On Being Married

Since we’ve been back from our honeymoon, I’ve enjoyed catching up with friends and colleagues, and the question is frequently posed, “How does it feel to be married?”  The honest answer is, it doesn’t feel much different than engaged life.  There was a part of me that was hoping to feel something magic and transcendent, but I have the same love and affinity for this kind, patient man than I did before.

Maybe they didn’t occur on the wedding day, but there were moments of transformation, situations that boosted us onto the next echelon of intimacy and understanding.  Helping him drink his juice as he came out of anesthetic, how he sat with me on the worst night of my life and swore he would be there for me and my inside-out heart, and all the nights that followed where grief made me do and think and say things I didn’t mean, but he kept his word.

I loved our wedding, every minute of it, and by the time it came, it was easy.  It was easy to put on a dress and say, I do, I will, I take you as you are.  The sacred and difficult work came before, the work of existing together in a studio apartment, the rhythm of meals, bills, and laundry, of mending childhood scars, turning anger into grace and learning.

And there is so much to learn.  I often have an achy back and shoulders from my desk job, and he is often willing to work out the knots.  One time he said he could tell they were feeling worse, and I asked him how he knew.

“Sarah,” he said, “I know every inch of your back.”

We map each other over time; the safe paths, the weak planks in the bridge, and the rivers prone to overflowing.  Learning the topography of these secret valleys is more binding than any certificate or gold band, more intimate than sharing a name.

I was expecting our wedding to be a revelation, and I suppose in some ways it was.  It was a chance to share my love with a person who has my back in the most literal way possible, a chance look into the eyes of our family and show them the map we’ve drawn, the work we’ve done, not one flesh but two people standing so close there is no space between them. 

The Story of Her

When my friends told my now-fiancé that I wasn’t always so contentious, so careful, he was surprised.  After all, he met me in graduate school, when I was twenty-four and already a stepmom.  A few years prior, he would have met a different person who lived with more immediacy and took things less to heart.  Those years between collage and finishing graduate school were transformative in many ways, but most of all because of her.

The story of my ex is less relevant to this story, and not very compelling.  After living abroad, I moved back to the US and was hired a sportswear company where I enjoyed being the only girl, and fit in well with the work hard, play hard culture.  We worked long hours, drank freely, and only two of us were single, so our relationship began as more of a statistical probability than a true romance.

From the beginning, though, it was all about her.  The custody handoffs between him and his ex frequently took place at the office, so their four-year-old daughter was often there, strutting around, all sass and tiny denim skirts and swishing dark hair.  Even with the immature, addled brain of a 23-year-old, I remember thinking, for the sake of this tiny, lovely person let’s try to get this right.

Dating someone with a child is a spectacularly humbling gig.  Already loving the child’s parent, you may feel a bond and sense of affinity towards the child, but there is no guarantee they will reciprocate.  Adults have the cognizance to hide their angst from failed relationships, but a child’s negative experiences with their parent’s divorce or earlier partners will be projected directly onto you.

Her dad had just gotten out of a long-term, live-in relationship, and for the first six months she literally didn’t speak to me.  I spoke to her a lot; we had entire one-sided conversations about songs, what the three of us were going to do that day, and what was for lunch.  I bought her new outfits, learned all the words to the three High School Musical movies and the pantheon of Taylor Swift songs, and finished her leftover chicken nuggets.  

Eventually she came around. The upside of being a stepparent is that if the child ends up liking you, it’s a hard-won privilege.  The adult may have oxycontin running in their veins facilitating bonding, but you really have to earn a child’s trust.  That makes it even more rewarding if you do.  Smiles and acknowledgement were like tiny ribbons of success, and the first “I love you” card she made me was like a little piece of alchemy. 

Having never established a real adult routine, I quickly adopted theirs, and after a hectic early-twenties, I loved the predictability and structure of a suburban family existence.  I loved it so much that I ignored a series of red flags about my relationship with her dad and instead implicated myself further in their life.  

About a year into our relationship, the start-up folded and we found ourselves jobless.  To save money, I gave up my apartment and moved into his townhouse.  I found a new job, started graduate school, and worked myself senseless to provide for my newfound dependant.  In the evenings I fixed her carrots and apple slices, played board games, and made endless crafts.  Strangers sometimes mistook me for her real parent as I gave her a ski lesson, piggy-backed her through a fun-run, or studied for grad school exams while waiting in line to see Santa, and while she already had a great mom, deep down I felt grateful for their validation of the motherly role I was trying to play.

There is a dark side.  Regardless of how deeply you love the child, your views on parenting and discipline will always be subverted and your access to the child is wholly dependent on the biological parent.  Cracks appeared in his carefully honed mask of integrity.  Our parenting views differed on everything from money to nutrition to discipline, which became more evident as she grew older and required more of each.  Eventually his duplicity reached a tipping point where I was faced with dual imperatives: stay out of love and duty to his child, or save myself. 

