Love Is Negotiating Differences

Purple garden
Lo, There Be Snares along Love’s Garden Path

Jay and I learned love’s lessons slowly.  One of the first is that who you are in college and who you are as a married person are vastly different facets of the multi-dimensional self.

College Campus Loving

We met and fell in love while we were college students at different schools. For both of us, campus life focused on studying – going to classes, reading, researching, and writing. Tension and anxiety built up around exams and grade reports.

Campus couple on bency
Photo by Mojor Zhu

College can also be a time of great financial strain, but we were spared that anxiety. Jay’s parents handled the cost of university education for all five of their children.  And I had been fortunate to be accepted at St. Mary’s College on a work-scholarship program that covered tuition and dorm fees.

Due to such good fortune, the time Jay and I shared was “downtime.” Social life was our release from the relentless march toward a degree.  We got together to have fun. It could be low-key – coffee, cigarettes and long conversations.  It could high excitement – a big football game or extravagant ball.  To be together meant winding down, de-stressing, relaxing.

Living Together Reality

Becoming married radically altered our way of being together. We stopped dating.  We didn’t even realize that we had done it. Because we came home to the same place every night starting with our wedding night, the necessity of meeting somewhere simply slipped away.  And stealthily with it went the perks of actual dating.  At first, about half the nights in the week, one or the other of us was working or at school. But even when home, we were no longer necessarily ‘together’ in the way we had been while dating. We shared space, but not time.

Couple in small apartment
Photo by Soroush Karimi

We did the stuff people do “at home.” – cook, dishes, laundry, pay bills, read, iron and get work projects completed. Going out wasn’t an option because we were no longer supported by our parents or by scholarship funds. Our cost of living was now our own. Our salaries couldn’t be stretched to cover eating out or entertainment.  The responsibilities of maintaining our place and budgeting our money ate into the little bit of free time we did have.  So, even a cheap date like a walk in the park sounded more like a chore than a treat.

As for curling up and having a long conversation over a nice cup of cocoa, we slowly but steadily realized that away from the heady atmosphere of campus life, our most passionate interests were worlds apart – quite literally.

Being Politically Correct
Chicago Picasso
Photo by Solstice Hannan

Jay had cut his wisdom teeth on politics. For three generations, Ward/Brophy family members had been active in the Chicago Democratic party. Passionate about civic involvement, they campaigned for and won elective offices in city, county and state government. Dozens of others in the family, men and women, held non-elective government positions.  Politics wasn’t just their work.  It was their life. Every noon hour they met for two-hour lunches to discuss the “business” with one another and other city and county officials. They went out together after work before returning home for dinner.  They played golf together twice a week. Many belonged to the same Catholic parishes.

Whenever and wherever these gatherings occurred, the topic was always the same – politics.

Jay could hardly be blamed for regularly bringing this same subject to our tiny kitchen table.  Unfortunately, when he did, my eyes glazed over.

I could as easily be mesmerized as anyone by a charismatic figure like John Kennedy, but the day-to-day running of civic affairs could not hold my attention for very long before my imagination had wandered off to faraway lands.

A Land Far, Far Away

France, for instance, with her glittering capital city and romantic wine country, or the fjords of Norway. As much as Jay loved the here and now of the Chicagoland political scene, I loved just about anywhere else.  Who should run for Alderman of the 29th precinct just couldn’t hold a candle to my daydreams of an African safari.  Any time I passed a travel agency, I slipped in to scoop up any free brochures.  The vivid photos of high waterfalls and deep valleys, barren deserts and tangled jungles entertained me as I rattled along on the bus ride back to our apartment.

When I tried to get Jay to look over the brochures with me, he’d smile, give me a kiss and remind me that the electric bill was due.  Often this slightly chiding remark preceded an announcement that the next evening we needed to pass out election pamphlets to commuters as they crossed the Jackson Avenue bridge toward Union Station.

