The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad In-Between Part of Marriage

The reason I began a new blog, simply put, is because I have started a new life. We have started a new life. When I first started blogging, I did so with the hope that even if I never acquired another reader outside of myself that my children may read this one day and know what their mother was truly like in the time before them. I wanted to record my journey, and all of its many, many lessons, for them. Now, it is not my journey that they need to know, but ours.

After reading my last post, I somewhat worried that I had made our marriage sound perfect. Too me, it is a blessing- a wonderfully, perfect blessing. Still, it is not without mistakes at times. We are not so perfect that we never fail to make a mess, though typically it is a mess of the simplest matters. Funny how the simplest things can upset feelings the most sometimes. It is as funny as it is sad that sometimes others feel the need to interfere and create a mess that need never have been.

In the past five months there have been disappointments and frustration. There have been late nights, long afternoons, and a few tears shed. The rule that states "Never go to bed angry." has been broken once. I guess because neither of us ever heard it stated as fact by those we trust, we instead found out that sometimes you say things you don't mean and you don't listen to the other as you usually would in your exhaustion. I can not even recall anymore what caused the upset that night. I only remember the worst part being that both of us woke up feeling sorry, but neither of us had time to talk it out before work. We always try to settle matters swiftly, but that night we were not so lucky.

When I married my husband, I truly wanted to believe that I knew him so well that we could never argue. I think we both did. To give ourselves a little bit of credit, sure, we did. We knew all that we could possibly know at that time. In the ten months that we had known each other, we had only gone one day without speaking. In our letters and conversations we had opened up and shared with one another a lot more than we had ever told anyone else. Even so, neither of us knew everything about the other.

My husband and I smile now when we consider our first week together. Everyone always speaks of those days as being nothing more than romance, but for us it was a little more than that. In the daytime, we spoke about those in our lives. At night, we spoke about the past and the future. I remember laughing one night as I told him how surprised our children might be one day to know that we were discussing them in our first days of marriage- everything from how wonderful they would be to the scrapes they were sure to get into. No, it may not have been what people say it ought to be, but for us our first week together was the very beginning of what was to come.

I knew that at some point we would disagree. Worse yet, I knew feelings would be hurt. It seems like the world only tells of the two extremes- either you will both always be happy or you will both always be miserable. The reality of the in between is little mentioned except by those who love you most.

I love my husband. I can not imagine my life without him. Becoming his wife has been one of the best decisions I have ever made and I know it. Even so, there are days when my head begins to ache as I try to explain something to him. There are nights when I hop in the shower just to cool down and think before I speak. It is the cooling down that is hard. It is the pinpointing just what upsets me that has been the struggle sometimes. Before, I might have been upset with someone simply because they said something I didn't like, therefore I automatically assumed I had a right to be upset. With him though, I can't just say that. I have to know why. Why am I upset he said this or that? Why am I upset he didn't do or did something? It's not worth it to me to just go running up to him and tell him he was mean. I am not five. I am a wife- a very much loved wife who very much loves her husband. Something I have had to remember each time is that my husband does care for me even when we don't agree. If I don't tell him specifically what is wrong, he can't fix it. He'll apologize, and he will be sincere, but he won't really know why I am upset. Chances are, if he doesn't understand why, it will happen again. It's not to be cruel. It's not to be stubborn. It will happen again because he will do it as unintentionally as he did the first time. That said, my husband remembers what I tell him, especially when it is something about me. If I tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (no drama or exaggeration necessary) he will do all he can to make sure he understands. The same goes for me. I have never meant to argue or upset my husband, but of course times have come when I have failed him, too. Rather than yell or rush out, he knows he has to tell me and he knows to explain it. He knows, thankfully, that at the end of the day I love him. We both know the other loves us, and therefore it makes the difficult, frustrating times a whole lot easier to let pass. Knowing there will be forgiveness, and knowing that the person who has hurt you loves you and did so by sheer accident, makes it all the easier for us to work things out. Yes, the talk is sometimes hard. Feelings are raw. At the end of the day though, we have to remind ourselves that this is marriage. It is the harder part of it that we could not have prevented unless we were perfect. As it is, we are not, so we laugh and we smile, and we disagree and we talk, and we forgive each other and we work things out all because we love the person that we are married to and thankfully they love us, too.

