Marriage: Not for the Faint of Heart

Belief is built on an incredible mountain of lies. Now, that sounds bitter, and I'm feeling a mite pissy at the moment, it's true. But I mean this in earnest, not in bitterness. Previous generations simply did not strive for accuracy. We were taught how our parents thought things should be, how they wanted us to be, by way of statements that implied that ideal in their minds was how things were. Children construct their worldviews based on the teachings of their parents, and these worldviews are not at all fact-based but rather are constructed from a set of beliefs (albeit a very difficult-to-access set of beliefs, as ingrained in our thought patterns as they are). One of my beliefs, based on never witnessing any of my parents' marital challenges (and although I still don't know what they might have been I do know now that they must have had them), was that "good" marriages didn't have challenges. And, based on how disparagingly they spoke of others whose marriages failed, I also quite erroneously concluded that people with marital struggles shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. Oh, that fictitious world was so delightfully simple! And so nonexistent! I don't know if it will be of any benefit to my children to have less wool over their eyes, but it has been a great challenge to me to discover that all marriages of all kinds have difficult times, and that a failed marriage often is just too many things being too stressful without a break for too long. Condemnation on top of that is much worse than not helpful, it's cruel. Marital failure can happen to anyone. In fact, it's much easier to fail-- at anything in life, including marriage-- than to succeed. Success requires such constant uphill work, even when things are just in maintenance mode. With all we modern humans are trying to juggle it is physically impossible to keep it all going. The least squeaky wheel will get the least amount of oiling, until-- surprise! It rusts through and falls off, leaving you stranded in mud, utterly bewildered. (Yep, that's me, knee-deep in mud.)

Just for tonight, as a gift to myself, here's what I'm going to do: I'm telling the voices of my parents and anyone else in this highly dysfunctional culture that pass judgment left and right in my head to go f**k themselves and shut the hell up. I don't need their lectures anymore, thank you very much. I am a tired, broke, overworked mom of two and I am giving myself permission to be real and human and not have anything held together anymore because superglue I am not. So there.