Marriage is work…
Oh what a revelation,
Which might also might explain why there are so few that last,
Because we live in a microwave, instant message world,
And no one wants to wait for anything to happen,
And we for darned sure aren’t trying to put up with anyone’s mess,
Well in marriage there is a lot of mess,
To be sure,
When I got married,
I didn’t have many female marriage models,
My mom wasn’t married,
One aunt was dead,
One aunt divorced,
One never married,
One widowed,
And one married for over fifty years,
But amongst them I never heard how to be married,
I heard much, ‘A man will be a man…’
Kind of stuff,
And I also saw, savvy-hardworking women who could do much,
So I decided that I would figure out this marriage thing based on me and my values,
I vowed to stay married,
Work through it,
And it was hard, damn hard at times,
In the early years it seemed I did all the work,
Raised the kids,
Worked part-time jobs and got some education,
Felt so one-sided,
BUT,
I was married to a hardworking man who provided well for his family,
And LOVED him some me,
No matter what we went through and we went through a plenty,
We worked it out,
We didn’t call our parents,
We didn’t talk to our siblings,
We didn’t go to our friends,
When we were broke,
We were broke together,
I remember that first couple years before kids,
On the night before payday we created meals out of nothing,
But no one knew but us,
Once we had children and were doing better financially and the kids were driving us nuts,
We dealt with that quietly also,
It was our family and our business and that is how we dealt,
Because something I knew innately is that everybody didn’t necessarily have our best interests at heart and I wasn’t going to spend time trying to figure that out,
Instead I would use that energy on my marriage,
I also inherently knew that there was no such thing as a 50/50~
Umm ummm,
Marriage is giving all you have,
All the time,
And sometimes my man only had twenty percent,
Therefore I had to come up with eighty,
And there were the days when my twenty was all I could give,
And he had to put in eighty,
And even with all that we still wanted to saddle up and leave at times,
But we didn’t,
Because what we both knew is that the devil was a liar,
And we were in it to win it,
And one of the best lessons was that marriage wasn’t about him,
Or about me, it was about US,
And thanks be to God we had an US mindset,
I can remember so many women saying they couldn’t be married to the Army,
My husband was a soldier for twenty-two years,
I told them and meant it,
‘I am not married to the Army, I am married to that man who is in the Army…’
The same way he is now married to a woman who writes books, works a full time job and has a gang of other stuff going on…
If you want that man or that woman,
You are going to have to put in work,
Now I am in no way condoning madness,
If you don’t love the person,
Want to kill them,
Or they don’t love you and want to kill you,
There might not be a whole lot that can sustain you,
Well GOD can but that is another blog for another day,
But if you do love the person and is willing to put in work,
Along with lots of PRAYER and understand that nothing lasting is built overnight,
And that there are no crops without lots of rain,
And that sometimes,
The rain is the result of a storm,
And that there are sometimes even when you want to shout from the rooftops,
You have to be really quiet,
And when you want to cuss,
You have to pray,
Or if you feel like spitting,
You need to go outside,
And know that everyday is work,
But the past ends at midnight and if you woke up this morning,
You have time to get it right,
You just might be able to be married~
Love and BLESSINGS~
angelia
