Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

Lisa

Fighting for better

Eleven years ago today, Phil and I exchanged vows, partied with our friends and family, and set out on a three-week road trip honeymoon that included a daylong hike to the top of a mountain in the Great Smoky range where we slept in a primitive cabin accessible only by foot.

Some people thought we were crazy. Especially about the road trip honeymoon part. Hours together in a car? That’s the basis for newlywed fighting, they said. Phil and I dismissed their warnings because we got along really well. In our three years of dating/engagement, we didn’t really argue. We were great friends and enjoyed a lot of the same things. Conversation flowed easily between us. I could not imagine us being one of those couples who fought.

Fighting couldn’t be good for a relationship, I was sure.

Photo by CloudVisual on Unsplash

—

Fast forward almost 11 years.

We are sitting next to each other on the couch in silence. The kids are in bed and we are trying to decide what to watch for our evening entertainment. Generally, this is difficult for me. Phil had suggested a comedy special or a movie. I was leaning toward an episode of a TV show that we’re working on finishing. For once, I actually voiced that this was my preference. Usually I’m a “whatever-you-want-to-watch” sort of girl because I don’t want what I want to create conflict. (The Enneagram is helping me sort out this part of my personality.)

Phil was sticking with the comedy special or movie, so given those two choices, I chose movie. He then offered me three or four options, all of which only sounded okay to me. I showed little to no enthusiasm for any of them and could not make a choice. I tried to explain to Phil that because a movie wasn’t what I wanted in the first place, that whatever movie he wanted to watch would be fine with me because all the options were equal in my mind.

This was not the answer he was looking for. (My husband’s Enneagram number is helping us understand this better.) I could sense him beginning to shut down. This was a Saturday night, the end of his longer stretch of work for the week and the end of my full day with the kids home all day. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the couch, which I often interpret as the end of the conversation.

I sat there looking at him, trying to find words to say out loud. I did not want the evening to be over before it began. I also don’t like to sit and do nothing. There have been times in our relationship when I would have just walked away, grabbed a book and headed to bed for the night, leaving my husband on the couch to pout (that’s how I saw it). This was my temptation this night also.

So, I said some words out loud to this effect: “I’m not going to just sit here.” I don’t remember the other words I said, but I kept talking, wanting to provoke Phil to say something, anything. (This is not my usual modus operandi.) I didn’t want to run away, but I didn’t want to be bored. I kept trying to explain my point of view, which was met with mostly silence. At one point, I got up from the couch to take a bowl back to the kitchen. I remember Phil telling me to “Go. Get out of here.” It was a hurtful sort of tone, and there was a part of me that was shocked at his words. A bigger part of me didn’t believe he meant what he was saying, so I raised me voice and said, “You don’t mean that.” He countered with my own words back to me, the ones where I said I wasn’t going to sit there next to him if this is how he was going to be.

It was like hearing what I said for the first time. I understood how it sounded when I said it. Like I couldn’t handle his emotions so I was going to abandon him.

“That’s not how I meant it,” I said. I still needed to take the bowl to the kitchen, but I promised him I’d be back.

There was still some silence when I sat back on the couch but somehow we managed to talk through what was going on. Part of the motivation for making up was that the next day was Mother’s Day and we had plans to go out for breakfast early. Neither of us wanted to still be fighting then.

We settled on an episode of Doctor Who (another show we’re still catching up on). Our Saturday night was not ruined.

—

Maybe these kinds of things happen in your marriage, but they haven’t happened often in ours. I was surprised at how good I felt after this argument. (That’s different than feeling good about the argument.) I felt like something had shifted in our relationship.

I remember days early in our marriage when my opinion would differ from Phil’s. It didn’t even have to be a big thing. I thought it was my “job” to go along with whatever would make him happy. Because I thought if I could keep conflict out of our relationship, we’d have a good relationship. Years of therapy helped me uncover how unhealthy this was for me.

I’ve discovered that I have a mind full of my own wants and needs and it’s okay (better than okay, it’s necessary) for me to express those and take appropriate action. And I don’t need to feel bad if what I want or need is not the same thing as what Phil wants or needs. Neither do I need to feel bad for meeting my wants or needs.

This runs counter to some things I learned and believed in my younger life.

—

I am 40 years old and I am just now finding my voice and the courage to use it.

Change, I’m learning, requires some conflict. Maybe it’s internal conflict. Maybe it’s relational. Maybe it’s public. But for anything to change, there will be some resistance, and I never thought I would be a person who creates conflict on purpose.

But this is part of who I am.

I worry sometimes that if I challenge something or raise a question that doesn’t go along with whatever is keeping the peace that I will be viewed as someone who creates conflict for the sake of creating conflict. I don’t want to be a drama queen or accused of “rocking the boat” but what I’m learning is that sometimes the boat needs to be rocked. And every time I use my voice to speak up, to ask a question, to challenge something, it costs me something personally. So, I have to make sure whatever I’m fighting for is worth the personal cost.

—

I always thought it was a no-brainer that my marriage is important to me. I love Phil and I want to be with him for a long time, but only recently have I seen how much work we have to do, how sometimes we have to fight if we want something to be better.

Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

Sometimes fighting looks like giving each other space to work on our own garbage and become the best versions of ourselves. Sometimes it looks like a literal fight with raised voices and hurt feelings. Sometimes it looks like caring for each other in ways that are sacrificial. Sometimes it looks like caring for ourselves in the same ways.