I sighed, but I met him on the bridge at five o’clock the next evening because deep in my heart I was very proud of his earnest engagement. I knew that being politically involved was honorable and that I needed to do my part.  But who could blame me if, while I smiled and thrust leaflets into reluctant hands, I pretended that the Chicago River was the Thames?

Have you had a time when you and someone you held dear had vastly different dreams?  What love lessons did you learn?

Safe Sex and Family Planning – Twin Oxymorons

Hearts and flowers Valentine's
Happy Belated Valentine’s Day

There it goes – another Valentine’s Day, done and dusted. The annual celebration of the lusty side of love, the hearts and flowers, the candy and wine, the romance and the sex has come and gone, mending and breaking hearts as it has done for as long as I can remember.

On the surface, it’s a holiday centered on mawkish sentimentality, but seething underneath vibrates a current of hot passionate physical desire for nothing less than ending the day with a night of ardent sexual coupling. For most couples in the 21st century such pleasures, however robust, fall into the category of “safe sex.”

The “safe sex” myth
Couple at bonfire
Photo by Wesley Balten

But really? Is there such a thing? Half a century ago, in our early years as a dating couple safe sex meant “avoid getting pregnant.” Only refraining from genital intercourse offered anything like “safe sex.” I remember being warned in high school health class about possible infections, but because the teachers stayed fairly vague about intercourse itself, the cause of infection remained a mystery – and the  one sure way to avoid it – just say no, of course.

The problem with drawing a line in the sand and dropping a curtain on the other side was –  it raised our curiosity.  Just how close could we get? What was safe and what wasn’t?   As Catholic kids, we had an even more nebulous rule to follow, “Don’t do anything that was an occasion of sin.” To follow such a dictate meant being able to name the “sin” and intuit the “occasion.” Clearly, the wrongful act was “going all the way,” but how far along the way could one go before the “occasion of sin” aspect kicked it? What was the point of no return?  The moral dictum assumed one.  If you could always stop short of the sin itself, then nothing could constitute an “occasion of sin,” which is a pre-state that once achieved made sin inevitable.

If all that rattles in your head like stones in a tin can, it’s no wonder. Much of Catholic moral reasoning during our youth felt like running on a hamster wheel – all noise and getting nowhere.

Now nearly a quarter of the 21st century is already history, but what constitutes “safe sex” is not much clearer than it was in 1962. Since then, the societal mores shift dubbed the “sexual revolution” has vastly altered our understanding of with whom we are free to be sexually intimate.

Contraceptives
Photo by Reproductive Health Coalition

Also changed is the age and the life stage at which young people become sexually active. Centuries of caution were set aside in less than a decade because the widespread availability of a “birth-control” pill caused women and their partners to believe they could decide if and when they would become pregnant, independent of their decision to have sexual intercourse.

a house of cards

As Jay and I discovered very early in our marriage, however, there is no easy fast track to safe sex, and “family planning” depends on the architecture of chance. By 1964, Enovid, the first readily available reversible birth control, was tentatively approved by some of the Catholic Church’s pastoral advisors.  It was argued that it helped couples practice “natural family planning” because it made it possible for a woman to pinpoint when she would have her menstrual cycle. Their argument convinced us and my doctor.  I began taking the pill the month before we married.

None of us knew that the medication had been rushed into production despite concerns about serious side-effects.  In 1964 Pope Paul VI convened the Commission on Population, the Family and Natality. Many representatives to the commission urged the pill’s acceptance by the church.

Surgery sutures on belly
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

Jay and I blithely gave ourselves over to a blissful life of frequent and, as we believed, now “safe” sexual intimacy.  But eight months after our wedding, I was hospitalized for major surgery on both ovaries.  I lost all by a fraction of my left ovary to tumors. My surgeon warned me against taking Enovid. Even more emphatically, he told us our chances of conceiving a child had been greatly reduced. Despite the fact that had hoped to postpone having a family until we finished school, he counseled us against using birth control of any kind.  We needed, he said, to be open to whatever possibilities for conception that might randomly occur, given the injuries to my reproductive organs.

