I am mustering up the courage (see previous post) to write again. So I am digging up old journal entries and posting them to remember how much I loved the creative writing process. That is what we need sometimes I have found. To dig up the old bones, sort em out and build something new. Enjoy this entry from six years ago, before I started birthing children and losing my creative self to diapers, wipes and passies. Grateful for motherhood. Not so grateful that I left myself behind somewhere in the corner crying out, "Hey! Wait for me! What about ME?" These days I am finding that leaving my creative self behind was a mistake. But we don't get there till we get there. And now I'm there, picking up the pieces, looking for my Stacy, the one that was born to be creative, just for the sake of it. An old, wise friend and counselor once told me, and I will never forget it. She said, "My job is to help you find and become who you always were." Profound. And now I'm so thankful she's still in there. Fiesty, opinionated, fragile and hopeful. And honest. Enjoy...
It took me five years, seven months, and two and a half days to figure out I married a perfectionist. Never mind that I studied the basic temperaments, knew I was a sanguine, or an otter, or an ESFP or whatever. Knew I was a total right-brained, creative, free spirited, "Oh would she please grow up" type. I knew I was bound for a lifetime of childlikeness, which is not to be confused with childishness because I make my bed now. Knew that my husband was my incontestable, undeniable polar opposite.
During one of our premarital sessions, I looked our counselor square in the eye and asked, "Do you really think we'll make it?" She replied with four little words that made me real glad we didn't just hop in the car on a whim and do a drive-in ceremony at the nearest get-married-for-forty-bucks Pigeon Forge wedding chapel. "Marriage is the cross," she said.
Oh, well now you tell me. Forty-eight weeks at eighty dollars a pop, and now you tell me "marriage is the cross." I didn't ask for any more information. I didn't quite know what that meant then, and I'm not sure if I know now, but at the time those four little words sobered me up like a crack addict on a four-day tour of Israel with Joyce Meyer.
Being married to a left-brained, charts and graphs, recipe to the 't' man of my dreams who orders his number two pencils from a special pencil company in California and reads manuals to everything, and I mean everything, including my Singer sewing machine from cover to cover, can make a girl grow a second head. My one head says, "Oh, Honey, I love you. You are wonderful. . . . You read manuals, you change the oil in my car, you show me how to work the computer, and you have a map and directions to every city known to man. . . ." My other head says, "Oh, God, I am locked in a prison of letter dotting and special pencils and long explanations of exactly why T-shirts should be folded without the crease going down the middle."
Manuals to me are an excuse for entertainment for some sick brain-o-maniac somewhere in Japan who has a little too much time on his hands, and whose sole purpose in life is to make me feel stupid. To my husband, manuals are the key to all knowledge and must be mastered with great skill and read slowly like a C. S. Lewis novella.
Before meeting my husband, I never dreamed what my future husband would be like. I assumed that one day it would just come and bite me in the butt like a giant horsefly on a hot summer day. And it did. And I know God loves me enough to give me what I need and that we balance each other out and opposites attract and all that horse malarkey. But that doesn't make it any easier. I guess it is just God's sick way of making me realize that without His help I would be swimming in a pool of "I can't get my husband to do what I want him to do" brain sludge for the rest of my natural born life.
Not that we argue or anything. For a while even I was under the perfectionist spell, and I actually started to think we were both pretty close to perfect. This is mind-blowing given the fact that I have been hyper-aware all my life of my utter lack of perfection, that perfection is nowhere on my list of positive character qualities, nor is it anywhere to be found on my rather short resume.
In the beginning of our beautiful life together, I was determined to rise above the adversity I found in our oppositeness. So I chameleoned, and I Mennonited myself. I wore really long dresses and no make-up, and I even learned to bake a perfect loaf of freshly ground perfectly sliced whole wheat bread from scratch. And let me tell you, that was one very long three-day sacrifice of praise.
These days, I'm learning to embrace our differences and the fact that some days I feel like waking up, stretching long, putting on a long dress and red lipstick, and jumping straight out the window. But then I remember there is no controlling it. When I feel like taking a two-person bicycle ride on a sunny day in Georgia, he is locked up in the rules and regulations of traveling with a two person bicycle on the back of my 1992 convertible Volkswagen Cabriolet. When I feel like going to a Bonnie Raitt concert in downtown Chicago, he is stuck in his Greek concordance trying to figure out the genealogy of Israel and where they migrated after Christ ascended. Finding common ground is like finding the Holy Grail in a sweat suit.
On my best day, which is not today, I am grateful my man takes care of me. I'm glad I get to paint and play while he works his little perfectionist-workaholic- get-up-at-the-crack-of-rooster-ain’t-got-no-time-for-fun-‘cause-the- man’s-gotta-work-bound-up-little-self off. I wish I could say something really spiritual and holy and wonderful like, “I deeply appreciate my man’s differences today, because God in all of his creativity and holiness saw fit that I, a woman in need, needed a man to help straighten me out and give me a good taste of stale crackers. Now I know how it feels to really thirst for the good living water of God.” And then I could stabber on about how God is quenching my thirst because of these stale, dried up crackers I’ve been eating for the past five years, as the prime time of my life is slip sliding away.
