Yesterday the weather dawned generous and balmy for these coastal Northern California-ites. To the unitiated, that translates to a scorching 81 degrees. To celebrate this little localized act of global warming, we took the dog and the 3-year-old and the massive SUP board we got at Costco this past Christmas, and weaved a motley trail down to the happy little nudist beach down the road. We sat in our swimsuits and drank beer and took turns building sand castles and finding our sea legs out on the giant, shimmery blue. On the way down, as we were gathering our earthly clutter, my partner turns to me and says, “So. How does it feel to be married for 9 years?” Enter….crickets. Keep in mind at this moment, that I am a woman of reasonable intelligence. I possess no known disorders of the mind or chromosomes which would render it difficult for me to pick up on normal social cues or customs. I have known the man speaking to me for all of my adult life. I have made a baby with him, signed on for a mortgage with him, travelled the world at his side. He at mine. And yet. This question of marriage. And how does it feel? I know there is only one appropriate response to the loaded gun of a thing such as this. “Mah-velous, Lover. Each day with you is better than the last!” And yet I hesitate. I stutter. Lord help me, I cringe.
Years ago, when we were first wed, I was finishing up my last year of college. With a completely amorphos degree in the Performing Arts, I was gifted the task to craft a final project which would demonstrate the accumulation of my skills and knowledge over the past four, ahem, six years. I penned a one-woman show entitled “Finding My Feet”, which amounted to little more than me prancing about the stage for roughly 45 minutes, in various degrees of undress, wondering aloud for my assembled friends and acquaintances, just where my 25-year-old life had gone off track. For the first 20 minutes of said piece, I bemoaned my fate as a young girl in love, now gone and rendered that precious thing moot by attaching the ole ball and chain to it. “No longer the blushing bride,” I lamented beneath the bright stage lights, “but a Wife. Making cookies and babies. … No more doling out free milk samples cuz I’d gone and sold the damn cow.” I waltzed around solo inside a terry-cloth bathrobe reciting my self-penned rant. Peggy Lee’s “Is that all there is?” accompanied me softly in the background.
Then, as now, the notion of marriage is strange to me. In theory, I get it. I like it even. This beautiful idea of commiting your life to another (forsaking all others), and doing your damndest to carve out something that has beauty and meaning and heart and verve to it. To plunking down some roots so that you may watch a thing grow. To creating a container that is sold, depenable and sturdy between your two hodge-podge souls, so that when Life’s inevitable storms come your way, you can row in tandem, trusting that what you’ve built is buoyant, seaworthy. But unlike the poetic metaphorical world upon which vows are written, flowers, dresses and quadruple-tiered cakes are bought and put on display, the inside work of this institution is slippery, and fraught.
I was my parent’s prodigal child. After reading my journal for the umpteenth time, and declaring her findings of my teenage life ungodly and thereby unacceptable, she put down the ultimatimatum. Change or leave. So, at 16, I packed a bag and thumbed it down the road. At 17, I rode the coattails of another friend up to the Northernmost end of California, and rented my first little one-room apartment, in the shadow of the chilled Pacific and the ancient trees, where I’ve called home ever since. At 18, I shaved my head and hopped inside my two-door, blue, used Tercel to venture on up the road to a disco party that was being hosted by a co-worker. I intended to dance, chain smoke, laugh loudly and drink too much, in no specific order. Maybe make out with some random someone at one point along the way. And then there was this guy: brown-eyed, and deeply-tanned, sporting a long, blonde ponytail and holding court around the bonfire outside. Earthy and simple. With the craziest, strong, gnarled hands I’d ever seen before. Not at all my type. Six years later, I married him.
Again, from that little show about my poor, rambling Feet : “In one fell swoop, I’d managed to raise my family status from resident blacksheep to hallowed golden child. They could crown me Mary-fucking Poppins! But by embracing one age-old, convention, had I unwittingly signed on for the whole damn package? Like one big, cosmic bluelight special? ‘Attention, KMart shoppers! Marriage, children and a lifetime of mediocrity on sale now - aisle 5!’”
It’s a question that some days haunts me still.
The ancient yogis have a way of describing the ruts we carve for ourselves, both in life and inside the swirling vicissitudes of the mind. Samskara is a word used to describe our habits, our grooves that we unwittingly settle into. Like the needle idling on an old record, stuck, inside the same damn riff of a song you’ve heard over and over. The more it plays, the deeper the rut is carved, making it harder to venture into the landscape of a different song, a different set of sounds and verses, lines and notes, a world beyond this spinning sound. Just as it is hard to break a habit - obsessive thoughts, swearing, smoking cigarettes, or wearing flip-flops and yoga pants every damn day - the habit of marriage is a tough one to break.
