By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann

We couldn’t have been married more than six months. A year, max. I am in college, he’s in grad school. We live off pasta and love. Evenings out are samples at the nice grocery store and a dollar-night movie.  

Our apartment is on the 12th floor of a 13-story building next to a hospital. Ambulances blare all hours of the night. It’s cheap, convenient, and everything we need is within walking distance. We furnish the one bedroom space with hand-me-down furniture and thrift store finds. Our grocery bill for two weeks is the same amount I now spend just on milk. We are pragmatic by personality, frugal by circumstance.  

I come home from class one day, open the green metal door, drop my bag, and see a bouquet of flowers in a wedding-gift vase from across the room. A smile flashes. My breath catches. I’m so tempted to get dizzy with the simple romance of this gesture. 

But I swallow the thankyouthankyouIloveyou I now wish I would have said and instead speak with practical budget-conscious words. I don’t consider how he’d never buy what we could not afford nor could I fathom an emotional bank that could ever run dry. I do not yet know that love is meant to be lavish. So I say, Thank you. But. Fresh flowers just die. And we can’t afford it. 

And then, as if I was making a rule: I don’t want you to buy me flowers. 

***

Two years earlier, I was a senior in high school. I had a hint I’d marry this boy I was falling in love with, but what I knew for sure then was that my mother was dying. Not two weeks before her funeral, at the school’s end-of-year ‘talent’ night, I stood at a podium and read a poem attributed to Jorge Luise Borges called Comes the Dawn. I couldn’t put into words why I loved it, I just knew I did. 

***

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises ...

***

I sit across from a kind woman with a notebook in her hand. She has nothing to offer me except listening ears and a trained mind. I’ve come to her for help. I’ve been married now for 20 years to the young man I fell in love with in high school. He and I are at an impasse, and we cannot find our way through. She asks me, not about my marriage, but about my heart, “What do you want?” 

What do I want? I think to myself. I stare at her and tilt my head. She waits. I stall. I look at the wall, the window, the floor. I notice the hum of a fan, how clean the baseboards are, the tiny quiver growing in my throat. What I want? I want to talk about my mom, I think, though this admission scares me. I want this life to be easy and for pain and hurt to be instantaneously healed. I want my husband to buy me flowers and have that be enough. But I say none of this. 

“I don’t know,” I finally reply. I’m not sure if what I want has been buried so deep under what everyone else has needed that now it’s inaccessible. Or maybe I know, but I’ve had so much practice not saying it, I don’t think I can admit it. 

***

And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,

***

You read about it, hear about it—these individuals who keep going and going, from one thing to the next. College. Marriage. Career. Family. Then they get out of the baby phase or reach the middle of their lives, and for whatever reason look around one day and ask How did I get here? As a couple, those same people ask, How did we get … like this?

It seems so distanced, so foreign, so sad. You’re busy right now changing diapers and patting backs and finding pacifiers for nap time. And you’re vaguely aware it could be you, one day. But no, it won't be; you’ll be okay. And you give no more time to this thought because someone is crying. Someone needs you.

***

And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn …
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

***

“Are you happy?” he asks me in our bedroom. We are 20 years and 500 miles away from that first apartment. Four kids sleep under a roof we own. The issues all pile up, all unresolved. And we argue, night after night, in hushed-the-kids-are-asleep voices -- for months. I’m on the other side of the bed and I almost laugh. He’s not offering this as an olive branch. It seems more like a loaded gun.

“Am I happy?”

“Yes, are you happy?” his eyes lock on me. “In this marriage.” 

My heart pulses against the constraints of my skin. I stare at him, cheeks flush. I don’t dare say no, I know what that would do to him. But I can hardly say yes, for that would be a lie. 

The truth is—and hear my heart clearly when I say this, for I am no martyr—that my circumstantial happiness or unhappiness does not change the commitment I made to this man. The honor I place on our vows. So what I want right here, right now, in this bedroom—what I’m desperate for, is not happiness in our marriage so much—but health. Healing. For both of us.   

What I don’t know yet, is that so does he.

***

So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

***

So how does a once happy turned unhappy marriage change?

For us, it started with an acknowledgment: that whatever set of spoken or unspoken rules we’d been living by for so long were (for so many reasons) no longer working. Then it took an admission, a surrender, and a confession: we could not fix this on our own. 

And even then, especially then, it took time. And tears. And reassurance—often and overt—from him to me and me to him, of our commitment both to each other and to the painful progress of allowing God to excavate deep. Down to the bottom. Where it felt like there was absolutely nothing left but open hands and free grace. Those rules kept us bound. But learning how to live unconditionally loved, as is, no strings? It freed us.  

***

And you learn that you really can endure …
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth …
And you learn and learn …
With every good-bye you learn.

***

I walk through the grocery store now with a cart overflowing. It’s just a week’s worth of food—mac n’ cheese, apples, three gallons of milk—the basics. I round the corner towards check out but stop at the flower display. They all look so beautiful, reds and pinks and green. A seasonal bouquet with a splash of white catches my eye. I grab the bunch and put it in my cart. 

I will go home and my husband will help me unload the car. I’ll make dinner and afterwards he’ll put the kids to bed. I will replace last week’s flowers with these. They’ll sit on the table till I, or he, buys new ones. 

The rules didn’t need to change. We did. 

Photo by Lottie Caiella.