‘I bet my life on you…”

Now remember when I told you that’s the last you’ll see of me
Remember when I broke you down to tears
I know I took the path that you would never want for me
I gave you hell through all the years

So I, I bet my life, I bet my life on you…”

Imagine Dragons

I was 19 and unknowingly sitting in his chair.  It was a rundown upper flat on the east side of Milwaukee occupied by four guys, Doritos and no toilet bowl cleanser.  He walked in with a friend, noticed his chair was taken, sat down on the floor in front of the curb-side coffee table and proceeded to roll a blunt.   He was in a white hoodie and red Adidas pants and the ugliest pair of white Lugz in existence.  He had just come from work in the kitchen at a local restaurant, he took the black bandanna he had on off revealing his frosted tips in true “Justin Timerblake 2002 style”, and lit up.  He was everything I wasn’t.  He was everything I was taught to avoid and was afraid of – 5 years later, I married him.

It wasn’t love at first sight.  It was curiosity.  He wouldn’t have noticed me that night if I hadn’t been sitting in his chair.  He stayed for the duration of his smoke. showered and left with the friend he came with.  We didn’t say more to each other that night than ‘hello’.  I finished my evening there chatting with his best friend, who asked for my number at the end of the night and I turned him down and left.  I wasn’t looking to date anyone.  I was just getting, or about to get, out of a relationship with a nice, safe, comfortable economics and IT double major who was sure to amount to something. The kind of guy every mother loves. – I was bored.

A few weeks later, I found myself talked-in-to going back out to a party with the guys from that house because my roommate was dating one of them.  He was there, he barely looked at me for the first part of the evening.  We ended up at a house party where we paid $5 for a red solo cup to get in and ended up playing cards, ‘Asshole’ specifically.   It was apparently the most productive drinking game I’ve ever played.  I don’t remember who won.  Honestly, I don’t even remember who else was playing.  I remember the eye contact. I remember his stoic non-nonchalants that, at the time, I thought was disinterest and therefore a challenge – turns out, he just had no game.

Well, game or not – we figured it out and after 3 years of intense fighting, drama, breaking up, getting back together, late nights, drinking and fun – he proposed, I said yes, and we moved to the Chicago suburbs for a year while he went to culinary school and I planned a wedding and sold over-priced furniture to really, really rich people.  Our first apartment was full of Ikea and bright colors with apartment-beige walls.  It was small and expensive and some days, I still miss it.  That was the only time in our entire lives together where it was just ‘us’.  Between work and school, he was gone 7 days a week for 10-17 hours, depending on the train schedule and we were dirt poor, living on nothing but love, passion and a credit line I shouldn’t have been given at 22.

We married about  a year and a half later in October 2007 and by then, we had moved back to Milwaukee to be near our family, and he took an internship.  I waitressed for a while and we ended up living really parallel lives.  opposite schedules, long hours, no money.  Its an exhausting combination.  A million things happened to us on both ends. We stopped fighting, which most people think is a good thing, but for us, it was the worst thing we could have done. We built our relationship on arguing, passionate tempers and the challenge.  It’s what unknowingly drove us. It’s what showed each other how deep the love went.  it stopped.  We ignored it, and a million other things.  We barely saw each other for the better part of 2 years due to opposite schedules, so fighting seemed pointless and wasteful.  We bought a house, and had a baby, and got really good at hurting each other.  then something happened that I didn’t think would ever happen to us.  He asked for a divorce.  It was 2014.  I understood all of his reasons, but I just couldn’t believe that it was happening.  Despite all the distance and events and resentment, I loved him as much as I did the day he proposed.  I still felt the same way when we made eye contact during that first game of ‘Asshole’, and I always thought we would just be fine.  At some point, it would all magically come back.  All the hurt and damage wouldn’t matter and the growing up we had done together would just trump it all. – That was the hardest part.  He knew me.  We became adults together, we certainly weren’t when we met.  All of these things that had happened, all of our reactions and resentment – It was all from a place of immaturity because well, we were immature.  We weren’t grown-ups yet.  And when big real-life things happen at 25 – You react and handle them much differently than you would at 35.

Due to financial constraints, we lived together, but separately, for a year.  it was the hardest year of my life.  It was the most painful experience.  We had officially been through everything there is to go through together, aside from the loss of a child.  We had watched each other grow up. We graduated college together, and moved 4 times, bought a house, had a baby, a dog and 4 cats over the years.  We had faced illness both mental and physical and gone through personal conflict that would have broken most people.  And now here we were, like 50% of the rest of America, separating our life like it all never happened and looking to start over.

