By Anna Jordan
@annaleighjordan

For most of the last decade, California has experienced severe drought.  In fact, last year was the first winter since I’ve become a mother that we had above average rainfall and saw improved water supply conditions. 

I wasn’t familiar with drought in a practical sense until I lived through one. Sure, I’d heard about droughts in other places. I knew about drought in a Biblical sense, that is to say, I knew about it because there were Old Testament droughts. I suppose you could say that the drought here in Santa Barbara was fairly Biblical in that it lasted for about seven years, which was consistent with my previous working knowledge of the condition.

Eventually, our county declared a Stage Three Drought Emergency.  This means that we could no longer expect or take allocations from Lake Cachuma, our nearby reservoir. Instead of being cool and rainy, as they had been during my college years, our winters were dry. Hot. We feared fire whenever the warm Santa Ana winds blew through, and, ultimately, our fears were realized. Flames coursed through the mountains and the hills, scorching not just our coast, but many other parts of California

But in the midst of it all, our little town rallied together.  There were fundraisers and clothing drives. Group efforts to care for those displaced from their homes or evacuated with the fire hit. But after the fires, our land was still scorched, so we made practical changes to our daily lives. With the exception of those who paid to bring water to their estates by the truckful (it is Santa Barbara after all), the yards around the neighborhoods got rather crispy, as we were encouraged to stop watering. People replaced grass with drought resistant plants, rocks, and mulch. I took to giving our houseplants a drink with the warm leftovers of water bottles or shower water. The city filled the fountains with succulents and rocks. 

We are not the same as we were before the drought or the fires. We are still scorched in places and have visible scars. But we adapted.

***

I twirled the stir stick in my latte as the marriage counselor spoke. I drew my face near the opening of the cup, so I could feel the warmth on my chin. Despite the fact that it was nearly 80 degrees outside, the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf where we sat was unreasonably chilly.

Kiah’s hand was on my thigh, and true to form, he appeared to be perfectly comfortable. The marriage counselor opened up the folder containing our test results. This was our final premarital counseling session, and in the previous session we’d completed a kind of personality inventory called the Taylor Johnson Temperament Analysis. The test assesses the way we perceive ourselves as well as the how we perceive our partners, and then the points of disconnect are the areas the counselor focuses on in therapy. I’m not entirely sure why we worked through this assessment so late in our premarital counseling, but there we sat. Awaiting our final results and closing remarks.

“You’re pretty well matched,” our counselor said as he rifled through the papers. He seemed surprised. I stifled a duh. “My one concern is this: you think so highly of each other. Anna, in particular, you really view Kiah through rose-colored glasses –”

“I’m marrying him, so … isn’t that good?” I said. Kiah chuckled and chimed in that he really didn’t see how this could be a negative.

The counselor proceeded, noting that thinking so highly of my husband could lead to great disappointment later when real life hits and he tumbles from the pedestal, so to speak.

“Sure,” I said. “I suppose that would be problematic if I put Kiah on a pedestal, but … I don’t.”

The counselor gestured to the dot graph in front of him that outlined my perception of my soon-to-be husband. “It appears that you do.”

***

In January, I chaperoned my son’s third grade class trip to Lake Cachuma, the same Lake Cachuma from which we couldn’t draw water for years. While the lake currently boasts about 80% full, it was at record lows in the last decade. At one point, a report went out declaring that, at its lowest, the lake was at about 5% full. It was basically a large puddle.

The day of the field trip was bright and crisp, and as I looked out over the lake I could hardly believe that just a few years ago it had been almost completely empty. A cold breeze whooshed across the water, and all the kids shivered as we boarded the boat. Our guide, Rosie, pulled a beanie over her head and slipped on a pair of knit gloves before she pushed the throttle and eased us out onto the water.

Almost immediately the children began exclaiming about the Western Grebes swimming and diving in front of us.

“I’ve never had a group this excited about grebes!” Rosie exclaimed.

“We learned everything about them!” my son and a few of his friends shouted over the roar of the wind and the boat motor. 

As it turns out, they really did. Apparently, the class had spent a considerable amount of time talking about grebes (a creature I’d honestly never given a second thought to until 16 nine-year-olds loudly spouted fascinating facts about a bird I had assumed was a duck).

“The can run on the water!”

“They carry babies on their backs!”

“They can hold their breath for like ninety seconds!”

Rosie slowed the boat, laughing at their enthusiasm, and pointed out to a cluster of branches poking out of the water.

