In spite of how happy I am to be married overall, John and I definitely have our conflicts. They are not daily, or even weekly for that matter, but they do occur. I've noticed that the issue of respect is a common theme that permeates 90% of our disagreements. I don't mean the "respect my authority" kind of respect, but rather the "respect my space" and "respect my stuff" and "respect my time" and "respect my feelings" and "respect my ideas" kind of respect that people in all types of relationships deal with to some degree. Marriage can exacerbate these issues because another person has constant access to your space, stuff, and time, and as much access as you give them to your feelings and ideas, even when clear boundaries are set. Privacy is at a minimum in marriage, and this is where trust comes into play again. If we set aside time and space that is to be only mine or only his, we have to trust the other person to respect those boundaries. And, when (not if) the boundaries are crossed, the breach can seem like a betrayal of trust even more so than in relationships where boundaries are clearer than they are between a husband and a wife. These feelings of betrayal and disrespect breed conflict.
Now, I realize that some may question whether or not husbands and wives should have any separateness since we become "one" when we get married, so I will briefly pause here to address that question. I definitely think that a certain amount separateness is important in order to maintain individual sanity--sanity which will ultimately make the marriage stronger. Brief time apart each day or each week allows each spouse to rejuvinate and to return to togetherness without fear of becoming completely sick of the other person. This sanity-maintaining alone time helps prevent the constant feelings of being at odds with the other person that marriage-gone-wrong produces. The amount and nature of the time and space each person needs will obviously vary from person to person and marriage to marriage, but I think some personal time and space is a clearly established need in a healthy marriage. For some people, these boundaries can take place outside of the home at work or at play, but for others alone-time may be needed at home as well.
Clear communication is necessary to boundary establishment. If I say I need an hour by myself, I need to be assured that I will have that hour I requested and not just 40 minutes. In my marriage, this is tricky because our house barely holds the two of us, and so neither of us has a space that is just ours. So, if John and I are sitting on the couch and I say, "I need an hour to [read, practice yoga, call my mom, nap] so I am going upstairs," John has to be able to say, "OK, I will stay down here for the next hour so that you can have that time." And vice versa. Same thing with feelings and ideas. If I say, "What you did made me feel [sad, angry, defensive, irritated]," I need John to say, "I may not understand why you feel that way, but I am sorry that what I did caused you to feel like that." And vice versa. Basic respect issues. Seems simple enough, yet these very issues are what constantly create 90% of the division between us. We are both smart, people-savvy individuals, yet when we get together we can sometimes forget our intellectual and relational skills and become ill-mannered. I read an article about this in last month's Experience Life magazine that supports that our respect problem is one that many married couples experience. Even in this article, the solutions are simple on paper, but in practice an unwavering committment to behavior change is not so easy to muster. Especially after a long week at work.
Marriage, I am learning, requires continuously upgrading your active love of the other person. Marriage is not just about love, it's also about embarking on a life-long journey of discovery of another person. Learning how to love and respect someone else requires both a constant awareness of yourself and the other person as well as a deeply-embedded genuine excitement for learning how to make the other person light up. Marriage vows require a serious understanding that it's not always going to be easy or fun to fulfill your committment to each other. However, marriage vows also come with the hope and promise that if you are both committed to making your love last, marriage is going to be worth persevering through the un-easy and un-fun times when you know that each day you will both become better at loving the other person and therefore your love and marriage will become better as well. Or, at least, this is the theoretical, utopian goal.
By the way, the other 10% of the problems John and I have are issues that are by and large out of our financial control at the moment. I may write about those issues another time.
Because I am fascinated by the minds of people who kill other people, I am, of course, following the Pamela Vitale murder case. More than most, this story interests me because the culprit is (alledgedly) a 16 year old troubled boy. And this was not an impersonal school shooting. This was a hands-on crime, one that in my mind takes a different kind of madness to commit. What could go so wrong with this boy that by the time he turns 16 that he become capable of brutal murder? Was it a flaw that he was born with that drove him to commit such an act? Or was brutality and disregard for life something that he learned in his environment? If his mother is in fact guilty of accessory to murder, then it has to be at least some of the latter. Nature or nurture is complex. It's usually a combination of both, and I'm sure this case is no exception. With train-wreck-like wonder, I'll be watching as the story continues to unfold....