The financial stress was completely overwhelming.  We were in debt, and the house was in no condition to sell for a profit.  So, not knowing exactly how to proceed, we sat.  We basically just did nothing for an entire year.  We lived in the awkwardness and focused on being parents and trying to be friends again, because through it all, that was the biggest loss.  There were a few fights and then mostly just tears and a lot of time just spent trying to respect each others space and privacy as we both tried to move on.  We watched each other go out and come home late, we watched each other smile though it and try to make it amicable and easy.  We both knew that we had put each other through enough.  We just needed to find a way to stay family for Sawyers sake and be good parents.  And we did.

I never thought that being poor and in financial ruin would ever be a blessing.  It had been a huge struggle for years.  But at this point, I can say that everything really does happen for a reason.  If we had been able to afford to live apart, we wouldn’t have had that year of simply trying to be friends and remember why it was we became partners to begin with.  We had to take the time to sit and stop worrying about what we were getting, or not getting from the relationship, let go of that resentment, because it no longer mattered.  We had to stop and talk each other through issues in our own lives, simply as just friends and family that knew each other – without the hindrance of it being “my job” or “his job” to sit and listen to our daily grievances.  We had to take the time to stop tip toeing around things that annoyed us, because we didn’t want to upset each other.  Funny thing is, when you are headed for divorce – you care a lot less about pissing each other off and just say what you think.  I learned more about him in that year than I had in the previous 11 cumulatively.  And about a year later, he asked if he could stay.  I took a few weeks to say yes, but mostly to give myself time to get over the anger that all of this had happened and appreciate the fact that it did.  We hit the proverbial reset button.  There were of course discussions after the initial one, but ultimately, I knew there was no way I was going to let him walk out now that he had told me he didn’t want to.  There was a huge sense of relief and fear all at the same time.   Relief that the dreaded ‘move out’ day would never happen.  Relief that I would never have to explain to my child that ‘daddy doesn’t live here anymore’. Relief that the only person I had ever loved to the core of his existence wasn’t indifferent to me.  Fear that we would fall back into old habits.  Fear that the things I had taken the year to figure out personally, would go out the window.  Fear that the things I realized were fundamental ‘needs’ I or he had in a relationship wouldn’t be given out of sheer differences in who we are as people.  Fear that he only wanted to stay because it had become easier than starting over would be.

But, at some point, we both realized that we had finally grown up.  We finally had gone through everything there was to go through.  We had seen it all.  And as we listened to other friends going through divorces or break ups steep in the hate and resentment and mud-slinging, we realized that neither of us ever felt or desired to be that way towards the  other.  We had both given reasons to hate each other over the years.  It would have been possible, easy even.  Our friends actually didn’t understand why we didn’t some days.  And I think when we realized that our love and like of each other was actually purely genuine and from a place most people don’t grasp, all the ‘stuff’ just seemed less important.

The older I get, the more I realize that relationships and people don’t need to ‘work for me’ in the way that I initially thought. It’s not about what you take from it or it brings to you, its not about putting a quarter in the relationship bank when you do something nice, its about that human being and realizing their journey and wanting to be part of it.  Each person has their own journey, they don’t completely combine when you marry someone.  They simply cross over when you need the support.  The life events you experience may be the same, factually, but how you perceive them is often incredibly different.  Accepting that that’s the point and realizing that it’s OK when their perception and experience in something is different than yours is what makes it worth it.  It isn’t a sign of distance or incompatibility, it’s just a fact of life, and the ability to see that, and try and understand and join them within it is what creates a bond and love that can’t be broken.

Divorced or not, we would have had that, and it probably would have been to the detriment to other relationships we would have attempted for a long time.  But when you became an adult with someone in such an intimate, yet independent way, no one one the planet will ever know you as well or be able to really see things the was you see them like that person can.

It’s been a little less than a year since we reconciled, and it’s taken this long to both find time and the words to write this out, and it still has me in tears when I think about that year.  But we are OK.  Probably better than OK, he drives me bat-shit crazy and we fight.  And for most relationships, that might be a sign of marital discord, but for us – it’s how I know we have a heartbeat.

“I’ve told a million lies, but now I tell a single truth; there’s you in everything I do…”- Imagine Dragons.