So I Chew...

So I Chew...

Marriage is hard.  It just is.  It is impossible to live with another person who has their own thoughts, memories, feelings, hopes and ways of doing things and get along all the time.  The notion that you fall in love at first site, join in matrimony and live your life sighing dreamily at one another while slowly slurping the same piece of spaghetti till you kiss over a romantic moonlit dinner every day for eternity is, well, simply not true.  Loving someone you would like to spend your life with does not come easy.  These notions are the stuff of Sweet Valley High novels and Disney movies and I was brought up on a steady diet of these and believed them hook, line and sinker.
Marriage can also be wonderful, full of adventure, passion, care and mutual respect.  The problem remains that those things rarely can be retained without work and lots of it.  I think I always felt deep down that if you had to work at it then it wasn't meant to be or something else as utterly naive.  Well now Frank and I are working and working hard.  There is damage to repair and a future to map and disagreements to negotiate.  There are hopes and dreams to protect and children to raise and budgets to discuss and date nights to plan and it. is. exhausting.
Back when we were first married, Frank's grandfather, Wally, was still alive and in a nursing home nearby.  My mother-in-law, a dogged protector and nurturer of her family, had had him living at home for a long time until our wedding when he went to the nursing home just for the weekend while she was away.  While there he got very ill and ended up remaining as his medical needs were greater.  Joan went every day to feed him dinner and when that became inhibitive to her sanity, we all started taking turns visiting him an feeding him dinner.  We would often set up up at the nurses station where there were other people and more activity; where the action was.
I remember a little old lady who used to hang out at the nurses station every day named Molly.  She was chatty and clearly lonely and I came to love talking to her.  One day she patted me on the knee and asked me how long Frank and I had been married.  I told her we had been married less than a year and she smiled knowingly and said, "That's ok honey, the first five years are hell, but then it gets better."  I remember laughing, but you know what?  Truer words...  Except we are on year 14 now!
Granted, we have had some extraordinary obstacles with the death of Liam, Frank's cancer and my alcoholism, but everyone has something don't they?  All I know is that on the days when I feel like giving up I don't.  Everytime Frank looks like he has had enough, he doesn't give up either.  I have to believe that this tenacity that we share will carry us farther.
I have recently had some bumps that all seemed to coincide at the same time.  I got tired and I stopped trying as hard.  I didn't get up early like I normally do, I didn't journal, I didn't write on the blog, I didn't read the daily literature I need to, I didn't make as many meetings and I began to rest on my laurels.  I told myself it was no big deal, I told myself that I deserved a break from it all and guess what?  I felt it.  I don't mean that I started wanting to drink, but I didn't feel as good about myself, I didn't treat others as well as I would like to, I started thinking negative thoughts, I wasn't able to see Frank's point of view in some of our discussions and it all suffered because of it.  In reality, though there were some negative things happening, there were some wonderful things as well, in fact multitude of them.  What happened to my own advice that there is freedom in discipline?  What happened to gratitude?
I have put myself back in the saddle and another gem from Molly comes to mind.  I noticed that every night after dinner she went to her room to get a chocolate covered marshmallow from a box and ate one.  She always had a box of these and always ate just one.  I asked her what they were and she said they were available only at Passover and she bought enough to eat one every day for the whole year because she loved them so much.  I said to her, "but Molly, don't they get stale?"  Her very simple answer was to shrug and say, "So I chew!"
Some times life is that simple.  Sometimes in order to have something that you love you have to protect what you've got, discipline yourself and deal with the staleness.  So as I said, I am back in the saddle of the things that make me the better me I want to be and when things get tough, I plan to simply chew.