The Yellow Boat

I was ready to write to you all about lots of picture-laden stuff. But now my camera is out of batteries and with the new technology of rechargeable batteries (hey, it's new at our house!), I have to wait until the batteries recharge instead of running out to CVS for some new ones.

Isn't that a beautiful photo? Mr. Pom snapped it on our last day on the Cape. The color is not retouched. It was just a beautiful, yellow dinghy waiting for us to take its picture in the sunset.

It was a  simple, grace-filled moment. I was too tired that evening to hike across the sand and Mr. Pom got out of the car to get the shot for me.  The boat was just waiting for us to tell its story. And Mr. Pom jumped into the breach to capture it for me.

The longer I am married, the more I have to learn about living in a relationship. Sometimes it is just so simple. You need someone to take a picture, and the other person does it.  Other times, you feel as though you are negotiating a chess board.

When I as a kid, a cousin of ours was in the midst of an ugly divorce. There were lots of tears and remonstrations and requests to take sides. I was too young to have any idea what was going on - and my parents would never have shared those confidences with children - but I remember my father kept talking about how much "work" marriage was. He talked about the work of marriage being something that you had to do everyday. I didn't understand what he was talking about.  They were just my mom and dad and I heard them fight and get annoyed at each other and just plain seem bored with each other at times. Whatever "work" they were doing wasn't helping my mom get dinner on the table or keep my Dad from working 6 days a week. My parents' marriage was a given and I didn't give it much though. I certainly never thought of the "work" of their marriage unless they meant that my mother watched TV on the small black and white set in her bedroom so my Dad could watch sports or history at night downstairs on the "color TV console".

When my father was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, it was the realization of the worst fear you have as a child, and it didn't help that we were all grown up. Daddy was sick. Daddy was dying.  I watched my mother simultaneously pull herself together and crumble like a scone.  She was fiercely protective of him, but wandered alone in her thoughts. She buffered any negative news getting to him, but we were all scrambling to fill in with the doctors and nurses and home health care issues as we struggled to come to terms with his rapid decline.  She watched him like a hawk and cooked for him and made him drink Ensure and played cards and took him to the movies. She stood her ground until the last moments when she cradled him in her arms and we all become undone.  Now I was fully aware of my parents' marriage. Completely in awe of the power of their love and how they had created this family that was ultimately unbowed by death, perhaps even stronger for it. 

A little tiny part of me quivered inside and wondered if my own marriage was equal to the love that my parents had shared. Did we possess this extraordinary depth of emotions? We would be as broken and crushed as my mother seemed? Would my kids, only babies at the time,  become as united in grief if one of us died as we sisters seemed to be? 

My husband and I loved each other deeply, but I had to admit that there was a love I had for my parents' marriage that seemed to transcend anything that my husband and I could manage to create.  It wasn't as if we were casual with each, or lacked intimacy, or weren't deeply committed to each other. But, were we in love as much as my parents had been?  Had we created this iconic relationship? It wasn't as though we were more casual with each other than my parents were. But gee, did he love me like my Dad loved my Mom?  Could I have  been more Freudian if  I had degree in psychiatry?

When I had the surgery this summer and Mr. Pom was waiting on me in ways that I could have never foreseen, I kept hearing my father's voice in my head, "marriage is a lot of work".  I thought of how easily I would have grown impatient, annoyed, and just plain sick and tired of nursing him. And I thought of the many times I did in fact nurse him.   And for the first time, I really had been married long enough to see my marriage as though from the top of a summit: it really was a lot of work.

But isn't "work" in a labored, exhausting, drudging, or begrudging way. The work of marriage is like the sanding of a board over and over and over until it is ready to take the primer, the topcoat, and then the final glowing varnish. I think we've begun to glow together. I think all our hard work has brought us forward into the future of our marriage. We're past the child-bearing, the child-rearing, the juggling for career dominance, the wistful wondering about cities never lived in, and the expectation that there is something outside ourselves that will bring happiness to the two that is "us".

The callowness of youth rings in my ear when I think of putting my marriage on one side of the scale and my parents' on the other.  What daughter doesn't  look to her parents' relationship as the benchmark of love? And what marriage in situ can meet the mark of one that has reached it's final glowing, seal? 

We're too busy these days to worry about the depths of our passion. We are too involved with pushing the other out of bed each morning to go to work.  And with making sure we're eating healthily. Or with figuring out how to paint the first floor in a two-day weekend. And  whether The Teen should get braces, if Mystery Man's tuition was paid, and when to get The Princess's car in for service. The bills are stacking up in the mail basket. The pantry is pretty bare. We can't possibly have take out another night.  Should we get the dog groomed this week or next? Is there time for a walk before bed? Is there any clean underwear in the basement? Can we afford ......whatever?

We're just Mom and Dad.