“If you look over there,” she started, “those branches poking out of the water are actually willows. When the lake was at its lowest, much of this area was actually dry land, so plants that previously would never have survived in other conditions began to grow here. We have seen so many new bushes and grasses and trees in this area. As the water came back, this whole area became rather marshy. Now, as you can see, the willows are drowning, but for the last few years they’ve been a fantastic nesting space for the grebes and other birds.”

I thought Rosie was going to say that the grebes had been absent for the last decade. That they had to find a new home in a new state, a place where there was water so they could still swim along carrying their babies on their back.

But she didn’t say that.

The grebes stayed. They lived in the lake when the water was low.

Rosie went on to talk about the ways in which the animals had to figure out how to survive when the water was depleted. Most of the wildlife found new ways to thrive.

“Drought conditions actually create a whole new kind of biodiversity,” Rosie said. “We saw wildlife in this area flourishing in ways we didn’t expect.” 

In short, they adapted.

***

 Five years ago my husband was fired from a job he loved. I’ve never actually written that sentence before, and truthfully, there are people close to us who still don’t know that this happened. The whole thing went down in a deeply painful, incredibly awkward, yet surprisingly amicable manner. There was an NDA and a statute of limitations and a whole host of other restrictions that essentially required us to lie to the faces of nearly everyone we knew, and in return, my husband would be able to retain a handful of clients and give the impression that he was splitting off from the company he had previously been deeply committed to in order to begin his own venture.

 We were fresh off the heels of two years of foster parenting and a bumpy road to adoption. When my husband walked into the house the night he was fired and handed me the packet of termination documents, I was nursing our second baby, who was six months old. 

Real life.

As I sat in our faded living room chair feeding our still-too-small baby, my eyes scanned the cover letter and so much about what I had believed about how our life was and how our life was going to be crumbled as I processed the words on the page.

For what it’s worth, my husband being fired wasn’t completely unexpected. For lack of a better word, things had been weird at his office for a while. 

“They’re hedging you out, “ I had said. “You have to leave.”

I worried. I prayed. I suggested he look for another job. But he stayed, because he’s loyal, and he worked harder because that’s who he is,  yet now here we were.

It was the worst case scenario I’d feared for at least a year. 

I set the letter in my lap and looked at my husband who was leaning against the kitchen counter, his head down as he waited for me to finish reading. I repositioned our baby daughter and slowly rubbed her back, breathing in the fresh baby scent of her head.

It’s hard for these moments to not feel like failure, to not be filled to the brim with all the should have/could have/would haves. While I had feared he would be fired, I didn’t actually believe it could happen. He worked too hard. He was too dedicated. Aside from frustrating office politics, his clients loved him. This was a mistake.

Mistake or not, it happened. We could not take it back.

I made a couple jokes because I don’t handle bad news well, and I said the sentence I’ve believed to my core since the moment I met him: “We’re going to be okay.”

This wasn’t a lie or a reframe or rose-colored glasses (although our premarital counselor would disagree with me, I’m sure). As I looked at my husband, and then to our daughter, and then to the documents in my hand, I knew that while this moment was defining, it was not defeating. I knew because my husband had proved to me before that when things in life were unsteady, he was steadfast. He always pushed forward and persevered, and I believed in him.

***

As we worked through this challenging and unexpected season, I returned to the phrase our counselor said about how I would perceive my husband once real life hit. Once real life hits and he tumbles from that pedestal …

I do think my husband hung the moon, so to speak. He’s wonderful in countless ways, but not because I’ve elevated him or put him on a pedestal. Quite the opposite. In the context of our relationship, we’re standing side-by-side, arms wrapped tight around each other. Sometimes I hold him up; sometimes he holds me up. But always we’re together, and there’s comfort and security in that knowledge.

The season that came in the aftermath of my husband’s firing was particularly dry. He did start his own company, and it goes without saying that the first years of starting a company are not without trial. Compounded with my husband also finishing grad school, clients that required long hours and regular travel, and then there was that unexpected third pregnancy...  In hindsight, the fact that all of this occurred against the landscape of a literal drought feels a little on the nose.

We lived through the dry season. We prayed for rain. And for a while there it seemed like the rain wouldn’t come. But just because the land was dry, doesn’t mean that it was unyielding. 

We found new ways to thrive. Together. 

Side-by-side, we adapted.

Words and photo by Anna Jordan.