21 Years

Today is our 21st wedding anniversary, and I can honestly say that I love Heather more now than I ever have.  I know this for a fact.  It wasn’t until this past year that I discovered how to love her better, more like she deserved.  This isn’t to mean that I never loved her before.  Rather, I never loved her wholeheartedly.  There was always something kept back, a part of me that I couldn’t and wouldn’t give to her.  It took my over twenty years to realize that.  I wish I had learned it earlier, but I am glad that I got to the place where I could learn it at all.  I don’t think I could have learned it earlier, though.  I had to come to the place where everything I thought I could know and control to fly apart before I could reach that point.  

I have always worried that Heather would leave me, that she would realize what apparently everyone else already knew.  I wasn’t good enough for her.  I mean, you know her, right?  Disney princess come to life.  Brilliant beyond belief.  One of the smartest people I know.  Determined.  Loving.  Joyful.  Professionally respected.  Loved by everyone who knows her.  Beautiful.  She is the most incredible creature.  I often feel like The Beast when I’m next to her Beauty.  I’m this big lumbering Hagrid oaf, this troll, Shrek.  I’m a foot taller than her and big.  Even if I wasn’t overweight, I would be large.  I was supposed to get an MRI the other day and couldn’t fit in the tube.  That wasn’t because of my gut, either.  I didn’t get that far.  The technicians knew my shoulders wouldn’t make it.  So, I’ve always had this concern that I wasn’t enough.  

This has been exacerbated over the years dozens of times by people telling me that I’m not good enough for her. No, that isn’t hyperbole.  I’m not making this up.  I have had people tell me … to my face … that I don’t deserve her.  I married out of my league.  I married up.  She settled.  She married down.  Whatever terminology that you want to come up with.  My own family has said this.  Yes, to my face.  My pastor at the church where I worked when I got married said it.  His wife said it.  Some of my best friends said it.  My own mother said it.  Some of you reading this post said it.  After hearing that enough, from enough people, and people who should have your back, you start to believe it.  And I did believe it.  It became a truth to me.  It had been reinforced enough times.  (Lest you question the power that words have, even said in jest.)  Heather went along in her training, became even more awesome she became, did even more impressive things.  And I … didn’t.  I stayed home with the kids so she could what God made her to do.  I got a job and taught online.  I made some money, got some accolades, inched up the ladder, and always hit some unidentifiable thing that would push me back down.  The more time that went along, the more I knew that the day would come when she would realize that she could do better.  I told her this, multiple times.  I believed it so much that I put up walls to keep distance, hoping that when she did finally leave that it wouldn’t absolutely destroy me.  That makes no sense; I know that.  There is no scenario where losing her would not cause a personal apocalypse.  

It probably comes as no surprise that Heather never ever even one time agreed with all of this.  She never believed anything people had said.  She never saw me as anything other than her husband who she loved.  She never wanted me to be something more.  Yeah, she may have wanted me to remember things better or do the dishes more frequently.  But she never bought into the belief that she deserved better.  She would refute what I said.  She would fight back against those claims.  She would get angry about the things people had said, for she had heard them too.  Yet another reason that she is amazing.  She was the person who never gave up on me or on us.  And sometimes, she was the only one fighting.  She fought for years when I battled depression and couldn’t get out of the dark hole.  She fought when I gave in to the hateful voices that I regularly was defeated by.  She fought when I quit writing and wanted to quit everything.  She would buy me Legos because they made me happy.  She would order dinner because I couldn't bring myself to make it.  She would force me to interact with people when I wanted to hide.  

