Uh oh ... football is starting ...
It is preseason - the first game - and I am turning to the page because I want to pitch a fit and demand a Netflix movie instead, or better yet, the Olympics.
But I won't, because the one thing you learn when you marry later in life is the art of compromise, and to be honest, I also sort of like football ... sometimes.
When Bill and I first met, I knew he loved football, but because we only dated on weekends and rarely on Sundays, I didn't really understand how much. It wasn't until our first real football season together that I realized that loving football meant watching Thursday night, Saturday, Sunday AND Monday night - every week.
At first, I was interested. It was new. I had never really learned how the game worked, and I enjoyed having my new husband teach me. I discovered that I could get really excited about a close game. I liked to cheer and scream and boo and generally express myself, and I liked that for the most part, my husband enjoyed my enthusiasm.
I warmed up to the players, too. Brette Favre - an underdog, carrying the Vikings almost to the Super Bowl. Peyton and Eli Manning - great human interest stories, helping me create sentimentality for the game. McNabb - a villain who showed just a tad too much arrogance in one game and earned a stubborn streak of disapproval lasting four seasons.
After a season of two to four days a week for five to six months, however, I reduced my viewing to a few select portions of the season. Clemson or Carolina games are a must with a family evenly split and equally passionate for both teams in this historical state rivalry. NFL football interests me late in the season when the final teams approach the Super Bowl.
The rest of the time, I turn to my writing pages or a book or Netflix on my laptop screen, and I don't complain. As I've said, compromise is important, and Bill doesn't complain (not loudly anyway) when I tune into American Idol, The Bachelorette, or So You Think You Can Dance. This is one of the easier passages we have navigated in this mid-life marriage we are creating.
Sometimes I just watch my husband as he watches football, and I learn even more of the vast continuum of activity that occurs beneath his seemingly unflappable exterior. He is quiet. He doesn't generally cheer. He just watches, and when a catch is really close or a tackle just barely missed, he turns his head just so or presses his hand deeply into his thigh while his shoulders rise slightly, and I know in these moments that he is every bit as passionate as I am.
I marvel at this, at the differences in our personalities, and I am grateful for the many ways these differences show themselves and for how we learn together to accept rather than resolve them - a very important distinction.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Friday, July 6, 2012
moods and hopes
I asked my husband the other day if he thinks I am bipolar. He said, "No, but you do seem to have highs and lows."
Understatement.
Yesterday I woke up perfectly fine, though perhaps a little tired as I didn't sleep well. I never sleep well but that is another post. By mid morning, I was holding a delicate balance between being cheerful and encouraging at the crisis ministry I direct, and secretly imagining that my hands were large enough to simply flick nearly everyone with whom I came into contact away from me like a bothersome fly and into the proverbial stratosphere.
It was that kind of day - all day.
Sadly, or perhaps comical depending on the mood or the moment, this is not unusual.
Mercurial might be a better description of the stage of life called menopause. At its most basic level the word or stage signifies the end of menses, a woman's fertile stage of life. There is so much beginning, however, that it is difficult to think of it all as an ending and perhaps this is why it is so volatile.
I know a woman who left her husband of more than 30 years after discovering through the many hormonal shifts in which clarity comes and goes that she had no longer knew him and perhaps never did. Their marriage, which began in an unspoken contract that cast her as a student to his personal brand of wisdom and later as a mother to his children, became a shell as these roles fell away and she began to discover a wisdom of her own. Now she writes poetry and travels the world.
I have taken an almost opposite route. I spent fourteen years single and mothering before marrying my husband right on the cusp of this passage. I eked out wisdom from myriad missteps and triumphs and now must try to discern what stays, what goes and what transforms in this beautiful and terrifying union while hormones rage and a new, yet unexplored crone wisdom creeps in.
I want to tell my kind husband to run, but I won't. I want to grow old with him as I dreamed in my younger days when I hoped for such a union.
Understatement.
Yesterday I woke up perfectly fine, though perhaps a little tired as I didn't sleep well. I never sleep well but that is another post. By mid morning, I was holding a delicate balance between being cheerful and encouraging at the crisis ministry I direct, and secretly imagining that my hands were large enough to simply flick nearly everyone with whom I came into contact away from me like a bothersome fly and into the proverbial stratosphere.
It was that kind of day - all day.
Sadly, or perhaps comical depending on the mood or the moment, this is not unusual.
Mercurial might be a better description of the stage of life called menopause. At its most basic level the word or stage signifies the end of menses, a woman's fertile stage of life. There is so much beginning, however, that it is difficult to think of it all as an ending and perhaps this is why it is so volatile.
I know a woman who left her husband of more than 30 years after discovering through the many hormonal shifts in which clarity comes and goes that she had no longer knew him and perhaps never did. Their marriage, which began in an unspoken contract that cast her as a student to his personal brand of wisdom and later as a mother to his children, became a shell as these roles fell away and she began to discover a wisdom of her own. Now she writes poetry and travels the world.
I have taken an almost opposite route. I spent fourteen years single and mothering before marrying my husband right on the cusp of this passage. I eked out wisdom from myriad missteps and triumphs and now must try to discern what stays, what goes and what transforms in this beautiful and terrifying union while hormones rage and a new, yet unexplored crone wisdom creeps in.
I want to tell my kind husband to run, but I won't. I want to grow old with him as I dreamed in my younger days when I hoped for such a union.
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