Pursuit of Happiness

Source: http://worldaccordingtomaggie.com

I think a lot about male-female dynamics and roles in a marriage or partnership. My husband and I have what you might call a "traditional" set-up--he goes to work, I stay home and do the child-rearing. But truth be told, this is an economic decision. If I worked in a field where I made a lot of money, Henry would be the one to stay home. Alas, I am a teacher and he is a systems engineer, so he will always have more earning power than me. But with this reality comes a heavy burden on his part. There's a lot of pressure to work hard to support a growing family, and sometimes that means taking jobs that don't make you excited to go to work everyday.

I feel pretty strongly that it is not healthy to sacrifice for your family at the expense of your own happiness. An unhappy spouse and parent is toxic to the whole family. This doesn't mean being selfish but it does mean that it's okay to take your own needs into consideration. When I was pregnant with Alice, I was profoundly unhappy at my teaching job and Henry supported me when I left that job, even though I had many months left before the birth. I've always encouraged Henry to take trips and vacations without me, if that was something he wanted to do. One year, he went to Italy for a week to a friend's wedding. It was too expensive for the four of us to go there together but I felt that he should be there at least, and so he went alone, with my blessing, and had an amazing time. Much better for him than staying home, and wishing he were in Italy, celebrating his long-time friends.

When Henry was laid off two years ago, he found a new job pretty quickly but that job turned out to be at odds with his own professional goals. He was offered an amazing opportunity to interview for what is basically his dream job. The catch? The job was in San Antonio. (If you missed it, we live in Connecticut.)

For a variety of reasons, I was not willing to relocate. I could tell that Henry was really excited about this job, so I urged him to ask about a remote position. Lo and behold, it turned out that the company was just beginning to open up remote positions. He did a whole mess of phone interviews, he flew down there for a face to face interview and killed them all with his intelligence, talent and passion. So, of course, he got a job offer. But there was yet another catch: the offer required him to be in Texas for a year. I definitely was not willing to uproot our lives and the kids just to move to Texas for a year. So, I told him to go--we'd wait for him here. He didn't want to do it; he worried about leaving me here alone with the kids, he worried about missing us and being lonely but I told him he couldn't go on being stuck in jobs that didn't make him happy or excited. And he knew it, too. At this stage in his career, he deserved a job that would utilize his strengths and encourage his professional growth.

A lot of people think I'm nuts for encouraging him to go. But why is it nuts to want your husband to be happy, to take an opportunity to pursue something he deserves? A year is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and if it all pans out, the payoff will be huge for him, for us, for our family. When we get married, we don't suddenly morph into a single person. I'm still very much the same person I was before we got married and had kids, with the same need for independence and solitude, and I take it upon myself to make sure those needs are met. In fact, we both do. We look out for each other. I think that is the key to our marriage--it isn't perfect by any means but we work hard to understand each other, and support each other, with varying degrees of success.

So, we're here, and he's there. To get his emails describing his days at the company, all the things he's excited about makes my heart swell, and tells me that this is worthwhile, this sacrifice that we're making as a family was the right thing to do.

Those We Love Most.

Let's hope that I'm not jinxing anything by writing this but I have been fortunate to not face too many tests in my life. Or maybe my deafness makes life one big test, so I've come to take everything in stride and don't really register anything as a test, spiritual or otherwise.
This is not to say that my life has been easy, by any means. No one's life is easy. If someone's life appears to be easy, rest assured things are rougher than it looks on the surface.
I'm young, I've got an entire life unfolding before me. My marriage is also young. I just celebrated my fifth anniversary this past October. My husband and I, we've had our challenges to be sure but nothing has rocked the core of our relationship in the way that a tragic loss can. Maura and Pete, the couple at the center of Those We Love Most, by Lee Woodruff, are on shaky ground before losing their son suddenly, and struggle to recover that ground in the aftermath of loss.
When I look at my marriage, I see that we are strong in so many ways, but in other ways, we are still learning and growing and changing. Part of this is because we didn't know each other very long before we got married. We just knew that it felt right and so far, our instincts have proved correct. It keeps us on our toes, and we can't take each other for granted. Not yet, anyway! But I came away from the book with the feeling that the test of a marriage is not a question of if, but when. Until that time comes, I will work on making sure that the ground we are on is solid enough to withstand the weight.

