In October of 1976, two young, slightly counter-culture suburbanites--a
20-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman--bound themselves together for life…or
until such time as the union became untenable.
I distinctly remember throwing in that caveat…because otherwise I don’t
think we could have pulled it off. Forever
just seemed too much to promise, unconditionally. So we gave ourselves an out.
But, as it has unfolded,
forever seems to be exactly what we committed to, because…here we still
are. Forty-one years and counting. Has it been the stuff of fairy tales—“happily
ever” and all that? Definitely not. Has it been what I hoped for, or even what at
any given time I thought it was? Not even close. Has it been the best I could have
realistically expected? Probably. The mere fact that we are still in each
other’s lives after all these years is way more than I should ever have counted
on, had I really thought about it forty years ago.
We jumped into the marriage
contract without ever going beyond just that---marriage. Eternal couplehood. Two halves of a whole. We never made the transition to the next
logical step: family. Turns out I am infertile, and was not willing
to go through the tortures of the damned to combat it…as if we could have
afforded that, anyway. Adoption was
never really an option, either. I worked
50 hours a week until I was 40. You
don’t bring a child into that. Who knows
how our lives would have been different, how our marriage would have ultimately
panned out, if we had done the usual thing and brought children into the mix?
And beyond that…well, 20
years in was when our relationship stopped growing and started fraying around
the edges. What caused binding to halt and unraveling to
commence? Hard to say, but I have my theories.
Financial circumstances played a large and ugly part. In late 1994, I lost the job which had kept
me challenged and sane for eight years (which seemed a long time, in those
days) and which, at the time, was more than half our income. Only a few months later, my sister declined
into the final stages of her terminal illness, and passed away in May of the
following year. Needless to say, that
was a terrible time. And things didn’t
get any better for many years.
Through all that, the
husband…kind of stood aside and watched.
Because HE had, in that same time frame, at 38 years old, latched on to a “real” white-collar job that
paid “real” money that might actually support us some day; good thing, I
suppose, because I have not held a job for more than eighteen months in a row
since. In the way of many good baby
boomer men, he believed the best support he could offer was financial...nose to
the grindstone, keep bringing home the paycheck, and everything else will sort
itself out eventually. And, of course,
work serves as a good excuse NOT to become too tangled in the emotions
surrounding…anything. Not that he wasn’t
freaked out that my half of the household income had evaporated (and that my
former employer reneged on its promise not to stand in the way of my collecting
unemployment in exchange for my resignation…)
So, buzzing in the not-so-background of the worst time of my life was
the constant drone of “Get a job! Get a
job!” Not all of that pressure came from
him…but enough of it did that I felt dismissed and unsupported by the one
person I had thought would be my staunchest ally. Turns out, emotional support is not his strong suit.
And so we headed toward the
turning point in our marriage…the point at which we ceased being two halves of
a couple and became two individuals bound together by…what? The fact that we’d been together half our
lives and wouldn’t have known how to BE any other way? I attended my sister's death, half a
continent away; and returned home to a place a hundred miles from the family
with whom I longed to share my grief. My
parents were aging quickly, and recent experience had driven home the fact that
they could be gone all too soon. We had
moved to Portland in order for me to accept a promotion with my now
ex-job. I wanted to go home.
I wanted to be with my family. I
wanted to tuck my tail between my legs and slink backward in time, to a place
where I had been, if not happy, at least busy and engaged. And we all know how well going backward
works.
The husband was not ecstatic
about going back. By now, he had been with his big-boy, white collar job (hereafter
to be known as Job #1) for almost three years, and change is never his thing,
anyway. Still, he made arrangements to
go back to the job he had left when we moved to Portland. He had it all set up. We sold the house...we picked out another one
back home. "We" were all
prepared to make the jump (backward.)
Until Job #1 decided that they couldn't do without him. Made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He cast his lot with them and has never
looked back.
So...I moved back home. He took
an apartment in PDX, paid for by Job #1, and came home on weekends, driving a
truck also provided by Job #1. The
original arrangement was for him to be in PDX Tuesdays, Wednesdays and
Thursdays, and work from home on Fridays and Mondays. Theoretically, that would have meant that we
would be together more than we were apart.
But it never worked out that way.
Any time Job #1 crooked its little finger, he would extend his stay up
north. Eventually, OUR relationship
boiled down to a mostly weekend thing.
Valentine's Day, my birthday, our anniversary all happened at "bad
times," when he couldn't possibly tear himself away from his Portland
office and work from the home office they had provided for him...so we could
maybe at least go out to dinner or something.
That was the turning point.
That began the second half of
our marriage.
