Hurt

It is hard to write a chronicle of the first year of marraige for someone who will read about our experiences in retrospect. My intention is to keep a journal for my husband so that we can have a keepsake of our first year together. To remember all the small details that don't make it to a photo album, memorialized forever. To give life and memory to the mundane 'everyday' that we go through. I know that we will look back on this year with a much different perspective than we had while going through it. And I want to remember how I felt, how he felt. I want to be able to remember this year with the same perspective with which I lived it.

The only catch is that as much as you want to remember the funny little things, to truly capture the year means to write about the hurts too. Marraige is not all emergency plans, and home depot and valentine's day stories. So I write now, knowing that when he reads this, all will be fine again. I know that, but I think it's worth something to remember the times it was hard. Not to would be a disservice to our first year of marraige.

So....

Marriage kicks in most when it gets hard. And it has been hard.

We are not a couple that fights very often. We bicker and laugh. We disagree and discuss. But it would be rare that we actually fight. The kind that hurts, that you can't get over with a 'sorry' and a kiss. I would estimate that over 8 years, we have gotten mad enough that it hurts only 4 or 5 times.

I am hurt. What I am hurt about is irrelevant. It always is. For me, it has always been the fact that he would hurt me at all that cuts the deepest. In an argument there are boundaries and I know that they are sometimes crossed. To do so inadvertantly is unavoidable. No one can always know where those boundaries lie. Those are the types of lines that if you accidentally step over, you can jump right back behind the line. The types of things that are more easily forgiveable because of their nature.

But to knowingly cross the line, and to take that step when someone is telling you "please don't do this, it's a whole other thing if you take that step" is to do so intentionally. It is much harder to go backward if you were moving forward at such a deliberate pace. The types of things that are much harder to forgive because of their nature.

Arguments happen, and they escalate. No one gets to be married without going through that. I am sure this will not be the last time, but it is the first, and that counts for something.

Because what my blue eyed boy does not realize is that yesterday I would have said he was perfect. I would say it still today or tommorrow, but I would know deep down that it wasn't entirely true. Which is fine, because no one is perfect. It's like the first time something happens that makes you see your parents as real people. You still love them just as much, and you get over it...but they are redefined to you, and somehow you can never go back to seeing your parents as they were when you thought that their whole purpose of being was you.

See? That's the problem with deciding to step over the line intentionally is that no matter how mad you are and how justified you feel at the time, you lose something much more valuable than whatever's at stake in the argument.

Because until yesterday your wife believed you were perfect.