SISTER WISDOM

My husband is changing jobs after working at this one since he was 15. It’s been his only job for his entire life. It’s a family business, and he has loved it, but it’s time. Change is moving in, people are moving on. It’s the right thing, but that doesn’t make it easier. Nothing is easy right now, because nothing is familiar.

That Lost Feeling

I remember that same lost feeling for the first few months of marriage, maybe even the whole first year. I was knocked-out in love with my husband (I still am) and I knew I wanted nothing else but to be with him. But it wasn’t easy because it was all so different. No parents. No familiar routine. No Mom to run errands with. No old friends to call up for shopping or coffee. Everything was new and different, and because of that, it was difficult to accept.

Everything changed with one morning’s strange epiphany during that first year. Joe was doing something – I don’t even remember what – but it was different than what I was used to. I was just watching him, feeling that tightening, the offense at what was unfamiliar, when it came: the fact that it was different didn’t make it wrong. It just made it different, and I could get used to different.

I Can Get Used to Different

That moment was the first in many steps upward, back to the comfortable glow of familiarity. When I reached that threshold of being comfortable in my new life, it wasn’t because I had finally managed to make it the same as my old life. It was because I had accepted a new set of circumstances and behaviors and routines and surroundings as my own. I had put aside the prejudice against the unknown, allowed it to come close enough to me to become known, and had accepted it as something equally good to what I had before. In many ways, something much, much better.

The One That Stuck

I could have shortened that process had I learned a little something about acceptance before getting married. I think it was shorter than it might have been because I had been watching, a long time, and making those resolutions that single people love to make before marriage. A lot of them disappeared once I experienced marriage, but one stuck. Over and over I had seen my friends and family expend all their energy on changing their spouses. It seemed so obvious to me, the single and objective onlooker. You can’t change somebody else, and you just frustrate each other when you try.

Create a New Right

I didn’t understand the powerful motivation of wanting to accomplish that change until I entered marriage. It’s not as simple and petty as I thought, not necessarily a power struggle, though it often turns into that. Mostly we start trying to change each other because we are trying to create a life that feels right. We have strong ideas about what right is. It takes a good bucketful of humility dumped on your head before you realize that sometimes “right” is merely a matter of preference, and fighting to the death over preference is just stupid. Create a new right, together, and you’ll both be happier.

I think that’s what acceptance is. It’s letting go of comfort long enough to get close to the unfamiliar. It’s letting go of assumptions long enough to see that the unfamiliar isn’t so bad. It’s letting go of control long enough to let someone else’s preferences be just as important as yours. It’s a difficult thing to do.

But we need to learn how to do it.

Some days I wake up and I don’t feel comfortable with myself. Some days the whole world feels foreign. Some days the ability to accept is the only thing I’ve got going.