Our Engagement Picture- June 2013

A New Start

To feel the keys beneath my fingers again is such a comforting feeling. I have missed my writing greatly, and yet I love the distraction that has kept me from it for over a year now. Six years ago I started my first blog. Though so much of my life has been recorded there, it somehow didn't seem the same to return to it after all these months. With a fresh start, it seemed the best step to take in journaling this new chapter of life would be to start a new blog- RetroBelle Wife.

If we have never met, then please let me introduce myself. I have been born and raised in the south. I love history, crafts, road trips, and my family. I love all things vintage (especially from the 1930s-1950s). I will never turn away a glass of tea, a cold coke, or a hot cup of coffee. Oh, and I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to write! Only recently I have found time to begin sorting through the events and emotions of the last several months to begin posting about life again. My greatest distraction from my writing has been, and undoubtedly will always be, my husband. My incredibly wonderful, caring, loving husband, I should say!


Visiting Natchez, MS

My husband and I met on Match.com. After a year with no success, I had actually given up hope of ever finding my future husband on the site. Even so, on January 4th, 2013, I hit send on what would become the most important email I have ever sent. He responded the very next day. We wrote to one another every day after that. He would write in the late afternoons and I in the very late evenings. During a vacation with my family at the end of the month, I agreed to meet him later in the week. We were both nervous that first night we met and hardly ate anything. Funnily enough, it wasn't until a month or so later that either of us knew that the other had actually been nervous. Our conversation never ended during that first date and it hasn't stopped since. When we didn't see one another, we wrote to each other. I'll admit, I was nervous for a short time that he wasn't the one. I had for so long been cautious and strong- cold in a way. He was polite and kind and attentive. He remembered everything I said and listened to everything I had to say. It worried me that if he didn't leave on his own accord, that I would hurt him with my coolness in the end. I had a lot of thinking to do. In the end, I realized that I would rather risk my heart with a good man than hurt it continuously by keeping it all to myself. Every prayer I ever prayed concerning my husband and finding him was answered. God knows I am a literal person and therefore He made certain that I would not miss His signs.

 

We first said "I love you" on March 16th, 2013- the same day that he gave me a bouquet of handmade paper roses. That said, we have both admitted that we realized we loved each other before we actually got up the nerve to tell one another.

 

He "officially" proposed on May 30th, in my one day old car in the parking lot of the branch I was working in at the time. I know I am supposed to say that it was the most elaborate, detailed event of all time, but truth is, it wasn't. From stories I have heard from others, I am starting to think that men only propose on the nights when you are in the worst mood possible. His nerves had caused him to be short with me all throughout our date that night. By the time we got back to the parking lot, the last thing I wanted to do was show him my new car. Still, I let him sit in the passenger seat and look around. I was just about to kick him out and tell him how frustrated I was with him when he began to speak. I can say that although the rest of the date had been miserable, when I heard not only the words, but the sincerity in his voice as he told me that he wanted to marry me I could not have been happier. I had known early on that I had wanted to be his wife. To hear him say that he had chosen me, that he hoped that I would be his wife, was the most wonderful proposal he could have offered to me.

We were married on October 19th, 2013, on my parents' land under the arch my daddy had built for us. While I knew I loved him that day, I have come to realize everyday since then how much I truly love my husband. I have spent the last four and a half months overwhelmed by my inability to fully describe this love that I have come to know. At times I have thought of my mother (who taught me so much more than most mothers teach their daughters these days) and wanted to ask her how she could have left out these feelings I know now in her stories she told me. Then I realize that just as I can never express all that I have come to know in this love for my husband, she could not have done it either- not in words or in writing. If I think about it, it was something I saw in her eyes. It was something, no matter where my daddy was, that would fill her eyes at the simple mention of him. I know I saw it. I know I paused and considered it from time to time, but in my ignorance I simply thought it was the look my mother and daddy had when they thought of one another. Now I know.

To someone who has always known love, it is strange to suddenly realize what it is to love someone you once considered a stranger. As I said before, I knew that I loved him before we were married. I simply did not realize how much I did; how much I could.

 

Since October 19th, life has changed completely. I am now the wife of the computer tech that found my heart. We live a fairly quiet life, though much busier than the ones we lived before we were married. We have had to learn to do a lot of things- how to deal with family drama, how to handle rough days at work, how to plan for our future, and in what order to plan. It was one thing to know how to get through a rough day alone or to know how to handle our responsibilities. It is quite another thing to learn how to help your husband through a rough work day or how to make decisions that affect the other person. It is not always easy, but the best part is that I have someone else to learn with and that person is my husband.