Sunday, May 3, 2009

Training Pants

No, not babies - if only! More along the lines of something I always say: start out as you mean to go on.

My husband (it still feels foreign to say that, as if I don't deserve to be allowed to say it, to have such a wonderful husband) reminded me this morning of an incident that happened the day after we were married. We'd travelled to the other side of the world for the ceremony and were well prepared to be spending a lot of time both together and apart with our respective families. The night after the wedding however was a big deal. Having both been a bit poorly on the wedding day with the onset of colds and flu, we really pulled the stops out to keep as alive as we could, not that it was hard, it was the best day of my life. It meant however that we were pretty shattered the next day.

Long story short, I gave him some time and space to go and talk with some of his family while I sat downstairs in the hotel with his poor tired folks. Hours passed and it was getting near midnight, I was embarrassed by my inability to focus and chat due to my tiredness. Eventually his Mum could be kept out of bed no longer so went up to shoo him down only to find he'd actually gone upstairs and fallen asleep! Needless to say I was fuming. How selfish since we were ALL that tired but had to keep up the effort regardless!

We went back to my folks' house that night and my awesome husband acted just wonderfully in the face of my wrath. He didn't slope off and hide, which I suppose is what I'd come to expect from men, but stayed in the living room with me, my Mum, my sister and my brother's dog and faced the music. He sat through the humiliation of me explaining to them what had happened, through my sister's wicked sniggers and my Mum's careful downward looking not-remarking on it, with apt shame. But what he did that made me laugh today when I remembered it was to crawl over into the corner and cuddle up with the dog on her blanket. Truly in the doghouse he was!


I am extremely proud of his actions that night, going through that with me, for me, it must have been so hard for him. To my credit, to some extent, I chose not to hold that grudge and forgave him and we snuggled up on our second night of marriage, just as we mean to go on.

When I started writing this I thought "start out as you mean to go on" would refer to being in the doghouse but the truth is neither of us has revisited that place ever since and neither of us ever intend to have to go there again. All you have to do is just keep talking. There are answers for everything and even if the answers are bad at the time, you can work through them and get to a better place. Even understanding why something is bad is better than obliviously keeping on the same track without addressing the problems.

Love is worth the effort. Forgive and get over it. You don't even have to forget - it might turn out to be funny further down the line!

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