On Marriage and Maintenance

All the references to marital dalliance in that Coetzee book were in the back of my mind when I was talking to a lady at the children’s museum this past weekend. The museum was open only to military families with a deployed parent or a recently returned parent (i.e. any military family) for “Family Reintegration.” My six year old had struck up a friendship with this lady’s son, and so the two of us struck up a conversation while trailing the boys as they ran from one tableau to the next: train station, fishing boat, grocery store…



As we walked I got more of her story than I wished to know. Her husband has been gone for almost a year to a Central American country on an unaccompanied tour. Shortly after he returns, he’ll be gone another couple of months for a school right after they move to their next duty station. She doesn’t mind him being gone, and he looks for jobs that require deploying.

So, I wanted to ask, why do you stay married?

But then, I guess that question could be asked of me. My husband has been gone more than he’s been home the past year. The past couple of years, really.


This hasn’t necessarily been bad for our marriage. Distance makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Letter writing is good for romance. And it’s difficult to fight with someone you speak with only by telephone. Your conversations tend to be pretty positive because you look forward to these phone calls. But last week, my husband and I were discussing car repairs and family economics, both incendiary topics, and we inevitably grew heated, until a sheet of ice froze our conversation and ended our phone call abruptly.

I went to say night prayers with the kids and could only think of grievances. The ice had penetrated my heart.


Sleep, of course, is elusive when nursing an offense.


The story has a happy ending, or I wouldn’t be telling it here. My husband called in my morning and apologized. I had finally fallen asleep and awoken rested and repentant, so my return apology to him was sincere.


But it reminded me of a couple of things:


1. It is usually a bad idea to talk about money when you are tired.


2. It is a lot of work to be married.


Many people gave us both pieces of advice when we got married, but we were having so much fun at the time that we didn’t believe them for a few years.

But eventually, we did have to cut back on playing around and go to work.


But if marriage is work, it is also the making of a thing, a creative project that sometimes frustrates, or is threatened to be displaced by daydreams, or needs shoring, so that it can be enjoyed and savored more fully because of the effort that went into the making of it. And if the human heart is modeled after a Creator’s and longs to create something beautiful, what could be more satisfying than making a beautiful marriage, even if it does require some sweat and tears to shape it?

When I read the Mother Teresa biography, Come Be My Light, a couple years ago, I had the thought that sometimes Mother Teresa’s desire for an absent God, who once spoke to her but now was silent, was something like the experience of a wife whose husband has left or who is emotionally distant. She knows he exists, but he doesn’t reappear just because she wants him to. But she never stops desiring him.



Just three weeks (!!!) until my husband returns. Seeing each other every day will force us to work a little harder at keeping our edges smooth, but we’ll also get to appreciate the fruits of those efforts more fully.