Posted by
Maggie May
Blogging at 1 am. Hair still damp from shower at 9:30pm, after snack at 9:10pm, after run at 8pm, after hanging out with Ever and the local roughians ( oh you KNOW who are you are ) Put both daughters to bed late, late, late at 10:30 pm. Don't feel like worst parent in the world or terrible mother even though both daughters truly need an earlier bedtime than they've been getting lately. It's not fashionable to give yourself a break, only to be pleaded with by others to do so while you sit, dull eyed and sighing, dutifully attempting to accept a break, but failing. I give myself this break. So does Mr. Curry. He is the master at giving his wife breaks. He in fact does not give me a hard time about a single thing I can think of. It's always been that way. He's always seen me clean through, warts and all, but yet with physics particular to love, he also sees me at my best, even when he clearly sees me at my worst. What do they call that, again? Yes, unconditional love. That's what he gives me. And I love him unconditionally but I don't live with him unconditionally- that's the physics of marriage, my friends, and it involves a rhythm and energy exchange and balance to rival the stock market. The lucky have this easily. Mr. Curry and I have had our easy times, but being beset with life events beyond our control- and some within, such as the sparkle two colored eyed creature of our youngest child- our rhythms and energies get clusterfucked until we retreat from each other frustrated and, it pains me to admit, confused. Well fuck, bipolar is a confusing fucking disease. It makes a person want to say fuck a lot, for starters. And I'm not a piece of cake, a breeze, a snap of the finger to be married to, either. I give a lot in return for the ways I'm difficult, though, I do, and I know Mr. Curry feels it more than a fair trade. I'm by nature excruciatingly honest with myself. If Mr. Curry calls me on something- a manipulation I've entrenched myself in even subconsciously, or a childish behavior- I will, the second I recognize what he is saying is true, admit it, and apologize profusely and then, almost all of the time, not repeat the thing. Not interrupted Mr. Curry has been one of the hardest bad habits to break though, specifically during a heated discussion. In my defense, he tends toward loooong pauses and a more timely manner of expressing himself, and because I am his wife I almost always know the entire next five minutes of what he is going to say. Like in a sitcom, I can find the timing and two beats ahead of him lip sync the next thing he will say. In his defense, I'm impulsive, emotional and straightforward to the point of being demanding during heated talks and he probably can barely process what Im saying before I've said five other things. Yet in remains true that as we've grown up together, there is- despite his bouts with bipolar and my bouts of anxiety- a tenderness to our talks, a desire to not only get our point across, to be heard emotionally, but also to address the vulnerabilities of our partner, to work around them. We accept each other's apologies quickly and whole heartedly. Over the years we've had points in our marriage where this balance was perfected and we were in step with each other every day. Anyone married knows how much work it can take to retain that rhythm when life strikes with overwhelm, pain, suffering, self-doubt, the past rears its head, new children are born or you know, it's Thursday all the sudden. And you're like, WTF THURSDAY I THOUGHT IT WAS FRIDAY and then all bets are off. Adding brain distress to this seesaw makes it a hundred times more unpredictable and difficult to pull off. As does a long list of human encounters: injury, disease of other names, bankruptcy, death, poverty, war. With every word on that list the allowance of time to concern oneself with fulfillment or happiness or even functionality decreases. Can you imagine living in a country where there are no Grown Ups? For all the many faults of the US, many continue to try, and the Adults ( i think of this word now in a very particular way. it doesn't convey money, or necessarily even power, but instead a morality, an ethical agenda, a capacity for hard work and loyalty, for kindness and honesty and yes, sacrifice ) are here, here and there, if like the quote we all love so much is true 'look for the helpers'- if we do, they are there. So again, imagine if we lived in a country with no helpers? Where the only people who seemed capable of helping crept in slowly and confusingly from other places? Where those who were helpers had been murdered or crushed to helplessness? I can imagine it, but not in the in depth all body and heart way I can imagine many things. More of a distant imagining, as I imagined Ancient Rome from the books of myths of my childhood. Here in the US, we roar with despair over our own injustices and murders- but I note with care that each life is considered worthy of it's own notice, it's own new story, picture in the paper, gathering of neighborhood mourners. Each life taken before its time is considered by large groups of US citizens to be an injustice worthy of great notice and an agent of change. A single child injured and killed by something or someone in America can create an entire organization with media presence and thousands of signatures on a petition and protests and campaigns and law changes. That happens often. Death has always come, but that we maintain this level of care and attention to each individual who is brought to our attention- that is something worth noticing, valuing and contributing to. To me it indicates that we have a foundational deep respect for the sanctity of life. There has always been war and murder, but has there always been this communal care for individual life lost, in a tribe as large as the continental US? Even the US itself did not have this level of societal respect for individual life lost in our early days. Children died of disease and accidents, women died in childbirth, men died working, during travel or in war, and only the family and the small group of their own mourned. The vulnerable of society often received no notice at all in life and even less in death. Of course here and now, many get lost and never get held up this way, again especially our most vulnerable members of society. But the fact that so many do get remembered, get mourned communally and honored as an irreplaceable individual human being, that it is in fact one of the most powerful agents for change, means that we see the importance of the loss in the first place.
maybe no one will read this because it's one long block of text but it suits me to leave it this way, and my blog is the last place on the planet i can do what i like outside of my bathroom with the door shut and even that is only on a good day. anyway it's not really a blog post, is it?
love you guys.
