Mirrored

November 30th, 2010 Marriage

His hands are mirrors which recreate my body, showing me myself. Yes, I’ve seen versions of that body in flat, hard, silver-dead mirrors countless times—clothed and naked, young and not, filled and emptied—but fleshy reality cannot exist in two cold dimensions. And yes, I’ve touched that reality countless times as well, with grips and scratches and strokes from my own hands, but self-touch only muddies the mind, bringing a duality of perception that obscures itself. As I sense my body from without, I must also sense it from within, and there cannot be purity in truth that’s both subject and object. But his hands bring clarity of vision, revealing what my own cannot, graphing my landscape with each tracing motion. The slight curve of the jaw. The steep rise of a shoulder. The smooth dip of the sacrum, which John Updike calls the arabesque of the spine. “It is here,” he says, “that Grace sits and rides a woman’s body.” I feel that grace in the notches of my lowest vertebrae, latent, waiting for that release which only comes through the touch of another. And when it comes, every time is the first time.

A river in a time of dryness

September 23rd, 2010 MarriageTags: love, marriage, passion

Updated from its first iteration, January 12, 2006.

I used to think that one of the downsides to being in a stable marriage is knowing you’ll never fall in love again. I mean, really, passionately in love. When your every cell is supercharged with life, and the whole earth feels renewed with promise.

Truth be told, I didn’t even experience that kind of heady power before I got married. At least, not to the extent that I knew was possible, in fabled theory. Happy as I was after the big “yes,” part of me felt that I had missed out on the stuff of legends. Period.

Thankfully, I was wrong. Read more »

or is it everything?

September 3rd, 2010 Food, Marriage, MusicTags: eating, marriage, Radiohead

There’s pizza, and there’s pizza from The Pie.

There’s eating pizza from The Pie, and there’s eating extreme veggie pizza from The Pie. (redonionsmarinatedtomatoesartichokeheartsfetacheesefreshspinach)

There’s eating extreme veggie pizza from The Pie, and there’s eating extreme veggie pizza from The Pie with your favorite person on earth.

There’s eating extreme veggie pizza with your favorite person on earth, and there’s eating extreme veggie pizza with your favorite person on earth sitting outside on one of summer’s last evenings perfectly warm in the shade.

There’s eating extreme veggie pizza with your favorite person on earth sitting outside on one of summer’s last evenings perfectly warm in the shade, and there’s eating extreme veggie pizza with your favorite person on earth sitting outside on one of summer’s last evenings perfectly warm in the shade with the sound of rushing waters in one ear (plaza fountain 10 feet away) and the sound of Thom Yorke in the other (uncannily, singing the track that’d been in my head all day).

Let’s go down the waterfall
Have ourselves a good time
It’s nothing at all
Nothing at all

Legacy

June 17th, 2007 Family, Marriage

My wedding band is special. It’s gold, of course–yellow gold, about 8 mm wide. No stones–I wasn’t interested starting a marriage in debt. (My roommate’s ring came with monthly payments, which struck me as ridiculous. Reed claims this is one reason why he married me.) I like its plainness, its classy simplicity. But I love my ring for this reason: it was made from the gold of my father’s wedding band.

My parents divorced when I was five; each of them remarried a year or so later. I’m not sure why my mother ended up with her ex-husband’s wedding ring–I imagine my father had no interest in this token of their unhappy union. But she saved it, along with the white gold bands of her wedding set. And when I became engaged, she offered these mementos to me.

Reed was thrilled by the economy of it all (he paid less than $100 to have the precious metal melted down and recast: yellow gold for my ring, white gold for his.) And I was thrilled by the symbolism. I did not want to repeat the disaster that was my parents’ marriage, of course, but I was hopeful that I could take the raw materials of my past and make something new, something good.

Fifteen years have passed. For Reed and I they’ve been difficult years, in some ways. Even though both of us have been committed to marriage since our wedding day, it took us a dozen years to figure out that we really, really wanted to be married to each other (big difference). But we know this now, and life is sweet.

I just called my father to wish him a happy Father’s Day. We don’t speak very often–a few times a year, usually, unless there’s some crisis afoot in the family. Like my marriage relationship, my past relationship with my father has been difficult in some respects. His personal weaknesses have hurt me, at times a great deal. But I love him. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this is that I married someone very much like him.

On this Father’s Day I am grateful for the love of my husband and father. I’m grateful that I have learned to love them without reservation. And I am grateful to wear a constant reminder of them both, shining with soft luster on my ring finger.

Yin and Yang

July 22nd, 2005 Marriage

Recently I’ve been re-reading parts of Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses. Her approach is way too Freudian for me to swallow wholesale, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

One claim she makes is that we tend to marry people who act out the parts of our own personalities that we repress out of fear. This goes beyond the more obvious spouse-as-complement idea (e.g. a lazy man marries a hard-working woman, a loud woman marries a quiet man). Could it be true?

The other day, Matt, our destructo four-year-old, created a whopping toilet clog with wads of toilet paper. Poor Andrew, the innocent eight-year-old, flushed. (Later on Andrew told me that in the past, flushing had cleared up the problem–toilet paper experiments are popular around here.)

We had just sat down to dinner when I heard the dreaded sound of an indoor waterfall. Rushing to the bathroom, I found a major deluge. For some reason, the water flow hadn’t stopped once the toilet tank was full. “Reed,” I called, “emergency!” And here’s the funny part: I didn’t feel at all worried, or upset, about the water. I was a bit reluctant for my husband to see it, because I knew what his reaction would be, but overall I was–shall I say it?–serene.

Predictably, Reed was furious. Sharp scoldings came. As I grabbed towels and our carpet-cleaning vacuum (great for sucking up water) I felt badly for Matt, who of course didn’t intend to cause true disaster, and for Andrew, who of course didn’t either. But I realized that had Reed not been there, I would have been furious too. Would have scolded, would have fumed. Since he was aptly playing out that role, I didn’t have to.

Having Viorst’s claims freshly in mind, this got me thinking. My husband has a few traits that I don’t like, and they are the very things I fear in myself. It’s entirely possible that (among many other reasons) I chose him in order to vicariously express myself in taboo ways. So even as I resent some of his personality and behavior, he’s actually contributing to my sense of emotional safety. Oh, the irony.

(There’s a whole part in the book about marrying Daddy, and I hate to say it but my husband is a lot like my father…)

A couple days after the toilet clog I found a note my nightstand from Christine, age 6:

Mom is 100% Mom, 0% Dad
Dad is 100% Dad, 0% Mom

Maybe she’s been reading my Viorst book.