Carry On, Warrior Read online

  One day I was watching Tish stroll her baby doll around the family room in a little pink baby stroller. My gaze fell to the floor behind her, and I noticed that the stroller wheels were making perfect lines across the carpet. Perfect, fancy, “I just vacuumed” lines. CA-CHING!

  For the last three years, before company arrives, before Craig comes home from a trip, every time I feel like playing dutiful housewife, I call Tish and ask her if she’d like to take her baby for a walk. And Tish says, “A reg-a-lar walk or a careful walk, Mommy?” And I say, “A careful walk, honey.” When she was two, I taught Tish that a careful walk is when you stroll your baby back and forth across the carpet in such a way that the stroller lines run perfectly parallel to each other . . . back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And so for three wonderful years, Mommy sat on the couch and cheered for Tish while she and her baby doll “vacuumed.”

  Craig would come home and say, “Wow! You vacuumed!” with the same proud tone he uses when I cut a tomato all by myself. And I would smile and bat my eyelashes coyly but never answer directly because honesty is very important to me.

  It was a miracle, really. Except that one night I saw Craig looking quizzically at the floor. I realized with terror that he was finally noticing the piles of floor crap surrounding my fancy lines. Not good.

  I had anticipated that this might be the fly in the ointment, so I quickly mumbled something like “stupid vacuum’s broken. But nice lines, huh? Look! Shark Week is on!” I have been mumbling variations of those sentences for three years now, with great success.

  So when Craig walked in the house with this surprise vacuum, I was suspicious that he was suspicious. And so I watched his face verrrry closely. And right after he said, “Look! This will make life so much easier! I hate for you go to all that trouble with that broken vacuum and never get the results you want,” I noticed a faint smirk and an itty-bitty centimeter of an eyebrow-raise. It was almost imperceptible. But I saw it. My first thought was: He knows. He knows about the stroller vacuuming. The jig is up.

  But I recovered quickly. And my second thought was: Oh. The poor guy doesn’t know who he’s messing with here. He has grossly underestimated the depths to which I am prepared to sink to preserve my way of life. He just doesn’t know.

  The other day, after Craig left for work, I told Tish that I had a surprise for her. I announced that since she was such a big girl now, it had become time to pass down her itty-bitty baby stroller to Amma, because I had bought her a brand-new, big girl stroller. I explained that big girl strollers look very, very different from little girl strollers and even make big noises like cars! Because big girl strollers have engines.

  Time for a careful walk, baby. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  Your move, Hub-Dog.

  Easter

  Craig and I never decided on “our song.” Actually we might have, but since we were quite tipsy for a long while, we can’t remember much. Plus, we had questionable judgment. So I’m quite sure that if we had a song during our courtship, it was likely one by Snoop Dogg or Britney Spears.

  A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to a song and said that it reminded her of us.

  I was so excited. Isn’t it exciting to get a glimpse of who people think you are? Because, seriously, none of us really knows what we’re like, do we?

  I anxiously listened to the song. Well, really, I clicked on the link and couldn’t get it to work and yelled and cried about how much I hate my computer until Craig ran downstairs to avoid property damage and gently moved the mouse and it worked immediately while I closely monitored his face for any traces of smugness. I hate this whole process, which repeats itself several hundred times a day.

  Then we listened to the song. And I got chills. Craig and I replayed it maybe six times. We decided that John Prine must have been WATCHING THE TWO OF US when he wrote this song.

  It’s called “Spanish Pipedream,” and it’s about an unsuspecting guy who walks into a bar and meets a topless alcoholic dancer who has some strange ideas about life. And despite the fact that he should probably run, he marries her, because he thinks she might be on to something. Also, because, well, she’s topless. Then they build a house in the country, kill their TV, and have a bunch of kids who eat peaches and find Jesus all by themselves.

  Obviously, there are some important differences between us and the couple in the song. For example, we prefer pears to peaches. But the rest is dead-on.

