We’re finally moving to Los Angeles. We’ve been preparing to move for over a year. After 26 years, our NJ house is sold. The kids finished their school years; two of them even graduated. All that’s left is the organizing, packing and loading. I’ve visited my parents in upstate NY. I’m seeing my four sisters several times in the next weeks to say goodbye. I won’t be able to see them so often anymore.
My husband is gone. He left in April and already loves California. He found NJ hard to take when he was home last. He misses us, but has moved on. We are apart for 3 months – the longest in our almost 27 years of marriage. He insists this is our “trial separation.” I warn him not to joke around because I’m much more extroverted than he is. (If he wants a trial separation…bring it.)
But in a way, he is right. I needed to ‘try’ how it would be without him. It has been good to see how it might be if I considered the other path of not moving to LA – staying on the East coast where my family is, my aging parents, my home, my friends, my life to date. Could I contemplate life without my husband in order to keep life as a I know it?
The answer is no. Even if I had someone to do all the chores he does around the house – make lunches, do laundry, clean the kitchen, take out garbage, mow the lawn – I’d still have no one to be my husband, the man who is, for me, an easy laugh, a quick pal, an arm over rough terrain and a man who still sees me in my 20s.
Marriage is a funny bond. We each gin up adventures and recruit the other. We both trust one another and question each other constantly. I’m leaving my family, but he is my family, along with our three kids. We can each help the other through the challenge of change, but we each have to face our own troubles and turmoil. We are mated and fated wherever that takes us. In the end, marriage is a collaborative creation. We’ve created our marriage, day by day, choice by choice.
And after a long and trying separation…California, here we come! It’s going to blast us out of every rut we didn’t know we were in. I’m finally excited to leave New Jersey and join my darling husband who is already embracing his new potential as he creates it day by day.
Marriage transported. Our own, physically from one coast to the other. From being parents of a growing family to parents of adultish kids, nearly empty nesters. We find each other again, find that fun, that relationship, that interdependence. We explore each other anew as we familiarize ourselves to new territory.
Marriage is transported to a broader more inclusive concept this week by the Supreme Court’s historic decision this week on same-sex marriage. Everyone’s marriage is transported to become not just a way to protect women and children, but more. Not just a religious construct, but way more. Not even just a financial construct, but even more than that. This growing awareness of the human need for ONE other person, partner, spouse transports marriage beyond the social construct and elevates it to a human need.
Marriages is transported to a way to join our lives in the adventure of our mutual choosing and creation. “So say we all.”