I am respecting the wishes of my wife today by NOT celebrating Mother's Day. Not in the normal sense, anyway. No flowers, no breakfast in bed. No jewelry.
I'll grill up her fave this afternoon, ribs, the big fatty country style ribs that cook slowly for three hours and have the sauce perfectly crusted when served with a salad and a little corn bread. But I likely would have done that anyway, since we are fond of the late lunch/early dinner thing on Sunday. It allows time to laze into pj's and bed whenever the mood strikes.
My wife is out walking today. She'll do six miles. She did ten yesterday. She hit the gym three times a week before her latest adventure, and now she walks in addition to her fitness regimen. In August she will walk in the Susan G. Komen Breast cancer walk in Chicago. Twenty miles a day for three days.
Adele is working her way up to it. She can now go ten miles a day, and is making great progress toward her goal. But the athleticism and endurance required is substantial. Especially what I remember that in between three 20-mile walks are two nights sleeping on the ground in pup tents.
Organizers provide food throughout. All participants need to bring is the ability and determination, rain or shine. This will be August in Chicago, remember. High humidity 90-degree days are the norm. Rain will likely be welcome. One doesn't enter into such a promise lightly. But Adele has long been one to make commitments when she feels the need. She'll figure out how she is going to do it along the way.
So this is how we will spend our summer. Me cleaning, shopping, cooking, and her walking. Along the way there will be a White Sox game or two. (A few of the guys will be swinging pink bats today. If they can hit the friggin' ball ferchrissakes they should use 'em every day!) We'll have a few dreamy nights at the Ravinia Music Festival, which is literally within walking distance from our house (don't mention that to her 'cause I don't feel like lugging a cooler all the way over and back) at which Elvis Costello will top another great season. And every weekend she will extend her walks until she can knock off 20 miles a pop. Then she'll keep working until she knows she'll be able to do it three days in a row.
Then she'll do it.
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I've long wanted to write about high-achieving women like her, and the shlub husbands who try to keep up with them. Such a course is fraught with peril, of course, for I would like to continue to be married to her. But she is very focused right now, and likely won't allow herself the distraction of reading this, so here goes.
I asked her why she married me. She responded with brutal candor: "I was pushing 30 and no one had asked me."
The statement displays her practical side. Something needed to happen in her life, and it wasn't going to happen all by itself. It would happen if she made it happen. So she did.
Many is the time I wish I had married, pardon the expression, a dumb broad. Someone dumb enough to recognize my inherent intellectual superiority. Someone who understands that my fragile ego-psyche MUST be placated by sex, administered regularly and with admiration. Someone softer. My wife is many wonderful things. Soft is not one of them. Lot's of sharp edges here. Time has shown those edges necessary to slice through the jungle which once stood between what she was and what she was to be.
Women like Adele aren't usually described as revolutionaries, but is there a better word? She never shouted through a megaphone, "Follow me," for she was too busy getting where she was going to worry about whether others had chosen the same path. She was not by historical circumstance destined for this. She is the daughter of a mother who came to America barely out of her teens, who left the house to go to church, to go shopping, and to go meet with other parish women to roll out pasta. Yolanda, like most women, was a wife first, a mother second and Yolanda third.
Then came the great change. The social order was blown up and reconstructed. This came about in part due to an author who died this week, Marylin French. I read "The Women's Room" and hated it. To me and others who thought like me, she responded simply, "I didn't write this for them."
She wrote it for millions of women who saw themselves in her pages. People whose needs, dreams and potential ran head first into walls constructed by men, who willfully or otherwise had relegated half the population to second-class status. Change is messy and in the middle of this mess Adele became a woman whose saw familial role models--her mother, her aunt, her parish people--as wonderful people whose traditions she would not abandon. But the role models for her future didn't exist, so she became her own. Rather than choosing the past or the future, she chose both.
She got a job, got a husband and made babies. Her career path went like this: In addition to the job she had, she always did all the work no one else did. Within a year or so she would receive the appropriate title and compensation.
The most difficult choice she made was to allow her husband an equal role in child-rearing. I was home with the kids hours before her and our most serious arguments were when she second-guessed my work upon arriving home.
(I always started work early. She always took the kids to school before heading to the office. Thus, there was always a parent home with the kids before and after day care, then school.)
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The sexual revolution was not without its casualties. For as we have learned it was not about sex, but about how we would live. The casualties I think resulted from those who didn't get this and left behind fatherless children. They didn't get that life is work and children are work. Raising them, making their needs immediately more important than your own, is part of the deal. If you aren't prepared to do it, then please don't.
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There was an afternoon along the way that I keep remembering on Mother's Day. Rose, our oldest, was still a baby. Adele had spent an hour strapping her onto a bicycle one weekend afternoon. I was working two jobs at the time. I probably had to work that night and had no interest in riding a bike. I would have enjoyed a few hours together with my wife and baby daughter. But Adele still had weight from the pregnancy and felt she needed to be more active whenever the moody Midwest weather allowed. So off they went.
She returned an hour later splattered with blood and tears. She had somehow fallen sideways, she and the baby. She had hit a knee and damaged it permanently. She had to get herself, the baby and the bike home on one leg. She cradled the baby in one arm. With the other she leaned on the handlebars of the bike, giving her injured leg some support. And she got everyone home.
I think the same thing today that I thought then. Why do you do it? Why not relax on the couch? It's safer. And more fun. One may as well ask a fish why it swims. It is in her DNA to blast forward first, and figure out how she is going to get to her destination along the way. I doubt she even knows her destination, nor finds such knowledge relevant. She must simply go forward.
For a spouse, there is no keeping up. One tries to stand aside most of the time. Grasping at a comet is suicidal for the fool who attempts it and irrelevant to the comet.
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Comments
Monte
You and she both are lucky to have each other!
Chicago--I think it's worth it. And I know you do as well.
Fingerlake--Thanks you and congrats.
PS. I walked a marathon last October and spent ALL of last summer walking, too. Six days a week, walking, walking, walking. It consumed all my time. I wish her all the best with her goal. It's a great one!
waking--Congrats on completing what I know to be a grueling task. My thinking is that if she can do it, I can support her doing it.
I don't care if the phrase about the comet came from somewhere else, or if you dreamed it.......the image fits so well, the project of bonding you both share.
Rated, 'cause the best marriages always work with acceptance
Gracielou--I wouldn't have it any other way. I realize some of my observations may seem critical, but we have to deal with the reality of who we are, not the portraits we'd like painted of ourselves.
Michael--Thank you.
Essie--If I tell you, every young stud wannabe actor this side of New York will be camped in my yard with bbq's. I never cook and tell.
Ha!
You are a lucky man. And you know it.
Congratulations.
Duaneart--That day was nearly 20 years ago. I'll never forget the look she gave me when, after the dust had settled and she was on the couch with an ice pak on her knee, I suggested maybe she didn't need to excersize so much. It was as if I told her to stop breathing. Thanks for checking in.
ConnieMack--Thank you. I'm taken by your thought about points of intersetion. One really has to look for them and take advantage. And let go when they aren't there. I'll have leftover ribs by myself tonight because she's doing something or other. But we had a nice time yesterday afternon and that'll have to do for a while.
Julie and David--Thanks so much.
Yeeouch! Fuckin - A....
You're a damned good man, Jimmy, a fine catch, don't you doubt it for a minute!
"For a spouse, there is no keeping up. One tries to stand aside most of the time. Grasping at a comet is suicidal for the fool who attempts it and irrelevant to the comet."
I will have to write this down somewhere. How true, how true.
Big thanks to all!