Fine

You sweet readers praise me for my "transparency," my "honesty." But let me take you back to a time in my story when that was not true of me. I lived for a long time with my world crashing in on me and yet all anyone knew was that I was "fine." Maybe you've noticed that this second part in my story has taken a long time to write. It covers a terribly painful time for me and revisiting it is hard. But there are some really good, recent things to share and I'd spoil their impact a bit if I don't take us through the hard stuff first. I guess God is kind of like that, too, isn't He? He allows us to go through difficult things so His goodness becomes all the more evident. It's like seeing shadows - while they themselves are dark and gloomy, their presence tells us the sun is out somewhere nearby.

I left off the story with fulfilling dream number one - getting married. Next in the plan was five years of marriage and then starting a family. I felt like these five years were kind of dead time. I'd work for these years, but once we had a baby, I'd stay home full-time. So excelling at my career wasn't really on my radar. I am someone who always gives 100%, though, so I still gained progressively more responsibility in the jobs I took.

But the five-year wait was also intended to allow my husband and I to have some great times together and make some memories, just the two of us. We did have some great times on Gills St., where we rented our first little home, the top level of a duplex on a street of duplexes occupied by at least four other Liberty couples. It was so much fun living so close to friends. I have fond memories of running next door for an egg or some sugar and of game nights that lasted way past my normal bedtime. I still laugh out loud when I remember this pair of shoes my neighbor had that smelled so bad she had to leave them outside on the porch every night! Some of these neighbors are still close friends today.

But you see, marriage is hard and marriage takes work. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. Or maybe it does. Lots of people leave when the feelings fade. But I wasn't like that. I knew going into marriage that it was a decision for a lifetime, and not just because fairy tales always end with "And they lived happily ever after," but because the Bible says that God hates divorce.

I understood why people divorced. I had seen my share of romantic comedies and Disney movies and, while I dreamt of being swept off my feet by a prince on a white horse, I had heard these plots scoffed at enough times to realize this wasn't reality. "True love" wasn't true at all. Eventually, everyone is going to start to drive you crazy. But you work on your marriage and you cling to it fiercely and, if you do enough of this, any marriage can succeed.

My husband and I were the typical newlyweds, buying our first house a year or two in and getting the baby-prerequisite puppy. Then my husband was offered a promotion about three hours away. So we sold our wonderful first house and packed up and moved. We were still a couple of years away from the magic five-year mark when we would start having children, so I found a job at the community hospital in our new little town.

While small-town life in the South is friendly, I've found that it's hard to find actual friends. Everyone has lived there for generations and has so many relatives that keeping up with them alone pretty much fills the social calendar. But soon my husband made a good friend through work and we started hanging out regularly with him and his wife. The couple had both lived in our small town their entire lives and yet their social calendars still had room for us.

It was great to finally have some friends in our new town and I was especially thrilled that my husband had made such a close friend, something he'd never really had before. Soon we were doing pretty much everything with them - joining their family cookouts, attending their daughter's dance recitals, picking their son up from daycare, vacationing at the beach together. My husband was much closer to the husband than I was to the wife, but I didn't mind hanging out with her since her husband was such a good friend to mine.

He was a real gem. He'd do anything for us and was always our first call if we needed anything. He'd give you the shirt off his back and buy you a second one so that you'd have a spare. He even brought me flowers at work once, just to thank me for letting my husband be his friend.

The relationship worked both ways. Not only was he a great friend, he gave me an out when I, an introvert, couldn't keep up with my extroverted husband. After a day at work, I was usually looking forward to a night in, preferably with a book, but my husband was just gearing up. So he'd tuck me into bed and then head out for guy time.

My husband was good at his job and soon got another promotion, this time to work for the corporate office as a trainer. We'd both been elementary ed majors for part of our college years and this was a great fit for him. But it meant a much longer commute and frequent overnight travel. Soon, getting some alone time wasn't an issue: I had an abundance of it. I still hadn't made any friends of my own since we were struggling to find a church and spent all our free time with my husband's friend and his family.

I changed jobs a couple of times. Without friends and often without a husband to come home to, my only real activity was work and it seemed important that I find the right job that would imbue my life with a sense of purpose. Of course, it would only be for a time, because soon our self-imposed five-year wait to start a family would be over.

