To Stick

So I’m sitting here on my day off, watching “Eat, Pray, Love” and thinking about marriage. At its core, the movie is reprehensible. It’s about a scared woman who marries someone she shouldn’t (who I’m sure is lovely on some level but is predictably portrayed as a buffoon) and so abandons him to travel around the world with what seems to be an inexplicably large amount of money. And of course, it’s making me think about the fact that I am up to my eyeballs in a 15-year relationship (and almost 10-year marriage) and that IT is the adventure of my lifetime. I don’t need to travel around the world to find meaning in a plate of pasta or on a beach. I find meaning in the life I’m building day by day with my husband.

And dear god, is it SOME life. It is unbelievable what we have been through in these first ten years of our marriage:

• The world fell apart on 9/11
• I walked away a career I’d been building for 20 years
• I went completely crazy and had to be hospitalized for over 2 straight years
• I was arrested
• We were POOR
• We moved every 2 years on average - once, across a continent, leaving everyone we knew
• We learned we could not make babies and fell apart for a while
• We bought a house
• We built 2 careers with some success
• We decided that our families are unsalvageable and destructive forces in our lives
• We discovered that one of us has an orphan disease
• We spent SO MUCH money on therapy…

Lying in bed last night, we both discussed what to make of all this. A curse? A self-fulfilling prophesy? Behavioral patterns passed down by previous, suck-y generations? That one sounded the most likely. And how to proceed? Bury-head-in-sand sounded good as did pull-covers-over-head. But the amazing thing is that we both came to the same answer on our own.

We get up each day and continue to try to make a life.

Nothing else makes any sense. All other options are worse. I’ve tried them - I know. How amazing to roll over in bed and discover that the person lying right there next to you thinks the exact same thing as you do. And, on top of everything, loves you right back. THAT is an adventure.

(And funny enough, that’s what Julia Roberts discovers by the end of the film too…)