After months of reckoning and full of guilt, I chose the latter.  He reciprocated by cutting off my access to her entirely.  After three years, it had all evaporated.  The grief was stunning, like someone had removed my lungs and replaced them with gills.  It’s a lonely, conflicting experience, because though logically you know you have no claim to the child, your body and your heart never quite catch up.

Three years on, he hasn’t changed, but by all accounts she is doing fine.  Like a particularly potent drug, grief has an awfully long half-life.  I still have every card and piece of artwork she ever made me, and when I see her out with her dad at gatherings of mutual friends, I tear up but don’t fall to pieces.  I put my lessons learned in my back pocket for next time— I know I am capable of that kind of love, tenderness, and responsibility, and I know what kind of parent I want to be.  As for her, it can’t hurt to have one more person in the world that loves her indefinitely from afar.

Dreams

A few weeks ago, a friend posted a link on Facebook to a Flickr account titled, "The Faces of Addiction."  After scanning a few photos, I became so captivated that I spent an hour scanning every image in turn.

Chris Arnade is a Wall Street banker and father, who in is spare time (where does he find the energy?) traverses the streets of Hunts Point, Bronx photographing and interviewing the neighborhood's residents, many of whom are on the spectrum of addiction and homelessness.

Their stories are all unique, but tangled around common and tricky themes of violence, victimization, children living elsewhere, and the interdependent cycles of prostitution and drug abuse.  

Along with the somber realities of their lives, Mr. Arnade asks the Hunts Point residents about their dreams.  One answer in particular struck me- that of a Michael, who squats in an abandoned building and cross-dresses to engage in survival sex to support his heroin habit.

“I am sick of this life. Sick of jamming needles into myself, sick of not having a home, sick of all my money going to dope, sick of waking up and needing drugs. I just want a normal life. I want to have a home and watch movies.”

I have never struggled with addiction or housing insecurity, but through the lens of other experiences I found Michael's dream to be wholly relatable.  What more could we want than a place to sit quietly and without suffering, and something to take our minds off the day?

These days, I am grateful for every moment that seems normal, boring even.  Healthy hands to do the dishes, a job that's safe if not stellar, and walls I own.  Not to be reductive, but does there need to be more?

I admire for Mr. Arnade's pastime.  Far from exploiting this vulnerable population, his profiles are sympathetic and humanizing.  He explains that his photography habit helps him unwind from the stress of his job-- and as difficult as I'm sure some of the interviews are, I understand.  It doesn't need to be so complicated.  What is money, trade, bonds and securities, compared to security, normalcy, home.

Spell

This year I have felt like I was under a spell—a spell of fatigue, grief, and anger.  Feeling this way has got me thinking about other kinds of spells, in the fairytale sense.  Young women unwittingly find danger, with poisoned apples, enchanted spinning needles, and devious witches disrupting their lives and punishing them for their daring hope.

Rapunzel lived in a tower until the age of twelve, when a prince came to rescue and marry her.  She could nearly taste her freedom, but she was found out and banished to live “in a place of misery and want,” while her intended was struck blind.

As a child, Snow White evoked the envy of the “godless” queen.  After numerous foiled attempts, the queen finally tricked Snow White into eating the poisoned apple, after which she fell dead while remaining flawless and cold in her glass coffin.

At birth, Princess Rosamond was cursed to prick her finger and sleep for a century.  Through she grew up lucky and adored, at fifteen she wandered through the castle and fell upon a sewing spindle, collapsing into a deep sleep that “fell upon the whole castle.” 

What lesson do we learn from these parables— that that the reward for youth and hope is trickery and suffering?  In 2013, girls don’t aren’t hurt by spinning needles or jealous witches, but what are anxiety, depression, grief, and abuse if not spells, bewitching forces that render us trapped, silent, and still.

After years of wandering, Rapunzel’s blinded husband found her.  Her tears healed him, and he saved her from a life of misery and suffering.

A prince barters with Snow White’s dwarves to take her coffin away on his carriage, and the ride jolts her, so that the apple dislodges and she awakes to his proposal.

Another prince finally makes it alive through the tangle of briars to kiss Princess Rosamond, breaking the spell and awaking her from her sleep.

But what if a man doesn’t break the spell?  What if the prince is there, and very kind, but the fog remains, stubbornly shading you from happiness and well-being?

It helps knowing who the enemy is.  It isn’t the patient man at your side, it isn’t the girl you miss like a second heartbeat, and it isn’t the people who want so much to help you.  It is something other, something outside yet deep within that you don’t own, but has been done to you.

One night I tried to wrap words around it. “I’m tired of feeling so angry.”  The fog thinned slightly lifted with a simple admission.  That night we went to a show, and the music jolted the apple slightly. 

Relief isn’t a grand moment of awakening, the spell breaking in one deft crack.  It takes a thousand tiny steps of honesty, song, tears, pages, hope, faith, running away, waking up, and coming back to save yourself.