True love

Last Sunday, Mother's Day, LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER day was also our twelfth wedding anniversary.  Lost in the chaos, set aside, but deliberately. With care.  This post was inspired by (though it falls short of) two of my favorite writers, Maggie May and her Blue Collar Love Letter (oh, to write characterizations like Maggie) and BHJ's Poor Beauty (just, oh).

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I can see him from the big window on the landing of our stairs.  Framed in the large square of light formed by the open garage door, he sits in a cheap green plastic chair.  He is intent on the metal bones of some car part fossil spread out on the makeshift work table before him.

It's late and I'm tired.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, a niggle of irritation worms its way between thoughts.  We've barely seen each other today and he's out in the garage, tinkering with that truck.  Upstairs, I set down the towering basket of clean laundry in my arms and push open the door to the Snow White room.  They are all asleep, sprawled in perfect relaxation on their miniature beds.  The baby sleeps too, cuddled tight against his polka dot crib bumper.

Don't you ever feel trapped, she asks, like you're just so stuck in this and there's no where to go?

I get it, I tell her.  I do.  I empathize with the feeling of being dissatisfied, not where I want to be, but no, I don't feel that way.  I feel frustrated at times.  I feel tired.  I feel martyred by laundry.  I am petty.  I complain.  It is a part of the human condition, isn't it, to become mired in one's own limited situation, even when you know the big picture is bright and pretty and good.

But, I don't feel trapped.  I feel lucky.  I feel lucky to wake up each morning and dress my four children for school.  I feel lucky to spend my days with them and with friends that I never could have made, or spent so much time getting to know, in any other circumstance of life.  I feel lucky to sit at my basically clean dining room table and type about life in the beauty of my nap-time-quiet house with the sun and the horse dog and the new leaves budding outside the windows behind me.

I know couples fall out of love in this season of their lives.  It's hard to find the thread of self in the press of the days and hold it, let alone the thread of each other.  We do, though.

I don't know where he finds it; he doesn't write his thoughts down for me to see, but I know where I find it.

I find it in the way that he holds a newborn baby, casual and confident, like he's standing on a ladder holding a roofing tile.  I find it in his 1950s-house-wife coupon holder, each little pouch in the small accordion divider a nest for a different category of carefully clipped savings.   I find it in the way he spins the kids until they shriek with laughter and in the way he talks to Garrett when those awful boys chase him under the slide.  It is in his neatly hand-printed budget sheets. A new one each month, the columns set out reverently, a little bit like prayers. Prayers for the future.  Family. House. Gas. Clothes. Stacey. Matt. And in the way he divides his overtime checks into thirds, 1/3 for family, 1/3 for Matt, 1/3 for Stacey.  Hours he's worked beyond the grueling seven tens in a row, divided among a family of six with no complaints.  I find it in the handmade wooden dory drying upside down on props in our garage and in his painstaking care of our ninety-year-old house that moans about its age in protest under the strain of our young family.  It's in the way he pops the stuck nursery door open with a screwdriver.   It's in the way he looks at me at three o'clock in the afternoon when I say I'm taking a shower.

Seen. I am seen. These are my poems to collarbones. I find them every day in our lives, hidden in the dirty diapers and endless loads of laundry.  Tucked under dirty pillow cases. Stashed behind dog-hair covered sofa pillows.  Folded into casseroles that kids refuse to eat.  Priceless pieces of Limoges, fragile and egg-shell-thin, somehow in tact at the bottom of a huge cardboard box thrown on the lawn at a corner garage sale.

The strongest impressions are surges of feeling.  I remember a moment in college, so early on a summer morning that the light was still gray.  I remember the surprise of opening the door of our dilapidated student-ghetto house to Matt, tired and young and eager.  He had driven all night to get home to Ohio from North Carolina a day early. Ditched the last party with his friends because he wanted to see me, not desperately or needfully, just honestly.  I remember feeling so warm with happiness and love and promise.

I still feel that way inside. Though, I am not a girl and he is not a boy and from the outside I'm sure we look the very definition of settled, trapped complacency.  Hidden inside this pony-tailed, unfashionable, can't be bothered with make up, dented minivan driving, easily irritated, impatient mom of four in worn out running shoes is that slim, summer-sun-stained, sleepy girl in his old, torn OSU t-shirt, her beautiful, twenty-year-old legs bare, her olive-tinged, just-awakened face childishly smooth, uncreased by care, her eyes lit up with surprise and love. 

He knows where to find her, eighteen years of life and twelve years of marriage later. And that is the secret, hidden treasure of our togetherness.