As a school counselor in a high school, I hear some crazy and horrific stories on a regular basis from my students. I would think that I'd be building up a numbness to it all so that I'd be better able to maintain the "blank slate" on my face that as a couneslor I'm supposed to have. It is, however, one thing to hear about what happens to my students and another thing to get a visual sneak preview of it. Yesterday after schoool, I held a parent-teacher conference for one of my struggling tenth grade Latina students. If it wasn't bad enough that the mother began her interaction with me with a racist comment about the population of my school, she ended it by leaving a traumatizing image burned into my mind. After thanking me and saying good-bye, she turned and backhanded her daughter across the mouth. The office door hadn't even shut and her daughter was still facing me when she was struck. I got to see the hurt, shock, and humiliation flash across her daughter's already tear-stained face. More than the sound of her mother's hand crossing her mouth, the student's face is what echoed in my head the rest of last night. In Maryland, parents are legally allowed to use corporal punishment on their children, even when their children are 15. I cannot pass a value judgement on the parent for making the choice to slap her child as long as no mark is left on the girl, but I can question the timing of the slap. It seems to me that if discipline is the goal, the slap could have waited until they were in the car or even at home. Slapping her in front of me seems to come more with a humiliation motivation rather than a disciplinary one. Humiliation and discipline are not the same. In fact, humiliation can often lead to the opposite effect of discipline. Instead of positive behavior correction, humiliation can spur further rebellion. Before our conference, the mother told me how disgraced she was that her daughter was not doing her work. On some level, she may have wanted to humiliate her daughter to make up for her own embarrassment over her daughter's behavior. She did not think about the effects that such humiliation could bring in terms of worsening her daughter's behavior rather than improving it. Regardless, I would have personally preferred not to witness the slap. Legal or not, I would rather not close my eyes and see that image.
Yesterday, John and I signed up to join a new gym that is opening up in February near where we live. This gym sounds like everything I've dreamed of--plenty of equipment, plenty of parking, plenty of natural light (windows!! oh, how I've missed those since I graduated from Maryland and left their gorgeous gym behind), and extensive hours of operation (24 each day, to be exact). My current gym is a dungeon-like daughter of the large gym I went to when I lived in Bowie. This new gym is everything my current gym is not--clean, bright, expansive. In spite of this, I can't help but feel a twinge of guilt. I have long-standing connections at the Bowie hub of the gym I currently attend, and I feel as if I'm somehow betraying them by picking a new place to workout. Beyond those personal ties, I feel some ethical guilt. I'm leaving a small business in favor of a national one. I'm buying into the advertising that new is better and that bigger and better services will make me happier. I'm supporting the machine of Capitalism that runs small bookstores and small grocery stores out of business in favor of superstores and small gyms out of business in favor of large ones. I'm falling for the razzle-dazzle advertising schemes that promise new life and great happiness. I'm oiling the cogs that keep the big machine running and running over the small folks. This nationally owned gym will cost John and I a mere $10 more per month than the locally owned gym that we currently attend. To me, just having that natural lighting is worth the extra $120 a year, and that doesn't even factor in the free towel service, free evaluative technology, and free magazine subscription that the new gym offers. But my guilty conscience still nags me. I may have been getting less service at the other gym, but I was supporting the "little guy" of local business. Ultimately, I suppose I expect to get over my guilt when the new gym opens its doors on February 3 and I see the sun pouring through the windows. In the meantime, however, I am going to be extra nice to the front-desk workers at my current gym in order to make myself feel better for planning to leave them for--literally--brighter horizons. Hey, big businesses need love, too...don't they??