There have been a few tough years in our marriage.  The one that included the third year of med school was tough; it notoriously is.  Many of the struggles were due to me being a butthole.  I have a natural ability to be one; I get it from my parents.  Lots of struggles were due to finances.  That’s the downside of being in medical training for a decade.  But I personally feel that our twentieth year of marriage was the most trying of them all.  Financially, things were better.  We still towed around gobs of student debt, but we were working our way out of the gloom.  We were even able to sell our house, make a profit, and buy a new house.  Yay!  Then December struck.  Heather got Covid for the second time, and this time it wasn’t playing around.  This was while we were packing our house.  And shuffling two closings.  And moving temporarily an hour away with family.  Due to quarantine, Heather and I were kept apart for weeks.  While she suffered with Covid, I tried to ignore my raging rheumatoid arthritis and pack the house.  I legitimately feared that I would lose her.  It kept getting worse, and there was literally nothing I could do.  Our closing got delayed again and again and again.  Christmas was chaotic and traumatic.  The whole month stressed and stretched us.  Then the Spring started.  Our kids floundered in virtual school, and they started to crack under the pressure.  We both were already at our limits, and it felt like something broke.  For the first time, I felt like we weren’t teammates.  I had to drive an hour to Columbia to go to the doctor, to go to the storage unit, to sign documents.  Each time, I would get further and further into my head.  I convinced myself that my fears were finally realized; she had figured it all out, and she was going to leave.  There was a gulf, which was made worse by the fact that I already had built a moat.  I started to pull into myself and give up.  

Again, Heather refused to give up.  She kept pushing for us to go to marriage counseling.  We finally got something set up virtually.  In our first session, I was being a little truculent.  When I finally started talking, the counselor said her heart broke for me.  I was expecting a battle, and instead she expressed how sad she was for how much I had been hurt.  And Heather was sitting there feeling the same way.  I was a little stunned.  The counselor said that she was worried that I wasn’t at the place where I could even make much progress on us until I worked on me.  So I found a therapist who specialized in trauma recovery.  I’ve said before how much I love watching gifted people work.  This woman is gifted.  She helped me to unlock so much about why I handle things like I do.  I started to make quick strides.  Finally one day, I woke up and the voices had stopped.  All of those critical, hateful, marginalizing voices that I heard every fricking day had shut up.  It was a little disconcerting.  It’s like the scene in Friends when Emma the baby is screaming and screaming and then finally stops.  And Phoebe is concerned she went deaf.  That’s how it felt.  No one was telling me I was worthless.  No one was reminding me of my screwups.  No one was encouraging me to hate myself.  It makes it easier to function that way.  

As a result of these changes, I came to a place where I recognized that I was experiencing a kind of cap on my ability to feel things - especially when it came to Heather.  I had never noticed it, and I didn’t like it.  I was reading one day; the relationship depicted in the work was very passionate and demonstrated deep emotions.  It got to me.  I related to the characters, and I found myself longing for those strong feelings.  I never felt like I was allowed to feel deeply.  I don’t know exactly why.  My parents were certainly never very passionate: they never kissed, never held hands, hugged a couple of times, never said they loved each other.  Couples who were overly affectionate were made fun of.  Romance was kind of limited to newlyweds or new couples.  And, in the church world, emotions are generally discouraged or feared - at least that was how I felt.  Jesus was a Man of Sorrows.  Church was this somber occasion.  If you were too emotional they would call you a charismatic - which was a bad thing in my upbringing.  And, being a guy, well you didn't want to be too sensitive.  That got you ridiculed non-stop.  So this story really affected me.  I felt hot all over, tears were coming to my eyes, my heart was pounding.  Then something cracked inside of me.  I swear, it felt like an actual crack; I can remember the exact moment and feeling.  And then I burst into tears.  I laid in my bed and sobbed.  The next day it happened again.  I was worried something was wrong with me; I even asked Heather to come home from work because I thought something was wrong.  Nothing was wrong - I just finally was able to feel.