After the initial fanfare of cake and pageantry and love songs and toasting has subsided. After the gorgeous, $60,000 weekend-long Parade of Us-ness has sauntered through town, most often the float’s replaced by a beat-up Chevy or a used stationwagon. And we plop ourselves unwittingly behind the wheel of a vehicle we never intended to inhabit - vowing somehow, this time, to take a different route than our predecessors. Avoid the main highways and chart a path through the wilderness. Arrive at a different destination than those who settled themselves into the great bucket seats of matrimony before us. And yet, too often, we find the damn car’s got a mind of its’ own, a weather-beaten, hackneyed GPS that’s wired to loop around in circles, looking for the nearest Exit, the tires are not thick enough to range out beyond the small confine of well-worn interstate. We thought we’d been granted the keys to lifelong happiness and sunshine, mutual orgasms and holding hands sedately into that great, long march into Oblivion. But is the car we’re driving the one we want?
All this to say: Perhaps we’re asking the wrong damn questions. “How does it feel to be married?” Well, shit. It’s tiresome and boring sometimes. It makes me feel grumpy and old. Like I’m wearing a shirt that wasn’t made for me. At times, I feel complacent and resentful of the expectations that come along with this role. How I perceive others expect me to behave as a Wife, Mother, Homeowner, Taxpayer, hell, even what a Grown-up should be. Under the weight of these nebulous expectations, I fail miserably most of the time. The dishes piled in the sink. The dinner sprung from a can or another round of take-out, the fourth this week. The sex we haven’t had for weeks on end. The time we spend talking about money and house-stuff and work-stuff and schedule-stuff and kid-stuff and general, mind-numbing stuff-stuff. At times I feel too full, and empty inside that same breath. It’s amazing how the things that come with amassing a certain quality of life, can drain the Life right out of ya’.
This week, as I scroll through my personal pocket of news and information, there’s a dentist catching hell for his general douche-baggery and a failure to realize that #LionLivesMatter. The pro-lifers in my sphere are up in arms that we would get our panties so up in a twist over a damn cat when it’s so blindingly obvious that only #UnbornBabiesLivesMatter. Folks on the trail of the Democratic Primary are catching heat for implying that #AllLivesMatter, taking attention away from the #BlackLivesMatter struggle and campaign. Transgender Daddies are requesting that I stop asking such questions about their anatomy and sex lives, and turn my attention to the pictures of the two smiling kiddos by their side. And Donald Trump and his assanine lawyer are taking offense that you or I would deign to call the tearing of hair from his wife’s scalp and shoving an unwanted dick between her legs an act of Rape, and not just good ole, marital fun. And maybe you are scratching your head right now, gentle reader, wondering just where this rambling train is headed and how dare I compare my own humdrum struggles to the larger pain and battles that are being fought on the larger playing field right now? Indeed.
What I want to make a case for now is perhaps, as much as our legal system and our ever-more-partisan society at large seems to crave them, I’d like to propose, however briefly and humbly, that possibly: #TheseLabelsDoNotMatter. How does it feel to be a person of color in a world which systematically favors only the color white? Dear friend, I do not know. And I look to you to help me understand. How does it feel to be trapped inside a body which does not reflect the truth imprinted in your Soul? Illumine me. Write me a letter. Paint me a picture. Show us all what’s up. How does it feel to have someone you trust brutalize your body and then walk away unscathed? These are questions whose answers may only be grappled with by those who know, who have lived it, and who are brave enough to share their stories aloud.
How does it feel to be married? Meh. Some days golden, some days not. It is a vexing and venerable institution, one which I am often tempted to renege on and find some other way. “How does it feel to love?” you might better ask. To be a sentient, sacred being temporarily encased inside a pulsing, impermanent mound of flesh and synapse? To know that, in the end, this body, whatever color, shape, size or form it may assume is only the vehicle through which all of Life must express itself into the world? To attempt to carve out a piece of something Sublime and Whole using mere tools of clay and bone? Oh. Well, that feels very good indeed.
It feels good to walk some long portion of the road with you and hear your thoughts along the way. To sit and ponder on the Big Ideas, and let the dishes stack an inch deeper in the sink. To know tenderness, pain, beauty, sweetness, bitter, the in betweens. To cum to you. Argue with you. Adventure and dream and slog through shit with you. These things are very real and good. And if you need to affix a label to this mess of Gorgeous, hallowed, mundane stuff, fine. Slap a ring on it and call me Wife. And if small, census-oriented-data is all you crave, there are many fine and concise labels I could attach to the world which I inhabit, a small smattering of colors I could use to try and paint the vast rainbow of experience which I’ve been handed. But you would miss those shades of vast Amazing-ness, my limited palette of words cannot describe. In the end, we know, #LoveMatters - and the way we choose to employ it, with whatever tools we’ve been handed.
