Thoughts on marriage after 9 years

Mike and I are very different, a fact that would become immediately obvious to anyone looking in on our morning routines. 

Mike treats leaving the house like it’s a mission he’s been training for his entire life, one generations of Freymans have carried out before him, a duty to be met with determination and poise.

His process begins the night before with the setting up of The Piles. There’s The Pile of neatly folded clothing in the bathroom. There’s another pile on the kitchen table: headphones, wallet, hat, keys. A stack of vitamins in the cabinet, a cup next to the sink waiting to be filled. The coffee maker is also on schedule, filled with water and grounds and timed to begin brewing exactly eight minutes into Mike’s bathroom routine.

There are checkpoints along the way: 4:45 am wake up before the alarm goes off, 5:10 am shower complete, 5:15 am time to pour coffee and take vitamins, 5:20 am out the door.

I, on the other hand, approach leaving the house each day as if it’s something I’ve never done before. I wake up to find myself on another planet, one that looks only vaguely familiar in my dreamlike state. I’ve suddenly landed on Mars and have to figure out how to get us all safely back to the space rover with limbs intact. I’m barking orders like our lives depend on them–Put your pants on! Brush your teeth! Where are your shoes?–while also wondering if my compatriots are actually alien life forms. They stare blankly at me. What is a shoe? How might I put it on my body? Their behaviors would be maddening were it not for the fact that I can’t find my own shoes, much less figure out how to get them on my feet while simultaneously putting toothpaste on toothbrushes and passing out vitamins.

Unlike Mike, I have no hope of leaving on time, especially when I can’t decide what to wear. It’s become such an expected occurrence that the other day, my son commented innocently, “Your coworkers don’t have to say you look perfect, they just have to say you weren’t late.” Lord bless the children.

My most difficult mornings usually occur when I’m preparing to go to work, but Mike has the day off. He takes care of getting the kids ready but there’s no interrupting or assisting my chaos. There are no checkpoints or forethought, nothing to save me from myself. And if Mike so much as comes near when I’m engaged in The Outfit Crisis, I ask with steely eyes and a tone that could cut, “Do you need something?”

A second pass by to check on my progress—the kids likely sweating in their spots by the door—is bolder yet. By now the bed has its own version of The Pile, except in my case it’s a heap of discarded clothing. 

“How’s it going?” Mike may ask in the least judgmental tone he can muster.

By that point I’m really feeling the pressure of my wayward choices (or lack thereof). It suddenly feels like getting off the planet is hopeless and that I’m the only one to blame. Still, I’m determined to hide my folly.

“Fine, fine, just a few more minutes,” I may say. I look around at the mess I’ve made in minutes and wonder if it’s all part of the artists’ process, until I remember what’s on the line: being on time for kid drop off and work. Or you know, survival.

A third pass by our room is Mike’s most daring of all: his mere presence could trigger existential meltdown. 

“It’s not about the clothing!!” I’ve been known to whimper through tears.

Alternatively, the sight of Mike’s helpful frame in the doorway could be met with overflowing rage, poorly masked in a plea for empathy. 

“I’m doing the best I can! “ I shout before he’s even opened his mouth.  “Can’t you see all of the things I’ve tried on?” As if The Pile is not right behind me, ratting me out.

In the end I select nearly the same outfit I wore the week before—a favorite shirt and pair of pants. Or the dress I’ve had for five years that makes me feel less stranded astronaut and more me. 

Once dressed, I rush out of the house leaving new Piles in my wake: breakfast dishes and kids’ toys, clothes in a heap and the bathroom counter a mess. 

When I make it to work, I feel as if I’ve dodged a bullet. And I have, that is, until Mike and I engage in The Airing of the Grievances. It’s a very technical practice during which we list the annoying things the other does in hopes that person will become a little less annoying.

“Do you think you can shut the cabinets more often?” he asks kindly. 

“What are you talking about? I never leave the cabinets open,” I say, until I remember how I walked into the kitchen the day before and narrowly missed bumping my shin on a drawer left pulled out.

“When you get out of the shower, can you point the shower head down so it doesn’t blast me in the face?” I say to my 6’4” husband, wishing for a more welcoming experience for my 5’2” frame.

“What else?” I ask, eager to know anything I can do to become an even more perfect partner. 

“Well, there is one thing,” he says, eyes shifting nervously.

My heart begins to beat, worried we’re on the path for divorce. What is my fundamental character flaw? What have I been doing for years without even realizing?

“Well, it’s about your morning…routine,” Mike says, his choice of words far more generous than merited. “Do you think you could…pick up after yourself once in a while?”

I slink down in my seat, feeling like the kid who got caught picking his nose and eating a booger.

Lest I ever get too big-headed in my moral superiority, it only ever takes The Airing of the Grievances to help me see how hopelessly human I am. And how much grace my husband regularly extends to me, and I to him.

We’ve been two distinct people since before we got married. In the early days of our relationship, I remember looking at him with such curiosity. Like the first time he sat in my little car and I saw his knees hit the dash and his head touch the ceiling. “Who is this giant?” I wondered. With a seven year age difference and very different upbringings (me in rural Iowa, him in Calumet City), we didn’t share any cultural cues. We didn’t like the same music. When we met I was still holding onto the jam bands of my college days while he loved everything from Willie Nelson to Wu-Tang Clan. 

We didn’t have a shared religion, just a mutual faith in family and humanity, of living lives of service to others. He called the convenience store on the corner a “stop and rob” and wood-sided station wagons like the one my family drove for much of my younger life “grocery getters.” We didn’t even like the same food. When I met Mike I was experimenting with veganism. He still teases me about choking down kale potstickers the first time I cooked for him. He later brought out my love of mayonnaise (Hellmann’s, never generic) and bacon (the thick kind with pepper on the edges). And he’s taught me much more about feminism and social justice than I ever knew possible, challenging every single assumption I have and comment I make. 

We never wanted to be the same person. We never wanted to add the lines “two become one” into our wedding vows. We never wanted to merge souls. We (I) craved individuality. I wanted to know that marriage to Mike was a choice, not a foregone conclusion. 

When my parents divorced the idea of marriage shifted like a sandy foundation under me. Despite my notions of marriage as a choice, that choice felt all the more shaky. Suddenly it wasn’t a guarantee that I would be with Mike forever. There was no invisible bond between us, unable to break. Just a daily attempt at trying to be less annoying and instead, more supportive of our many differences. Which is where we find ourselves after nine years of marriage, a decade together: still taking it day by day and doing our best.

My dresser drawers are still pulled out, but most of my clothes are off of the floor and the kitchen cabinets are shut. The shower head was still pointed too high this morning, but Mike recently drove me two hours round trip to pick up the most perfect plants for our garden. We still have different tastes in music and movies, podcasts and TV shows. I still go to prompt care every time I sneeze, while Mike would put Vick’s VapoRub on a broken femur. I’m consistently too cold in our home and he’s consistently too hot, but our thermostat wars are mostly civil. 

He’s far better at getting the kids out the door than I’ll ever be. And I’ll be the first to admit that without Mike in our family, we’d eat cereal for dinner every night and the kids would only bathe every week or so. We have to discuss our vacations ahead of time so that I give him enough time to relax, and he meets my need for daily excursions. He never calls me when I’m out, but always leaves the light on when I come home. I pray each day that I can be as loving to him as he is to me.

But most of all I pray that each action, each conversation, is enough to sustain us. That we will keep taking each day as it comes, doing our delicate dance of mutual respect and consideration. There are no guarantees in life. But I hope that with each day, it becomes harder to separate the bonds we’ve built, that the bridge between two very different people who are making marriage work holds fast.