Marriage Math

Sorry for the radio silence on my writing blog. As this post can attest to, we had a busy June! But I am looking forward to getting back to regular writing after our travels. Good writing takes time, and I am striving for quality, so I will always choose that over quantity. But I love this little space on the internet. I hope you do too. 

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“Going once. Going twice. Sold to the gentleman in the back.”

The auctioneer pointed to my husband, Rob.

When he had put in a bid for a week long stay at a house in France moments before, I thought he was just trying to help the charity fundraiser by upping the bid*. We had four kids. A busy life. A trip abroad was not even on the radar. But when he outbid another person, I knew.

He was doing it for me.

My husband doesn’t love France. He’s big, they’re little. He’s loud, they’re quiet. In a country of demure, he’s a mechanical bull in a china shop. But he does love me, and he was thinking that this trip could be our 10 year anniversary gift. We had talked about doing a big trip, perhaps skiing in Austria or Rome in a few years, but he knows my passion for food has some big roots in French cooking, since my mom studied there for a year and was really influenced by the food. Growing up she passed the love on to us. I had visited Paris in college with good friends when I did a semester abroad in London, fell deeply in love, and vowed to return. In the mean time, I worshipped at the knee of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and David Leibowitz’s My Paris Kitchen. Rob knew all this, and on a whim, acted on love.

And that’s how, a few weeks ago, I was packing a bag for France. The week was a doozy: I was solo parenting, the kids were on their first week of summer vacation (read: fighting). I had to bring the car to the mechanics and meet a plumber to install a new hot water heater, go to lots of tennis lessons, mine and the kids, and leave my house and fridge ready for my mother-in-law to watch my 5 and 2 year old. My plate was Thanksgiving buffet in Vegas full. I really didn’t even have the head space to consider what we should do in France. Should I brush up on my French? Research wines? Or just grab my passport and go? Wait. Where was my passport? (Commence turning house inside out. I should have done the ConMari method while I was at it if I had an ounce of time to spare. It was on my desk the whole time, where I had searched over and over. !@#$%#!) Finally, thanks to my saintly mother-in-law watching the two youngest at home, and a blessed father-in-law who came along and watched the big kids so we could go out at night, it happened. We were on the plane, Champagne in hand.

This was the longest trip we had ever taken. Even our honeymoon was a quick 5 day affair to Aruba because it had a direct flight and my husband had just started a new territory for work. Then we had four kids in succession and moved a couple of times. We also learned that since Rob has to travel a lot during the week, family trips were best taken on long weekends.

But the other truth is that we ski a lot. All of our travel eggs went into a ski condo basket, which we bought just after our third was born. It was a tough decision at the time. I wanted to figure out our main house first, and we were in the process of looking for a house in a bigger neighborhood with more kids. But my husband loves to ski the way I love to cook. He took me up to see the condo one fall weekend, at peak foliage time in the mountains, because he is a salesman and knows to do things like that. We committed – to skiing and spaghetti dinners and weekends away – before we even knew where we were going to live the rest of the time. Since then it has become our family get away. Going up there has not always been easy, especially when our fourth was a baby. There have been tears and fights. But it has been so worth it to have that family time up north, to have a familiar place with rituals and routine and relaxation.

So when he bid on the trip to France, it was a gesture. A giving back to all of the times I have packed up four kids, driven them north (often alone since he would meet us from work), returned tired but happy on Sunday night, only to dive into a busy school week. He knows the sacrifice involved, and how I made room in our lives for his passions. He was returning the favor, and I was deeply grateful.

We went into this trip knowing that we have both made concessions for the other. Sacrificed to fit in big important things – our time, our money, our sanity – for something vital to the other person.  All sweet things in a marriage. But what is beautiful to see is that all this giving has made a certain alchemy happen. When we shared in each other’s passions, they took root in our own hearts and grew. And when our kids share in it too, the joy grows exponentially.

I have become passionate about skiing, excited to see the first flurry in winter, philosophical as I navigate a challenging run, and giddy when I ski with my kids next to me. And they love it even more then I do. When we are skiing, we are in the moment. Fully present, fully alive.

And Rob has grown to love new food, and possibly even France. When we got married, he hated fish. On our last night in Paris, we sought out a salmon for dinner. We all made happy memories over a cote de boef that was as big as our labrador, the intense flavor in the raspberry macarons, the trois fromage crepe that called to us every night at 5 o’clock, hungry and thirsty from exploring hot streets. We ate in the moment. Fully present, fully alive. And while there is no question that Rob would take the beaches of Saint-Malo over the hot crowded streets of Paris, he still found beaucoup de joie de vivre in France.

They say that love is when you can halve each others sorrows and double each others joys.

It is marriage math. And I am so thankful to be its student.

*I wrote before how our trip was from the charity fundraiser for the Hope For Gus foundation. Please visit their page to learn more about helping families with sons who have Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.