Yeah, I missed some days. With predictable suddenness, the wheels up date for hubby's tour of duty in Afghanistan has been moved up. Training in another state all this week, wheels up Sunday. So things got really busy really fast.
And then there's the rest of the shit.
Son and daughter-in-law, who adopted Precious Treasure (granddaughter) last year, which caused hubby & me to move here rather than stay several hours away - are splitting up. Yeah, that's right. Divorce. So I've been detouring around my heart lying there on the carpet for a week now, since they told us. We knew things weren't good - there's been so much tension in that house that I'm surprised the entire state hasn't been put on alert - but had hoped they would work things out. Nope. So I'm alternating between heartbroken and madder than hell. Maybe I shouldn't have tried so hard not to be an interfering mother/mother-in-law. Right now, I'd like to shake them both and then ask them what the hell do they think they're playing at? This isn't some game. So they're miserable right now. So fucking what? It stopped being about their happiness when they said they wanted to raise Precious Treasure because we're close to 60. If hubby and I had split every time one or the other of us spent months being miserable, we'd have divorced before any of them came along.
They've probably listened to some of this bullshit about how a marriage is supposed to be 50/50. Bull-fucking-shit. Marriage is 100/100. If you marry someone because you expect they'll make you happy, you've married for the wrong reason. The right reason? Simple. Marry someone because you intend to make that someone happy. Not the other way around. Not you hope to make them happy. Not because you might make them happy. Because you intend - you expect to work at, you expect to give every plan, ambition, hope, dream, wish - all that you had, all that you have, all that you will ever have -- to make the other person happy. Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's unfair. It's all of that and more. It's also the only way it will ever work.
Understand me - I mean that both of you have to marry with that in mind. There will be times when each of you will forget. There will be times when nothing you try works. There will be times when it takes more than you ever thought you would have to even keep breathing, much less continue to work at making sure the other person is happy. But if both of you marry with that intent - not if you say that, but if you mean it from your skin right down into your soul and out the other side, if each of you gives everything to and for the other, you will each find reasonable happiness. Not always. But for the most part. Enough to stay together even in the hard times.
I wish I could say to them, to each of these people whom I love dearly: It's not about you. It's not about what it takes to make you happy. It's not about what is good for you, or for you, as individuals. It's about what's good for your marriage. What's good for your family. Taking Precious Treasure from the only home she'd ever known, breaking the legal bond between her and her mother (thank Whomever they had the sense not to try to break the emotional bond), taking on the job of raising her - a job hubby and I were as committed to as we were to raising her mother, her uncle & her aunt - pulling us all apart like that -- we did that because it was what was good for Precious Treasure. God knows it wasn't what we wanted, hubby and I. It wasn't what was best for us. We agreed to it because having parents who were young enough to take her to the water park, ride bikes with her, run her to scouts and soccer and cheerleading and dance and all the other stuff without exhaustion - because that would have been good for Precious Treasure. And they love her, honestly, they do. They're just neither of them grown up enough (and you'd think they would be in mid/late twenties) to put her first. Maybe they're not able to. They're certainly not willing to. And that makes me insanely angry.
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