But these were dark days. I was three hours away from my family and friends and had no community in my new town. I was lonely. While I was still happy that my husband had such a good friend, I began feeling like a third wheel. I was usually welcome if I wanted to tag along with whatever they were doing, but my husband and I didn't do much where it was just the two of us anymore.

I had been to a number of Christian women's conferences and one thing they all seemed to say was that you shouldn't talk badly about your husband, especially to your own family. If you have a problem with your husband, you approach him with it. It seemed like good advice, even Biblical. So I shared with him my loneliness and feelings of being left out and rejected. He said I should find my own friends and be more outgoing. He said his friend's wife never felt left out when they did stuff without her. I got the message - I was the problem.

Since I seemed destined to be basically friendless in this town, I began dreaming of bumping up the baby timeline a little. A baby would give me a pastime, and having a baby often opens the doors to friendship with other moms. I'd spend boring days at work reading posts on baby name discussion boards or looking at nursery themes. I was ready for this next phase of our lives to begin, even if I had to sacrifice my timeline by a few months, so I started hinting that sooner would be better.

But my husband seemed oblivious to my hints. He was great with kids and spent a lot of time with his friend's two kids. But he didn't seem to see the urgency for kids of our own. I actually didn't care for his friend's kids that much - I thought they were spoiled, watched too much TV, and had taken over their parents' marriage. Their mom even shared a bed with the two of them, while her husband usually crashed on the couch. But heaven forbid I say anything against them; if I did, I was quickly informed that I was the one with the issue.

All of this was really hard. I've since read somewhere that the hardest kind of loneliness is the kind you feel when you're married. That is so true. You think that by getting married you now have a permanent best friend, a champion, a number one fan. When that person tells you with their actions that you are no longer the favorite in his life, that if there's a problem then it's you, and you've been told that talking badly about your husband is wrong, you keep these things to yourself and don't get a voice of reason or even kindness that tells you anything different.

To the world you are "fine." Even to yourself, you are "fine." Your heart is broken and you feel worthless, but divorce is wrong and you're stuck. So you can't even acknowledge to yourself that everything is not "fine." It has to be "fine."

You live in denial until you repeatedly end up in urgent care with a pounding heart, choked with panic, feeling as if you're literally going to die right there in the waiting room. One can only hide so much; eventually, it finds its way out, like a pipe bursting under too much pressure. But when the doctor asks you what's going on in your life that might be causing these symptoms, you tell him, wide-eyed, that everything's "fine," because your conscious mind still thinks it is, even though your sub-conscious mind knows different. And when that jerk of a doctor asks about your husband and your sex life and you burst into tears, you still don't even know why you're crying.

Because good Christian girls don't know much about sex, except to avoid it like the plague until you get married, and even afterward approach it with caution. I didn't know what frequency was "normal," but I was starting to get a sneaking suspicion that not once in two years was probably on the low side.

But still, I had to make things work. So my baby hints became outright requests. We had talked about baby names since we were dating, so I knew he wanted kids; he was just holding back for some reason. And I deserved to know that reason. You don't just get to withhold a girl's dreams and not tell her why. I admit it - I became a dog with a bone, determined to ferret his reasons out of him. What was he waiting for? There was no logical reason to wait anymore. His younger sisters already had babies. Nag, nag, nag.

After some months of this, he changed his tune. He didn't want to wait to have a baby. He didn't want to have one at all. He didn't want to have one AT. ALL. That was incomprehensible, the deepest blow he could level against me. All my dreams, all my plans, my entire life - ashes. And I didn't even get a say. Nor did I get a reason. He'd just go silent when I'd ask why, what had changed his mind, why he was doing this to me.

My life was crumbling around me, but all anyone knew was that I was "fine." This "disagreement" my husband and I were having wasn't something I felt like I could talk about to anyone, if there had been anyone to talk to. I still had to wave off those sweet ladies who kindly asked when we were going to start our family. I had nothing to say, nothing I could share, at least.

But I didn't give up on trying to get an explanation from my husband, slipping in a question whenever I thought there was an opening. Same response - silence. But if you poke a sleeping bear long enough, it will wake up. And you'll be sorry you ever poked it in the first place. I finally got to my husband, wore him down so much that he gave me the answer I was demanding, told me why he didn't want to have kids: He thought I'd be a bad mother.

Drop the mic and walk away; there's nothing you can say back to that.

To be continued...