  Craig loved the song as much as I did, and he got teary and we decided that it was our song. We had a moment.

  • • •

  This is how I have been telling myself this story. But that night when we were getting in bed, Craig asked, “What are you writing about tomorrow?” and I responded, “Our song.” Then he said, “What’s our song?” I stopped what I was doing and looked at him very scary. He looked at me blank and terrified.

  Then I started thinking back to what really happened that morning, and the replay looked very different. I remembered details like these: Actually, the whole time we were listening to the song, Craig was on his iPhone. And then I remembered his facial expression, which sort of suggested that he hated the song. And then I remembered how he kept saying, “awww,” and “sure, honey,” and “uh-huh” without looking up at all. Hmm. I wonder how many of my beautiful experiences are not really how I write them in my head? Whatever. I don’t want to know. I try never to allow other people’s lack of participation to get in the way of shared moments.

  During the first nine years of my marriage, I rolled my eyes sweetly and laughed about this sort of communication breakdown. Boys will be boys, you know. But lately I laugh about it less.

  Craig and I have two recurring problems in our marriage. I feel sad when I don’t get listened to, and Craig feels sad when he doesn’t get made out with. I am starting to understand that these two problems are related. They’re both about intimacy. Craig and I lack intimacy. When we talk, we seem to miss each other; it’s like we’re communicating on different planes. I’m high and low, and he’s in the middle. We don’t connect. And when we have sex, we don’t really connect either.

  Craig wants to be intimate physically, which feels odd and icky to me when I don’t feel like we’re being intimate anywhere else. If we are not connecting in the kitchen, in the family room, in the backyard, and at the dining room table, we’re not really going to connect in the bedroom either. We’re just going through the motions. But it seems to me like going through the motions is good enough for Craig. Like just getting the job done is sufficient. And that bothers me, a whole lot. I want more in every room of our house. And if I can’t have real intimacy, then I don’t want to fake it. That I can’t tolerate.

  To me intimacy is about communication. Through the written or spoken or physically expressed word, communicating is how we get into each other’s hearts and minds.

  An intimate friend is someone who notices when I’m saying something important and never forgets it. Each feeling, story, and secret is a gift. A good friend knows that, so she doesn’t throw it away. She keeps my gifts in a special place and never loses them, so my energy and time feel well spent. In an intimate relationship, every conversation builds on the last, and what each has shared is what binds. Good friends become each other’s keepers. I hold your story in my mind. I carry it for you. I’m a record of your life. I know what you will do next because I know what you’ve done in the past. We communicate paragraphs through a glance or a raised eyebrow. When our eyes connect and twinkle over a crowded table, I know telepathically that you are remembering the very same thing at the very same moment. In those moments, we are on the same page of each other’s stories.

  I have this telepathy with my intimate friends. This type of intimate friendship makes me feel safe and loved and known. It also makes me the lucky recipient of special gifts. Because when I talk to an intimate girlfriend, she not only listens and
remembers the things I say; she stops and thinks and offers me something back. She tries to relate. She asks questions, because she really wants to understand. She gives feedback. At best, she offers her insight and, at the very least, humor and empathy. I have confidence in these friends, so I’m able to confide in them.

  With Craig, it’s different. Sometimes I tell him stories—stories that are really important to me—and he doesn’t remember.

  Craig probably doesn’t know that when I was eight, I had two cats named Gummy and Blackie. When Gummy had kittens, she abandoned them in my bedroom closet, and I didn’t find them until they were all dead but one. I called an all-night vet’s office and they told me to feed the kitten with an eyedropper and buttermilk. I did just that, and I never left his side for days. I named him Miracle. Despite my hard work, he was a teeny bit brain damaged, so he’d attack everyone in our family but me. Which made me love him even more. He thought I was his mama. Three years later, Miracle got killed by a car right in front of my house.

