Wedding Cake for Breakfast (10 page)

Faith and Fairy Tales

ANDREA KING COLLIER

Once upon a time there was a young couple who was, well, picture-perfect, at least to the human eye. As happens in most stories that have a handsome prince and a cute, resourceful princess, they got married in an over-the-top fairy-tale wedding. There was a big dress, a bigger cake, big drama, and four hundred guests.

In hindsight, there was big dumbness. At twenty-six years old, I was so focused on the ring and the dress and the man of my dreams that I didn't see what we know happens in almost all fairy tales. I wandered into marriage without a single thought about the wolf in the woods that would huff and puff and threaten to blow our house of new straw and no foundation down.

There was no planning for what happens when an only child (me) tries to build a life with someone with a big family (him). There was no planning for the arguments that would spring up out of the most ordinary things, like buying chicken already boned and skinned, or who gets to control the remote. Each, a minor struggle, but for two people who were totally unprepared for the delicate dance of negotiation and compromise that marriage requires, together they added up and got overblown. Not only was the marriage brand-new, but we had to figure out how to be grown-ups.

No. We couldn't see ahead to the friends and family who would innocently or sometimes not so innocently wreak havoc in our lives. There were the arguments about his siblings or friends just dropping in without calling, or the chaos that ensued because I didn't set up the spices in the same way his mother did. Each thing benign by itself, but together all the little things signaled that the honeymoon was definitely over.

The first year was a thousand-piece puzzle of sorts. Even though we thought we knew each other inside out before we got married, we had to piece together what it meant to be committed for the long haul. He struggled to understand a woman who couldn't balance a checkbook to the penny, and I couldn't understand why a man wore his old pants until you could see through the butt.

These are the things that didn't get dealt with before we said, “I do.” They didn't go away, they just boiled in the cauldron, like a witch's brew. They just showed up each and every time someone left their socks in the floor or forgot to take the groceries out of the car—even decades later. The things we didn't know needed to be cleared off the table in the beginning, before the wedding, like who's family got us at Christmas and who got us at Thanksgiving, would become little bricks in the foundation of our marriage and our fights.

I was also challenged by a bout of depression, probably triggered by the loss of the grandmother who raised me. My husband would come in and ask what we were eating for dinner, and I would run into the bedroom in tears. He was confused by the sadness—after all, we got married, didn't we? That's what I wanted, wasn't it? I didn't know how to say that I had built an unrealistic fairy tale of a marriage in my mind, and we were not living up to it. In hindsight, I know that nobody could live up to that.

In real life, the first year is as perilous as any obstacle that the Brothers Grimm could imagine. And if you are lucky, you actually fundamentally like each other, because even that gets tested from time to time.

Almost everything that could happen in that first year did test us. He lost his job. I quit mine. We were broke as hell for the first few months, which is what happens when neither of you has a job. Someone robbed our house and stole our televisions, video recorder (it was thirty years ago), and our ice cream out of the freezer, in the very first week after the wedding. We moved—twice, including almost having to move in with one of our parents. It was like we banked up a whole lifetime of crappy stuff in twelve months.

It is easy in marriage, when life is throwing you all kinds of monkey wrenches, to forget that you love each other. Even the smallest thing, like going to the grocery store together, would spiral into a major fight. He didn't know what to do any more than I did. Plus he was a guy. Sometimes he just wanted to be by himself to put on some headsets and listen to some jazz.

I couldn't wrap my little princess brain around the need for alone time (something that marriage and little kids would correct) and saw it as a personal rejection of me. My mind went to all my insecurities. Wasn't the whole point of marriage to be together ALL THE TIME? What was wrong with me? Why wasn't I enough for him? Maybe he didn't really love me if he wasn't willing to go shopping with me or kiss me every time he left the room.

Or were we just two people in love, who might not be able make it work? In truth, I did love him so much that it scared me. All of my fears bubbled to the surface, forming a frothy toxic spill over everything that was important to us. Sometimes he could see it in my eyes, and say, “It's going to be all right. I promise.” Sometimes I believed him.

Although we believe in God and good, neither of us is a religious person. Yet it was a real faith, a belief that we were really supposed to be together, that kept us hanging on. The first time I saw my husband I was out on a date with someone else, and I spotted him across the room. There was this voice inside me that said,
That's going to be your husband. Take a good look.
Call it my God voice, or my too-many-glasses-of-wine voice, it was clear, and confusing. I'd thought the guy I was out with was going to be my husband. It would be another three years before I even saw him again, or even knew his name. But the first thing I remembered was that this voice told me who this man was going to be in my life.

Faith. Belief. Trust. I believed that God wanted him for me. I still do. You just don't look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if the gift came from something greater than you. If there hadn't been that underlying faith, I am sure that I would have thrown in the towel at about six months. And that would have been tragic, because we wouldn't have made it to see it get better, great, terrible, and then wonderful again. In order to have a real marriage, you have to stay married.

• • • • • • • •

Having faith that you are where you are supposed to be, when all else fails, is a good thing. And it really came in handy in the first year when I took some money my mom gave me as a Christmas present and bought a few pairs of shoes (fifteen), and he got mad and bought a rusted-out old MG sports car with his hidden emergency savings account. My Prince Charming turned into a beast that sucked all the life out of me. And I in return became some screeching harpy who started every sentence with “You never,” or “I hate when,” or “I just hate you.”

During the time that we were both out of work, our routine was to get up in the morning and stake out our spots on the couch in the living room. We'd watch the
Today
show, and go through all the ABC soaps, and on to the evening news, with breaks for lunch or snacks. Thank goodness we both liked
All My Children
and
General Hospital.
I recently asked him about how he saw our first year, and he says those days on the couch were fun. “Don't you really think that it was good?” He also remembers fondly the fact that I would cook three square meals, make pies, and grind my own hamburger meat. “Why don't we grind hamburger anymore?” he asked.

