Post Children Plans

The Man Who Puts Up With Me and I have lived together about fifty percent of our married life. It's truly shocking to contemplate, even fathom if you are married and in a normal relationship. However, when I add it up, we've lived together about half of the time since saying "I do."

When we first married, he was in the military. We spent eighteen months in California before I moved ahead to Alaska. Then we actually spent some six years under the same roof before I moved on ahead to Minnesota. He joined us a year later, then became an over the road truck driver, a far less stressful job than owning our old business. Now he comes home for a couple of nights every week or two, which when you start averaging it out, means that we live together fifty percent of our married life.

There's a special kind of modus operendi that takes place when you rarely see your spouse. First, Verizon Wireless saves our marriage. The money we invest in the Friends and Family plan not only helps us deal with day to day emergencies, it also helps us co-parent, plan for trips or the future, and gossip, laugh and tell jokes..  Plus it's cheaper than seeing a marriage counselor. Suffice to say that without cell phones, I wouldn't have much of a relationship with him at all.


Second, getting reunited is like getting a new lover every time. I can kiss him once when he is clean shaven, and the next time he comes home, I kiss his mustache. Sometimes I feel downright shy when we get together after being apart for over ten days. We have to date again, learn to touch again, and snuggle. I have to remember not to refer to the bedroom as "mine," or sit by myself on the rocking chair all the time.  Let me tell you, it's work.

Being in this kind of long-distance relationship is much like having a boyfriend or having an affair, only one that's sanctioned by your church.  One day last week, for example, I met him in a local town for lunch.  We kissed by his truck, and if I had been impulsive and crazy, I could have suggested we find a place for a liason. Instead, we've been married long enough to agree to meet later, if the mood comes over us. 

I got to thinking of our odd marriage one day last week when we talked about where we would go after the kids went off to college. He said, somewhat forlornly, " I know you and I'll probably be living in two different places after the kids are gone." And there it was, something both of us knew in our hearts: eventually we'll live apart even more. It wasn't news, really to me, just more of a surprise that he had already accepted it. A sadness crept over me.

You see, though we love it other deeply, he wants to move back to a remote part of western Alaska.  It gets cold there in the winter, really awful, and in the Bush, it's outdoor toilets and long hikes to the vehicle. There's a lonely wind that gets a wind chill down to minus sixty or worse, and sometimes you can go long stretches without seeing a soul. It's work to live in a remote cabin. Sometimes you have to haul water, read by small, kerosene lanterns, and use wood for heating a cooking. Even if you figure out a way to run a battery, or set up a solar panel, or get running water, hauling it all to a remote cabin is a ton of work. I won't mind visiting on occasion, but living there full time will not thrill me.

Plus he would like to commercial fish. That's another activity that makes you grow old fast. It's labor intensive, and I've faced the reality that when I turn sixty, I won't want to do heavy physical work like that. Men probably don't mind, but watching him slave away all day won't be my thing at all. I'll insist on doing my fair share, and I've seen that women who do heavy, physical labor look old after a couple of years. I'd like to age gracefully.

So when Youngest moves out, The Man Who Puts Up With Me will move on. Oh, we'll get together as time and money permits. And it'll be wonderful to see each other again, to love and be loved in each others' presence. But it's makes me sad to know that the time will come when he'll be even more gone than he is today.  It's not the way the love story is supposed to be written. Men who ride into your life on a white horse are supposed to take you away to a lovely castle where you're both live "happily ever after."  At no time is the Prince to get on his horse and ride back out. It's not done that way. Obviously we're breaking with convention, but we have to face facts. It's the ending that we both see coming.