An Off White Picket Fence

Last night after work, I spent a couple of hours counseling a good friend that is going through some rough times with his fiance. There is close to 14 years difference in age between them and they have been through a lot together. She was young when they got together and he was a little younger at heart than he maybe should have been.

For seven or so years I watched from the sidelines. This was certainly not a Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts-everybody learns a lesson in the end-feel good comedy of the year. It has been a period of growth for the both of them. A some times blissful and often times volatile evolution into, what seemed to be, a happy future with all the bells and whistles attached. I won't go into the gory details here. Not sure what the forecast for this parade. Hopefully they can figure things out.

As we walked and talked, I began to relive a painful time in my life, that resembled the drama that was unfolding with every step we took. It's a tale of lost youth and burning questions of what could have been. A pursuit for greener grasses that would be wrought with all manner of pests and riddled with some most unruly emotional weeds.

As I have explained in blogs past, my wife and I were married with children very young. We are not unique in this distinction. There are many people in the world that have had children young. The difference between a good percentage of them and us, is that we are still tethered to each others souls after twenty years. What most people don't know, is that our bliss almost met an untimely demise nearly twice. The roughest one being seven years ago. As my friend was beginning his ill-fated journey of love, my own nuptial odyssey was coming to an end.

It seems that from the time we made a vow to each other, we have been on a quest to find the balance in our life. Between raising children, the battle with our weight and the struggle for the legal tender, our barnacle ridden, marital craft, has been tossed too and fro on an angry sea of being. Things are on solid ground now, but we almost didn't even make it out of the dock.

At eighteen, my ambitions of being a rock star seemed to dwarf the responsibilities of raising a family. No matter how hard I tried, I was just not equipped with the wisdom to see the lack of equipoise in my life, especially when we were first married. I worked all day and tried to go to school. Three nights a week I would rock out with my high school compadres, forever on the trail of a one hit wonder that would no doubt keep us in milk money for the rest of our lives.

When I wasn't with the band, I was talking about the band. My head was firmly in the clouds and my feet were barely touching the ground. The lack of focus on my small clan, pushed my wife to the edge of doubt about her choice to marry a child she thought would grow up. All it would take was one more mention of how it would be cool to get a record deal and an opening slot on the latest U2 tour, to send her on over that edge. This would be the second time I would have to make a very heavy and adult decision.

When I cast my eyes towards our future my perspective was definitely blurred. I thought I could have my proverbial cake and eat it too. My beautiful young wife was patient, but I could see the unhappiness forming on her face, in the shape of a furrowed brow of worry and down turned smile. This became more evident to me on a daily basis. We were at two opposite ends of a spectrum of memories and moments that would come to be our life together. She was totally willing to commit herself to me and my, rock star addled, devotion to her was unintentionally dim. Things had to change.

The best way I can figure to describe it, is like this. Look at it as a kind of fuel gauge with two needles at opposite ends. One on full and the other on empty. Replace the fuel with commitment, then place my needle on empty and my wife's needle on full. That should paint the proper visual embodiment of what was going on at the time.

Skip ahead to our fourteenth year of matrimony. Our needles on the gauge had now reached their apex at half a tank. We had both reached a place where our commitment and affections for each other were comfortably in the middle. This sounds like a good place to be right? Nope. What I had failed to realize, was that while my gauge was moving obliviously towards full, hers was clandestinely moving towards empty. It was the calm before a storm that would reach it's most violent stages and toss our (now) marital ocean liner into a Titanic tail spin.

The troubles all started when she had struck up a friendship with a male co-worker that soon began to move from a casual acquaintance to a much closer bond. Now, I am not a jealous man, and I had complete trust in my wife. I had had the same type of feelings for people I have worked with before. More from a curiosity stand point than anything. From what I could see it was just a friendship.

As she began to spend more time around him, she saw in him all the things that had always lacked in her life since the day we had gotten married. We could never seem to manage to get our act together. Here was a man who was a master thespian in comparison. He had his act together and worked the stage of his life better than we ever had. Things that we had struggled with our entire adult lives he seemed to have complete control over.

I continued to push forward with our day to day struggle while she had begun to retreat from it. She would catch herself gazing at the greener grass often. A grass that lay on the other side of a picket fence, stained off white, with the thoughts of defecting to it's lush life. A fence she had been teetering on for sometime, unbeknownst to me. The gaps between those slats framed what looked like a life with less frustration and the very thing that she had been longing to have for once in her life. Stability. Not emotional stability, but the kind of stability that makes life a little less worrisome.

As you probably already know, a fragile state of mind is like silly putty. In the wrong hands it can be manipulated and bent to do anyone's bidding. This guy saw a way in and began to push an pull on her emotions until she could no longer see what she was giving up. Sure, what she had with me could be financially uncertain and frustratingly inconvenient from a creature comfort point of view. But what he managed to blind her from was the fact that there was love and devotion for her in my heart on a colossal scale. I was willing to give her her freedom in hopes of getting her back. If only I had been strong enough to be alone for just a little while, things would have been a lot less dramatic in the end.

With his urging and her need for something new, we separated and went through a year or so of very painful and often depressing times. I retreated to the solace of another woman, and with that, it seemed like us kissing and making up would never come to fruition. The fortunate and unfortunate part of it all, was that the bright green turf that had represented a life of freedom from frustration from financial worry, revealed itself to be artificial and cold.

From our very first date in high school, I never wanted to lose her. But my cowardice to stand up for what we had worked so hard on in the past fourteen years, sent me on my own journey of realization. A journey that I had no business going on without first checking to see how I still felt about her deep in my heart. A journey that yielded the realization that, she was someone I was meant to be with. I tried to find what we had (in others), but it was impossible. No matter where I dug, "X" never really marked the spot and I left a beach full of holes in my wake. There was no getting around it. My heart was forever anchored to hers.

We eventually realized just how wrong we both were in this whole thing and reconciled our lives separation back together. The dust began to settle and we set out to clean up the mess and debris that came from our mid-marriage remodel. We had experienced our seven year itch, seven years too late and lived to tell the tale. But not without some painful lessons learned.

1. It is never a good thing to become ineffectual with your providence. In other words, it's never Okay, to be Okay, with just being Okay. Always push for making your life as full and complete as you possibly can. This is what keeps us moving forward.

2. Embrace the voyage and hold on for the superunknown. Never neglect yourself or the people that matter most to you along the way.

3. We all make mistakes. And, no matter what color it is, make sure there is a gate in your picket fence and that is stays unlocked. Just in case you or someone you love, needs to get back to where you once belonged.

4. Stay focused on the things in your life that are important. We all want what we don't have. The sooner we stop wishing for the good life, the sooner we can get back to the business of striving for a better one.