Marriage musings

After a whirlwind weekend in Oklahoma for my sister-in-law’s wedding – the last of the siblings to marry – we have been slowed in the return to everyday life by frequent reminiscing about the weekend and about our own wedding. At both, we danced and laughed and ate and drank and enjoyed the party, which lasted all weekend long. This wedding was a reminder of how much we’ve grown up: at my wedding, this sister-in-law was the age of my oldest child. During the couples’ dance when the DJs call out the amount of time people have been married, we were one of the last 5 couples dancing. (OK, this was a small, young crowd.) We were the first of the siblings to get married, so at ours, like at this last wedding, everyone seemed to have a good time without sweating about details.



Blessedly, I didn’t have too many preconceptions about what our life would look like when we got married. A college professor, an emissary of Heaven perhaps, had assigned Familiaris Consortio around the time my dear esposo and I began dating, so my expectations of what marriage should be were elevated. I jumped into marriage without planning where we would live (the Navy would take care of that), how many children we would have (although I think I thought conceiving them would take longer), or caring how we’d earn our daily bread (again, the Navy); I had been inspired by the idea that self-gift was more important than any of these practicalities.

Numerous people told us that marriage was going to be work, that we shouldn’t go to bed angry, and that we’d have to learn to be good at saying sorry. For more than our fair share of years, we honeymooned, wondering what these people were talking about. Marriage was easy! Having babies was a little bit of work, but the marriage part seemed effortless. We owe a great debt of thanks to JPII for these happy years.

But of course, honeymoons don’t last forever, and eventually we had to roll up our sleeves and get to work. I remember reading somewhere during our marriage prep training that the 7 year point is a tough one for a lot of couples, and maybe it was around then that we started to hear about friends’ and family members’ divorces. Is it because people get tired of self-giving? Our biggest arguments haven’t been about large problems but over petty irritations. Does the heart begin to contract as we age? All those passions of youth fade among the dirty diapers and long hours. Maybe it gets harder to make sacrifices because more people are asking you to make them.


When I initially read JPII on marriage, I thought that what would carry our conjoined souls up to God was that euphoric wedding day love, which overflows onto everyone around and transcends all the muck of life to transform it into a mirror of that love. But as these working years stretch, I wonder if it is not also the humbling of self, the slow, chiseling away of selfishness, which, if we dwelled on it too much, could leave nothing but dust. Yet if we keep trying to give, eventually what is left beneath that crust of self will be raised up. Like the widow of the parable, if we keep giving when we have nothing, our sacrifice will be appreciated all the more than if we give of our excess.


In the car I read Eudora Welty’s short story “Circe” about Odysseus’ visit to the daughter of the sun from her perspective. Circe wants to keep Odysseus, alone, with her forever. She intuits that their lives are similarly grounded on passion, and she keeps him in her spell for a year. But then one morning she sees him in a circle of his men, preparing to depart. She begins to understand the mystery of fickle, mortal love. Odysseus will turn his back on a life of pleasure for the sake of his men – and perhaps Penelope? (my own romantic interpretation) Whereas Circe’s passion consumes, Odysseus’ is directed toward the good of his men.


My memory isn't serving me well but I think that Plato says something like this: Where passion turns lovers' eyes so they can only see each other, true friends learn to look out with the same eyes at others.

Thankful for sickness

My kindergartener stayed home from school the other day, after I was shamed by his teacher for sending him in with a cough the day before. So we had a little home school time and discovered a treasure: Crepes by Suzette by Monica Wellington. Suzette owns a little crepe cart she pushes around Paris. Mixed media depictions of famous places in Paris (Notre Dame and the Louvre, of course, and also L’Opera and the Tuileries.) are the background to Suzette’s day as she serves crepes to cartoon copies of personages from famous paintings: Cassette’s mother bathing her child, Mona Lisa, Degas’ Little Dancer, Seurat’s circus performers, and Chagall’s Bride and Groom. I love books like this that combine history and art into a new story.

So after we finished reading we followed the simple recipe in the back of the book for crepes. They would’ve been better with Nutella, but melted chocolate chips tasted awfully good.
Add crepes to my lovelist!

And add sick days to the gratitude list. Nothing like a day at home with a schedule cleared by germs for enjoying a stack of library books.

