Heart Goals and Hearth Coals

When my wife announced last February that she no longer wanted to be my wife, I went into a tailspin. It was not what I wanted to hear and it triggered a lot of grieving.

Even though I knew that I would still be able to carry with me the results of the personal work I had done in an attempt to make the marriage work, that seemed a very slim silver lining at the time. Mostly I just felt the loss.

To be sure, being less reactive (a specific area that I've worked on in counseling the last two years) was of immediate benefit. Instead if spinning my wheels unproductively in anger (at my partner walking away unilaterally), I moved through that, and I didn't get mired in shame at having failed to make the marriage work. I was centered enough to just let the grief and sadness wash over me. I didn't try to push it away or box it up; I just rode the rapids in a swamped canoe.

As the pain subsided, I started taking stock of where I was and where I wanted to be.

Question #1: Did I still want a partner? 

Yes!

Question #2: Was this urgent? 

No; I would wait for a good fit.

Question #3: What's a "good fit"?

Two weeks ago I came up with the following list of non-negotiables. I want a partner:
o  Who wants me (and welcomes my wanting her).
o  Who respects the work I do.
o  Who maintains her sense of self (and does not submerge her life into mine, nor expect me to submerge mine into hers).
o  Who will let me know when something seems off between us.
o  Who hangs in there to work out tensions and differences.

I've known for a long time that I needed to pair with a strong woman; someone who would not be knocked off center by my large bow wave. There have been moments in the past where I was not careful about that, and it didn't work well.

Question #4: What do I mean by "strong"?

Slowly, I've come to understand that strong comes in many flavors. In the past I've looked for a partner who was strong in the same ways I was: as a social change agent, a public speaker, an author, an organizer. But now, as a sadder but wiser man of 65, I can see nuance I had missed before. Instead of a firebrand (like me) I can find complementary strength in a keeper of the hearth; someone in whom the coals of home are enduring, though not incandescent. I don't need a mirror or a doppelganger if I have a partner with whom we create a whole (as opposed to a woman who, like me, can create a hole—with incisive body-piercing analysis that exposes the unworkable status quo).

In short, I could seek a synergistic relationship, instead of synonymous one. (Mind you, I am offering this analysis as a journal of my journey; not necessarily as a blueprint for others. Caveat emptor. What credentials do I have, after all, for advising others in this regard?)

Question #5: To what extent should I prioritize home in my search for partner?

In the wreckage of my marriage I also lost my home. It was a double blow. Having lived in the same zip code for 41 years I gradually developed a deep connection to place that turned out, to my surprise, to have powerful spiritual dimensions. I have come to know something of the sacred through connection to hearth and place.

This has been a complicated choreography for me. As someone who has dedicated his life to the exploration and promotion of community and cooperative culture, my calling requires that I'm on the road half the time—talking and teaching about community even as I'm not at home to enjoy it. With one foot at home and the other on the road, I was only partly in either, which strains the bonds of relationship that are the very lifeblood of community. It's been a longstanding dilemma. Home is at once a base of operation (a secure platform from which to engage with the world) and a refuge and sanctuary (which affords me much-needed renewal and groundedness).

So it's in that context that I'm unexpectedly starting over, trying simultaneously to reestablish home and to climb back on the partnership horse. For the last four decades home has been my North Star, with partnerships orbiting around its solidity, or budding from it. Now however, both elements have slipped their moorings at the same time and I'm adrift.

It's intriguing in this time of fluidity to shift how I think about my search—to contemplate a partnership that offers hearth as well as heart: to seek these two cornerstone elements as a pair. While I'm holding very different cards today than I was a year ago, there is still plenty of room for playing my hand well. Perhaps, it occurs to me now, I'll find the Queen of Hearts in the fireplace, instead of in the places of fire where I am wont to look.

Marriage Aftermath

Have you ever pondered the oddness of the term, "aftermath"?

I reckon you can conceive of it as what happens after you've totted up the pluses and minuses of a situation—which is a tender calculation I've just been going through with Ma'ikwe, after she announced eight days ago that our marriage was done.

As you might imagine, Ma'ikwe went through her own calculus in determining whether it was time to move on—and I believe she did this carefully and with sensitivity. While I'm not happy with her conclusion, I fully believe in her right to make this call. Good things don't happen from someone staying longer than they think is good, say because of guilt, obligation, or pity.