‘Cause I’m getting old. I’m thirty. And a life full of "let’s act grown up ‘cause we’re grown-ups now" seems like a sentence of never-ending grown up-ness, and I just want to jump in an old Cindy Lauper record, dye my hair red, shave one side, wear a polka dotted dress, and sing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” so loud and off key that the neighbors wake up demanding we have a party right then and there while my husband is inside quietly reading his Greek interlinear Bible, drinking distilled water and green magma, and talking about the importance of pH balancing.
Now I know he loves me when I’m hormonal, loves me when I have zits, loves me in the morning when I’m all swollen and incoherent, loves me when I’m crabby, and loves me when I change my mind every second. I know he loves me when I’m inconsolable and when I am hard to live with. I know he gives me space, stays with me after I’ve hurt, never yells or calls me names, and never expects me to be something I can’t be. I know he wakes me up in the morning real softly and tickles my arm and speaks in a sweet voice: “Honey…it’s time to get up.”
“Five more minutes,” I’ll say.
Five minutes later.
“Honey. . . . It's time to get up.”
“Just . . . just five more minutes,” I’ll say and roll over.
He comes back in five minutes. Exactly five minutes.
“I brought you some water,” he’ll say.
I start to get that lovin’ feelin’, so I sit up and drink the water and thank God no one flicked the light on and off one hundred and eighty-five times and yelled, “Get up! We’re late!” And no one sang any real cheesy opera morning song to me about how it’s morning and the birds are chirping and the sun is shining. And no one opened my blinds without my permission or started stomping on the floor or turned the hair dryer on high or even turned the radio on with Metallica singing “Unforgiven.” Ahh. . . . This is a piece of heaven.
I guess I don’t have it so bad. After all, when I open my dictionary to look up a word and come across one like nice or considerate or kind-hearted, I am amazed my husband’s eighth grade class picture isn’t next to the pronunciation key to give non-readers a clue.
And I remember how a friend of mine told me once that we cannot be intimate unless we at some point hurt each other. And we eventually will. And I remember how some will choose to leave, some will choose to stay, and the ones that realize this key to intimacy and hurdle through it are all the better for it after the dust settles and the words stop shooting.
I remember how we have already hurt each other, and I start wondering on the Richter Scale of intimacy where exactly we are. And I wonder if all those times we've sat down and told each other we were sorry and forgave each other for our mistakes that day and hugged and made up and kissed up have made our marriage all the better. And I wonder if maybe we can make it to seventy something and be real old together like our friends the Brown’s. And I wonder if, like them, we can be on a country music video as the old couple who walk down the road holding hands, staring into each others faces, looking back and forth so we don’t get run over or anything. And I wonder if maybe we will laugh about our early years and tell other young couples that it really is okay to be so different. And I wonder if maybe then I will appreciate that my husband loves charts and graphs, follows recipes to the ‘t’, reads manuals, and tucks his pajama shirt in his pajama pants real tight so the spiders can’t get down there. And I wonder if maybe then I will love how he wakes up real early every morning to read his Greek interlinear Bible, and how he studies things like the fiery Gehenna and the resurrection and where the Israelites migrated after Christ ascended and the good news that we get this free gift of coming up out of the grave, because Jesus did it, and he showed us what it will be like, kind of so we won’t feel so scared. And I wonder if then I’ll appreciate how he tells me his favorite Bible stories at the breakfast table with Bible characters and rivers and stuff being oranges and bananas and granola with milk, and how he makes sure I turn off the stove. And I wonder if then I’ll love him just where he is, and not expect one more thing, and be so satisfied that the God of the Universe saw fit that I needed a man like this to help me see that he is a creative God who makes all kinds of people that aren’t just like me. And I wonder if maybe he’ll feel loved and think, Wow. . . . What a great wife I have. . . . and rub my feet for the eight millionth time right before I lull to sleep. And I wonder if maybe then I’ll love him more than life and breath, and maybe we’ll die together holding hands like in that movie The Notebook.
And then I start to think that maybe God in all of his God-ness and bigness and everything can help me just to love him like that now. Today. If that is even possible. Maybe God can give me the willingness to love him like I’m an eighty year old shriveled up prune of a mess, only I’m just thirty, and we haven’t even had a child yet, and we have our whole lives ahead of us. And I think of how grateful I am that somebody in the family likes physics and math and charts and graphs and all that heady stuff. And then I close my eyes and thank God for all of the wonderful blessings, and I tell Him how I am glad he puts up with me and teaches me how to live and how to love and doesn’t leave me stuck. And I start to see how perfect the plan is after all.
When I was a little girl, I thought of God as a big man who required Shirley Temple curls, three teired fancy dresses and shiny black shoes on Sundays to want to be with me. I often wondered why my mother had to drop me off in pink, funkily painted, cenderblock rooms for Sunday School to learn about God. I mean, wasn't God OUTSIDE? "He isn't in here", I would think. He's "out THERE".
(Before we tore the thing out I could peepee in the potty and spit in the sink at the same time.)