We were not the only victims. In the next two decades, birth control medications would be linked to the risk of blood clots, heart attack, stroke, depression, weight gain and loss of libido as well as the risk of ovarian cancer, iron deficiency anemia, and pelvic inflammatory disease.

In 1968  Pope Paul VI ultimately declared his opposition to the pill in the Humanae Vitae encyclical. Jay and I never again returned to the practice of birth control, but our faith in two institutions that had been the bedrock of our youth – science and the Catholic Church was profoundly shaken.  The pope had made his declaration against the advice of the married Catholic on the commission. In the new climate of the church since Vatican Council II, laypersons knew their voice counted.  To be so blatantly swept aside when the issue at hand was clearly in their sphere of expertise called into question for us and many others, the church’s moral authority not just on family planning, but about other deeply divisive concerns as well.

life’s great maybes

Jay and I would remain members of the Catholic Faith Community, but with an expectation that hierarchy could and should sometimes be questioned for the good of the community as a whole.

As for the small community – the family unit, we would discover that adding the word “planning” to the word “family” represented at best wishful thinking.  Families aren’t designed, they are astonishingly serendipitous. And we would learn to live by the motto, “We’ll know more later – maybe.”

8 children peering through banister
Phots by National Cancer Institute

“It’s a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn’t even know you were aiming for.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

I’d truly love to hear from you about experiences, momentous or trivial, that turned out to be so different than you expected, they changed your life in some important way.

Please fill in the box.

 

Never Doubt, Spring Will Come

Lighthouse on frozen beach
It’s Not the Cold That Bothers Me
Elsa on cake
Photo by Raychan

Long before the animated film, Frozen, took the world by storm, I frequently claimed, “Being cold doesn’t bother me.” Tropical climes have never called to me. Summer has always been my least favorite season, the best part about it is that’s it is just a season, not a year-round condition.

Winter’s shoulder seasons, Spring and Fall, delight my senses and my heart. But, ah Winter itself! I still get a childlike thrill from the first snowfall in late autumn.  Snowy days call to me to abandon my indoor tasks and go for a walk. Snow days close the schools and become spontaneous holidays for everyone with enough to see that earth is calling a halt, begging her children to slow down.

The magic works for me every year until February when suddenly some inner busybody gets going and whines, “Enough, already, what happened to the sun.”  The reality hits that winter with its chilly winds and bleak skies, its slushy, dirty piles of old snow or puddles of sloppy, umber mud will hold sway for another month. I begin to resent my friend for being a hog, for demanding more than his share of the year.

Let’s Get Out of Here
Boots in mud puddle
Photo by Daiga Ellaby

And the yearning to “leave it all behind” takes over as it has every February since the early years of my marriage. Before we became parents, Jay and I invented a yearly ritual that we dubbed, “Looking for Spring.”  This trek was motivated by the simplistic notion that places farther south than our Chicago home had to be warmer, and, therefore, must welcome spring before it arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan. We both worked for the county, so we’d grab Lincoln’s Birthday or Washington’s Birthday (they were two separate holidays in Illinois in our early married years), take one or two vacation days, and a weekend, and start driving south, determined to keep going until we “found” Spring.

This quest was necessarily a purely personal endeavor because it’s close to impossible to find a consensus on just what constitutes Spring and when it begins. We had no clear-cut definition in our heads. Our hearts, we knew, would tell us when we crested a horizon and found Spring waiting on the other side. Usually, this meant true color of some kind – not grey or brown shades. It

yellow flowers in field
Photo by Kumiko Shimizu

could be the sight of a hill of daffodils or crocuses or just the almost neon green covering a newly budding tree. Bright colors were not the only signifiers.  Softness was the other. Winter edges are crisp, clean, dark.  Spring spreads a haze over the landscape, a light dusting, a young girl slipping a frothy gauze dress over bare limbs.