After I rode the first waves of emotional response on my own (and with the support of friends; I got a lot of email), Ma'ikwe and I began an email exchange that has been invaluable to me—which, ironically, showcased just how good our relationship can be—where we each got to explain how we related to events of the last month and the final sequence that led to the demise of our partnership. This was important because, right up until the end, I was viewing our challenging times as difficult, yet constructive—while Ma'ikwe was convincing herself that it was time to pull the plug. While painful, it was instructive to plumb the information buried in the gap between our perceptions.

I was grateful that Ma'ikwe was willing to frame the larger picture of her frustration and analysis with me, and to take the time to point out how my behaviors didn't work for her. After four days of this back-and-forth I was able to write:

As I sit with what you’ve experienced as my criticality, my narcissism, my resistance to your ideas, my inability to provide empathy when you're struggling, my failure to follow through on commitments, my inability to honor requests that matter a lot to you, and my competitive one-upmanship it’s a fairly grim picture, and makes me wonder at the folly (even irresponsibility) of presuming that I’m capable of being anyone’s partner. Looked at from this perspective, I’m humbled that you hung in there with me as long as you did. Thank you. Your loving me has been a precious gift.

Ma'ikwe had a complex response to this. On the one hand, it showed I was hearing what she was complaining about, and she wholeheartedly endorsed the idea of my continuing to do personal work in an attempt to address these behaviors.

On the other hand, she encouraged me to soften what I did with her rejection because she was only saying that I was a poor partner for her. Well, this is tricky ground to navigate with sure footing. While Ma'ikwe and I agree that we both could have been better partners, I think it's dangerous for me to slough off responsibility for what went awry (laying it at her feet instead). Better, I think, is to try to own all that I can and see what I can do with it. (Ma'ikwe will have her own version of this, but that's her business.) So I'm facing a large hill to climb.

While there are ways in which it's only possible to work on intimacy dynamics in an intimate relationship (and I'm not seeing a clear pathway to that given all the barnacles on my hull), I am hopeful that most of Ma'ikwe's issues are tractable in the context of friendships and relationships with clients—both of which I have in abundance. So I'm holding onto the idea that I can continue my work without necessarily putting another partner at risk.

I intuit that my main challenge will be remaining open for engagement, and not playing it safe. It's the work I need to address after doing the math. We'll see how it goes.

Dating My Ex-Spouse

Last Thursday Ma'ikwe and I had a date. It was the first time we purposefully spent time together that was not work-related since she ended our marriage July 14.

It started the way most Thursdays evenings do: by ordering a pizza at the Milkweed Mercantile. After picking up our hot pie, we stopped by Moon Lodge (Ma'ikwe's home), collected a jar of Kalamata olives and a bottle of wine (interestingly, it was a pinot noir produced by Irony Wine Cellars in Monteca CA—how perfect was that for a date with your ex-wife?) and walked down to a shaded bridge on the path between DR and Red Earth, the neighboring community to the west.

There we shared stories. Some were things from our childhood that we didn't think the other knew. Some were poignant revelations about the tenderness and uncertainty of what we were doing together. Some were about the impossibility of our situation because we couldn't fully know what we'd create unless we committed to the attempt—and Ma'ikwe is in anguish at the possibility of making the same mistake twice.

Afterwards, it occurred to me how appropriate it was that we our date mostly occurred on a bridge, as that's the metaphor that I'm holding around where Ma'ikwe and I are in our evolving dance of intimacy. After Ma'ikwe sundered the bridge between us that we'd consecrated in our wedding ceremony back in 2007, I was more or less got dropped on my head and my heart cracked open.

Seeing the world differently I was able to behave differently (at least some of the time), and suddenly the prospects of what Ma'ikwe and I could create looked differently. Rather than accepting the inevitability of our separation, I made her an Offer: I would change how I saw our partnership and how I organized major parts of my life, if she would make also make commitments to being with me differently. Essentially I walked halfway out on a new bridge and asked her to meet me there. She's thinking about it.

Our decision to date was a response to my Offer. Understandably, Ma'ikwe isn't sure she can trust that I can do things so differently, and she's not sure that she can meet me in committing to be different. So there's a lot to think about.

On top of which she's angry that I'm making this Offer now, when she went through considerable agony to reach the decision to give up on the marriage because my progress on what wasn't working was too slow. She's angry both because she went through hell to try to get from me what I've now packaged together after she gave up, and because she had finally reached a decision to move on and now she's back in the what-to-do-about-Laird soup. Ugh!