A good quote

From C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism:


But in reading great literature I become

a thousand men and yet remain

myself. Like the night sky in the Greek

poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it

is still I who see. Here, as in worship,

in love, in moral action, and in knowing,

I transcend myself; and am never

more myself than when I do.

On a lighter note, we just read John Updike's A Child's Calendar.  I could love this book with its delightful illustrations by Trina Schart Hynan providing an appealing subtext about a biracial family who appears to celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, judging by the  December illustration. Updike's poems read well and have enough action to keep my 3 and 5 year old's attention. But I realized while reading this, along with other kids' books about fall, that there exists in children's literature a prejudicial preference for a New England/Midwest year: cool spring, warm summer, colorful fall, snowy winter. What about all the kids who live in the south and west? Where's the book about the year in the desert and the subtropics? How do they identify winter if they are looking for snowmen?  Palm trees and live oaks don't turn color.

Counting for something

On Friday NPR did a short feature about the retiring chief of police of LA, William Bratton. He came to LA from NYC, and cleaned up the LAPD’s image and crime at the same time. At his retirement he said,

"I think in my almost 40 years as a policeman, my life has counted for something,"

That statement has been under my skin all weekend. I envy Chief Bratton’s confidence that he has done his job and done it well. I know in my head that raising my children “counts” for something, but parenting is a vocation that doesn’t offer predictable results, and in my heart I wonder if I'm doing my job well enough. I can try to do all the “right” things, and my kids may still become criminals, or, worse, lose their faith.  Or they may just not turn out the way I imagine.  And then there's that tricky question of just what all the "right" things are...

I have to remind myself to surrender my expectations, and hope and pray that the kids at least get the basics: love for neighbor and love for God.

And I have to remember not to measure my “success” as a parent to an image of perfect parent from a magazine or a book. For instance, I finished reading Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods this weekend, and while it motivated me to make outdoor play a priority, it also added to my anxiety about being a good parent. How I can find a time and a place for my kids to build a tree house so that they don’t suffer from nature-deficit disorder? When can we buy a farm so that they learn to appreciate creation and their role as stewards of it?  Have I helped them cultivate a sense of wonder or is it too late?

On the tail of reading about the Trapps, who wandered the mountains and countryside near their home, celebrated feasts and sang prayers together, reading this book has thrown me into a state of mild despair that I am failing to give my children a better life. How can I make their lives richer? Is all the moving around that we do robbing them from a sense of connection with a place called home? Will they understand what it means to be a part of a community? Is my discontent a sign that we need to make radical changes?

Or is it rather a sign that I lack gratitude for what we do have? After the kids went to bed Friday night, Dan and I sat outside on the lanai (southern for patio) with our cups of red wine (don’t like to wash stems) talking about our blessedness. We have had so little real suffering in our lives that we wonder if calamity will strike sooner or later. Our culture is so fixated on avoiding pain that an absence of suffering could actually be detrimental to the soul. (Another anxiety: how can our kids acquire virtues if they don’t feel a little pain?)

One minute I think that all my worries will go away if we just make a few major changes – but the next I realize that most of my anxieties could be eased if I made a few minor changes of attitude. Maybe it wasn’t Bill Bratton’s achievements that allowed him to know his life “counted,” but his perspective.

The affliction is easy to diagnose; the cure, harder to effect.

Another grave

Another cemetery we visited recently was dedicated to the Confederate dead, on the property of Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's summer home, which was rebuilt after Katrina and recently reopened. Jeff Davis' father, Samuel is buried there. Not sure if this is his original resting place or not. He died in 1824, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He did not live to see his son elected president of the Confederacy.

Happy All Saints' Day

At the cemetery where I ran yesterday morning, many of the graves were decorated with silk flowers in fall colors: big chrysanthemums, calla lilies, sunflowers. It is a small, well visited place, although there is a corner in the back where a few headstones are stacked, displaced by Katrina and unable to be returned to the grave they once marked. Several of the gravesites have benches, many have small statues of Mary or the Sacred Heart. Most have some flowers, a couple have a teddy bears. I passed one grave decorated for Halloween, complete with plastic black fencing around the plot, fake tombstones, cobwebs, skeletons staked like they were coming out of the ground, and lots of orange flowers. “Tasteless,” was my first thought, until I saw the Hispanic name on marker.




Ah! Now I felt like I had been invited to someone’s party. Had wine been poured out for the dead? Time to go home and make pan de muertos and remind my kids why we celebrate Halloween.