The dogs are having a rough morning. I didn’t take them on their hour-long morning walk. Bursting with undirected energy, they’re reacting to everything from sunlight reflecting off the coffee pot to a cat’s tail twitching from the windowsill.
I take them on a long walk in the morning before work, and a short walk before or after dinner. This morning, I went back to bed instead. I think this is the first time I’ve done that in about four months, since George and I had our last fight and I realized I had to man up and take care of these nuts by myself if I was ever going to move on emotionally.
This discipline is new, but required for everyone’s sanity. The coyote, the one I think is a border collie / Australian cattle dog mix, is stronger-willed than I am. When it comes to persistently knocking, he wins. He is the widow bothering the judge until the judge settles her case. He is, in a word, energetic.
He also has a fantastic vocal range, from high-pitched whines to wall-shaking barks, from gentle moans to startled yelps. He is an opera singer, a wailing siren, and a cartoon mouse all in one compact, muscular, double-coated package.
So he wins. He gets two walks a day because he is better at driving me insane than I am at ignoring him.
I tell myself this is preparation for motherhood. I am operating on a vision I had before my relationship ended. This overwhelming moment showed me there was a man in my future who would marry me and give me a child. This is an idea that only a Biblical level of faith could even consider, much less sustain. I’m turning 45 in a couple of weeks. But since the relationship did end, in a way that I experienced as both unexpected and irrevocable, I have to assume the rest of it is true too.
So I tell myself that walking the dogs even when it’s still dark out, even when I’d rather be sleeping in, even when I am SO BORED by the idea of circling the same set of houses yet again, is preparation for school runs and diaper changes and all the other aspects of motherhood I never had any inclination to master before.
Hey, it’s a useful rationalization if nothing else. It’s not like I have any choice. The dog’s gotta move those cattle-driving legs.
This morning’s rebellion actually came from overwhelm. I felt overwhelmed by a reminder that change is coming. As exhausted as I am by my present life, I have admittedly been more afraid of someone else coming into it.
I was reminded yesterday that there is someone else out there and I do have to think like a single person. There is a difference between being single and being single. I’m referring to the difference between getting through one’s day as a weary, resigned shadow, versus engaging with one’s life and the world around one as though one could love again.
To love, one must be in a state of loving. One must be interested and curious and trying stuff.
I was reminded of all this in church (Jesus did some stuff in church yesterday). I was also reminded of all this later, as part of my Sabbath ritual of doing nothing on Sundays, while watching the deeply insightful film* Under the Tuscan Sun.
The movie, however syrupy it may be, makes a great point. You have to build a track for the train that will come, even if the train doesn’t exist yet. This is faith. I used to write about this, under a different guise, as “making your bed.” That was albeit in the context of a much shorter term and unBiblical goal, but the principal is still the same: if you want someone to join you in your bed you should probably make it.
In the romantic comedy zeitgeist this is the moment when she puts away her sweatpants and gets a startling but fantastic new haircut. I’m still in the sweats, but I figure I’m about twenty minutes from that scene.
This morning when I went back to bed I dreamed about having moved in with my husband. The house was enormous. I was scrambling around trying to clean it and figure out the appliances and contain the pet-mess before he came home from work. The dream summed up in a few concise scenes everything I was afraid of about marrying a Christian man.
I grew up in Seattle in the nineties. I’m used to women working, I’m used to marriages lasting about ten years before someone decides they’re actually interested in the same sex, I’m used to boys who expect you to pick up the tab. As much as one might think a “trad” marriage would sound awesome after living in that hot mess most of one’s life, not really. One gets used to the prison one has lived in. I’m afraid of being dependent, because it might mean being controlled or helpless.
This is why I ran from God and got involved with the man I did for almost four years. A man who could not provide.
I woke up and was laying there surrounded by animals contemplating this dream when a sense came over me of who he was. I realized that God makes a woman to be with a man. As partners. He will be familiar. He will be my other half. Our circumstances will be mergeable. I felt an overwhelming sense of comfort and peace and yes, curiousity for that future.
Is there anything else you’re afraid of about marriage, the Holy Spirit asked.
No, I thought.
Good. Then get out of bed.
Be well.
*That was sarcasm. Hey, we all need a good sappy romantic comedy now and then.