We fight sometimes. My husband and I. I do not mean that fists are raised and people are pushed around, I mean that we throw weighty words around like stones. We fight sometimes. Sometimes it’s irrational, over things of little significance. A means of tossing frustrations up into the air and off of chests that have grown heavy. And sometimes, though thankfully not often, it is about something fundamental - a disagreement over deep values that are important to one or the other. On those occasions our conflict is more about finding a space where we can both reside in compromised peace. A safe haven for both our beliefs.
We have “tiffs”. Conflicts. Overridingly, I feel this is normal. What couple, married or otherwise, doesn’t occasionally snarl at each other? Who amongst us has not, from time to time, gotten out-of-all-proportion-angry because someone did not hang up their coat yet again, or for the nine-thousandth time, did not leave enough parking space in the driveway? We all have. Conflict is normal. Within our marriage, we are both strong willed. Headstrong. Taurus Bull and Leo Lion, both opinionated and self possessed. And both quite invested in our own sense of what is right and how things should be. Sounds silly, hey? Often it is. Sillier still, neither of us wants to be seen as giving in before the other. This becomes paramount to cutting off your nose to spite your face during our most unreasonable times. Whatever the reason, there are times that we disagree and the after effects become out of proportion, out of REASON, with what the initial conflict was.
In short, sometimes we have a difficult time getting over it.
We recently found ourselves embroiled in a hot war of words. Decidedly unhappy with each other, it was not a feeling that was there in the morning and gone by evening. It was a feeling that lasted. It stayed, in fact, for several days, erecting a camp within angry hearts. We were hardly speaking. Instead, we had hobbled to our separate corners where we resentfully crouched, licking our wounds. For me, on the occasions when that has happened, I get sick to my stomach. My insides quiver in panic, like a bird is trapped in my chest. When you are the child of divorced parents, of blended families, you come to dread any conflict within a marriage. When you grow up as I had, fights within marriages, well, they become catastrophic. People separate and families shatter like shrapnel. I was existing in THAT place, where I felt vulnerable and scared.
On this instance, it is telling that I cannot remember what we bickered about. How important was it, if there is no memory of the cause? I do not recall what we said to bring about the aching distance, the angry and resentful feelings between us, but nonetheless, they were there, like the residue from a bad dream, the one you cannot remember but fills your belly with bile. Somewhere in the midst of all of this drama, a lululemon bra and a bottle of beard oil became quite significant.
The lululemon bra. A cast-off from Morgan. It had a tiny rip in the seam that needed to be sewn. Despite the seamstress stereotype, the wife in this marriage does NOT sew. She hates it. She is perfectly capable of it, perfectly able to thread the sewing machine, has even produced curtains and table runners. However, she would rather do just about anything, join the International Space Station for instance (I hate to fly), than sit in front of a pile of sewing. The husband however, again despite the seamstress stereotype, enjoys the sewing machine. I think that for Boyd it forges a connection to his grandparents, both of which spent dark, winter evenings in front of a quilting frame, piecing together beautiful quilts that can only be described as works of art. They together, pierced the tiniest of hand sewn stitches, with infinite patience and care. So, Boyd uses HIS sewing machine, the one which Morgan and I had gifted him several Christmases before, to make repairs and fixes to our household rips and tears. Several days prior, I given him this bra to repair for me. He had determined that it was probably a little beyond what he was capable of doing, requiring some nips and tucks and reseaming, and had placed it in a pile of things to be done.
The beard oil. We had been searching for the woman who produces Boyd’s favorite beard oil. Since retirement he had grown a goatee, after years of an RCMP enforced prohibition on facial hair that I was, quite truthfully, very happy existed. In an abrupt turnaround, I evolved from despising his occasional moustache to sort of liking the goatee. Enough to proclaim that if he were going to have it, it may as well be scruffy. In fact, the more goatish it became, the more I liked it. Months before, while wandering the Farmer’s Market, I had discovered a stall that produced, among other things, a selection of beard oils. I choose one aptly called “Sweet Seduction” and brought it home to my husband. He loved it. Enough so that both he and our furry family members perpetually smelled of patchouli and vanilla. The animals scented from the repeated kisses he bestowed upon them during the day.
The bottle was nearly empty. Thus, in addition to the lulu bra repair, it was on the to-do list to find our oil producing entrepreneur and to purchase more Sweet Seduction.
And so it happened that amongst all of those ugly feelings, in the midst of feeling pretty negative about each other, I came down over the stairs one afternoon, to find my bra laid on the kitchen island. Repaired. Whole. Looking as it did, I am certain, when Morgan purchased it from the fancy-smancy lululemon store. Standing next to it was a gruff, bearded man, not exactly snarling, but no sunshine radiated from him either. He had taken it to the tailor that he uses for his shirts and had it repaired. Upon seeing that, the peace offering laid silently upon the table, I walked back upstairs and retrieved from my dresser drawer a package that I had purchased that morning. As I handed him his beard oil with the vendor’s contact info and the means to have a never-ending supply of Sweet Seduction, I realized that though we were still not really speaking, we had each found a way to say, “I love you.”
Thus, began the tentative steps back to each other.
In that moment, I was fleetingly reminded of an ancient short story that I had read many years before. In “The Gift of The Magi", a young couple, determinedly in love, struggle to buy Christmas presents for each other. In the end, she buys for him a chain for his beloved pocket watch, secured by selling her long and lovely hair; he sells his cherished pocket watch to gift her combs for her hair, now newly shorn. The story is a message on the selflessness that comes with loving another. It is a resolve to grow together, to repeatedly trace a path back to each other, despite the wander. It is a reminder that no matter how angry we become or how intensely we may on occasion dislike the other, we journey together.
The power of being truly committed to each other is that, even when your marriage feels like the very last place that you want to be, love is toiling in the background. And sometimes love is forged in the weirdly comforting blend of beard oil and lululemon.