Ice Skating Awakening

Marriage is a lot of hard work.  Marriage can be more work than fun.  Marriage can be exhausting.  I have wanted to write about this for awhile but I was afraid to because who admits this?  Who would say that being with the love of their life every day is not the happily ever after they thought it should be?  No one wants to hear that marriage is work and compromise and polite smiles and the occasional dead eye.  People want to know that even when it is bad, blue birds are chirping and hope is on the horizon and by the end of the day there will be wine glasses clinking and a romantic fire blazing.  

Clink.  Blaze.

Marriage gives us the chance to present the absolute worst to each other every day.  We present our one-eye bleariness to each other in the morning and return at night to prop up our empty shells in front of the TV. Sometimes people change over a marriage and their partner is left wondering if they are the same person they married.  Sometimes people start eschewing meat while their partner starts writing about their life in a very public forum and they are left wondering who is this person??  And even, do I still like this person?

Sometimes in a marriage you begin to wonder what you have in common with your spouse.  This can be especially true as your kids get older and their day to day claims on your time start to fall off.  Maybe you think you never had anything in common and this makes you sad.  And while you are sad, you are building Jenga blocks of resentment and grievances in your heart and mind that color your reality.  And you know that you love this person and even like them a little bit you just can't understand why it feels like work.  Why is it the things that attracted you to them in the beginning drive you nuts now?  Sometimes you end up paying someone to remind you both what it is that you like about one another and what you can do to build that up.  And sometimes, you just trudge through.

But then little things happen that chisel at your heart.  Maybe it is a holiday.  Or maybe your spouse writes you a note.  A hand-written note with illustration.  Or perhaps, even though she is not happy you weren't there for dinner, she still saves a plate for you.  Little things that chip away the ice at your heart and weaken the mortar of your Jenga block tower of resentment.  And maybe you start focusing on how your spouse takes the early run to the school with the athlete instead of grumbling about dirty socks on the couch or five pairs of shoes by the door.  Or maybe she will bake vegan things just for you and you will not begrudge her early bedtime.  It is the little things that drive us crazy and apart and the little things that nudge us back together.

Sometimes you take the kids out for the day and end up having an epiphany.  We took them ice skating as the boy is almost 11 and somehow has never been on skates.  (Hush Canada, I can hear you tsk-tsking from here.)  We all had fun but I forgot how damn beautiful my husband is on skates.  He is all shoulders and muscle and fights gravity on land, but he is weightless on skates.  He is fluid and fast and light and effortless.  I always expect him to throw in a triple axel or a split jump, he is that light out there.  It takes my breath away.  And when he skated by and caught my eye and smiled, well, that took my breath away too. His eyes were alight and his cheeks flushed and he just moved through the crowd like it was nothing and for the first time in a long time, I saw Bill McMahon.  Not Bill McMahon the father or Bill McMahon the husband, it was just Bill McMahon.  And I really like Bill McMahon and I am so terribly guilty of not seeing him, just him, in a long time.  It is like marriage has you look at each other all the time until you are just an expected vision on the landscape.  You fall into your roles, your ruts, your expectations and that is when it feels more like work than happily every after.  

I am so glad I had that moment of seeing, really seeing, Bill.  It made me remember how I couldn't wait for him to call me, to pick me up, to kiss me.  I remembered a dad who held his new babies and told him all the things he was going to do with them.  It made me appreciate the fact that we have made it through some awfully hard years.  Marriage is a lot of hard work, and I think that it is okay to say that, feel that and admit it out loud.  There are good years and bad years and years where you trudge on, but through it all, if you take the time to see, is the person you promised forever to. Forever can seem like a blink of an eye or it can seem like a million years - depends who you have along side you for the run.  Me?  I have Bill McMahon and I am grateful and after he reads this, I see a lot of ice skating in our future.