Friday, February 4, 2011

Musings on Marriage

    Having an engaged daughter has made me melancholy about my advanced age (fifty-five tomorrow) and the realization that the years really do pass as rapidly as my mother told me they would!  I am both amused and saddened by the fact that my daughter Emily's relationship with her family may never be quite the same again.  Layne has replaced her Mother and Father as the most significant others in her life, and  although things are as they should be....I have never adapted well to change!       I reminisced with my friend Sue, whose daughter Melissa is also getting married, saying "do you remember feeling that rush of excitement, that glow of love and anticipation for the future?"  She nodded her head slowly as she recalled saying to her husband, Les before they married..... "Ohh...don't go! in response to his having to go home after a date.  She then said in a puzzled tone, "now, I just say, 'don't you have a place to go?"
     I laughed heartily at this, and added, "I used to think how nice it would be to share a bedroom, and talk cozily over  the day's events as we got ready  to retire to bed, and now .....as I see him  sitting in his underwear on the side of the bed cutting his toenails---wishing he had his own room!"
     I suppose we can't stay at the same stage that Emily and Layne, Melissa and Micah and all the other starry eyed young lovers are at....and the years of kids, financial obligations, and stress do take their toil.  Everything has its proper time and place, and although I love Jerry...I sometimes miss that butterflies in the stomach feeling.  Sueann, another friend, would  adamantly say as she dated her husband, Kyle, "he is like no other man!"  Now we laugh, and say, "yep, he is certainly like no other man.!."  Not derisively, mind you, just an acknowledgement of our extreme youth back in the day when life's trials had not touched us.
      I believe that living with another person and sharing the intimacies of daily life and kids has caused me to progress in ways I could never have attained as a single person.  I am grateful for the laughter and moments of pure joy, but I am just as grateful for the trials and disappointments because they have truly honed my spirit.  I view life differently, and because I have been able to experience the highest and lowest of emotions over the last 28 years of married life, I, who detest change, am forever changed by the experiences of loving and being loved.
  And so....I smile benevolently at Layne, Emily, Melissa and Micah...wishing them the best while knowing love won't always feel this way.   They should rejoice in that euphoria of their first experiences of being swept up in the avalanche of emotions that come when meeting their forever companion.  New love is wonderful, but old love is the stuff that sustains you when the sick kids, bills and disagreements come.  But then, they don't need to know any of that now....!   The years will also come quickly upon them soon enough.