Annabel Monaghan's Blog, page 5

Cords For Christmas

When my oldest son was two-years-old, he saw a toy in a catalog that fascinated him. He carried that catalog around wherever he went for six months, hypnotized by the little plastic animals that seemed to graze around a plastic tree. Because I was a person who had $20, I bought him that toy for […]

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Wake Me Up When The Election’s Over

We’re almost there, people. The election is just over the hump of the weekend, and the end is actually in sight. I tend to like a salacious and horrifying story, the inner-workings of human drama. But there’s no thrill in this election. It just feels prickly and uncomfortable, like the angora sweater my grandmother bought […]

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A Weekend Without My Family Wasn’t as Good as I’d Hoped

My husband took my kids away for the weekend to see the University of Tennessee play Florida in football. Apparently this is a big deal, and the trip was planned six months in advance. So for six months I had this little gem in my pocket: I’m going to have a whole weekend alone in […]

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Jigsaw Puzzles With Toddlers

If you’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle with a two year old, you know what it means to run through the entire range of human emotions. You hope, you cringe, you pull your hair out. At some point, you’ll be disgusted, elated and then relieved. It’s a worthy exercise, and its success depends on your […]

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Local Woman Gets Angry in Person

The other day I was stopped at an intersection, looking both ways as I’ve been told to do, when the woman in the car behind me started honking repeatedly to encourage me to take the plunge. I wasn’t in the mood for a fiery death, so I waited for the traffic to clear in both […]

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After Graduation, The Leaving Period

A year ago, a friend of mine whose child had just graduated from high school suggested I write an article about this big milestone. I thought about it and decided to wait. It would have been like writing a guidebook about Paris based on internet research, without actually going there and seeing the light, smelling […]

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High School Commencement Speech – First Draft

It’s kind of weird how Rye High School hasn’t asked me to deliver this year’s commencement address yet. I mean it’s a month away and these kinds of speeches don’t write themselves. I’m local, I’m verbose, the price is right. And heck, I’m going to be there anyway. Assuming they’ve been calling my landline or […]

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The Ins and Outs of the Thank You

One time someone did something really nice for me. I was full of gratitude so, naturally, I wanted to thank her. I could have immediately sent a text. I could have taken the extra 10 seconds and sent an email. I could have opened a drawer, pulled out a piece of stationary and written a […]

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My Dishwasher and Me

Sometimes the deepest friendships take a while to solidify. They don’t seem obvious at first. Maybe you have different interests, different backgrounds. Maybe one of you is a human being and the other is a dishwasher. Whatever the barriers are, they can often fall away once you spend a lot of time with someone. My […]

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Growing Up in a Marriage

Two hours married. So far so good.

When I was a newly engaged 25 year old registering for wedding gifts, I chose two sets of champagne glasses – fancy crystal ones and the cheaper, boxed ones for everyday. Yes, you read that right. In my mind, we’d definitely need everyday champagne glasses, like for Mondays.

Marriage isn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be 20 years ago when I stood up in front of all those people and promised to be married forever. Marriage was an idea attached to a big party. My boyfriend and all my friends would be there to see me in a really big dress. Turns out ‘married’ and ‘forever’ were concepts I hadn’t grown into.

I like to think of romantic relationships as progressing like life, starting in infancy and finally reaching maturity. When I met Tom I attached to him the way a toddler might attach to a strategically placed candy bar in the supermarket checkout aisle. You couldn’t have pried him out of my hands if you’d tried. I was afflicted by that mad, crazy infatuation that is probably the friendly cousin of the flu.

Like a little kid with no sense of object permanence, I could barely stand it if he left the room. I decided to marry him after about a week, but kept that to myself as best I could. We were engaged in 9 months, married 9 months later. I couldn’t understand why the whole thing took so long.

This engagement and newlywed period brought our relationship into adolescence. It’s that time when you’re pretty sure you know what life’s going to look like, mainly because you watched a lot of Dynasty as a kid. As I recall, this period was characterized by a lot of getting; getting jobs, getting engaged, getting presents, getting to go on a honeymoon. We fought about who forgot to fill up the ice tray and solved the problem by moving into an apartment with an icemaker. Why couldn’t everyone be as good at being married as we were?

(watch your step!)

Then life happens. There are beautiful things like children and long walks and a canon of inside jokes that don’t get old. But also banks fail and people get sick. Maybe one of you forgets to renew the other’s commuter parking permit. Whatever forces a relationship into adulthood is usually this other, darker side of the marriage vows, the ones we kind of mumbled through because they’d never apply to us. We’d be richer, not poorer, obviously. We had two sets of champagne glasses after all.

When life starts to happen, you learn a lot about who your partner is. It’s no longer Saturday night all the time. Adulthood can feel like a string of Mondays. Once you’ve moved through a patch of real life with someone, you learn a lot about the depth of their kindness, the strength of their integrity and the staying power of their sense of humor. It’s in this moment that you stop sweating stuff like the ice trays.

You may not have seen these qualities in the infancy of a relationship, as you were blinded by id and roses and that thing that feels like the flu. Twenty-one years ago, it never occurred to me to wonder if my new boyfriend would someday help take care of my disabled brother. Or how he’d react when my mom died. Or if he’d mind my sharing every thought I have about our family on the Internet, should the Internet turn out to be a real thing.

With so much good stuff invested over these twenty years, I’ve let go of the nonsensical way he manages the recycling. He’s let go of the whimsical way I put away groceries. Couples who can get through the commuter parking permit thing are above such pettiness. We don’t worry about whether we have things in common. I don’t golf and he doesn’t read, but we have the same address, the same kids, the same plumber who never shows up. At this point, we pretty much have the same life story.

Marriage, as it turns out, is more than just a really long, legally-binding date. We are a going concern, each other’s next of kin. Next week we’ll celebrate our 20th anniversary. It’s on a Wednesday so thank goodness for those everyday champagne glasses.

 

 

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