Running the gauntlet

It's true that I am a sap.  As often as I have given my mother grief for crying at Kleenex commercials, lately I'm realizing that in this way I have come to resemble her.  I would be lucky to inherit but a few of her many good qualities, not least among them, her fierce commitment to hanging in there through hard times.  But as a kid, for some reason her capacity for empathy for all things televised was just embarrassing.  Or maybe I didn't really want to know that my mom was somehow tuned in to the disappointments and heartaches of life.  I liked my little snow-globe of denial and seeing her cry was like someone shaking the bubble. 

The other night, we were half way into a Larry Sanders Show when something called to mind Long Duck Dong.  (In our house, LDD can always be counted on to inspire a series of guilty giggles.  When faced with a dilemma, we often ask ourselves "What would The Donger do?")

After a few such giggles over LDD's drunken antics, B asked my top 3 movies from adolescence.  Like many a teen of the 80s, John Hughes holds some prime real estate on my list.  But it's not every 16 year old who can't get enough of The Money Pit.  I think you could say it was a chortle escaped B's lips when I told him it's hands-down my #1.  (I even got a mocked up version of the movie box from my classmates as my senior gift!)  Before we knew it, it was queued up on Netflix on the Wii. 

Few things can make me pee my pants like Tom Hanks on the brink of losing it, standing over the gaping hole left by his erstwhile claw-foot tub, quivering in apoplectic laughter.  Still, I was a little surprised to feel a tear welling up a few scenes later as Walter & Anna wrestled with the dark underbelly of their barely-held-together relationship. 

I enjoy the married lifestyle but it's one which requires of both parties a tolerance for a certain degree of imperfection.  Sometimes it gets thick.  I try to be easy-going but I can get uptight.  I have a reputation for being impatient-- a rep which, incidentally, has been impervious to my dogged efforts to prove myself otherwise, but that's beside the point.  Recently, though, B & I had a long-distance thing going.  For a period of 2 years in which he toiled away as a new teacher, he lived 2 hours away.  We saw each other for about 40 hours a week, 16 of which were spent asleep.

It's funny the things people will focus on when you tell them about your life.  For instance, many were concerned about all that shoveling I had to do alone.  Or the culinary challenges.  Or even how nice it would be to have all that time to oneself.  Some married people, when we would tell them of our arrangement, would say, "That sounds perfect. That's about how long I can stand (insert spouse's name)."  I'm sure I'd get a worried, dubious look  on my face.  Such statements seemed not to be a great commentary on  the state of one's affections and I was unsure of what that might spell for us.  I like spending time with B.  We needed to handle being apart but I didn't want us to get quite that comfortable.

It turns out, getting too used to it is a legitimate concern.  I'm fairly independent & don't mind being alone, but being together so little has the effect of tiny fissures in a dam. Period.  The living, organic part of relating and connecting and understanding where both of you are on a day to day basis is hard to sustain, especially if talking on the phone gives you hives.  I will spare the details, as much as I would like to whine on about how much this sucked.  Like many things when you're living the middle of them, we got by.  We hung in there and did our best, even though our best sometimes fell short of what the other needed.  But we went through some changes.  We tested some missiles and learned a few things about ourselves and each other. About our commitment to the "us" of us and what we set out to do back on that rainy September day years ago.

I think I have a healthy appreciation for the gray areas in life but I can fall prey to black and white thinking like anyone else.  It's really easy to peer in on the choices of others and weigh in (hopefully silently, to oneself), thinking I know a better way.  Judging- or at the very least assessing.  And maybe even feeling some secret relief that at least I'm not dealing with that.  But I don't really want to do that anymore.  I don't want to live in my snow globe of denial so much.

Now that it's behind us, I'd like to think the gauntlet we ran those two years apart is more than just something we got through.  I'd like to think it's useful to me as a human being in the world, that it's deepened my well of empathy, made it harder to judge, made me less certain of what I know so that instead of feeling righteous, I can listen better and more fully imagine the complexity of a friend's feelings or experience.  And though I may not have wished it for myself at 16, maybe it's made me a little more like my mom, which ain't such a bad thing, afterall.  Pass the Kleenex?