Shut the (Back) Door

Have you seen Dear John?

So, I actually technically haven’t.  I skimmed it.  But this is the gist I got from it:

Girl falls in love with soldier.  Soldier leaves to do his job. Girl tries to wait but can’t so she marries someone else.  Blah blah blah other stuff happens but I don’t really care at that point.

Is that really a love story?

What IS a love story these days?

While thinking this over, yesterday, I melted.

And I do mean physically, with a temperature reaching +37 Celsius once you added in the humidex, this Canadian girl was not made for runs that seem like swims in the sticky, thick, sweaty lakeside heat.  I was a hot mess.

And not just in the holy-crap-my-knees-are-sweaty way.

Because I also mean I melted. 
Exploded.
Lostallsenseofreasoninmycompleteselfabsorbedangrymess.

Right now, I am taking full time classes through university online to finish the degree I started 14 years ago.
I am slightly panicked every single time I use the line of credit to pay tuition and worry that I will end up working at Starbucks to pay it off because a B.Sc. majoring in Military Resiliency is both interesting and possibly way to specific for the job hunt that’s coming.

I am also working part time at a local inner-city drop in.  Because my kids love Mixed Martial Arts and we love that they are in it and that means I am willing to work to pay their gym fees.

That gym?  I’m also going there now to take some strength training classes because the time the kids are in martial arts is the only time I have for running or exercise most days and hey, there’s that Army Half Marathon and Tough Mudder in September.
Riiiiight.  I was supposed to STAY in shape after the Ottawa Half.
Sigh….

Summer is starting.  That means today is the last day of school and I have 3 kids home full time while I do these things.

Oh, and to be fun, since this spring Dh has 2 training exercises and one training course, all of which are nowhere near home and mean it’s going to be just me as zookeeper for the majority of the rest of this year.

So yesterday, when my study day became take-Freckles-to-the-outpatient-clinic-for-cough and then work for the afternoon, and then come home to a dog that had some gastric distress in his kennel and then spend far more time then planned on parenting and school decisions for the kids…. I was frazzled. 

And the house was still a mess.  And laundry wasn’t done so kids are grabbing underwear out of a basket in the living room that I THINK I took out of the dryer.  But I’m starting to suspect it’s the basket that was waiting to get to the washing machine.

 And the floor hasn’t been swept in days so I’m wondering if I should just leave it that way and see if eventually the trodden on dog hair turns into a throw rug for the hardwood.

So when Dh decided to make a blanket statement to the kids about a parenting decision I didn’t think we had made yet, I may have lost my mind.

And when I told him maybe HE should be the one to do the parenting from now on and he told me that maybe I just didn’t GET how his job worked, I reached the very, very last nerve on a string of nerves that had been frayed at least since the last time I had sat on a wet toilet seat after my boys had been in there.

And then I played the long suffering wife who has sacrificed everything for the sake of the career he doesn’t think i ‘get’, and he became the husband who has worked harder than anyone to give all of us everything we need and those two extremes are never, ever going to see eye to eye.


Because both of them want to be the one who has given the most, as though sacrificing for the family is some kind of game and the winner is the one who’s life sucks the hardest.

I write all this because it has come to my attention that my writing about my husband has led some to believe we have the perfect marriage.

My friends….
No.
Just no.

Because when I told him in the morning that he was being an asshat and he accused me (mostly fairly) of having monthly symptoms beyond his control, and I followed that up by using a string of bad language and he left for work completely frustrated and I stared at my computer screen that said ‘Cultural and Literary Contexts in the Epistles‘ but all that rattled in my head was ‘why is your husband being a douche?’….

That, friends, is not the stuff of marriage seminars and love stories.

Years ago, when we had decided to stop looking for the church that would bless us and instead decided to attend the church that challenged us, we were invited to a Valentine’s Day dinner for couples.  The kind that offered free childcare, so we were in.

The first 18 months of our marriage Dh had been home for 4(ish).  We had maybe a couple months together child free before he returned from Afghanistan to a wife who barely knew him and a baby.  He was struggling to reintegrate.  I was struggling with reconciling what I thought my life would be and what it had become.  He was angry a lot.  I was sleeping in the guest room a lot.  And yet, there we were, listening to this couple talk about their marriage.

And I thought many times ‘You have no idea’.  And I thought ‘it’s never going to be okay‘.  And I even thought ‘I just want to go home because this is hard.’.

And then they said something different than all the other things I’d been told about marriage.

They told us to shut the back door.

They told us all those circumstances sounded like it was making things tough.  And when things get tough, people want to leave.  And as long as leaving out the back door of this marriage is an option, it’s always going to look like that’s easier than working through whatever is still in the house that’s making it hard.

But if there’s nowhere to go, well doesn’t that make working things out seem like a better option?  Because once you are convinced that there is no other option than to live with that person for the rest of your life, then, well, you are far more inclined to work to make it better then, aren’t you?

Late in the night that Valentine’s Day, I promised Dh something.

There would be no more angry ‘I’m going home‘.  There would be no more threats to take the baby and get away.  No more tearful proclamations that it wasn’t supposed to be this hard and maybe we should just give up.

There would be resignation.
That this is marriage and sometimes it’s making-the-baby beautiful and sometimes it’s holy-crap-what-if-I-poop-on-the-delivery-table-in-front-of-him realistic.

I had to accept that sometimes, it IS supposed to be this hard.
Because sometimes THIS HARD is exactly what marriage looks like.

And more than a decade, many more deployments and stress and kids and frustration and messy marriage later, it still holds true.

Marriage can look like kissing in the rain and holding hands at church and those nights you go to bed early so that you have a little more time in bed together. 

Marriage can also look like those angry stares when you don’t want to say what you are thinking in front of the kids, and slammed doors that wake the baby and staying up late clicking circles around the Internet to avoid any expectations that might arise if you get to bed while they are still awake.

But what marriage can’t look like is an open door out.  Because when the wrong recycling bin goes out and the kids filled the clean dishwasher with dirty glasses and the day your 4th class adds another writing assignment is the same day he tells you he’s going to the USA to take a course that ‘sounds cool’… that open door will always, always look easier.

But walking through it means giving up on those times when you send an email of apology for the 7 a.m blow up at 9:15am from the clinic waiting room and have no time to respond to his and don’t even have 5 minutes to spend talking any of it through until 11 at night when you are both too tired to do anything but lay next to each other and say you’re sorry before falling asleep together.

Our marriage isn’t any more special than anyone Else’s.
We just know that the back door out only stays open until you walk through it.  And then it closes and the door back in… it’s much, much harder to use.

So years ago, we went ahead and bolted the doors while we were still inside.

For better or worse, baby, our life wasn’t written by a romance novelist.

Thank God for that.

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