In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die

Where you invest your love, you invest your life.

In the early days of my relationship with The Husband, when friendship had gloriously transitioned into Something More, a moment occurred that remains burned into my brain. I had been floating on air for several days straight, and one morning I stood over my bathroom sink–the site of late-night (and early-morning) retching after too many drinks; the location of tears shed after too many bad dates; the venue where I had prepared for countless days of living and working in New York City within a fog of uncertainty while walking on a foundation of faith. Finally, I had found The One, and I knew it. But deep within, I also knew my (and everyone’s) tendency to let the newness wear off and be replaced by the taking-for-granted ways of familiarity. I told myself to remember this moment, these heady days of falling in love and flirting via text and meeting for late-night dinners, because if all went well, there would be another moment down the road when I would want to kill him for forgetting to buy milk.

Or for running over my toe with the cart. On Sunday, The Kid sat in the front of said cart while TH pushed it through the aisles of Costco and I hovered alongside them. Right there in the freezer aisle is where the offense occurred, where a wheel hit the tip of my toe, and my outrage far exceeded the extent of the crime. And I felt it pass over my face, that look that reveals the ugliest parts of me, the deepest fears and unfairest assumptions, that are all born of my own insecurities and doubts, that lie along the fault lines of my own heart, where brokenness sits in various stages of healing. I felt the look and in an instant regretted it–its message of you’re not taking good care of me and you don’t see me and, the worst, I knew you’d disappoint me. The fears that plague me when I choose them over faith, over protecting, trusting, hoping, persevering like I promised I would on an August day three years ago. The deepest-held fears I have not just regarding him, but regarding Him.

I haven’t seen Before Midnight yet, but I want to. Especially after reading this part of Entertainment Weekly‘s review: “This deeply bittersweet movie suggests that our long-term relationships sustain themselves over time by dying in order to be reborn.” And I think about what I know of dying to be reborn, what in my life has been resurrected from the ashes of defeat and hopelessness, and the answer is everything worth anything. I think about my resignation on the street in Manhattan when I passed that damn Tiffany ring ad one too many times and finally surrendered to a possible lifetime of singleness. How I finally got to the point of believing that if that was my story, it wasn’t because I wasn’t loved. I think about the past year, of the endless waiting-room moments and x-rays, of holding my son down in a search for answers as they stuck him with needles and he lay on a table, motionless. I think about typed-up reports filled with foreboding and the tear-soaked grief of not knowing but fearing the worst. I think about his first steps, and how he will not stop saying mama now. And I know that fear, though it deceives with its familiarity as if it’s a friend, does not have to be invited over for the week and given a guest room and towels because what it can be is a preface to deeper faith. To deeper, more real relationship.

There are moments of tension in warehouses with carts, and in kitchens with crumbs all over the floor, and during midnight cries and turns taken. There are moments of weakness when I wish I could erase what my face just said because it is a lie and I choose not to believe it. We are not the couple we were five years ago over a table in a crowded restaurant, empty bottle of wine and laughter between us. We are more–because of the thousand tiny deaths that faithfulness brings, that choosing to believe in each other entails, even when the waves of daily life and the moments of monotony would have us take it all for granted. Much is said of the sacrifices required for marriage and family, as if there is a resignation to a life of couple-ness that requires a surrendered sigh and digging in of the heels for the dark road ahead. But commitment to anything beyond ourselves asks us to die a little…and then what?

Every now and then we go back to that restaurant in New York and there is laughter and wine. We need to remember where we started, why we began in the first place. But every now and then we hold hands across from an MRI machine, or I collapse into him outside the doctor’s office when we didn’t get the news we wanted. We became a family that day in August and have been growing ever since, with the scars to prove it. That couple in New York had no idea what would be asked of them, and sometimes I envy their innocence. Then I see how TK’s eyebrows do the same thing TH’s do, and how they look identical when they’re thinking hard, and it doesn’t feel like we got here by dying. It feels like we got here by being reborn. It feels like a promise being kept every day.