  Craig doesn’t know the name of my family’s old sailboat. He doesn’t know who my best friend was in middle school or high school. He also doesn’t know when my eating disorders started, and he couldn’t tell you any of the details of my first AA meeting.

  I’ve told him all these important things in the past. I’ve offered him these gifts before, but he loses them. It makes me feel like he’s being careless, because these stories matter to me. They make up who I am. They make me different from anyone else Craig knows, and they make our relationship different from any other relationship he has. I have to ask: If you don’t know my stories, if you don’t know me, why do you love me? Me, personally. Not just your wife, but me?

  Sometimes Craig really tries. He focuses and listens hard to what I’m saying. But even then, his replies seem canned to me. Flat. Like an answer from a Magic 8 ball. Whatever comes up, comes up. It seems like he’s just trying to think of what someone should say right now instead of really reflecting and thinking and responding thoughtfully and honestly, like a girlfriend would.

  The dangerous result of all the forgetting and canned responses is that I stopped sharing important things with Craig. I stopped offering him special gifts because the offerings felt like a waste of my time and breath. Like each day we were building sand castles that were washed away each night. So now we go through the motions, doing what a husband and wife are “supposed” to do. We talk for ten minutes daily; we make out a couple times a week. Check. Check. And I save my real stuff—my hard stories and worries and thoughts—for Sister, my parents, my girlfriends, and the blank page.

  Is the Check, Check enough? Is wanting more too demanding? Am I asking my husband to communicate like a woman? Or is it sexist to suggest that a man can’t get as deep and true as a woman can? And if it’s not fair for me to expect Craig to be intimate with me mentally and emotionally, is it fair for him to expect physical intimacy from me? Because going through the motions in the bedroom, it’s not working for me. It makes me feel used and resentful and angry.

  And here’s what happens:

  I recoil from Craig’s touch often. He hugs me, and I politely endure, looking over his shoulder at the unfinished dishes and the toys on the floor lying in wait to break my ankle. He stops me in the kitchen for a kiss, and I make sure, with broken eye contact and a friendly pat on the back, that this kiss, while not totally unappreciated, is a definitive dead end. I spend a lot of time making sure Craig knows that his affection is going nowhere. Affection feels like a means to an end to me, so I cut it short one way or another. Sometimes I start discussing my overwhelming exhaustion as soon as he walks in the door from work, setting the stage for rejection early, so there is no false hope.

  On the nights when it’s officially been a while and offering more excuses would signify that we really have a problem, he’ll approach me, and I’ll try to remain open. But then, very often, I start to feel angry.

  Sometimes the anger is mild, like annoyance. I’m so tired after a long day with the kids, so used up, so saturated by need and touch already, why must you be needy too? Can’t we just be grown-ups and do something practical? There’s so much still to do: the laundry needs to be folded, the lunches packed, forms signed . . . miles to go before I sleep. Is there really time for something so unproductive? And really, we haven’t talked, really talked for weeks. How does sex even make sense? How do you compartmentalize like that? Do you want me, or do you just want sex? That distinction makes all the difference. That distinction is intimacy.

  But intimately is not how we learned to do it. Before marriage, with other people, we learned to do it irresponsibly, lightly, recreationally, indiscriminately, and desperately. Neither of us has unlearned that yet. For example, it is virtually impossible for us to make eye contact during sex. It feels way too real or too fake, I’m not sure which. Layered on top of these individual issues is the fact that since we don’t yet have emotional intimacy, physical intimacy seems extra phony to me. Phony sex feels as deep as scratching somebody’s itch.

  • • •

  So one morning after Craig had forgotten a very important story I’d told him the night before, I woke up early and wrote everything you’ve just read. I sent it to him at work. It was time. The truth is important. My subject line said, “You might not want to read this on the fly.”