Ironically (would you care for a glass of wine?), it took my losing her to crystallize:

o  What the partnership means to me.
o  What I'm willing to give up to make it work better.
o  My willingness to make my relationship with Ma'ikwe central in my life.
o  The work I need to do to get a grip on self-esteem issues (that my worth is not the same as my productivity) and the ways in which I undercut critical feedback (mainly through the crafty device of beating myself up).
o   The need for both of us to quit finding excuses to not say hard things to each other.

• • •

Today is the final day of the Ecovillage Education training at DR. We'll do an extensive heart-centered circle process involving every student, plus Ma'ikwe and me. In turn each person will offer a self-reflection about what the last 37 days have meant to them, and then receive reflections from everyone else in the room. 

In the afternoon there will be a graduation ceremony that includes brief video clips of student interviews when they first arrived, paired with another interview from the last few days. Then the fledglings leave the nest.

Starting tomorrow, Ma'ikwe and I will no longer have the excuse of teaching the course to spend regular time together. The many other things in our lives—that have been mostly held off the past five weeks—will flood back in to claim our attention. It will be up to us to choose to spend time together, or to let the new bridge languish, unused.

Today, I'm standing on that bridge, observing the chasm beneath me, the gulf that separates our hearts, wondering what my ex-spouse will choose. I am still breathing.

On Having a Chronically Ill Partner

My wife, Ma'ikwe, has chronic Lyme disease.

She had been suffering from symptoms (including joint ache, stiffness, fatigue, nausea, and occasional vertigo) for about nine months before receiving a definitive blood test in 2010. After treatment with heavy doses of the antibiotic doxycycline in the fall of that year, she enjoyed about 15 months where her health had rebounded to about 80% of normal. Then the symptoms returned around the first of this year.

Unfortunately, the same antibiotic treatment was not nearly as effective this time around, and she's eight months into trying a bewildering combination of protocols in a determined effort to regain her health. [See We Went to the Doctor and the Doctor Said… from March 24, 2012 for more on the disease and how Ma'ikwe has been treating it. See The Lemon and the Lyme from May 9 for how this has been a strain on our relationship.]

Two mornings ago, we lay in bed and Ma'ikwe was in tears, lamenting that she wasn't getting the support from me she needed. 

As her state of depleted energy has persisted, her patience is wearing thin with her slow, up-and-down progress in battling the illness. This journey is made doubly tough by the need to cope (as best we can) with the record-breaking heat assailing the Midwest this summer. Ma'ikwe is worn out, and she has diminished tolerance for:

My Not Listening Well Enough

This has a number of components. First, I sometimes repeat questions that she's already answered. 

Second, I have a tendency to talk over her when we both want to talk at the same time. 

Third, it's relatively common for me to share a past, related challenging experience of my own (if I have one) when she reports something that's currently being hard for her. While I think I'm bridging to her reality, she experiences it as my hijacking the conversation. Instead of continuing to be present for what's going on for her, she feels I'm turning her distress into (another) occasion to talk about me. Not good.

Fourth, our styles of sharing are different. While I like to walk through what's been on my mind since we've last shared, in a stream of consciousness monologue that jumbles together the trivial with the momentous; the humorous with the vexing in an unedited litany, Ma'ikwe prefers to be drawn out and then listened to without interruption. If I ask questions (in an attempt to better understand a thread), she often feels knocked off center and disrespected. In short, Ma'ikwe offers me what she wants in return and then feels cheated when I don't track her stories accurately enough or quietly enough.

While none of these communication issues is peculiar to our marriage, they add to the challenge of our successfully weathering the Lyme siege.

Right now, it mostly needs to be about Ma'ikwe and my challenge is to adapt better to what works best for her. It's not about what's fair or balanced; it's about what's possible and needed to get through a hard time—with each giving in proportion to what they can.

My Not Bringing Things Up

While Ma'ikwe ordinarily appreciates my being willing to talk about what's bothering me, it's hard for me to know when she has sufficient energy to hang in there with me when I'm churning about something in our relationship. How fair is it for me to ask my sick partner to listen to my lamenting about what's hard for me?

While I'm convinced that some of the time I should do this anyway (picking my spots for when her energy seems most able to handle it), it is damn hard to sort out. There are many days when it appears that it's all Ma'ikwe can handle to just hold her own life together, and I am loath to burden her with my concerns as well. Instead, it seems prudent (or at least humane) to just put such concerns on hold and wait until her constitution has been restored to something far more robust before bringing up relationship issues.