Those walls that I had built up to protect myself had fallen.  The voices that had been chastising me for so long were silenced.  And for the first time that I could remember, I was free to be what I wanted to be.  And I wanted to love my wife.  I wanted to love my kids.  I wanted to write again.  I was sick and tired of dealing with all of the negativity swirling around, so I just shut it off.  I stopped checking the news, only went on Facebook once a day.  I stopped playing my iPhone games.  Stopped watching even the small number of movies or shows I was watching.  I started to invest my time in my family and in writing.  That was pretty much all I did.  I even stopped building Legos (I know!).  I realized how much I hated being tied up every night for work.  I rediscovered how much I liked being with Heather, how much fun we had together.  I remember a long time ago, my sister-in-law told me that she loved how much Heather and I talked.  That we talked about the dumbest, most mundane things - but we were just happy to be talking.  Going to the grocery store was one of our favorite things to do.  That all got dulled over the years.  But that started to re-emerge.  We started making it a priority to go out together.  We went away for the weekend a few times - the advantage of having all teenagers who are pretty self-sufficient.  It felt like my life was rebalanced.  I also came to surprising discovery: I didn’t want to go to law school.  I don’t know if I ever really did.  I wanted to help people.  I wanted to make a difference.  But I also wanted to do something, to prove myself.  When I made that decision, I still was trying to silence those voices and show Heather I was worth her staying.  Taking on that huge life change didn’t seem like a good move any more.  My family needed my full investment in them.  So I’m not going.  I’m going to help Natalie graduate high school, help Gabe start at a new school, help Josiah start all in-person classes.  I’ve cut my workload at Kaplan to a few nights a week instead of every night.  And I’ve been writing … a lot.  It isn’t stuff that I’m putting out there; it is stuff to make me better, to show me I can do this.  

So year 21 starts us off in a new place.  Even though everything is kind of in the same place.  We are still watching Covid run rampant across the country.  We still have to deal with everyone fighting about everything all the time, turning even the smallest issues into political firestorms.  We still … you know what?  I’m tired of looking at all of the ugly crap that threatens to pull us under.  Yeah, things suck.  But the thing I have learned over the last few months, and it may seem cliched to say, is that love is the most important thing.  My job is to show love to the people around me: my family, my wife, my neighbors, my coworkers.  So that’s what I’m going to do.  Freely, passionately, proudly, unwaveringly.  I may not always succeed.  I still find myself getting sucked into angry vortexes when from time to time.  But my general approach is going to be different.  

The best thing is that I get to love Heather.  I get to have this amazing person in my life, to do life with her.  I get to sit on the couch with her at night with our dogs, just enjoying being together.  I get to take her out to dinner, celebrating how far we’ve come.  I get to joke with her about her devotion to her Peloton.  I get to accompany her to conferences and see her teach seminars.  I get to see how her coworkers and trainees see her.  I get to watch her fight ferociously for her children, warring with bureaucratic idiots more worried about hitting numbers than being compassionate.  I get to hold her when she is exhausted from a week of call with too many kids catching avoidable illnesses.  I get to stress out with her over our child driving in her own car for the first time.  I get to cry with her as our second child graduates high school.  I get to see how much my pain causes her to despair, wishing she could fix my ailments.  I get to be married to her.  I don’t have to prove my worth because she loves me, with all of my clumsiness and cluelessness and Hagridness.  I get to show her how much I love her every day.  And I know that I don’t deserve it, but who could?  Who could ever deserve someone like her?  But that doesn’t make me less.  She chose me; I don’t have to earn her.  And you know what is even better than getting to love Heather?  Getting to be loved by Heather. 

Blind Spots

​​I never saw you.

​​I never saw your struggle, your pain.

​​I only saw what I was in the position to see.

​​I saw when you stole our mangoes, or picked on our dog.

​​I saw when you mugged my brother and stole his bike.

​​I saw the images on the screen.  Drugs. Violence. Poverty.

​​I never saw you, though.

​​I kind of saw Tanisha and Tamara Kay and Willie

​​And Sam and Ellis and Tasha.  

​​I thought they were different than you.

​​I thought they were the exception, not the rule.

​​I saw what I was taught to see.

​​I didn’t know that I was missing so much.

​​I didn’t know that I was blind.

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​​I never saw you.

