Of Marriage, Vulnerability and Knowing That I Was Lost…

I’ve been married for 28 years. I have 3 children.

Though I haven’t always felt this way, presently I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.

I like being married. I like being a mother.

It’s hard work both as a wife and as a mother.

The challenges of motherhood are pretty generic. The ones I encounter as a wife have less to do with my husband. He’s great, loving, loyal, more than I could have ever expected.

At 49 I struggle with feeling alone, not as a mother, but more as a wife.

I wish I had more people with whom to relate, women like me, who love their husbands, believe in the institution of marriage despite all the naysayers and the terrible happenings with celebrities and people I know, who for myriad reasons have lost both their spouses and the hope in love and giving and the experience of receiving loyalty.

It’s sad when a person attributes a recent success and achievement to their spouse being at their back, such as Sandra Bullock did only to learn days later that that other person whom they loved–he and in many cases, she–was not really in their corner and had not been there in quite some time.

It is sad.

And yet this kind of occurrence has become commonplace.

With each incident like that which takes place I feel myself more of a minority in a culture where love and commitment to one person through the act of marriage has become less of what occurs and more of what people admire from a distance and seek to understand.

I suppose that’s why I write. To give myself company in the act of challenging the status quo that says, “No good deed goes unpunished–even in the act of marriage and with family.”

I believe in love. I also believe that it is hard to love–others and yourself–and even those who matter most–other and yourself.

How many times have we lashed out in anger at our spouse, not because she or he truly did something that was hateful or terribly wrong, but because we felt vulnerable?

Marriage is about vulnerability, accepting that it is inherent to the human condition and that it frightens us terribly.

And yet sharing our vulnerabilities, acknowledging that we have them propels us to seek partners with whom to share our lives, life long and possibly for eternity.

Without my husband having entered my life I would have remained lost.

Much of the truth I to which I have awakened has occurred within the confines of our marriage, not that I learned everything from him. Having a marriage, a family, someone in my corner has enabled me to open up to the uncertainties of life, see the dark spots within me and enter them.

Marriage saved me from myself.

Part and parcel to this taking place, this transformation, I had to know that I was lost.