Let’s Dream

An easier world by far to navigate than the slush and snow we’d left behind, it assuaged us, making our thoughts and feeling more pliable, expanding our possibilities. Our conversations as we sped along were dream dialogues.  Wouldn’t it be fantastic, we speculated, to be always on the road, never quite knowing what the next bend would reveal? We blocked out different scenarios.  We focused often on the possibility that once Jay graduated from law school, he would apply to the diplomatic core.

1950s family dinner
Photo by Museums Victoris

When Jay had been in high school, his father had been offered a position in Saudi Arabia.  The possibility of moving to such an exotic location thrilled Jay and he urged his dad to seriously consider the move.  He spent many a family dinner mounting his arguments, trying to engage his sibling in his excitement so that they too would campaign for this “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity. All to no avail.

His mother would have been horrified to move to another state, let alone another country.  Her life was tightly bound to that of her parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Her family had lived in Chicago for three generations and were pillars of Chicago’s Irish Catholic bastion. Life away from that community was unthinkable.  Also, she had heard how women were treated, or so she said, in the Middle East.  None of that for her, thank you very much.

Now that Jay found himself plodding along the expected path – albeit as a

Building with lots of nations' flags
Photo by Oleh Aleinyk

lawyer, not a doctor – he chafed at the confinement.  If his Dad couldn’t break loose, maybe he could.  I couldn’t help but foster those dreams.  I had never meant to fall in love in college.  In my best-case scenario (girlhood dream, that is), if I married at all, it would be after age thirty.  In the meantime, I would travel the world as a foreign correspondent for some, as yet unnamed news service.  In high school and college, I narrowed down those travel dreams to places where the first language was my beloved French, which would I dreamed make it possible to span the globe as I worked.

Love, however, is one of those life events that happen while you are making other plans. Jay had come into my life and once he was there, I couldn’t imagine life without him.  My hopes of becoming a journalist had been set aside, but being a diplomat’s wife sounded like a close runner-up.

So, we talked, dreamed, drove and somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee, we would finally find Spring. Checking into a cheap motel that accepted animals (Champagne, our tabby cat traveled with us.), we’d settled down for a few days to breathe in as much warm air and flower perfume as possible before turning around and heading back to our hometown, where flora remained frozen until late March.

Reality Check

By the time, the first crocuses and daffodils appeared outside our Chicago window, we’d forgotten our southern dreams. Studies and work absorbed our daily grind, and once again the fear that we’d remain forever infertile sidetracked our blither imagination.

What notions grab you when Spring Fever takes hold?  Please share it right here in the blog.

“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
― Mark Twain

Mountain Spring
Photo by Mak

‘Til Death Do Us Part

Woman smoking by window
“And the two shall become one flesh”

As a young bride, naive and overly sentimental, this quote meant that once married, Jay and I would no longer be two separate people, but a new being, a couple melded into a relationship so intricate that we would be, if not literally one individual, then emotionally, at least, one being.

My thinking was an eery, contemporary twist on the words of an ancient prophet.   In his as in most ancient cultures, a person’s identity was inextricably entwined with that of their extended family, the clan. Individuality, as we understand it, fell outside the common perception. Rather, each person existed at all times in relation to others, most importantly to the other members of their family.

Large Indian Family
Photo by Martin Adams

Those families were extensive.  A given household consisted of many sons of a single patriarch living within one compound with their wives and children. All of them were of “one flesh.” The same blood ran in all their veins. Within the extended family, every choice was meant to benefit all because they were “one.”

When a man and woman married, the family recognized the wife as now one of the family, one of their “flesh.” And thus, she and her husband became one flesh, members of the same family unit with all its inherent obligations and benefits – and enemies.

Modern Daydreams

As you’ve undoubted guessed, the impressionable twenty-two-year-old woman in my wedding photos had no inkling of this erudite interpretation.  I believed that being married would cure loneliness.  After all, I was “one flesh” with another person.  He would be in some sense with me all the time.

