A column post, worth reading

Leaving the Carillon wedding reception center for our honeymoon.
Earlier in the day . . . posing for pictures after the ceremony. Our photographer was a family friend and our photos aren't great. And it didn't help that I had my long hair cut, like, a week before our wedding. Who knows what I was thinking of!

I don't often endorse a particular newspaper column or column post, but I read one today that I think is worth the perusal. I've never even read this guy's column before . . . I was simply drawn to the title "A marriage that lasts only 72 days? I can relate to that". The column can be found here. ANY of you who have been married for more than 72 days (or maybe 90, 121, or 365 days) will be able relate to Joe Walker's column!
I got thinking back to the early days and months, even years, of my marriage. I mean lets face it, courtship and "falling in love" don't prepare you for marriage, any better than the garden of Eden prepared Adam and Eve for the lone and dreary world! Oh my . . . did I just use the words "lone" and "dreary" to describe early marriage? Let me explain.
Brent and I had a kind of unusual courtship, which I will not detail at this moment. We were apart for most of the summer, just before we got married, because Brent was in California selling the Illustrated Scriptures (which I had also been doing until we got engaged and I went home to get ready for our wedding). However, we were absolutely giddy with love and sugar coated thoughts of each other (well, at least I was . . . Brent's thoughts were probably happy ones of 26 years of celibacy finally coming to an end!). Whatever. We got married on August 17th, 1976 and went on a honeymoon to San Fransisco and then Lake Powell (with his brother and some of his friends . . . story for another post) and then we settled into married life in a basement apartment in Orem, Utah. I was a junior at BYU and Brent was in a doctoral program at BYU and he was teaching some classes. Our apartment was new but it was a typical basement apartment . . .it felt dark, less than roomy and kind of isolated. We were just barely into the semester when Brent dropped out of school to pursue some entrepreneurial stuff with his brother. These business pursuits often took him out of town, sometimes for as much as two weeks at a time. Sometimes I'd go spend some time with Brent's family but they lived in Brigham City (a two hour drive) and I was in school. I can still remember how alone and sad I felt, sometimes, in that basement apartment. I didn't have any close friends near by, there were no such things as DVD players, personal computers, facebook, cell phones or such. Most communication with my family in Canada was done by hand-written letters and the occassional expensive phone call. I can remember going outside and watching an ant hill in the un-landscaped front yard or watching the black widow spiders that had taken up residence outside our little windows in the windowsills. I named those spiders Myra and Lolita and I watched them by the hour from inside the apartment. Get it . . . I had BUGS for company! Sometimes I felt like the loneliness would swallow me whole. Even when Brent was home, he was occupied by lots of other things besides me. Imagine that. He didn't want to spend every waking hour just being with me. And I'm sure, just like Joe Walker, that there were days when I cried and found myself wondering what on earth I had done, and how I could get out of it! I mean, if I had been single at that point, at least I would be living with room-mates and enjoying something that resembled a social life! Sigh.
Now, of course you realize that I'm dwelling on the lonely and difficult times of my early marriage to make a point. ALL of us, who are married, are going to sometimes go through feelings of being lonely, sad, stuck, unappreciated, unloved, bored or even betrayed. Welcome to marriage in the lone and dreary world. But 35 years and many growing and wonderful experiences later, I realize that I would have missed out on so much had I "opted out" on day 72, or week 72 or even month 72! It's not been easy but I think Brent and I absolutely agree that it's been worth it.
I wish to note here that I'm not writing this in criticism of anyone who finds themselves having to suffer through a difficult separation or divorce. Sometimes there simply isn't another choice and my heart hurts for my friends and family members who have had to navigate those particular waters. I guess Joe Walker's description of his one particular night when he found himself wandering "what on earth have I done" just touched something deep inside of me. Touched me deeply enough to want to write about it.
One more thought about Joe Walker's column. Joe Walker says he's 56 years old. I looked at his picture on his column. Fifty-six? Is that what fifty-six looks like? I'm fifty-five! Holy crow! Moment of awakening to the cold, hard facts! I'm not really middle-aged anymore (not unless I'm planning to live until I'm 110 years old). I'm a grandmother with wrinkles and a flabby belly and mostly gray hair and a pronounced limp who qualifies for senior discounts from certain business establishments! But I guess all of that is for another post. Til next time . . .