PS There are quite a few themes in this book that I could write about but for the sake of my sanity, I forced myself to pick just one, and the easiest one, to boot. :)

This post was inspired by the novel Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff. Every family has its secrets and deceptions, but they come to surface when a tragic accident changes the family dynamic forever. Join From Left to Write on June 6th as we discuss Those We Love Most. You can also enter to win a live video chat with Lee Woodruff! As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes. Links to the book contained in this post are IndieBound affiliate links, which means if you buy the book through my link, I get a small commission from IndieBound. Support your local bookseller!

A Thousand Themes, Maybe

It's funny... the title of Jonathan Dee's book, A Thousand Pardons, did not register with me at all. I did not look at the synopsis of the book before I started reading. It was only until after that I realized that the theme of the book was supposed to forgiveness. In my day (that would be the '90s, ahem), reader response was the prevailing method for teaching literature. Accordingly, reader response is my default, especially when the setting and plot details hit home.

So I read A Thousand Pardons as a reader from Upstate New York, who lived in New York City. I read A Thousand Pardons as a woman with complicated, unseen layers in her marriage. I read A Thousand Pardons as a housewife that has been out of the workforce for as long as she's had children.

The writing is breezy, the characters are well-developed and the plot is the stuff of Hollywood. There is nothing too deep going on here, but a reader is drawn into the story, and finds herself cheering the characters on. Even the pitifully at fault Ben is a sympathetic character. His fall from grace makes a reader cringe in the way that a horror movie heroine makes you shake your head and yell at the screen, "No! Don't open that door!" The reader sees disaster coming before he does, and wishes Ben had the benefit of hindsight. 

Helen, on the other hand, rises from the ashes of her marriage with commendable fortitude. The reader knows that Helen has a small flame burning inside of her, that is at danger of being suffocated by her powerlessness over the unravelling of her marriage. The separation from her husband breathes new life into the fire and fuels her transformation into a woman with control over men. 

Does any of this resemble my own marriage? Not in the least but the discontent of a housewife, hidden or looming large, is a well-known and familiar feeling to women, whether through experience or exposure. For that reason, I blew through this book, murmuring in sympathy with Helen and telling her, "I know what you mean, girl."

I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley, for review purposes. Links to the title are affiliate links which means, if you buy the book using my link, I get a cut from IndieBound. 

Married.

My husband tonight said that our marriage is like an arranged marriage, in a lot of ways. I was so relieved to hear him say that because I've always felt the same way but thought he would be hurt by it. My husband, he's kind of a sensitive guy!
But his admission is just one more reminder of how quickly we fell in together.

In Barbara Slate's graphic novel, Jo marries the first guy her mother approves of, under pressure from her mother to get hitched before she becomes an old maid. Poor Jo. Too bad she didn't have parents like mine, who urged me to wait before getting married. My father advised that I wait until I was at least 30. I came pretty close. I met Henry when I was 26 and we married when I was 28. We had a whirlwind courtship, a one year engagement and a small, intimate wedding.

Like an arranged marriage, Henry and I didn't know each very well when we got married, and the early years of our marriage have been devoted to figuring each other out. It's a really good thing that we like each other so much because I don't think we could've made it this far without that. We were in love from the beginning but that's different from really loving someone. I think you have to really know someone well in order to love them (or hate them, for that matter!).  So, when Henry says he feels like we have an arranged marriage, that's what he means. We're getting to know each other still, really and our love has grown not just deeper but wider. I think of it as a tiny ball of light that expands over time, exerting its pressure. It grew little by little during the first 9 months of our marriage, then grew exponentially after Alice was born, despite my being a hormonal mess for the first six months of her life. It grew steadily bigger over the next 13 months, then there was another big growth spurt after Stella was born.

We've worked through a lot of angst and communication mishaps in the 4 years we've been married and as we approach our fifth anniversary, I finally feel like I really know my husband in the little ways and in the big ways, too.  I admit, there were times when I wondered if I'd made a mistake. Not so much in marrying Henry but in marrying him so soon after we met but I'm a believer in fate. If we're meant to be together, we might as well be married and figure out the rest as we go.

This post is inspired by Getting Married and Other Mistakes by Barbara Slate. This graphic novel offers a raw, yet humorous look at what happens to Jo after a surprise divorce. Join From Left to Write on Thursday, June 28 as we discuss Getting Married and Other Mistakes by Barbara Slate. I received a review copy of the e-book and all opinions are my own. All links are IndieBound affiliate links. This means if you purchase the book using my link, I get a percentage!