The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

It’s hard to believe that John and I have been together for more than two thirds of our lifetimes! Wow! And it’s been a wonderful forty years, too. 

I never could have had a better husband than John. His dry wit alone has seen us through both good and bad times. Plus, he is the most considerate man I know, starting with the cup of tea or coffee brought to my bedside every morning of our married life, or–these days, when I can enjoy sleeping in with the sloth of the retired–the pot of hot coffee left on the table for me if he leaves for work before I get up.

Apart from sleeping together for forty years in a bed that is smaller than the modern double bed, we have danced together (from jive to disco to waltz); marked papers together at the same messy dining room table; cooked together (me cutting up veggies, him stirring and watching to see thing didn’t burn); watched birds together (from our own back porch, mainly); done crossword puzzles together (John coming in especially at the end to finish up the last difficult answers).

We have  driven from the tip of Cornwall up to northern Scotland and down again to Kent, without killing each other, even when we got peckish each day around teatime). We have listened to classical music together  at one point, sharing a libretto together on the same sagging sofa while Wagnerian music moved us almost to tears). We have read things out loud to one another. We have wallpapered the bathroom together twice and still remained undivorced.

We have  bought a house together, slowly, over 25 years, mortgage payment after mortgage payment, without any rich relative dying and leaving us enough to pay it off all at once; we have managed this despite interest rates of that rose from 4% to 18% over those years. We have painted and decorated its rooms, dug and planted the garden, paid repairmen for the inevitable problems with the roof and the pipes (the latter being dug up  in midwinter, in frozen ground, at our expense, of course.). We have paid off that mortgage, finally, and felt the satisfaction of being home owners. 

We have laughed and cried together with joy at the birth of our daughter. We have, together, walked and fed and diapered her when she was crying and crying and crying as a collicky baby. We have watched, helping her together with homework, booboos of all kinds and a few crazy boyfriends, as she grew into a beautiful, bright, considerate, loving person, our greatest achievement. 

We have clung together during some scary times (his brain operation, our daughter’s attack of arrhythmia, my various asthma attacks, the Ice Storm, Y2K, 911, our grand daughters’ births, my knee replacement surgery).  We have laughed together and raised glasses of  various alcoholic beverages, from beer to oozo to scotch to wine, on Pasley Island, the Greek island of Skiathos, the British Isles, and the island of Montreal.

I know I have been very lucky and yet I also know that luck was only part of this achievement, that it involved day after day of working at being married, gently, with love, faith in one another, and mutual respect. We made mistakes, of course, but fewer, I think, than many couples do, because we really wanted a different kind of marriage.

We married when no one else was getting married; traditional marriage was considered a joke (or so it seemed in 1971), so a lot of our approach to marriage came from a reaction against the traditional marriage.  This started with our tiny but beautiful wedding (which was still the best wedding I’ve ever been to!), with a $25 wedding dress and no wedding ring, no relatives present, and no gift worth more than an electric beater, and a honeymoon that consisted of sleeping in a rented car, him in the back seat and me in the front, with a tent tarp slung over the car to keep it darkish after daylight, and two cats on leashes outside meowing to get in away from the blackflies.

I swore to myself from the beginning not to ever be the kind of wife who nagged or said “Not tonite, dear, I have a headache.” I have made a point of being agreeable rather than pouting when John got drunk at parties or was late for dinner or wanted to go out to drink or play tennis with his buddies. I have made a point of being calm when he couldn’t find his keys almost every morning on his way to work. I’m sure John has had many similar things he has had to put up with concerning me, the least of which was putting up with my shopping habits (which I still swear are just typical of all modern women).

It has been one of my great satisfactions to see that our daughter has found a husband just as wonderful as John: the new kind of husband, the kind that is up to the challenge of working beside the new kind of woman– one who has both a career and a family– and not feel emasculated. When John and I got married, this kind of husband and wife, this kind of marriage, didn’t yet exist. I like to think that either we helped to invent and define such a thing, or that we rode the cusp of a North American movement toward it.

It has been a long, strange, wonderful journey. And, unless John is currently  preparing divorce papers even as I type, it happily isn’t over yet!