Every so often, the debate about allowing elderly people to have driver's licences makes the national news. On the one hand, some older folks need to have access to cars and drive just fine. On other hand, some folks the same age are high-risk drivers due to their senility. While I understand that we don't want to discriminate against the elderly, there has to be something that we can do to prevent some of the more high-risk cases from being legally permitted on the road. This week in Florida, a 93-year old man hit a pedestrian and then drove three miles with the body still on his windshield. He was caught because he passed through a toll with the body on his car, and this, obviously concerned the toll taker. He renewed his license two years ago at 92. While he may have passed the mandatory vision test, he clearly was not given a dementia test. This is a problem because the police say that he had no idea that he hit someone or that the person was still on his hood. While other cases have occured in the past where younger drivers have hit people and driven home with them in their cars, this time the case had nothing to do with alcohol abuse but rather sheer mental breakdown. It's illegal to drive under the influence of alcohol; perhaps it should also be illegal to drive under the influence of mental illness, such as dementia. Maybe such laws do exist. If that is the case, then there has to be a better way to ensure that people with mental illness aren't issued licenses. As the family of the killed pedestrian in Florida know, dementia and driving don't mix.
As some of my long-time readers might recall, back in the spring of 2004, I devoted many entries on this site to an old flame. Even though I'm married now, I do still occasionally ponder my past and wonder what happened to get me to where I am today. I remember when this particular man broke up with me, I told him that I would find someone who would give me a safe picket fence life, but that I didn't want that kind of life. I wanted a life with passion, and I did not see how passion could co-exist with a picket fence. To me, the two seemed opposite. Passion is exciting; picket fences are boring. Passion has a hint of danger; picket fences are safe. Passion is what makes us feel alive; picket fences are for people who go through the motions but don't fully embrace life.
A few months after this man exited my life, I met my picket fence man. When I said what I said to my ex, I didn't necessarily think I was being prophetic. I didn't know if I'd ever fall in love again, let alone with someone I met not too long after my heart had begun to mend. I certainly didn't believe as soon as I met this new man that I would ever fall for him the way I fell for my ex. Even though we were married barely over a year after we first met, the passion was not an instantaneous development. It took awhile for me to develop a passion for working with young people, and it took awhile for me to develop a passion for someone who was so very different from what I thought I could feel passionate about--someone who was stable and kind. Stable and kind spoke loudly of picket fences in my mind, and I didn't want picket fences.
But since that time, John has taught me that it's not only possible for picket fences to co-exist with passion, but it's more beautiful than passion without the picket fence part. To me, the picket fence is still about safety and trust, but I've learned that safety and trust is what makes an even deeper passion possible. In what is probably my favorite song on her most recent CD, Tori Amos sings, "The sexiest thing is trust." She's right. I have married a man that I trust completely, and while that is still scary to me, it is also exciting. Any time someone gives another person trust, a power transfer comes along with it. My total trust in John gives him power over me. Because my guard is down, he has the power to destroy me emotionally, and that is somewhat frightening. But at the same time, it's exciting to trust someone with everything and to know he trusts me with everything, too. I'm sitting at home right now. John is laying on the coach in sweatpants and an old tee-shirt. He had a wisdom tooth pulled yesterday, and he's doped up on perscription painkillers, so he's been napping most of the day. A couple of years ago, this scene would seem mundane and miserable to me. Today, there is nowhere else that I want to be instead. I couldn't have envisioned that I'd feel so content in these circumstances before I met John and fell in love. But the passion makes the picket fence as exciting as the picket fence makes the passion.
I have a new friend. A lone fruit fly. He has been in my office fluttering around for a couple weeks. I find this interesting because I thought fruit flies only lived for 3 days or some small amount of time like that. I've also noticed him, or perhaps its his cousins, fluttering around our office bathroom as well as our staff lunch room. He is a mutant fruit fly. Not only does he have a longer life than the typical gnat-sized insect, but he lives on no matter how many times I swat him down with my hand. I don't know where he came from. I have no fruit in my office. I don't have any windows, so there are no plants here either. I have no idea what he feeds on, but it is obvious he is finding nourishment somewhere since he lives on. It's probably just as well that his life surpasses the lives of most fruit flies. I'm so accustomed to his presence, that I'll probably miss him when he's gone.
I woke up this morning with a bloody nose. Nothing like the change of season to dry out my sinuses enough to create spontaneous eruptions. I need to go to the doctor and get some real allergy medicine and some sleeping pills. I'm too young to be falling apart like this!