This is some of what 11 years has taught me.

That, and it’s possible for a marriage to get better with time. When I look at our life, the people we’ve become in those 11 years, I see only better things ahead. Our marriage today is better than it was a year ago, worlds apart from the day we set out on the road trip adventure.

It has not been easy. (You can read about some of those struggles on this blog.)

It has been worth it.

Whatever it takes to make it better. Even conflict.

The slow work

“Maybe you’re believing lies.”

As I drove past the church sign where this message was displayed, time seemed to stop. You know what I mean, right? It’s sort of like hitting a pothole with your car only it happens in your soul. I wanted to turn the car around and go back, make sure I’d read it correctly, but that wasn’t an option.

Church signs usually make me groan. Sometimes, I chuckle. Rarely am I still thinking about the message more than a week later.

—

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash

I’m itching to dig in the dirt. A month or so ago, during a restless early evening, the kids and I started clearing away leaves and debris from the flower beds. Winter was finally letting go of its grip on the weather, and I was ready for spring to show up and show off. There was little evidence–a few green stems–of the flowers yet to come, but I saw our work as preparing for beauty. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

We’re a little behind on our garden plans for the year, but I’ve been filling pots with packaged soil and planting flowers to line the porch. Even when the garden plot is ready and the vegetables have been planted into the soil, the reward will take its time in coming.

Still, we must do the preparing.

—

A friend, one of my best, graduated last week with a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy. She is a busy mama and in her spare time, she takes actual physical stuff people want to throw away or don’t need anymore or have given up on, and makes something beautiful out of those things. Whenever I see pallets or doors or windows sitting outside a home or business labeled “free” I think of her and would pick it all up if I could deliver it easily. She has a gift for trash-to-treasure.

Her job as a therapist is not much different. I know from my own experience in therapy, as a client.

It took years but my therapist helped me dig through the dirt and debris I’d accumulated in my life to find the beauty that was growing there. This is a gift to humanity–the digging together and the beauty that emerges. My friend, and people like her, are helping people make something beautiful from their messy lives.

But it is slow work.

—

The debris started accumulating when I was in elementary school. I believed one lie about who I was, and that’s all it took. Lies are slow work, too. Over time this one lie wound its way around my heart until I couldn’t see the beauty underneath anymore. Once you believe one lie, it’s easy to believe one more, until one day, you can no longer untangle the truth from the lies.

This makes me think of kite string, especially after the kite has been stashed in the mudroom closet for a season. You pull it out thinking you’re going to fly it, only to discover that the string is twisted and tangled. (If kite flying is not your thing, how about a necklace dumped in the bottom of your jewelry box?) The fun is delayed and maybe you become frustrated. (Guilty.) I do not have a lot of patience for untangling things. Exhibit A: my cross-stitch threads. If they form a knot and it takes longer than a couple of tries to straighten it out, I grab the scissors, cut my losses and move on. Same for kite string. And I have more than one necklace I’ve thrown back into the jewelry box for “some other time.”

Untangling the lies you’ve built your life on is just as messy and frustrating. It’s definitely not what I would call fun.

But the freedom … the freedom is worth the effort.

—

When I started seeing a therapist, I thought I was there to untangle the most obvious knot. If we would just pull this string a bit, we’d loosen the whole mess and voila! we’d have a problem solved. Turns out, it’s not that easy. Or it wasn’t for me.

Photo by Stacey Rozells on Unsplash

Sometimes we’d pull on a marriage string and other times we’d pull on a childhood string. Sometimes we’d be working with one section of the tangled mess and all of a sudden we’d jump to something else that I didn’t even know was part of it. The more untangling we did, the more painful it became. Those knots closer to the center were deeply formed and at times I wanted to just cut them loose. But my therapist showed me a gentler, more patient way. Cutting the knots out would have cut me off from something important. I would have lost a connection I could never get back and as much as I didn’t want it to hurt, I also didn’t want to forget. Not completely.

—

Do you remember the first lie you believed?

I’m not talking about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy or something your brother told you to mess with you (although that last one could be it, I guess). I mean the lie that sounded so close to the truth that you believed it enough to let it hitch a ride in your life.

I can’t tell you what it is for you, but I know what it is for me, and I know that believing it caused me to make decisions that I sometimes wish I could change. What would my life have looked like if I hadn’t believed that lie? I’ll never know.

What I do know is that the beauty was there all along, even when I couldn’t see it, and it took a lot of dirty work to discover it again. Now, I can’t stop marveling at the beauty that was buried beneath all the lies.

—

I spent a lot of years blaming God and other people for some of the stuff that’s happened in my life, and while there may be some truth to it, that’s a path that never led to freedom.

A couple of months ago, I decided to start forgiving myself. For not knowing better or different. For believing lies about my intrinsic worth and value. For the choices and decisions I made based on those lies.

“I forgive you,” I said to my younger self. And a weight lifted.

This doesn’t mean life got instantly better or I’m suddenly the person I always thought I could be. But it’s a step on the path toward healing and wholeness, which if I’m honest is some of the slowest work I’ve experienced. Sometimes I wonder if this is true: the slower the work, the more lasting it is. I don’t have a lot of evidence to support that statement, but it makes some sense to me.

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Trust the slow work, friends, and don’t be afraid or discouraged if the healing or transformation you seek takes time.