Being married is hard. It's a life of compromise and acceptance. As couples grow together they change and grow as individuals from the life they experience together. There can be stresses of money, bills, parenting, schedules, work, just making time for one another, and the normal duties around the home. These "normal" marital circumstances have been the cause of more than one divorce.
From where I stand looking at the world around me, it seems that couples manage to keep things together and happy by investing in their relationship. They have common ground in their likes and interests. They plan for their families together. They spend time together doing things away from their kids. Many couples have date nights and weekends away. I think it helps keep them close.
Our family has division. It's a divide and conquer process. There are no date nights. There are no weekends away together. There are nights that we divide our time between one child or another covering each child's activities. There are weekends away with the one child who travels for trips or swim meets etc. There is no bonding couple time. There is no working on our relationship. There is no us time. There is division.
I'm not really sure how we've managed to coexist and keep our family intact. I think that the two of us still enjoy each other's company, although we have grown into two very different people than who we were when we entered this relationship. I'd say how we've grown, and who we've become, has a lot to do with how each of us has dealt with the circumstances which we've been given. I know normal married couples grow and change as they grow old and raise a family together and sometimes finding their common ground is challenging too, this is not unique to my marriage. What is unique to my marriage is all the unspoken stuff.
When I say unspoken stuff I mean, how we cope with the turmoil of emotions that surround the loss of our daughter and the challenges and struggles brought into our lives by our son's disabilities. The emotional baggage and heartache that comes with those two things. I think we've both made the best of it through the years, but there is so much that we don't speak about. Each of us copes very differently based on our personalities and who we've grown into as adults. They do not mesh for more than a moment hear or there. At times, it's almost too painful to speak of. Other times each of us are in two different places that don't mesh. There is anger and resentment at times. There's resolve to make the most of what we have. There is just being plain grateful to have life and experiences. But they rarely, if ever, come at the same time. That husband of mine is the only person who knows what I've lost along this journey and how painful it has been and the price each of us has paid. There is no explanation necessary for random tears. I think at times the random anger is mistaken as being directed at the other... but that can be due to what is mistaken for normal marital stress and discord.
It's like the continental divide in my home the majority of the time. So much unsaid business... the good and the bad. Yet it is our common ground. Now throw all that other regular marriage baggage on top of it and you've got a recipe for disaster. Yet here we are 25 years later still plugging along... but we've reached a place in that divide where the gap needs to close and it seems almost impossible.
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