My heart pounds with increasing quickness in my chest. The more I try to catch my breath, the more it eludes me. Laying on the couch, I'm trapped in a state of semi-unconsciousness. I want to wake up, but I can't force my limbs to move or my vocal chords to work to get John's attention. "Is it too late?" I wonder, as I lay there helpless and still. I just had another nightmare about demon possession. These dreams have been recurring over the past several weeks since my mom and I went to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose on its opening night. I comfort myself with the light that pours through the slidng glass door. It's not 3am, so I tell myself I can't be possessed. This is little help for me since I'm sure the unseen world is not bound by time, no matter what a movie tries to tell us. I still can't move or speak. Frantically, I pray a silent prayer for protection and deliverance. I know I should be praying before I reach this level of desperation.
John's nap is untroubled. He refused to see that movie. Now I understand why.
*************************************************
For more information about the true story that inspired the movie that has traumatized me, go here and here. For Biblical support of the unseen world, you can go here, here, and here, as well as to numerous other passages in the Bible that refer to demons, spirits, and other forces that we humans do not understand.
I don't lose well. I don't like to lose, and I don't often lose gracefully. When I was growing up, the game Monopoly was actually banned in my household because of the level of stress it created in my entire family when the game wasn't going my way. I am a rare breed of person who would actually cry hysterically like the world was coming to an end if on any given day anyone in my family was more successful than me at Monopoly. This characteristic led to high levels of tension between me and my also ultra-competitive father. It also, however, led to an understanding between us. My competitve nature is what drove me to push myself so hard in school. I wanted to be the best at everything. My father knew this about me, and instead of pushing me harder, he'd encourage me to back off when I was setting the bar unrealistically high.
But in spite of my father's best efforts, some things never change. I am no longer a 10-year old girl crying over Monopoly; now, I am a 27-year old woman who can barely contain her tears when the team of 14- and 15-year old girls that she coaches loses. Especially in games like tonight when we lost to a team we should have beaten. We lost tonight because my team played awfully. Even my best players who haven't had a bad game all season looked terrible tonight. I tried my best to boost them up during the desperate time-out that I called and during halftime. But my best efforts were to no avail. I could not play the game for them, and I ran out of things to say to make them play better. So after we lost the game in an overtime that we shouldn't have even gone to if my team had been playing at their potential, I found myself struggling to muster some composure so that my frustration with my team and ultimately with myself as a coach would not come wailing out of me the way it so often wailed out of me when I was sitting around a board game with my family. See, while I recognize that my team did not play their best, what followed me off the field was a frustration that stemmed from that same self-competition that my father tried to soften when I was a student. How could we lose to a team who is clearly less skilled than us? What did I as a coach do wrong for it to come this with only one game left in the season? I wasn't upset with my girls, I was upset because I felt that I must not have done enough. The team's failure was not theirs, it was mine.
When I stop for a moment I realize that almost unfathomable level of arrogance that I must have in order to take such responsibility on myself. Arrogance was a trait I often sneered at in my father, but maybe it is the same in me. I set the bar so high that I must on some level be deluded into thinking I am actually capable of reaching it. Could it be that my desire to win actually has root in some belief that I am capable of winning at all? Or, instead of arrogance, is it the opposite--do I simply see no value in myself beyond outward success? It's as if I push myself so hard in order to prove to myself--even more than to everyone else--that I am worthy of life. Since self-confidence has never been my strong suit, I'm more inclined to view my competitiveness in the latter, almost more pathetic way. Without an inner belief that I am worthy, I need the outward acknowledgement to motivate myself to keep going.
So then the counselor in me asks how do I address the competitiveness in myself? Do I treat the behavior and ignore the roots hoping that by changing the behavior, I will sever the roots? Or, do I seek to destroy the roots in the hope that the behavior change will follow? Regardless of the methodology and/or ideology that I subscribe to, I realize that I must change. As a 27-year old, I need to learn how to handle failure with Audrey Hepburn-like grace. Crocodile tears over a loss are no longer cute, they're immature. Success, after all, is not about never falling; it's about how well you pick yourself up after a fall. That is cliche for the sheer reason that it is true. Beyond the immaturity aspect, my competitiveness is bad for my health. I am alredy half-convinced that my stomach problems the past two days are due to an ulcer I've developed over the course of this field hockey season because I get so tense when we're not winning by several goals. I need to change if I'm going to live to see 65 or even just next field hockey season. Maybe losing is good for me if I treat it as a life lesson. I need to learn humility, and I need to learn that I am valubale within more than without. If these are lessons that only losing can bring, perhaps I should be a grateful loser instead of a sore one.
