.
and things did truly shift. it was one of the greatest blessings of my life to restart life in new places, again and again, with my little family of three. as we moved from house to house, and town to town together, we got to know each other in ways that i don't think many people ever get to know others. in each new place, we always had our best friends, and those best friends were us, by necessity but i like to think also by choice. as our time together as a little unit flourished, our appreciation of that time together became the nucleus around which everything else gravitated.
and those beautiful dreams and fantasies that started us out were memorialized in each home by a collection of collages that encapsulated the spirit of what we most wanted. even our daughter was in on it all - the family farm dream. even though our lives looked nothing like the dream, we each had the dream painted on the inside. it was a sort-of secret club we had going, a secret dream that kept us moving.
but then, a great job for me slowed us down. financial security caused us to stop the moving, and for the first time since our crisis, we remained in one place for five years. there were times that i seriously felt a little like a drug addict tied down to a bed without getting a fix. the moving, seeking, dreaming, reaching had become an almost addictive impulse for us, and when life stopped we weren't quite sure what to do.
the stress of an intense job started bringing in my control issues full force, the ones that had haunted our marriage from the beginning. the lack of distraction from constantly moving backdrops brought in my husband's depression, in all the ways that had made me so confused about whether he was the guy for me back before we started moving.
we needed to get moving on these dreams asap, or everything was going to start falling apart. we revised the collages and rooted the dreams in the current biome where we lived. and we started looking for property, opening up to see how it could all unfold moving from right where we were.
we went out with realtors in a few different places, nearby and some far, but after each day out, we'd come back scratching our heads. we knew that where we looked wasn't it, but there was absolutely no indication at all whatsoever about what was it.
after getting slapped in the face a few times, i just felt ready to surrender. that surrender brought me to some of the greatest contentment that i think i ever experienced to that point. life just seemed perfect as it was. i felt ready to pack up the collages and put away the dreams. i was madly in love with my family, content with my job, and really comfortable with my surroundings. i was already living a dream.
until, i found out that my husband wasn't living in the dream with me. since i spared the details of my own little crisis, suffice to say that the end of our seeking was that stationary sort-of environment that brought on my husband's questioning crisis. he started to feel restless, and in that restlessness, he started to feel confused about what it was that really held us all together. he jumped into his own closet of skeletons, and to me, it was quite an abrupt awakening.
so, after all i'd put him through in those early years of our marriage, i had the patience and understanding to wade through the muck with him for a bit. it hurt to realize that maybe the dream that i was living in wasn't the same as what he wanted, to realize that maybe he didn't feel the way i did about our lives.
and that summer, our marriage died. it was one of the most painful experiences of my life to feel so content and at peace in my family, and then to realize that my husband was in such a different place. deceived, betrayed, unappreciated. . . the depth of difficult feelings is hard for me to express. my memories of that summer are a blur of tears, aloneness, and surrender.
in the surrender, there was no more hiding from all the problems in our relationship. so many of the patterns came to a head, and we honestly started to consider that maybe we just
couldn't be happy together, not without some big fantasy driving us one way or another.
at times, i thought two strikes was going to be it for us.
but, as it turned out, after this winter of our relationship, there was a spring. when asking all the most difficult questions, we ended up in the realization that we wanted to be together, and we wanted this more than either one of us wanted to be right. we truly wanted to be good to each other.
this moved into a rebirth of our relationship, a chance to reevaluate and restart. the trauma of the summer had taken us deep into all our discontentments, and with all we had seen, there was a surprising turn that came into our sense of the future.
to be continued. . .
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