Unfortunately, this leads to her bringing up hard stuff far more than I, and that, understandably, pisses her off as well.

My Touching Her in Irritating Ways

While cuddling and touch have been an important part of the vocabulary of our intimacy throughout the seven years we've been together, it's much trickier these days. Ma'ikwe suffers from fibromyalgia-like symptoms and even light touch can be painful. Usually my touching her back is pleasurable for her, but not always. Now, sadly, something that we used to look forward to very much has become uncertain, and we touch much less.

• • •

Hardest of all, we don't know how long we'll have to hang in there before things will get significantly better. We don't know if Ma'ikwe will ever fully recover or if it will again be OK for me to touch her casually and we'll both enjoy it. I have a much deeper respect these days for that portion of traditional marriage vows that goes "… for better and worse."

The Winter of Our New Contentment

Half a century ago (1961), John Steinbeck published his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent. The plot revolves around the protagonist, Ethan Allen Hawley, who falls into the temptation to compromise his moral standards around honesty and integrity for material gain and the chance to recapture higher status and societal standing that had been lost by his father's misadventures. The novel is a dark inquiry into a person's soul and the nature of happiness.

With the redbud and grape hyacinth now in full glory, it's a good moment to reflect on the winter just passed, before it's buried by the bustle of spring and the projects ahead. While my winter also had its moments of turmoil and uncertainty, I've arrived at a much different place than Hawley and that seems worthy of reporting.

Saturday I moved back to Sandhill after spending the last three months with Ma'ikwe at Moon Lodge, her residence at Dancing Rabbit. It was the longest stretch of concentrated time we've spent together in our 6+ years of partnership and it brought up some surprising joys and challenges.

While there was one point deep into winter where Ma'ikwe thought it might be a good thing that we weren't together so much (something about absence making the heart grow fonder and missing the occasion for such fondness), it got better. Irritations that were more tolerable in smaller doses became issues we needed to attend to. Ways in which we've been hiding from each other (in plain sight) became exposed. As Ma'ikwe and I practice it, intimacy is a push-me-pull-me paradox where we subtly reject and stubbornly undermine the very closeness and transparency we crave. It's humbling stuff as we peel away the layers of armor and self-righteousness, only to discover more layers beneath.

While we were able to make progress on some of our intimacy issues—such as my baseline criticality [see my blog of Jan 9, Critical Judgment, for more on this]—other interesting lines of inquiry have been put on hold as Ma'ikwe's declining health warranted the top spot in our consciousness.

It had been my plan from the outset to return to Sandhill at this time. (Regardless of how the winter experiment in cohabitation went, I wanted to protect time to digest the experience before reaching any conclusions about where I'd live on a regular basis.) On the one hand, this is a crazy time to step back from being close to my wife, as she's facing a major challenge with chronic Lyme [see my previous blog We Went to the Doctor and the Doctor Said… for more on that].

On the other hand, my home community also needs me and my connection there is precious. In the three days I've been home I've organized a highway trash pick-up along a three-mile stretch of blacktop nearest our property; helped move the FIC office back into our funky trailer now that winter is a memory, started work on the community's taxes, hand scrubbed the kitchen floor, and done a cooking shift.

The last few days have been intimately disorienting, with the familiarity and comfort of being in my own bed—one I made by hand 38 years ago—juxtaposed with the absence of Ma'ikwe lying next to me, and the morning rhythms of the last three months transposed from winter at Moon Lodge to spring at the White House (the Sandhill building where my bedroom occupies the southeast corner). While both morning rituals prominently feature coffee and noodling at the keyboard of my laptop, now there is no fire to tend, no quilted window coverings to roll up, no choreography with my partner about how the day will go.

Luckily, when I'm home I'm still only three miles away from Ma'ikwe and I aim to get over there 2-3 times each week. While I won't be in her daily routine any more—and that's a significant difference—I will have approximately the same amount of concentrated personal time with her, and that's significant also.

For the immediate future, the hardest part will be the trips that we won't be taking together while she focuses on healing. Traveling and working together has been a significant part of our relationship, and that aspect will be minimized in the coming months. For example, we had been planning all winter to take a three-week trip to North Carolina the latter part of April—which included time to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary, April 21. Now I'll be taking that trip by myself. While I'll still enjoy the work and the friends I'll see in the process, a number of things will be less favorable:
o I'll be separated from my wife instead of with her.
o I won't have her as my partner in doing the work.
o I won't be with her to help with daily domestic needs (cooking, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, emptying the compost, etc.).
o I won't be by her side for emotional and moral support when she has hard days (skype and phone calls count, yet aren't the same thing as being able to hold her and breathe the same air).