​​I never saw your history, your loss.

​​I only saw what I was educated to see.

​​I saw your mistreatment, your enslavement.

​​I saw you fight for rights, fight to be seen as human.

​​I saw the black and white images. Lynchings. Protests. Speeches.

​​I never saw you, though.

​​I kind of saw Frederick and Harriet and Dred

​​And Martin and Malcolm and John.

​​I thought that it was all in the past.

​​I thought that chapter had been closed, that things were solved.

​​I saw what the history I learned allowed me to see.

​​I didn’t know that I was missing so much.

​​I didn’t know that I was blind.

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​​I never saw you. 

​​I never saw your agony, your anger.

​​I only saw what I wanted to see.

​​I saw you reaching out for help, demanding what you didn’t earn.

​​I saw you on the opposite side of an aisle, embracing what I did not.

​​I saw your perceived laziness and greed and carnality.

​​I never saw you, though.

​​I was quick to see OJ and Marion and Clarence

​​And Lawrence and Al and Louis.

​​I wanted to believe that was who you were.

​​I wanted to believe that they represented what you were truly like.

​​I saw what my bias and prejudice wanted to see.

​​I didn’t care that I was missing so much.

​​I didn’t care that I was blind.

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​​I started to see you.

​​I started to see your oppression, your story.

​​I started to see more than I thought there was to see.

​​I saw you being marginalized, silenced, pushed into the cellar.

​​I saw you imprisoned and disenfranchised.

​​I saw you being the scapegoat, the enemy.

​​I started to see you, finally.

​​I saw through the eyes of Donald and Michael and Ta-Nehisi

​​And Angie and Howard and Colson.

​​I learned the horrific truth of our shared history.

​​I learned the indefensible, hateful, despicable truth.

​​I started to realize how my history affected yours.

​​I started to recognize how wrong it all was.

​​I started to recognize I had been blind.

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​​I see you.

​​I see your uphill battle, your constant fight.

​​I see what it breaks my heart to see.

​​I see you being villainized, suppressed, ignored.

​​I see you beaten and blamed.

​​I see you at the mercy of the merciless, depowered by the powerful.

​​I see you.  I see you.

​​I see Emmit and Elijah and Michael and Tamir

​​And Philando and Alton and Eric and Ahmaud

​​And George and Breonna and Botham and Jacob.

​​I am confused by the ignorance. 

​​I am angered by the hatred.

​​I see reality and wish it were not so.

​​I see you and I am so sorry.

​​I see you; I am no longer blind.

​​

​​They don’t see you.

​​They don’t see the sins of our land.

​​They don’t see what they need to see.

​​They see what they are told to see.

​​They see what they have learned to see.

​​They see what they want to see.

​​And they do not see you.

​​They don’t believe the truth of privilege and prejudice

​​They don’t acknowledge the existence of white supremacy.

​​They don’t accept the reality of a country crippled by systematic racism.

​​I’ve been there before.

​​I can’t justify it, but I can understand.

​​And I am going to fight to change things.

​​They don’t know what they are missing.

​​They don’t know they are blind.

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​​Tanisha, Tamara Kay, Willie, Sam, Ellis, and Tasha were some of the few black friends I had growing up.  

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​​Federick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John Lewis were some of the black historical figures who slipped through into the white European focused history I learned.

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​​OJ Simpson, Marion Berry, Clarence Thomas, Lawrence Taylor,  Al Sharpton,  and Louis Farrakhan were some of the black figures I encountered as I grew who served as the negative representatives of their culture, which was too easily seized upon by whites.

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​​Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz), Michael Eric Dyson (The Tears We Cannot Stop), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give), Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States), and Colson Underwood (The Underground Railroad) were some of the books that opened my eyes and my heart.

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​​Emmit Till, Elijah McClain, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Aubrey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Botham Jean, and Jacob Blake were among the dozens of blacks abused and murdered by those who still believed a black life was not worth the same as a white one.  And who still don’t.

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