Holding on
Photo by Brooke Cagle

I wasn’t unaware, of course, that work would keep us apart several hours of every weekday, and that in the mid-twentieth century this separation also meant no communication.   In addition during the first two years of our union, we were both in school.  Attending class, studying and commuting added to our time apart.

I had failed, however, to calculate that this schedule would mean endless days during we might not share even one meal. The only time we often “spent together” was in bed – and most of that sleeping. And even if I had more accurately gauged how few hours we would actually spend interacting with one another, I was much too young and inexperienced to evaluate ahead of the fact how utterly forlorn I would feel.  I couldn’t realize that the existential bliss of being married could not override the actuality of my isolation.

Long Lonely evenings

Evenings were the worst. Coming into a quiet, dark and empty apartment, I’d stand, hand on the door to the front hall closet, unwilling to shed my jacket.  I wanted more than anything to turn around and head back out. But in those early days, I had nowhere to go.  I had left my friends behind first in high school and then at St. Mary’s.  Because I worked toward my bachelor’s degree by piling up credits attending several different city universities on various evenings, I had no chance to make new friends. My day job as a caseworker for a foster care agency took me all over Chicago but didn’t offer opportunities to build relationships with co-workers.

woman on kitchen floor
Photo by Radu Florin

In those pre-Starbucks days, hanging out at a coffee shop wasn’t an option and it absolutely never occurred to me to head to a bar. Looking back, I wonder why, and the only reason that pops into my head is I had never known anyone who hung out in taverns or bars.  Growing up I’d only eaten in a restaurant a handful of times.  In college, there had been girls that “got away” with faking an I.D. to go barhopping – at least, I’d heard about them.  I didn’t know them.  No, I didn’t barhop because I was a “good girl.” To do so was simply out of my skill set.

But coming home to an empty place was also well out of my range of experience. I grew up in a home that was the antithesis of empty. My mother stopped working outside the house when I was born and remained a stay-at-home mom until my youngest sibling went to high school twenty-nine years later.  In those years, especially as a pre-teen, I yearned for solitude, something I could only find by hiding on the old glider behind the big coal-burning furnace in our dungeon-like basement.

At college, the only time I spent by myself was in the toilet stall – and that doesn’t really count because it was a communal bathroom with several stalls, a row of showers, and two bathtubs.  The rest of the time, whether working in the dining room, going to classes, or heading for mixers at Notre Dame, other girls surrounded me.

Votive lights, statue in chapel
Photo by Josh Applegate

Going to the chapel was the only way I could get some “alone” time.  Of course, I wouldn’t be the only one there, but, at least, each of us withdrew to a quiet corner to pray. Yet, although never alone, I was often lonesome.  Part of a big community, but belonging to no one person.

Now I was married, a life state I expected would rid me of lonesomeness.  At last, I thought, I’d be living with one person for whom I’d be the first priority and with whom I could do everything.  Instead, evening after evening I walked into an empty living room and then wandered into a cold kitchen, lost in dreams about the delicious, mouth-watering meals we would have together someday – when we were done with school  -when we could start a family.

feline rescue

But those days were a long way off. So, I  chose a slightly modified route to comforting companionship.

girl and cat
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

I adopted a kitten.  Here was one dream I could actually make happen.  I’d never been allowed to have a cat because my mother loathed them.  I never knew why.  But this, I realized, gazing around the small apartment was my very own home.  I could make the rules.  I ruled that Jule could have a cat.  And she did.

It wasn’t a perfect answer.  I still had a lot to learn about overcoming loneliness, but my little grey tabby, Champagne, helped a lot.  She gave me someone to care for.  She took me out of myself when Jay wasn’t home.  And when he was home, she delighted us both.  Nurturing her together activated the true process of “becoming one flesh.” Her life and being were equally precious to both of us.  To  love someone else equally and together was one of the most important Lessons that Love taught us.

Feeling lonely in a relationship or in a crowd is a common human experience.  How have you coped when this happened to you? Let us know.

Being alone is very difficult.” – Yoko Ono