This has been a really awful semester, for a number of reasons: difficult students, budget cuts and the attendant layoffs at my husband's university, crazy over-packed schedules for kids and parents alike--and now, today, the sudden death of my husband's dear colleague. If this weren't the last week of the term, I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
It's funny, though, that difficult periods like this function primarily to make me grateful for my family. I come home from a terrible day on campus--and there's my husband, reminding me of all the ways in which I'm fabulous. Last week, my daughter had a really terrible day--and I watched with great pride as her little brother worked to cheer her up. We're a team, me and my family. We take care of each other without being asked to do so. We enjoy each others' company.
I sometimes marvel at the fact that I've been lucky enough to wind up living with this group of people. And then I have to remind myself that family doesn't happen by accident: we are who we because my husband Mike and I worked hard to make it this way. Even before our kids were born, family was the priority. I turned down the first full-time job I was offered after I'd earned my MFA because taking it would have meant living two hours away from Mike for at least a year. Two hours might not seem like a great distance--many married couples live with much more distance between them, and that's certainly not uncommon in the academic world--but I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. Many people thought I was nuts, given the state of the academic job market, but I really didn't care. I wanted to live with my husband, my family, more than I wanted to be a professor.
That turned out to be one of the smartest decisions we've ever made, over the course of our marriage. We've often talked about how our lives could have changed directions if we'd made a different choice at that moment; none of the outcomes we've imagined are good ones. Sometimes I think that the main reason Mike and I ended up getting married is that we're both supremely practical people. We don't do what other people think is best for us; we do what we know is best for us. These things are often at odds with each other, it seems, but we rarely worry about that. Sometimes we actually take pleasure in doing what others find crazy. But we never do the crazy thing for its own sake.
For instance: we'd been good friends for a few months, but we had dated, officially, for just a few weeks before Mike moved in with me. We got engaged shortly after that, and we married six months later. Essentially, we went from getting to know each other to getting married in less than a year. No one thought this was a good idea--no one except Mike and I. We didn't get married so quickly in order to shock anyone: we were genuinely excited to get married, be married, and stay married. We knew we'd found the person we wanted to do that with, so waiting didn't make any sense.
Though it did make sense, we decided, to put off having kids. We both wanted children; we had no doubts about that. But we enjoyed hanging out with each other, living a grown-up life. My sister had three children, and we saw how our lives would change once our own were born. So we waited six years, until we were tired of seeing movies and trying new restaurants and traveling, all the things that couples without children can do. Many people had told us that waiting so long, getting settled in the life of a childless couple, would make it harder to adjust to having a baby in the house. Still, our adjustment to parenthood was no more (or less) difficult than any of our friends', as far as I could tell. And once we got over the initial shock, we loved being parents--because that was a choice we'd made together.
It hasn't all been wedded bliss, of course. Mike and I have been very poor--we once had exactly $7 with which to buy groceries for the last week of the month. We've lived in a cruddy basement apartment with fungus growing on the walls. We've had sick kids and no health insurance. All those moments in our life were difficult, but at every point on the time line of our marriage we were doing what we thought was best. Going to grad school in Columbia meant moving away from the support network of our extended family; it meant ignoring people who told us we were neglecting our children by putting them in day care; it meant believing the time we spent as a family in the evening was worth the time we lost in building friendships with other grad students and connections with faculty members who might help us out professionally. None of those things were easy, but we worked through them because we believed they'd pay off. We believed that together.
I went into my marriage expecting nothing in particular, except to be married to Mike for the rest of my life. I didn't expect that we'd end up in a particular income bracket, in a particular sort of house, or even in a particular state. I'm not sure either of us expected to have everything we have now. We just signed on for the ride, wherever it took us.
The anniversary of our first date, May 5th, is coming up next week. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "How can you remember that?" Well, it was Cinco de Mayo. That helps. But it was also the very first time I remember thinking "This is exactly who I've always wanted to be." I was sitting beside Mike on a picnic bench at that moment, snuggled up to him against the chill of a late spring evening. I was in love. I was feeling optimistic. I was absolutely happy. And still, even after all these years, that's who I am--and exactly who I want to be.
