Growing Up

I know getting married doesn't really coincide with "growing up" for many people anymore, but it does for Adam and me. Not that I don't respect graduate students as adults, and not that many of them don't have to support themselves far more than Adam and I did--but for Adam and I, this is our first try at a lot of grown-up things.

As inconvenient as it has been applying for an apartment from another country, trying to cope with health insurance, and trying to register a rebuilt, out-of-state car, these are all experiences I'm glad to have shared with Adam.

My parents got married at eighteen and, to be frank, had been largely taking care of themselves for years. Mom paid for Pop to go through law school. Pop worked as a janitor at UGA to help contribute. For extra money, they cleaned up repossessed mobile homes on the weekends. All of the first experiences of being grown up--health care, insurance, personal car ownership, apartment leasing--they experienced together. That was always one of my favorite things about my parents' relationship, a probable cause of the great closeness in their marriage today--thirty-five years later. My parents finished growing up together. It's given them a closeness, a trust in each other--and a youthful glow to their marriage--that I have never really seen in other couples' marriages.

I know we are never truly finished growing and changing. I sure hope to be someone better at fifty than I am at twenty-four. But I'm glad that this last bit of "growing-up," transitioning into adulthood, is something I can share with Adam. Dealing with the stresses and excitement has already drawn us closer as a couple. I hope that our shared experience continues to be an asset in our married life.

Our Hundreth Post: Moved In Again

It seems only appropriate that ...and Enide's hundredth post commemorates a huge milestone in my life with Adam. We signed our lease on Friday. The two of us now rent an apartment together.

Neither Adam nor I have been independent, self-sufficient adults since I went back to graduate school two years ago. We've lived independently and paid our own rent (for the most part), but across continents and oceans. We're starting over in DC with very little. We've bought a car. We getting our own health and car insurance for the first time. We're furnishing an apartment with our own ingenuity--not Ikea stuff, but real furniture. There's a lot of tedium in store for us in the next few weeks. But I like that, for us, the process of becoming grown-up people is a part of our marriage experience. It's something that we get to share, the final steps of growing up together. When I move into our apartment after the wedding, I'll be moving into a home we've built together--just for the two of us.

The pictures are of our apartment complex and the park near our apartment. I'll post more pictures of our apartment as we decorate.

Moved In!

I've only just finished assembling my new Tesco desk! So ends the six-month epic of furnishing my tiny, idiosyncratic room at the Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy. I move out in two weeks.

Over six years since I graduated from high school (that makes me feel a bit dated!), my life hasn't really been the picture of stability. I've visited fourteen countries on three continents, seen eleven states. I've lived on two sides of the Atlantic, and in four states. My mailing address has changed a whopping eleven times--try explaining that to the person giving you a background check! I beat Adam for moves, but not by much. Even this year, when we both have the same physical address for two years in a row, we've both moved into new rooms in the same building.

I think I understand now why people talk about "settling down." I love the idea of living in the same city, building up a community I won't have to leave every six months. And I crave my own kitchen to clean, my own bedroom to decorate, my own craft room to liter with fabric and sheet music. I'm ready to carve out my own space in the world, literally. For a tiny pocket of existence to be mine, and to share it with Adam.

I've always been afraid "settling down" was related to "settling," giving up on something you wanted for the sake of emotional support. But I'm not "settling" for Adam--I'm choosing him as the greatest adventure life has to offer me. We're not retiring from life by getting married like a pair of agoraphobic recluses. We're setting up a life for ourselves, a foundation built on the rock, and setting out on the mission God has in store for the two of us--together.

Yesterday, I told Adam I was ready to go home. He asked me where home was. I told him that home is where he is. I don't care if we live in a cardboard box as long as it's a space that's ours to share.

You can read a chronicle of my family's European ramblings here. Pictures!

A Mixed Marriage?

Time and time again over the past few months, I've excitedly invited a friend to join Adam and I in our new, Washington, DC home. Most people face me with blank stares or, at best, a sort of vague threat: "Don't say that if you don't mean it." My friends don't seem to realize how fundamentally important hospitality is to me, and to Adam.

Even though Adam and I are of the same race and the same nationality, we come from rather fundamentally different cultures. I'm from the American South, while he's from the American West with Yankee parents to boot. Still, Adam violates every Southern expectation of Yankee behavior on at least one point: hospitality.

Southern hospitality is one of my very favorite features of my culture. It's generosity and communal spirit in action in a vitally important way. That why it's so very important to me that Adam is not just an excellent host, but one who enjoys it. For both of us, sharing our food with other people is energizing and uplifting, as is opening our home to others.

When Adam and I sat down to think about our priorities in marriage, it made me really happy that we both included having an open, welcoming home on the list. That's part of the reason we chose our New Testament reading, from Hebrews 13: "Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unwittingly entertained angels."