As uncertain as the future is regarding Ma'ikwe's health, or even how much time we'll have together in the months immediately in front of us, we will be making decisions about that as a partnership that has never been closer or more resilient. Holding that framework in mind, I leave the winter content, and there is no amount of status or wealth that would tempt me to trade places with Ethan Allen Hawley.

Falling Short as a Partner

Two days ago, Ma'ikwe told me, “I want to talk about what marriage means to each of us.”

OK, I thought. That sounded like a good subject. It turned out, however, that when we got into it, that she first wanted to address a different topic, "Ways in which I’m frustrated with you as my partner.” While this wasn't exactly bait-and-switch—I believe that Ma’ikwe is genuinely interested in the first topic—it’s just that we never got there because the surprise topic was on top, and not simple to navigate.

Here's a summary of her critical feedback:

—I’m not with her enough. In particular, I don’t spend enough time at her home, Dancing Rabbit. With her current health challenges (see my blog of Dec 29, 2009) it appears that the stress of travel may be too much and she’ll have limited energy for working with me, which chokes a significant part of how we’ve been together during our 4+ years as a couple (either through participating in FIC meetings/events, or through delivering group process consulting and/or training together. For the immediate future it appears that this pathway to time together will be more of a gravel road than a four-lane highway.

Jibran, Ma’ikwe’s 12-year-old son, much prefers being at DR to being at Sandhill (where I live), and it’s awkward for her to come over to Sandhill without him. So it’s much easier for her if I come over to DR. And I haven’t been doing that enough to suit her.

—I’ve committed to too many things and/or not prioritizing time with her high enough. If I took on less, there’d be more of me to go around.

My major commitments include:

o My partnership with Ma’ikwe

o My home community, Sandhill Farm

o My two kids (and their partners and my granddaughter)

o The Fellowship for Intentional Community

o Process work

o Friendships (far and wide)

o Writing (mainly for Communities magazine, this blog, and the book in me trying to be born—see my blog of Sept 25, 2009)

While I’m reluctant to take anything off this list, or even to shrink my current level of commitment to any of these (magnificent?) seven, Ma’ikwe has urged me to look more closely at this, as well as the possibility that I might cut loose some lesser planets of connection circling around me in deeper orbit. Her sense, at least part of the time, is that she’s dead last when it comes to how I parse out my time among the Big Seven. Ouch! While I don't share her assessment of how I prioritize my time, it's sobering to know her view and feel her hurt.

—I’m not consulting with her enough before making commitments with my time. When I countered that it was my sense that she did the same, she had a different story. Ma'ikwe felt that I turned down her invitations to be more involved in her choices about where to commit, whereas she never got invited to offer input on my choices.

In the past year, I stepped down from administering a health care fund for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, and became a founding member of Green Eggs (see my blog of July 26, 2009), a consortium of cooperative business consultants. While each of these involvements represent a similar minor time commitment, Ma’ikwe was totally supportive of my passing on the FEC responsibilities, yet upset that I jumped into Green Eggs without first discussing with her whether that made sense in terms of everything currently on my plate (I had been discussing with her all along my growing interest in cooperative economics; yet she felt left out of the decision-making).

How It Looks from My End of the Kaleidoscope

I like how I apportion my life, and I value all of the commitments I have. Still, I want to honor Ma’ikwe’s requests. When I suggested that I might be able make more time available for her if I cut back on down time, she was dismayed. She wants me to offload significant chunks of commitments (though not to her, of course) so that there’d be fewer periods of squeeze, where too many things are clamoring for my attention at the same time.

While I can’t be sure she’s wrong, I am highly reluctant to attempt less. I feel that many people have supported my getting to where I am today and that I have service obligations to do what I can to repay that investment. Though Ma’ikwe’s is arguing that the quality of my service will be enhanced by accepting fewer commitments, I don’t think this is her call to make.

Unfortunately, her upset raises the ante, as what's at stake now is not just what I can deliver, it's how well I'm perceived as a responsive (as distinct from a responsible) partner. This is tricky stuff, and I'm not at all confident I'll get it right. Fortunately, however—and I truly mean this—Ma'ikwe will be a faithful barometer, and won't hold back on letting me know how well I'm doing. It's what good partners do for each other.

