Our fifth anniversary as a couple is nearing. I got to think--what lies ahead for both of us? Two people who once fell in love and begat two children--two important reasons why they have totally put aside their own needs and shifted their life’s patterns, so that they can enclose the little ones safely in between. Is there some reward for us in the offing? For us and us alone?My husband and I met while we were working in the same building in the south. He’s a web designer, and I…..well, it seemed that I had been a century old vampire, slaving behind the corporate desk all my life. One day, a towering guy who was young and brash and ready to embrace life head-on meets a pocket-sized woman whose only claim to fame are her proud appendages,and her disturbing brain. Nonetheless she too was cavalier and was never frantic about anything much. They fell in love, and voila, love took root, that's Gabriel and Sophia for you. But can you imagine what we had to do to make up for the remarkable disparity between us, the years that divided us, he being five years my junior? We certainly were not a match made in heaven, and God knows what concessions we had to put up with to find our very middle ground. It was not a walk in the clouds.
Children are supposed to be the underlying principle of our effort to stick together as a family, but sometimes when they come into our life, things don’t seem like they used to be. Suddenly, there are schedules to keep, deadlines to meet, mouths to feed, hours to wake up to, infantile emotions to check, undivided attentions to give. It’s all theirs, and hardly yours or his. You forget to be a wife or husband, to take care of your spouse, to act up fittingly in moments that you should take the edge off each other’s uncertainties, or show the least bit of tenderness and consideration.
It’s not as if I hadn’t. I know how it feels to come home from an endless traffic snarl, smog and the city blight. I sometimes wish that I could go to a place where I can shut off momentarily and enjoy some silence. Far from the car horns, from the earsplitting screams of my kids, from just about anything. But more importantly, from the unforgiving realities of this world. And have someone at your side, come hell or high water. I know he does too. That’s why I never want to censure him for his little acts of neglect. He needs what I need. But when he hates, I hate. When he loves, I love. It’s a work in progress and there are many loose ends to always tie up. It is not beyond me to do it, and do it right and good. I wish, though, that I don’t have to trudge alone. I wish that it wasn't always only me, but us.
I think that if love is to be made an action word, it is as my husband would one day tell me: that it is accepting, realizing, and affirming the other one. I am still of the same mind. If not always of the same heart. On our fifth year together, I feel that it’s nigh time for me to get doing these very verbs, and not just vacillating about them. A random person who refused to be called nice and yet unabashedly leaves nuggets of his wisdom once said, smile and the world will instinctively smile back at you.
So there, I am grinning from ear to ear....