And, for the record, our home will always be open to you.

Revolutionary Road

Although I have many happy things to write about from my vacation (including my first dress fitting) and my trip to DC with Adam (including our first meeting with the priest, an Engagement Encounter weekend, and apartment shopping), I find that it's always easiest to write what's fresh. And I have something slightly less sunny on my mind.

Revolutionary Road reunites Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in a dark sketch of married life. DiCaprio plays a disillusioned thirty-year old working in a job he hates to support the family he has been compelled--half by his own desire and half by social pressure--to start. Winslet matches him as an independent-minded woman trapped into the life of a suburban housewife that she never wanted. Though the film tends to be somewhat over-the-top and self-indulgent, it encapsulated some of my darkest fears about marriage after the silver plate has tarnished.

DiCaprio's character is a man who has never found his vocation. He suffers through his desk job to support his family. But he doesn't daydream of life as a writer, or an actor, or a teacher--he doesn't have that luxury. Because he has never taken the time to find his vocation, he doesn't even know what to dream for. This gapping hole in his life leaves him undamentally unhappy, emasculated, and unable to love his wife the way he ought.

Winslet's character has dreams of her own. She still pursues them, choosing to act in local theater even after moving down to the suburbs for their children. For her, its less that her own life is unfulifilled than that her husband's is. They can't be anything is he isn't anything. As he loses respect for himself, she begins to question his masculinity and lose her respect for him. The more he resentfully rebuffs her efforts to help him find his vocation, the more estranged their marriage becomes and the further she drifts from sanity.

The real tragedy of the film is how alone the couple is in their search for meaning. Other characters are fundamentally incapable of understanding the couple's complaint. Friends look at them with skeptical astonishment when they discuss their schemes to find something better in life. DiCaprio's co-worker waves his arms, gesticulating, about DiCaprio quitting his job to find his "vocation." In the end, the only man who recognizes the horror of the couple's lifestyle is the mad son of a neighbor. In the world of Revolutionary Road, only the insane look for meaning.

Winslet's character truly thought that he life was going to be special. Not that she was going to be rich or famous, but that her life would mean something to her and to those around her. It drives her slowly mad to watch the man she loves failing to live up to his purpose. Neither of them answer their callings; it ruins their marriage and their lives.

I'd be lying to myself if I denied how much I identify with Winslet's character, or at least the way I imagine her to be when she and DiCaprio's character first married. I, too, occassionally wonder whether I will feel trapped in the life I've chosen. I worry that Adam would choose a life he hated if that was the only way to support me, rather than allowing me to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to help him find and fulfill his vocation.

The mental image is difficult to sustain. Adam is absolutely wonderful. We have a strong vision of what it is we want in life. We've communicated with each other about it and are both prepared to do what it takes to get there. We think we're on the track of God's vocation for our lives. And, in all honesty, I think we are pretty special. But, in the dead of night, I sometimes wonder with Winslet: will my life always have meaning?

Taking Things for Granted

Adam: I hope being away from you this long means it will take longer before I take you for granted. I just don't want to ever be bored or annoyed with you after having to not be near you this long.me: Awwwww!

I hope I'm not boring or annoying!

Adam: you aren't!

me: Aww!

Adam: I think most couples eventually take each other for granted and then have to learn to live togetherme: That's true.

We can try.

In the midst of my frustrated staring this afternoon at the late fifteenth-century manuscript I've been working on, I paused to stretch and look around. My gaze rose to the ceiling of the seventeenth-century library, the Duke Humphries Library, in which I do much of my work. The Latin motto of the university, Dominus illuminatio mea ("the Lord is my light") stared down at me fifty times. I looked out the window in the Fellows' Garden of my thirteenth-century college, Exeter. Then it hit me. I really don't notice these gorgeous parts of my everyday life anymore. Even some of Western civilization's most beautiful and historic treasures are now part of my mundane, every day life.

Several weeks ago, Adam dropped a surprising comment out of the blue: "I hope being away from you this long means it will take longer before I take you for granted. I just don't want to ever be bored or annoyed with you after having to not be near you this long." I'm so excited about marrying Adam, it's difficult to image ever losing my delighted pleasure in his company. Still, I suppose that if experience has taught me anything, it's that I quickly get used to new experiences. I could focus on this realization as yet another reminder to love life as it is, right now--I should love Adam in the same passionate, infinitely renewable way I do now. But I don't think it's in human nature to continue perceiving blessings as novel. In one way, Adam has to be right. My love for him will continue to evolve and change. We will have to learn to live together, even when we find each other boring or annoying. Of course, learning to love as it is here and now is an important part of living a life of gratitude. As annoyed as I may someday be with Adam, I hope I never take him for granted. He is a gift from God, a blessing I never want to forget.

The photo of Exeter is obviously a cheat. I don't have a picture of the Fellows' Garden in the springtime.