Yesterday after church, John and I went to Champps in Columbia near where we live to watch our Ravens in what we hoped would be their second victory of a thus far disappointing season. We sat for three and a half hours in front of a big screen TV that broadcast the complete travesty of game that yesterday's match turned out to be. Prior to the game, both the Ravens and the Lions were 1-2. We thought we stood a fair chance of winning. But then we started racking up the fouls. One by one by one until we came one short of the NFL record for the most fouls ever in a single game. Most of the fouls were easily preventable--holding and unsportsmanlike conduct. We even got two of our players ejected from the game for their treatment of the officials. By the end of the game when it was obvious that the Ravens had no chance of a comeback, I was actually rooting for them to break the foul record so we could say we at least did something right. But apparently we can't even foul well. While I certainly agree that one of the Lions' supposed touchdowns was questionable, I do not think that the refs started out the game with malice towards the Ravens. But after so many fouls and such dishonorable behavior, it's not completely incomprehensible to think that the officials' eyes might have blurred. I love my Ravens, but we were acting undoubtedly foolish yesterday. I understand that losing can be frustrating, but they were only making matters worse for themselves yesterday. During one play, they got two penalities that added up to 30 yards. 30 yards makes a big difference in a football game, espcially for a team that has never been strong offensively. Even when they weren't fouling, they seemed to frequently pass the ball to the Lions making the Lions' job that much easier with the high number of turnovers.
At least Navy and Penn State are doing well this year. Penn State remains undefeated after beating Ohio State on Saturday. They now have their highest ranking in 6 years, which, of course, will only fuel Joe Pa's fire ensuring that he continues to coach no matter how old and senile he seems to be to the rest of the world. This season is so far only proving his point that he's still got it somewhere even if whatever it is has been lying dormant for the past several years. Navy is not undefeated, but John and I enjoyed watching them pull ahead of Air Force with a field goal with 5 seconds remaining in their game this Saturday. Since we have Navy season tickets this year, we sat in the drizzle to watch that game instead of the climate-controlled Champps where we sat the next day to watch the Ravens embarrass themselves.
My husband and I work at the same school. He's a history teacher, so we don't see each other a whole lot, but we do email frequently during the day. It's Monday morning, so no one is thinking 100% clearly today. John just sent me the following message that made me laugh out loud:
"Well, I am going to be fired now. As I was reading your email [a female student in his class who is also on my JV field hockey team] asked me a question. Without thinking since I say this to you all the time it slipped out. She asked something and I did not hear her completely and I said, 'What, baby?' Well the class started laughing and I had to explain that I was reading an email from you and my mind was elsewhere."
The more I work, the more I realize that work is not something I want to do for my whole life. I don't like it. I don't like waking up early. I don't like getting yelled at by psychotic teachers, parents, and students who don't understand that we're all on the same team. I don't like eating lunch in front of my computer and not having any windows in my office to look out at the free world. I don't like having to leave a paper trail for everything I do and then having to retrace the paper trail when the sh*t hits the fan, which, by the way, it always does. As the days pass by, I find myself becoming more and more committed to winning the lottery so that I can move to a beach and leave my computer behind me.
Of course, the other side of my heart reminds that while I may long to be on the beach, work does have a purpose beyond meeting my financial needs. Perhaps what I need is a change in my attitude towars work. Instead of viewing my job as a prison, I can view it as my ministry (1 Corinthians 15:58). In this light, my work is not for my gain, but rather for the gain of God's kingdom (Ephesians 4:28), which is always purposeful even if I can't see the purpose from where I sit in my office. When I feel like I'm not getting anywhere with my angry parents, teachers, and students, I can remember that I may not always see the fruit of my work, but a positive impact could still be there if the Holy Spirit is in what I do. The Holy Spirit rarely calls us to be comfortable. He calls us to serve and to grow and to do so with the kind of joy in our hearts that only God can provide.
