on marriage: doing battle(ships) at night

photo credit here

Amber and Seth Haines started a Monday series on marriage, penning letters about the grit and the grace of it all.  this week's topic is "nightly routine."


to rYan,

one day, we’ll come blinking out of the grad school bunker and squint in the light of the workaday world,
and i’ll beg these nights back.

sure, our checking account will be stretchier, and i won’t spend my days alternating doses of black coffee and B-12, but there is a bit of magic in survival mode, too, that i'd wager i'll miss.  how the war stories and the love stories intertwine.  i play Penelope to your Odyessean adventure.  we are Hemingway’s revolutionaries, hunkering down in the hills.

each night, we trade off reading Narnian voices and humming lullabies over white noise, then set up camp on the couch we scored for forty bucks with a frosted glass of nightcap and a sigh.  we face each other and the life we signed up for -- moving here, doing this.  laptops open in tandem, i sink your battleship, then grade an essay or two.  you flirt with one foot on an undercover reconnaissance mission, then resume your wrestling match with Plato.   his Complete Works are … errm, complete.

i’m exhausted.  perpetually.  but never alone.   we toy with the idea of knocking off early, trading in the tapping of laptop keys for salty popcorn and spooning by the light of the screen, but one of us wants Downton Abbey, the other Dukes of Hazard, so we settle for the ol’ YouTube favorites, then work some more.

that’s the thing about the work:  there’s always more.  we set alarms in the Google calendar to remind us to go to bed, then wink at each other in a medicine cabinet mirror strewn with ragamuffin quotes.  did i tell you that i never used to floss before you?  sad, but true.  we dance the tiny bathroom bedtime routine: the face cream my mama still uses, a nightlight flicked on, two big toothbrushes squeezed between two little.  in the dark hall, your hand on the small of my back, you whisper to me:  don’t look at the clock, it’s best not to know … 

oh, the life we know – right now.   how nostalgia will paint it so pretty one day.

one might think hard times would make us adversaries, but we’ve giggled our surprise that the opposite is true.  the kitchen is a mess hall, indeed, and we wear our fatigues for certain, but each night, under cover of darkness, we do battle, side by side.   i pull the shrapnel of discouragement from your furrowed brow (and the comma errors from your term papers).  you tiptoe landmines to rescue me, again and again, from an enemy who seeks to devour.  we find His grace, even in retreat, and we learn to trust Him – and each other – in the trenches.

much love,

keLi