  Two hours later, I got this reply:

  Dear Glennon,

  That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to read. So many emotions right now: confusion, depression, anger, not feeling worthy of our relationship or any relationship, not knowing what to do or where to start. When I read this I am trying to figure out what and why. What is the issue with me? Is it lack of long-term memory, short-term memory recall, concentration, distraction, stress, all of the above? And why? Why is this happening? Do I have issues with the fear of loss? Am I afraid you and the kids will leave so I don’t let my guard down and get emotionally attached? Probably. In every relationship I’ve hit the “get out of Dodge” button when my significant other got close. Had thoughts about doing that before Chase was born too, but God had different plans, which I’m tremendously grateful for.

  I’ve let you and us down, but I’m not going to give up. I love you too much for that. I will keep fighting until I get this right. I don’t want to be the old Craig who runs when things get hard or when feelings get involved. I need to break the cycle, I need to face my fears, and work on not falling into the same patterns. I need help.

  I am proposing a do-over. I want to sit down with you and re-hash out your life. I want to re-learn everything about you as if it’s our first time together. I will take copious notes (don’t laugh, I’m serious) to ensure I’m learning. I don’t want to miss anything and I will study it as if preparing for a final exam. There’s nothing more important to me in life than passing that final exam (which to me means a life-long intimately satisfied relationship with you). I can’t go back in time to the things I missed in 2001 or even last week, but I want a do over. Can we start over?

  Love, Craig

  Yes, I said. Yes, we can.

  And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

  —Anais Nin

  But things always get worse before they get better. Craig came home that night, and we couldn’t even see each other for all the sadness and heaviness and anger and fear between us. We spent most of the evening avoiding eye contact and went to bed early. The next day was a family birthday. We would have a house full of guests celebrating with us. It was too late to cancel, although we both wanted to. Craig kept disappearing from the party, and when I finally found him hiding upstairs in the bathroom, I said, “Are you okay?”

  He said, “No. I’m not okay. This is the worst day of my life. I feel so alone. You are all I have. But I want to be with someone who wants to be with me. And I’m afraid I’ll never be who you w
ant me to be. I’m afraid I should just let you go now. Because I feel like I’m trying out for a team I’m never going to make.”

  And he cried and cried. But I didn’t cry, not at all. I didn’t even feel tempted to cry, which scared me. I felt like I was watching Craig as a third party—a curious and sympathetic observer. Compassionate, but removed. That was the moment I realized that maybe some of our emotional intimacy issues were mine.

  I picked up Craig’s hand and said, “It’ll be okay. We have to go, there are presents waiting to be opened.” So Craig dried his eyes, and we went downstairs and cheered and clapped and sang and took lovely family pictures for Facebook.

  Craig and I sat next to each at church the next morning and listened to our friend and pastor talk about Easter. She said that for Christians, Easter means that people can rise from the dead, and that relationships can, too. That even the bush that looks withered and brittle and lifeless can bloom, if given enough time, enough tending, enough love. A new season will come. There is always hope. What looks like the end might just be the beginning.

  She said that Sunday might be right around the corner, but there is no fast forwarding through Friday and Saturday. The cross has to come before the resurrection. It’s the way of the world. And unless you bear witness to the truth, unless you face it head on and choose to open your heart to the pain, you won’t bear witness to the miracle either. If you run away from the crucifixion, you just might miss the resurrection.

  But I’m learning that the pain, the struggle that comes before the resurrection, can be a long and excruciating process.

  We started seeing a therapist, where, one day, not long ago, Craig delivered The News. The News that no spouse ever believes she’ll hear, even though so many of us do. The News was that our lack of intimacy was due to the fact that there had been a major betrayal of our marital vows, long ago and repeatedly. The News confirmed what I had felt all along. It was verification that the distance between our bodies and hearts and minds was real from the beginning. The distance was created by a solid wall of lies built between us. I knew we didn’t have the marriage we wanted and needed, but before The News, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why we couldn’t reach each other. The News opened my eyes wide, and hurt like hell.