Partnership & Individuality

Ma’ikwe, my wife, has been building a house this year. For anyone who has attempted this, you will be able to immediately relate to how this can be a wholly consuming project, and not at all simple (see my blogs of July 29 and Aug 1). She essentially set aside or downplayed all other threads in her life to focus on house building the last eight months, with the goal of having a livable space (meaning enclosed and weathertight) before winter.

I’m happy to report that she reached her goal, and Halloween night she slept in her house for the first time. She was understandably proud of her achievement, and has been enjoying exhalation and a certain post-finish-line euphoria these early days of November. She undertook this project with no background in construction and had to perform within the stringent environmental covenants of her home community, Dancing Rabbit, where there are serious restrictions on what building materials can be used and how they can be delivered to the work site. She was simultaneously the lead designer, construction manager, in charge of material procurement, labor organizer, bursar, main grunt, and chief cheerleader. Whew.

While there is a substantial amount of interior work remaining and house completion will still be a major part of Ma’ikwe’s labor landscape in 2010, the rush is over.

Naturally enough, Ma’ikwe has already been turning her attention to What’s Next—which is a question that has my attention also. As Ma’ikwe and I don’t live together (Dancing Rabbit is an hour’s walk away from my bedroom at Sandhill Farm) it is not a slam dunk figuring out when we’ll spend time together. This calculus is further complicated by my work as a community networker and process consultant, which has me on the road about 60% of the time (which means there’s considerable potential to not be together regardless of whether we share the same mail box).

Like most couples that are happy in their partnership, we like spending time together. Our challenge is figuring out the right mix of together and apart, keeping in mind that we both have diverse interests and already had full dance cards when we launched our intimate relationship four years ago. In some ways, or course, this is an embarrassment of riches, where we need to make selections from a menu replete with worthy choices. As much as we’d like to do it all, we can’t.

Thread #1

When Ma’ikwe slimmed down her other commitments to tackle the house, one of the things she let go of was involvement with FIC, which is a major area of commitment for me and one of the venues where our lives intersected leading up to our courting one another in 2005. Much as I’ve enjoyed her involvement in the Fellowship’s work (especially as an Event organizer), it’s not at all clear that she’ll return to any FIC role post-construction.

Thread #2

While she’s continued to be my teaching partner in facilitation training throughout construction—and that’s something that both been thoroughly enjoyable and nurturing for our relationship—she’s now questioning whether that’s a calling for her in the same way it is for me (to be clear, she loves teaching; she’s just not sure that group dynamics is where she ought to be plying that pedagogical talents). Ma’ikwe and I are committed to completing the training we’re doing in NC. After that’s completed in June, it’s not clear if we’ll do other trainings together (or consulting gigs either, which we’ve done a few times).

Thread #3

The first thing that bubbled up for Ma’ikwe when she contemplated what might be most satisfying for her as an underfed interest was Art: creative writing, painting, music, ceramics, and ritual—pretty much in any combination. As her partner, I want to support her having the life she wants. When you connect the dots however, this desire to explore her life as Artist may translate into my needing to make more money, to make sure there’s enough flow to meet her household budget. That, in turn, probably means my being on the road more, which is where I’m able to make serious money.

Thread #4

Ma’ikwe’s resurgent interest in writing coincides with my commitment to starting work on a book about cooperative group dynamics that has been rattling around inside me for several years. In fact, we have fantasy about renting a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this summer to do a three-week writing retreat together. While it’s unclear how concurrent dates with the same Muse adds up to time together, I figure there’s something precious in there about connecting with the ebbs and flows of inspiration and written expression.

Taken all together, these threads may weave into a tapestry where the weft of my life intersects less with the warp of my wife’s, not more. I have my personal pursuits and she has hers. I have my callings and she has hers. While this wasn’t how I was hoping our lives would entwine, I’m nonetheless dedicated to her having every bit as much choice as I have, and living the life that seems most promising to her. I have no image of our partnership thriving if it’s based on constriction and my limiting her choices. While it’s not yet clear how we’ll be able to pull this all off, that’s the challenge in front of us.

It’s early days, and Ma’ikwe has not made any decisions yet about what she’ll choose. Our marriage is still young and we’re testing the resiliency of the weave, and what partnership ultimately means to each of us as individuals. While I’ve never felt closer to her than I do at this moment, it’s ironically less clear than ever how we’ll nurture and extend this precious weaving. It’s uncertain how much time we’ll have together at the loom, with one hand on a shuttle and the other in each other’s.