Great relationships

My granddaughter just posted one of those little sayings people do on Facebook and it really made me think. This one was about not giving up on great relationships when you have problems. It says both people have to be willing to work to make it work.

It was like one of those little cartoon bubbles appeared over my head! An aha moment!

I doubt if anyone ever gets married thinking they will get a divorce and I especially never magined myself in that position. I met my husband to be in my freshman year of college and from that day on, if we weren't together we wrote to each other via snail mail. He was sent to Vietnam and I wrote everyday and sent audio tapes too. We were married and set off across the country hauling everything we owned in a teeny tiny U-haul behind our second hand Toyota only to discover there was no place to rent near Fort Riley Kansas where he was stationed. It didn't matter. We were in love and went door to door asking people if they knew of any, ANY, place to rent. Finally ending up in a dumpy two rooms of an old house with paper curtains and a peephole in the bathroom between us and our neighbors. It was awful and we loved it! We made do, met the neighbors, I did laundry in the bathtub and hung it on the community line when I didn't have a way to the laundromat, burned off all my eyelashes and eyebrows lighting the stove one day and spent my free time spit polishing his uniform dress shoes. I still hadn't learned how to cook for two, since I grew up in a family of six, so we had lots of company for dinner, dodged the mean dog living beside our house with her puppies and played house.

Life moved on. We lived in nicer and nicer places. I learned everything he did as I helped him qualify for Sergeant of the Guard and later on CLU, CPCU, etc. We were active members of our church, led the youth group, were members of a gourmet club, played in couples, duplicate and singles Bridge clubs, rode bicycles and played tennis and backgammon. Life was good!

In fact it was almost perfect except that we couldn't seem to get pregnant. So we became foster parents, then adoptive parents, then, finally, after miscarriages, we were expecting a baby! It should have been an even happier time in our lives . . . but it wasn't.

For the first time in our lives we had problems. The stories my father had told me about loving my mother more than ever when she was pregnant did not apply to us. I was an embarrassment. He retreated into his work and never again really had the desire to do the work that was necessary for us to make it as a couple. There were a lot of reasons for this, but mostly he never truly believed I could love him and still love those babies as much as I did. The idea of us both loving them that much just didn't register as a possibility in his thought processes.

From then on, he would make an outward show of doing the right thing but his heart was seldom in it and it would show when the tension became too much. He would issue ultimatums and use money to wield control over what was not the real problem . . . which was that he could not believe a whole family could love each other as intensely as we had loved each other.  He simply no longer cared whether we made it or not and retreated into his own dream world of what his life could of, should of been.

We stuck it out for another 18 years, but the love died long before that. Those were the happiest, saddest years of my life.