How’s Married Life?
This is the question I’ve been getting a lot lately. I’m not totally sure how to answer that question because I haven’t solidly wrapped my head around the fact that I’M MARRIED. This is mostly my fault because I think my little PTSD’d self had a hard time believing that it would actually happen. Leading up to the wedding I started to be convinced that Josh was going to die in a fiery plane crash or something equally as tragic. My life has not been the easiest for a lot of years so I just didn’t spend much time thinking about what life would be like after we were married, just in case something happened.
I’m not real proud of my lack of faith and hope. I keep thinking about this section at the beginning of Bittersweet:
I learned about waves when I was little, swimming in Lake Michigan, in navy blue water under a clear sky, and the most important thing I learned was this: if you try to stand and face the wave, it will smash you to bits, but if you trust the water, and let it carry you, there’s nothing sweeter. And a couple decades later, that’s what I’m learning to be true about life, too. If you dig in and fight the change you’re facing, it will indeed smash you to bits. It will hold you under, drag you across the rough sand, scare and confuse you.
This last season in my life has been characterized, more than anything else, by change. Hard, swirling, one-after-another changes, so many that I can’t quite regain my footing before the next one comes, very much like being tumbled by waves.
When we were in San Diego for our honeymoon, laying on the beach, I thought about how much I’ve fought the waves. How I haven’t trusted anything, and barely anyone, and how I’ve been so, so afraid. I’m not very proud of this last year of my life, I feel like in many ways I’ve failed. There have been a few bright and shining moments where my head finally surfaced above the clouds and I actually got to SEE what I have and what I’m living, but many, many of them have been marked by fear.
Somehow in the midst of it all I’ve forgotten that faith I learned when my first marriage fell apart. I forgot how to take blind steps forward, trusting that God knows exactly where he’s taking me. It seems silly because I KNOW that he will take such good care of me, just look at the ways he’s made everything new again. But somehow fear was easier, fear was in MY CONTROL. And hanging onto everything so tightly seemed to be the only way to keep it all together. (It wasn’t.)
So here’s what I’m learning now: the lesson that I have to learn over and over and over again. Surrender. I will never be able to control of my life. I may never know what the next six steps are. I may never know what’s next. But I am choosing to believe that whatever’s next, it will be OK. I have 32 years to tell me that whatever comes, I will BE OK. In the next month we will likely be moving to another house. We don’t know which house and if we for sure will be moving, but I’m choosing to believe that whatever house it is, that’s the house we’re supposed to have. I’m choosing to remember that my life has always been orchestrated in ways more beautiful than I could ever have planned myself. I’m choosing to stop fighting the waves.
So anyway, how’s married life? Right, I’m MARRIED. I think it’s good. I keep looking at Josh, across the table, or across the room and I feel so incredibly thankful. I get to spend the rest of my life with HIM. I watch him be incredibly patient with the kids and I think back to what I wished for, 3 years ago, when I was taking all of those blind steps forward, not knowing where I was going. I think back to those times when the hope of what could be in the future was all that got me through. And I realize that those things I hoped for, those things that I wanted deep in my bones, THOSE are the things I got. It’s like someone knew me and made it all happen.
