Tag: marriage

Snoring

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer4 Comments

You didn’t used to snore.  You used to sleep in silent stillness, so much so that I’d hold my hand in front of your mouth to make sure you were breathing.  You used to joke that you slept like you were dead.

And then came the time when you stopped sleeping, the year when you wrestled demons and wished you were dead.  You wrestled in the harsh light of day and every dark, lonely night.  Life was hard and there was no rest for you, no sleep to ease your mind.  My sleep was punctuated with nightmares, nightmares that continued into my waking hours.

Those were dark days when we clawed our way out of the pit, only to fall back in and try again the next day.  And the next day.  And the next.  We fought hard for our life together, fought hard to hang onto love.  And light.  And hope.  My prayers were fervent, urgent pleas for life over death.  We clung to God.  We clung to each other.  We clung for dear life.

After months of this exhausting struggle, my prayers were answered and you began to sleep again.  I remember the first night you finally slept.  You began to snore.  At first the snoring scared me, startling me from sleep, reminding me of all that had changed.  Even at night I couldn’t escape that fact that for better or worse, we were different.

Most days it feels like that was a long time ago and for that I’m grateful.  Our life is happy.  We are whole.  Changed, yes, but when we put together the pieces of our fractured life, you were still you and I was still me.

Now at night when I wake to your snoring, I press into you, safe in the knowledge that you are here in this life with me.  I remember the days when you couldn’t sleep.  I listen to your snoring and say a prayer of thanks that you have found rest, that we have found respite together.

I’ve come to love the sound of your snores.  In the quiet of night, your snoring is the sound I listen for.  In fact, it’s my favorite sound, the one I want to hear all the days of my life.

I heard you snoring last night and I felt safe.  I rolled over and slipped into a dream.  And when I woke, I woke to our life together.

It is the sweetest dream of all.

More Than Love

On By Alicia McCauleyIn The Junk Drawer6 Comments

My blogger friend, Hippie, has this cool collaborative blogging exercise going on as part of her Algonquin Experiment.  It involves Hippie posing a question and people responding on their own blogs.

So this is the question she posed:  What do you love more than love?

I thought of a thousand answers.  God.  But that one’s sort of obvious.  Cycling.  Obvious squared.  Ice cream.  Sadly, also very apparent.  Writing.  Same.  My friends.  But everyone loves their friends.  My little ones.  But I’ve written about them ad nauseam as of late.  My husband.  (A fact I should probably mention to him more often.)  All of my answers were so generic.

Except one.

The thing I love more than love is being on the other side of it.

Huh?

Sure love is great when it’s new and shiny, when your beloved can do no wrong.  And after a few years when the sheen wears off a little bit and you settle into the day to day acts of love, mmmm, that comfortable love is good, too.

But sometimes love unravels, frays at the edges and begins to fall apart in the very hands that made it.

I’ve been in this stage of love, too.  When love was painful work, when it was all we could do to hang onto each other and pray.  A lot.  This isn’t the kind of glass slipper love that fairy tales are made of.  It’s not pretty.  It is devastatingly hard, so much so that for me, heartache was actually physically painful.

But we chose to press into God, to hold onto the frayed pieces.  We chose to love when it wasn’t the easy choice.  And that’s what I mean by the other side of love.

So the thing I love more than love is love that has been worn thin.  Love that has broken into shards.  Love that has taken on water fast and is listing badly.  You might be thinking that’s a bit of a metaphor overload.  If so, to you I say count your blessings.  Others know with painful precision what I’m talking about.  You, dear ones, know that it’s possible to be frayed, shattered, and sinking all at once.

I can only hope that you also know about the love that comes out on the other side of all that pain. This love is scarred.  And fierce.  And secure.  And more wonderful than anything I could have ever imagined.  This is the love I have in my life.  I thank God for it every single day.

You know, I wish fairy tales did talk about this kind of love because I can say with assurance that this is the kind of love that creates a happily ever after.