Twenty-four hours earlier I was prepared to burn my marriage to the ground.
Not literally.
Mostly.
The details don’t matter.
Just know there was a company event, photographs, old wounds, hurt feelings, enough emotional baggage to qualify for an oversized luggage fee, and a very long truck ride.
You know.
Romance.
The next morning I found myself sitting in a lawn chair watching my husband move a sprinkler.
Again.
Because I had changed my mind about where the arbor should go.
Again.
At this point the arbor had been relocated so many times it qualified as a military family.
The puppy, sensing an opportunity to contribute absolutely nothing of value, had excavated a trench beneath my giant wisteria, exposed part of the sprinkler line, and was now celebrating his achievement by aggressively licking my husband.
Not supervise.
Not help.
Not contribute.
Just lick.
Face.
Arm.
Ear.
Whatever surface was available.
My husband finally sat up, sweaty, muddy, frustrated, and looking every bit like a man spending his Saturday repairing damage caused by a committee of one.
The puppy licked him.
I continued providing absolutely no meaningful assistance. Completely on purpose. Growth. You’ll understand later.
I was sitting in a bikini eating a rapidly melting popsicle and offering occasional arbor opinions nobody had requested.
A role I felt uniquely qualified for.
He looked over, shook his head, smiled, and said,
“You’re hot.”
Now, if this were a Hallmark movie, this is where I’d tell you all my anger disappeared.
It didn’t.
If this were a marriage book, I’d tell you everything suddenly made sense.
It didn’t.
If this were therapy, someone would probably ask me what I was feeling.
Unfortunately, the answer was all of it.
Love.
Anger.
Affection.
Grief.
Resentment.
Exhaustion.
Confusion.
A mild desire to throw my popsicle at him.
And then, because apparently we hadn’t suffered enough, we spent the next day in a truck talking in circles for three hours.
The problem with being married for twenty-five years is that eventually your feelings stop fitting neatly into categories.
The same person can be the source of your deepest comfort and your deepest frustration.
The same weekend can contain an argument that leaves you questioning everything and a moment so ordinary it reminds you exactly why you stayed.
Somewhere between the fight, the wandering arbor, the sprinkler relocation project, the dog acting as an unpaid saliva consultant, the truck ride, the migraine, and the popsicle, I realized something deeply irritating.
The thing exhausting me wasn’t just the marriage.
It was me.
Which was incredibly inconvenient because I had arrived fully prepared for this to be someone else’s fault.
I have spent years telling myself I was carrying things because nobody else would.
And sometimes that’s true.
But this weekend I found myself staring at a possibility I liked considerably less.
What if some of the things I’m carrying were never actually mine?
And what if I knew that?
What if I wasn’t carrying them because nobody else could?
What if I was carrying them because I couldn’t tolerate putting them down?
That one landed like a brick.
Because suddenly I wasn’t thinking about marriage.
I was thinking about my entire life.
The truth is, I don’t just carry things.
I negotiate with uncertainty.
I carry because carrying feels productive.
Carrying feels responsible.
Carrying feels safer than waiting.
Safer than trusting.
Safer than admitting I don’t control the outcome.
If I think about it enough, maybe I can prevent it.
If I prepare for it enough, maybe it won’t hurt.
If I love hard enough, explain clearly enough, remind often enough, worry long enough, maybe I can keep things from falling apart.
Maybe I can keep people from leaving.
Maybe I can keep disappointment from showing up at my front door.
Maybe I can outwork uncertainty itself.
Which, admittedly, sounds ridiculous when written down.
Yet somehow I’ve spent years trying.
Because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
It asks us to sit still.
To wait.
To admit we don’t know what happens next.
I’d almost rather drag an entire emotional sectional sofa up a flight of stairs by myself than do that.
At least carrying gives me something to do.
At least carrying creates the illusion that I’m helping.
At least carrying lets me feel involved in the outcome.
But this weekend I started wondering whether some of my exhaustion comes from confusing involvement with responsibility.
From assuming that because I care deeply about something, I must also be responsible for holding it together.
Maybe carrying isn’t always love.
Maybe sometimes carrying is fear dressed up in a very respectable outfit.
Fear that if I put the box down, I’ll discover it was never mine to carry.
Fear that if I stop managing it, I’ll finally find out what happens without me.
And if I’m being completely honest, I think that possibility scares me more than the weight ever did.
Because here’s the part nobody tells you.
Control rarely announces itself as control.
It disguises itself as responsibility.
As commitment.
As loyalty.
As being the person everyone can count on.
Until one day you realize you’ve been holding things so tightly for so long that you can’t remember what was yours and what belonged to someone else.
For years I’ve been asking whether my husband sees me.
This weekend I found myself asking a different question.
Why am I still carrying things that belong to two people?
I wish I had an answer.
I don’t.
What I have is a migraine, an unfinished garden project, a husband who can simultaneously infuriate me and make me laugh, and the growing suspicion that some of the heaviest things in my life aren’t heavy because they’re difficult.
They’re heavy because I’ve been carrying them for so long that I forgot to ask whether they were ever mine to carry alone.
Maybe that’s the real lesson.
Not that marriage is hard.
Not that people disappoint us.
Not even that love requires work.
Maybe the lesson is that responsibility and fear can look remarkably similar from the inside.
That sometimes we become so accustomed to carrying things that we stop noticing the weight.
Until one day our backs hurt.
Our hearts hurt.
We’re tired in ways sleep won’t fix.
And we finally stop long enough to ask:
Who handed me this box?
And why am I still carrying it?
Because if I’m being honest, I still don’t know the answer. I didn’t even realize all of this until I began to write.
I only know that I’d originally planned to write a funny story about a sprinkler, a dog, and a popsicle.
Instead, I ended up writing about the emotional moving company I’ve apparently been running for years.
Unpaid.
Understaffed.
And desperately in need of a day off.
Leave a Reply