After three months of soaps and soufflés and unemployment, we both got jobs, moved, and found a house to rent. We were the first of our crowd to have a real home. And I was the only person in our age group who actually liked to cook. So our house became a hub where our friends, even the married ones, could get a home-cooked meal without going to their mother's. After a few months of relative bliss and traditional living, we decided to throw our first dinner party. It was a real grown-up party, with food that I cooked, good wine, and music. I used the china, crystal, and silverware we got for the wedding. And for that moment I think we were impressed with being married. I was happy until his brothers, who I had insisted not be invited, showed up. They snuck out of the garage with half of my food and all of our liquor. My husband shrugged and said, “You don't understand because you are an only child. That's what brothers do.” He explained that when you marry a person you marry their family, warts and all.

“Do you do that?” I asked, afraid that this was something else I didn't know about him.

I just remember being so stressed out and overwhelmed that I passed out on the floor. The good news was that I didn't have to explain to our guests what happened to the food and drinks. The party was over after that.

My husband was right. I didn't understand nor did I have anybody who could help me figure it out. I soon learned that there is nobody you can really talk to about YOUR marriage, so it is best to keep your mouth shut. There should be a law. A newlywed should be banned from talking to other newlyweds—or for that matter anybody who hasn't been married for a hundred years. Maybe they can talk, but they shouldn't talk about their marriages. Given a frozen margarita, some good guacamole, and a little marital discontent, nothing but mayhem can ensue. Debriefing about the horrors of snoring and old girlfriends, and in-laws, without any context or life experience in navigating out of those troubled waters, isn't helpful.

Sure it makes you feel as if you are not alone. But it also makes you wonder why anybody ever got married or stayed that way. Real conversations should be limited to women who are marital survivors. Would you expect answers about surviving job loss, breast cancer, a train wreck, or a hammertoe from a person who has no experience in surviving these things?

• • • • • • • •

Even if I talked to my mother about most things, talking to her about my fragile young marriage made it worse. She could be angry and passive-aggressive about her own marriage to my stepfather, and always gave me angry and passive-aggressive advice, even though she really did love my husband. The minute any marital pearls of wisdom came out of her mouth, even I knew I shouldn't do it unless I was ready to wave the white flag and call it done. “Don't be a fool for some man,” she'd say.

Women. Before the wedding, they are cheerleaders. Making you feel like an old maid for not being married yet. They point out all the fun you are missing. Yet not one of them tells you just how challenging the first year of marriage can be, until you are waist-deep in it. Of course, I wouldn't have listened, because we all think that we invented a new kind of love, which is so musical and magical that it couldn't possibly be anything other than happily ever after—every single day.

But I would have appreciated it if someone had just said that the first year is the thing you have to go through to get to the happily married part. Even if you have a first year that is one extended honeymoon period, it's only the cocktail hour/warm-up and you've yet to sit down for the entrée/actual show. For me, the first year was like being rodeo riders. I had to muster just enough faith to hang on until the ride got smoother. Sometimes the frog turns into a prince, and on some days he goes back to being a frog. And sometimes Cinderella's glass slipper gives her blisters, and she gets really cranky. Even though it was scary and awful and there were lots of red eyes and wolf breath and big teeth, this girl and the boy managed to go on to live their version of happily ever after—so far.

The notion of true romance and a love deluxe just gives you something to hang on to while you're fighting or not fighting. Nobody tells you the whole fairy tale, so in the first year, there have to be lots of little leaps of faith.

At least I had faith that if we just hung in there, our marriage would survive. Many of our friends who had gotten married a year or so before me were falling down the rabbit hole. My husband and I had an unspoken agreement that no matter how angry we might be at each other, we never brought it out of our home. We had witnessed enough screaming matches among our friends to know that that was not how we would present ourselves to the rest of the world. All around us, there were divorces, near divorces, and things that should have caused divorces in that first year. Then there was one couple of friends who didn't actually get divorced but lived together for about a year and never saw each other again. Not everybody got divorced, but everybody we knew was suffering the growing pains of learning how to be a married couple. It took me years to figure out that for most of us, it's a part of getting to know each other and yourself in this new construct called WE.

The couple that swore that they were so happy, I found out later, was lying. They wove big elaborate stories about how blissful they were, and how they loved to see each other come into the room. And “what is the secret to your success?” those of us who believed them asked. Lots of sex, the wife would slyly answer. Now, this was a problem answer for those of us in the know. There was, in fact, lots of sex, but we later found out that 80 percent of it was being had by him, outside the marriage.

• • • • • • • •

I am still surprised at how little “long-marrieds” tell you about what it is going to be like in that first year. And it is even more fascinating that they all have the same doofus piece of advice: NEVER GO TO BED ANGRY. I am angry that people told me that. It is so, well, so not helpful. Of course you are going to go to bed angry. Maybe a better piece of advice is “try not to go to bed angry every night for two consecutive months.”

In the world of the fairy-tale marriage, telling someone to never go to bed mad is like telling Cinderella to get home before the coach turns into a pumpkin. Or it's like telling Snow White, “Girl, you better not eat that apple.” You know it isn't going to happen. If someone had only told me to forget that dumb advice, and instead told me how take a deep breath before I said the things that I would be horrified that I said decades later, that first year would have gone a lot smoother.

In the first few months, I tried. I just wouldn't go to bed. I'd want to stay up and talk it out. If it took three days of spinning in circles and talking about long-gone girlfriends and the fact that he is inconsiderate in leaving the toilet seat up, then I thought we ought to talk it out. After all, real grown-ups with real marriages that lasted longer than fifteen minutes told us never to go to bed mad.