Overflow

Until last night, when my wife corrected me, I thought today was going to be our nineteenth wedding anniversary. Apparently it’s just our eighteenth anniversary and I’ve been deluded for the past few months. I feel oddly disappointed. It just seems like we’ve lived ninteen years worth of marriage in eighteen, I guess.

With our nets being full to breaking most of the time, it always seems like we have lots of fish wiggling free and flopping around in the bottom of our boat and there’s no time to oil the squeaky oarlock or fix the cracked gunwhale. Heidi and I have this bursting at the seams approach to family that is more expansive than either of us can account for. People ask us how we fit it all in, how we do all we do. We don’t, I don’t believe. The results are greater than the sum of our parts. We don’t know exactly how the fishes and loaves expand to feed everybody, all we can do is just stare at the leftover baskets in wonderment every once in a while and give thanks.

Today is one of those staring in wonderment days. Happy ninteenth eighteenth anniversary baby!

Okay, so I’m not updating much. Life is has been tumultuous lately. It will take a little while to get back into some kind of equilibrium, some kind of routine that is sustainable. Right now we are renegotiating the routines of our family life and our marriage.

But it’s a good thing. Ultimately good news. Heidi and I have a new job. Or two depending on how you look at it.

Heidi and I agreed to take on the youth ministry staff position at our parish which was in desperate need after the former youth minister left suddenly. We aren’t exactly Mr. and Mrs. Right for this position, but we were Mr. and Mrs. Right Now (and willing to help.) So for the past six weeks or so we’ve been playing catch up and rearranging our lives to make up for the fact that Heidi is no longer a stay at home mom anymore.

And then we were hired to fill the adult and family minsitry position at our church. The youth ministry is a temporary stop gap. This other is our passion. Heidi and I have had a couple vision of working together at something we love for years now. The opportunity to do so this early in our lives is a source of joy.

But the fact that the new new job overlaps the old new job is a source of chaos. At least until Heidi and I get remarried.

Yes, remarried. I plan to ask Heidi to remarry me for, like, the tenth time or so. Every time our lives change in some significant way — a new child, a new job, a new house — it’s a new marriage. All the routines, the plans, the expectations, the commitments need to be revisited, restated, and recommitted.

We have a lot of work to do, preparing for this new marriage, for this new life. Last night I was talking to the teens at bible study about Advent and how we need to prepare our hearts for the new life Christ brings into the world. I see the relationship work before us as just such a necessary preparation. And a joyful one!

I have several activites that are my barometers of life. Art, poetry, reading, exercise, prayer, and, yes, writing here in Overflow, are all activities that I have as part of my personal life if the rest of my life is to be sustainable. Right now it’s just not sustainable, but we’re doing the work to get there.

For a more clear-eyed look at love and marriage, read these refreshing articles in Boundless Magazine. These are based on Scott Stanley’s book, The Power of Commitment: A Guide to Active, Lifelong Love. Being certified to teach his and Stanley Markman’s PREP course, I’m already a fan.

And I do not mourn the myth of the Soul Mate. Heidi is my mate. I’m happy she has her own soul and I have mine.

We’re off to the Smartmarriages conference today, just in time for the weekend event to be wrapping up. We’ll pull in about four hours or so after most everybody else has pulled out.

We’re not going for the conference part,which we’ve been to and highly recommend, but for the post-conference classes which will enable us to teach two marriage education programs. “How To Avoid Marrying A Jerk” and “PREP for Low Income Individuals.” Last year’s theme was to learn PREP and bring it back. This year’s theme is to bring back material to teach single people about marriage.

Years of experience has told us that teaching engaged people about marriage, while a great good in itself, is not optimal. If you’ve already sent out invitations and picked out china, you aren’t quite as open to an honest evaluation of your commitment and comaptibility. So, in addition to teaching that, we wanted to bring some material to bear for those who’ve been married for a few years and are looking for some brushed up skills. That’s what we did last year.

This year we want to learn and eventually teach material to young people who are still dating to help them recognize healthy relationship behavior when they see it and, even better, exhibit healthy relationship behavior themselves. “How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk,” I suspect, might just as well be called “How to Avoid Being a Jerk in Marriage.”

This is all part of the Heidi and Cody Strategic Plan to:

• Keep our own marriage skills sharp
• Pursue Lifelong Learning
• Develop a future income stream that capitalizes on Heidi and Cody’s gifts.
• Get away for a romantic, child-free recharge

It’s fun, educational, and strategic. What more could we ask? Back in a few days.

Quite inspiring is this must read interview with Historian and Futurist Theodore Zeldin. Zeldin anticipates a new kind of relationship between men and women, relationships built on friendship as well as love, relationships which will prove to be the engine that changes the world.

“I believe that the new relationship which we are trying to construct between men and women is one which is organised to produce courage and people can in privacy acknowledge their vulnerability and be helped to overcome it. And I think that this combined with the curiosity which people are beginning to express and feel means that they can go beyond what exists now, and that means that private life is going to be the source of change and not public life. We cannot change public life until we have changed private life.”

I agree. I am coming out of my disillusionment with proscriptive futurism and into a more normative take on it – that in marriage and the family, the intersection between the personal and the communal, is the place of maximum leverage where futures thinking should be applied.

I envision a world with no professional futurists, or at least very few futurists, in favor of one where thought and care of a commonly held future are woven into the intimate fabric of love and life.

Researcher John Gottman and The Relationship Research Institute have come up with a mathematical model of marriage that can predict with 95% accuracy which couples will divorce based on interactions observed during the first few minutes of an argument.

Apparently successful couples have a minimum 5/1 ratio of positive to negative interactions, even while arguing. The model can be used to simulate “what if” situations such as major life transitions and improvements such as the husband allowing himself to be more influenced by a wife’s communication (a key success behavior in marriage BTW).

This is a book I would like to buy, just to get a look at the equations, see what the variables represent, and understand their interrelationships. This model has been validated against data from hundreds of couples arguing under laboratory conditions. Rather exciting for a marriage/systems/futures geek like myself.

“When couples struggle, it is seldom over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude. The struggle for marriage in the contemporary context is the struggle to cultivate gratitude between men and women.” – Arlie Hoschild, The Second Shift

Gratitude grows out attention, appreciation, and humility. Acknowledging the importance of the Other. Taking time to notice what they do, the little things, the tiny ordinary graces. These are the soil of a fertile marriage. My greatest Achilles heel is that I get spun up in cloud of activities and distractions so that I fail to stop and notice, pay attention to little things, and appreciate. Prayer in my life needs to serve that function – slowing down, paying attention, appreciation.

Along those lines, reading Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson has been a prayerful experience. It has done wonders in that it has connected my left brained engineering side to my sense of wonder at the ordinary stuff of domestic life. It makes me want to go home at lunch and hug my wife, air the bed, dust under the couch, and read care labels. I read along this morning in gape-mouthed fascination at the unlocked mysteries of such things as dusting, ironing, and folding laundry. It made me want to go home and try my hand at folding a fitted sheet.

Reading all this was pretty overwhelming. Any manual pf proper care sets a standard that the limits of life, time, and space make it impossible to measure up to. But reading Home Comforts so far has mostly been an exercise in increasing my attention, appreciation, and humility about things domestic. And gratitude for the wonder that is my wife.