While I may feel that I would personally have a lot more joy in my work if I was able to do it on my time instead of the public school's time, I realize that God can fully renew me even while I'm running in my hamster wheel for over 8 hours a day. God can keep me from burning out because God equips us for what He calls us to do (Acts 13:2). Putting my hope in God is more certain than the lottery ticket. Especially since I'm only committed to winning the lottery in my daydreams--I haven't even bought a ticket yet. Of course, at the very least I would like to do my work on the beach if that is possible....
After field hockey practice today, I decided to take my dog for a walk to enjoy the warm evening. I went home, picked her up, and drove to a nearby lake that I enjoy visiting. Even though she is a miniature, my dog loves to walk and has a surprising amount of endurance in her tiny legs. The path around the lake is two miles. She jogs along the whole way and still has enough energy to wrestle with my cat as soon as we get home. In addition to the energy expenditure, my dog particulary enjoys walks around the lake because there are so many people to get attention from and so many other dogs to greet.
My dog, unlike me, has no concept of time. This truth was evident again tonight when I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy as the skies became increasingly darker while my dog continued to bounce around without a care in the world. As dusk fell over the lake before we were even halfway through our walk, the crowds on the path started to diminish. I found my mind replaying years of Fox News stories of young women abducted, raped, and murdered. Maybe I've read too many of those stories, maybe my imagination is just too wild, or maybe it's a combination of the two, but I saw new headlines tonight: "Young woman disappears in park. Car found abadoned in parking lot." "Small dog floated to the top of a lake." "Woman's body surfaces solving a year-long mystery." I could also hear John repeating to reporters on national TV the conversation that we had just last night: "She said last night that she didn't feel safe walking by herself after dark because of the dangers. I don't know why she would be out here the very next night."
It's sad that I can't enjoy a walk by myself at dusk without any uneasiness. Maybe I am just buying into the mass hysteria that the media sells us at bulk rates. Even though I could tell myself that I'm being unreasonable and that the area where I live is safe, that doesn't mean that I would be wise to go out by myself after dark as a woman. It's the safe areas where people are always taken by surprise; its the safe areas where crime still makes the national news. And it's those national news stories that ring clearly enough in my head to make my paranoia seem legitimate in our world today.
As the news stories about my untimely demise were reeling through my mind, another thought entered my head--in a few weeks, this 7:30 light will be 6:30. Daylight savings time is a curse on a working woman who wants to exercise outside and has no exercise partner (or no pepper spray). Fortunately, I am a working woman in education, so once my coaching season ends this year, I will still have a few more hours of daylight. With a miniature dog, I'll need those extra hours if we're going to take any more walks by ourselves. She's not big enough to be intimidating to a predatory man. So for the safety of us both, I must keep us out of the darkness. Sorry news folks.
I had somewhat of an epiphany this morning, if I can use the word in a broad sense. In my pre-John relationships, such as the one with Nick that I thoroughly documented on this site before my site went down, I battled daily with insecurity. I never felt adequate and I never trusted the guy. I made myself crazy and in the process drove others crazy with my insecurity. I realized this morning that I am no longer that insecure person. Since John entered my life, I am not even a shadow of who I used to be. For the first time in my life, I trust a man completely. To me, that is the beauty of marriage--complete security in another human being.
Marriage is by no means a smooth ride every day. John and I have had our angry moments where we've both questioned what we were thinking when we agreed to this union. I've cried, he's sulked; I've yelled, he's given me the silent treatment; we've slept on opposite sides of the bed and once in different rooms entirely. We've broken the rule about letting the sun set on our anger and we've both learned what it means to take for granted and to be taken for granted. But ultimately, neither of us doubt that our hearts have found their home, and that is where our marriage has been a success.
At its best, marriage is a fulfillment of many Biblical promises. For me, the one that stands out most this morning after my epiphany is Jeremiah 29:11--"For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." Through John, God has given me a hopeful future. A hopeful future is not a "happily ever after" future, but it is a future that I look forward to because God is in control of all of the uncertainities and I can trust Him even more than I trust John. Marriage in its ideal form is analogous to the relationship that Christians have with their Creator. Any good that I have in my marriage is even better in my relationship with God. As John and I grow closer and deepen our trust in each other, our closeness with God and trust in Him is also deepening because we see His reflection in each other.