The long road home

We had a long distance courtship and for two years, a commuter marriage.  His career took off and so did his relationship with planes, trains, and automobiles.

There has never been a time when we haven't had to deal with separation and distance--and not only in geographical terms.

Our relationship has always included an element of Together Apart.

I'm proud of the ways we have refused to hold each other back, but often the price for that has been not holding each other at all.

We have had to respect and bridge the gaps between us over and over again. Sometimes it has taken a long time and all our resources to make our way back home, to continue the journey together.

Text and art copyright 2011 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. Do not cut, paste, copy.

(This is inspired by Bon's home project, a weekly glimpse of marriage and partners.) 

Those we pair off with

"a relationship is an impossible thing to put into words."

Bon says this is why we seldom write about our spouses or life partners, and I agree. Ironically, it's easier to write about when things aren't right between us. Sadly, all relationships seems to fail in much the same way. Everyone can relate to being hurt, feeling ignored or abandoned, the reality of betrayal, distance, lack of connection, and the mundane disagreements over who does what, when, and how. We all understand what's meant by "irreconcilable differences."

But describing how a relationship works, what you get out of it and what it means to you is infinitely more difficult. The older I get, the more I can see that every marriage is negotiated and re-negotiated over the years. It exists on its own terms, terms that often can't be understood by the outside observer, terms that change and evolve.

Bon has started #thehomeproject and invited others to join her. Every Monday, she will attempt to document some aspect of her relationship with her husband.  She will do this for a year.  I know I can't commit to it for that long. I'm not even sure I can commit to next Monday. 

But I have been committed to E for more than 30 years, and that commitment is something that is renewed every morning when I get up and live the life we've made together, every time I've chosen to point my heart home to the place where he is.

Before he was husband, life partner and father of my children, he was simply a cute boy I met at the track. A tanned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, broad-shouldered All-American guy. A guy who always called when he said he would and often called when he said he wouldn't, just because he couldn't bear not to talk to me.

A week after we met, he said, "I don't know what I've been looking for all my life, but I know you are the closest I've ever come to finding it."

I thought it might be a line, carefully calculated and delivered to accelerate "progress" in our relationship.

But it wasn't.

For him, it was the truth and he dared to say it out loud. From the very beginning, he saw us as a pair.

Art and text copyright 2011 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. Do not cut, copy, paste.

Someone had turned off the moon

She was lost in her longing to understand. She could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures, too many mutual misunderstandings, useless arguments, unresolved angers. Suddenly she sighed: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not."

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Doing Laundry

It is an act of intimacy

Handling that which has kissed your skin

Heard your heart beat

Held your sweat and scent and soil

Lived the story of your day.

Laundry hints at where you've been

How you've felt

What you've done.

Often it is all I have of you

Souvenirs

of the life you live without me

Flattened with absence

Clutched to my breast

Smoothed by my hands

Carried from the basement

To the bedroom

And back

Over and over again. 

Truth in fiction

In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other's thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaenous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera