Monthly Archives: June 2009

Damned If You Do


I read The Globe and Mail fairly regularly. One of the columnists, Sarah Hampson, has a semi-regular feature on relationships with a tendency to view marriage as a glass half empty. Because she is divorced, she focuses about half or more of her columns on divorce – the process and the aftermath. She is playing to her strength and the fact that divorce is one of the most common of denominators in many people’s lives anymore. Cynicism shouldn’t be a given, but she has a jaundiced eye. There are many divorced people who do not cast such a world-weary glance at the institution of marriage or love in general, but she isn’t one of them – though she will give credit where it is due.

Her most recent piece was on the Obamas’ Broadway date night and their tendency to promote their marriage as a successful one – which by all accounts it is. Her issue though is that they don’t air the dirty laundry as much as they try too hard to put a good face on their relationship, or at least that is what I read between the lines. She feels that the Obamas are being disingenuous.

Interestingly, I ran across a blog piece the other night that said much the same thing only the targets were ordinary bloggers who write about themselves. The blogger questioned whether the women whose blogs she reads are really telling the truth about their relationships, mothering experiences or their sublime contentment with being single. The writer thought that perhaps they were fudging and putting on airs to maintain a façade in a game of one upmanship because … I don’t know … because if you are chronicling your life in the blogosphere (or living it in the public eye as the President and First Lady do) and you are not doing it reality tv show style – with dysfunction being the main ingredient – then you are not real? You are faking it? Happiness and contentment are not common? Misery and longing is the major theme of most lives? Real relationships have sticky thorn-like issues? The average single person would rather not be*?

I have touched on this subject a time or two. Recently even. And I don’t think I am deliberately cultivating a façade because I keep private details about my marriage and my children private. There is no fourth wall in blogging, but each blogger does establish boundaries with their audience. I can be as revealing (some would say TMI) as John and Kate, but the truth is, I don’t want to, and Rob and I are so not John and Kate and so not interested in being so. We do not have a dramatic life. We are two remarkably well-suited mates who live a pretty ordinary life that just happened to have an unusual beginning. If anything, I feel a bit guilty FOR BEING happy, content and right where I belong. It’s not as if this has always been the case and I marvel often how I ended up just exactly where I should be. 

I am not Dooce and my motivation for blogging is, as it has mostly always been, about writing. 

What I think Ms. Hampson and the blogger are about is projection. A Facebook acquaintance recently  posted an update that read,

“It’s all about them. It’s all about them.”

And what he meant was that regardless of how your life manifests in the public sphere, others will interpret it through their own experiences and the spot in life where they are currently residing and make whatever is going on about whatever is happening in someone else’s life about what is not going on in their own.

Ms. Hampson, for example, is divorced and writes about the experiences of the divorced and all the other downer topics that consume the single. Since I was single a long, long time,  I know those gray-colored lenses through which she peers and how they tint the landscape with a pessimistic and cynical hue. Naturally, she would see the Obamas’ as posing, flaunting and perhaps even trying to hard. It looks like that when you haven’t had a relationship that really fit.

My dear friend Cissy, whom I have known for twenty years and is the big sister I had to go out and find, has a marriage that to anyone not privy looks effortless and loving. It is certainly the latter. Cissy and her husband were my role models. Had I never met them, I wouldn’t have married at all because I didn’t learn much about marriage from my own parents beyond endurance. But Cissy’s marriage is not effortless. There has been ebb and flow and back again during their 25+ years. I have not been privy to the details but I have been assured time and again that issues come up and are dealt with and it stays between them. Where it belongs.

Here’s what I learned about marriage – quickly – that the person you talk to when things are at ebb tide is your spouse. People who “poll the audience”, so to speak, do themselves no favors and their relationships much harm.

I never discussed Will and I with anyone really. Things that came up stayed between us. And we worked at making time for each other and communicating regularly throughout our day and allowing each other space and individuality. I brought these lessons with me when I began dating Rob, and he in turn brought with him the very similar things he’d learned from his marriage to Shelley. And key to this? Our relationship is about us. 

I am a writer. A blogger. I open small windows into my daily life just like everyone else in my genre. Just excerpts. Little splices really. It might seem like an Obama photo op, but I don’t think the world is a worse place because happy, successful couples share their lives. It is certainly healthier than the Spencer and Heidi’s of the world. Or the John and Kate’s. Give me a First Couple who date after 16 years of marriage and obviously delight in one another any day.

 

*My Auntie is 78 years old and never married. She will be the first to admit that she has known lonliness, knows it still from time to time, but she is not sorry she never married. She has more friends than my mother – and that is a feat – and she is never home between her social life, her volunteering and the army of devoted nieces and nephews who include her in every family function imaginable. And Auntie is not an isolated example. I know people in my own peer group and even people in the blogosphere who are not lamenting the single life. All life choices have an up as well as a downside and nothing can ever be said to be permanent.

Photographic Evidence


I am not big on taking pictures but I find I am documenting my life more by photo than I have at any other point in my life. This is big. As an example of my near lifelong tendency to journal/blog rather than whip out a camera I present the following evidence:

Exhibit A: I have no photos of happy or indifferent or even humiliating moments from my junior high or high school years and those snap shots from university were taken by other people and somehow I ended up with copies.

Exhibit B: I didn’t even own a digital camera until Thanksgiving of 2006 when I bought one on a whim at Target because it was ridiculously cheap as opposed to indecently over-priced.

Exhibit C: Most of my photography is blog driven which means I need a photo to go with a piece and am too lazy to google free images.

That I now take the bulk of photos is a mystery yet to be solved because Rob is a shutterbug of legendary proportions who for reasons unknown forgets to bring his camera along anymore (because he knows I always have one on me?).

But pictures are evidence of life. Jokes aside about Kodak moments (dating myself back to the Iron Age now), photos remind us of real and important events because even the smallest moments can mushroom in retrospect.

All of the photos from the early days of Will and I are gone. They were taken by friends and members of the service organization he and I belonged to and I never got copies.

Pictures of us in the days of yore before his illness (although technically speaking there never was a “before” he was ill the day I met him) aren’t in digital form but I do have some evidence there was an “us” and a love.

Rob has a photo – somewhere – of he and Shelley at their grad party, which is where they “hooked” up. I haven’t seen it, but it is, for what I have heard, radiating with all the romantic potential they would find together and I don’t know that many couples are lucky enough to be captured in the moment of falling.

Rob and I met here. Unless he was photographing himself that night, and I can assure you I wasn’t, there are no pictures.

The self-portrait Rob sent to me.

The self-portrait Rob sent to me.

 

 

We dated via Yahoo, MSN Messenger and our trusty land lines. Again, tangible pictorial evidence is hard to come by, but here is the first picture he sent of himself to me. I was quite excited to see the beard. I’d seen photos of him on the widda board from his trip (and so had many other women who apparently had lewd discussions about him in the late night chat – no serious wonder why there are so few widowers there. They are hunted down like wooly mammoth and dragged by the tusks back to caves.) But the beard hadn’t been in evidence in any photos I had seen. I love full facial hair on men and am partial to goatees. Sly old future husband of mine paid enough attention to the things I written in posts and on blogs to know this.

We met, as I have mentioned, in Idaho Falls. No pictures exist although Rob did bring his camera and we tried to set up a photo op along the river walk. However it was February and even he will admit to be cold on that walk, so we opted to go back to the hotel and … snuggle up instead.

 

Tee sees a deer. Idaho Falls 2006

Tee sees a deer. Idaho Falls 2006

The photo was taken a few months earlier by Rob during his memorial trip for Shelley in the States. The woman is Tee. She was a friend of Shelley and Rob’s from the Mexican clinic. Rob took me to meet her that weekend. She was a special woman. Gifted with sight, in my opinion, and I apparently passed muster with her, which was important because Rob was quite fond of both she and her husband  and they, as most people who know him personally do, adored him.

Arkansas is where we spent a week and became officially engaged. And again, there are no pictures of the latter, but only because we were in bed at the time and who admits to being naked when the proposal of marriage is made -aside from me – but there is papparazzi aplenty of the trip.

 

Heading into the Bat Cave.

Heading into the Bat Cave.

This photo is us after (I think) we emerged from our caving expedition. Rob got us the nifty jump-suits from his plant because he wanted to really crawl back as far as we could go. Most people (that would not be us) are wearing civvies and flip-flops and stop about the point where things are pitch dark and quite slimy, which is early on. Not Rob and I, we stopped when I was an inch away from bats and one needs to really go back aways before one is that close to the ceiling.

 

Us, kissing in front of our cabin. Someday I want to go back there.

Us, kissing in front of our cabin. Someday I want to go back there.

I don’t know which day of the trip this was. Maybe the first full day but since I am wearing shorts, it may have been the day after I had a severe allergic reaction to some bug bites and had a horrifying rash all over the back of my legs ‘cuz I remember wearing shorts that day and I seldom wear shorts.

Regardless, it is a good piece of photographic evidence the charged nature of our trip and of the continuing business of falling. We were quite serious about getting it right. Many topics were discussed that week. All thoughtfully and with an eye to the future. How unromantic does that sound? But it actually was. 

 

Rob and I going off for pictures after the ceremony. Edde (aka ED) took this pic.

Rob and I going off for pictures after the ceremony. Edee (aka ED) took this pic.

 

It doesn’t get better than this for artifacts, does it?

My favorite wedding photo and the best day up to that point of my life and it has not proved to be one of those impossible high points whose feelings and energy fade in the harsh light of the everyday, which is not something everyone can say, and I certainly have never been able to say, about life.

The moments that are caught unawares are the most revealing and the wedding photo is one of those moments.

Transit Observations


Like the patterns my daughter is forever pointing out, the same people began to emerge as fixed features on my commute last week. The woman handing out the free newspaper in the station’s lobby. We spoke nearly every day. She was probably my age, but she was worn down by circumstances I could only guess at but wouldn’t be too far off the mark if I did. Life knocks people down in rather predictable ways, in my experience.

There was a young man dressed mainly in lack on the 4:40 train every evening. He got on somewhere before Enterprise/Bay Station. Often he was standing, wide-stance and slightly swayed back like Johnny Cash singing Folsom Prison Blues. His jacket, also black, was circa Members Only. Nearly every guy I knew in university wore jackets like that.

Frosted brown hair was combed forward from the crown to hide an expanding widow’s peak in that peculiar habit men employ when hair loss is noticeable enough that they feel the must take camouflage action. It never works. There was a practice stubble too, but whether it was a slight case of workplace passive-aggressive rebellion or an inability to grow a real man’s beard, I didn’t have any information to tell.

He got off at the stop before mine. Belvedere. Like the butler. And disappeared  with the unhappy looking Asian girl and the black woman who always sat back with her eyes closed until her stop was announced.

The school kids were long home by the time I left class and caught the train. I traveled with the work crowd. Jasper Avenue has a uniform. Black business chic. Men, in chronological age only, dressed like hip priests, and women in puffy skirts or clingy slacks wearing Victorian inspired blouses but for the excess of cleavage.

I am dowdy and maternal among them. Clearly someone’s mom, escaped from the sprawl beyond the city proper, posing among the child actors in their post-teenage visions of what a grown-up is.

On my last day, I encountered the Fat Girl. She morphed without warning into the seat across from me on my way into the city. Two-thirds of the seat vanished as her waist settled around her like a hen on a roost. The edge of her belly threatened to drop over her knees and drip to the floor and she was out of breath in a way that seemed permanent.

She cast a quick look at me that was not apologetic and maintained a stony visage clearly meant to show me that she would not be cowed by a disgusted glance.  I smiled at her. She blinked and then smiled, very tentatively, back. My smile was part instinct and part knowledge. Fat girls don’t get smiled at much if they are even acknowledged at all. I knew she didn’t get many smiles and wasn’t expecting one today – on the train of all places.

I thought about striking up a conversation but she was equipped defensively with earbuds and she was quite young though I’m not sure that would have been apparent to a casual observer as her features were swallowed by the puffy flesh that framed her face. Our eyes met again a time or two more and I smiled. I got off before her and looked back through the window. She was watching me go. Two smiles met this time, and then I headed to the stairs and the surface where the intermittent rain was now a drizzle. I hoped I was not the last smile of the day for that girl.