I Didn't Want to Wake Up.

Two nights ago I had a wonderful dream.  I fell in love.  I fell in love with a stranger.  He told me my thighs were amazing.  My thighs!  And I was just the way I look in real life, which means he was either clearly lying or really loves jiggly thighs.  The feelings of first love were so real and vivid.  It felt amazing.  He was handsome and romantic and he adored me.

At this point my dream took a turn for the bizarre, as they sometimes do.  I was suddenly pregnant and a serial killer was on the loose and my lover was gunned down in cold blood and I was taking the subway to get away from the killer.  I have a lot of pregnancy dreams.  I'm always turning up pregnant in dreamland.  Most of the time the baby daddy is someone famous.  Like Ringo Starr (doesn't he have a dreamy nose?) or Gerard Butler.

Back to the dream at hand.  Regardless of the scary ending, when I woke up I didn't want to be awake.  I wanted to climb back inside that dream where the all consuming feelings at the beginning of a love affair make you feel as if you could walk on water.  It bothered me all day.  My husband and I have worked hard on our relationship to get it to where it is today.  I quickly learned that part of the work of a marriage is honestly...lowering your expectations.  With the stresses of finances and children and integrating two different family styles that first glow of love that you once shared with your spouse can simply not be sustained.  That's not to say that you don't love each other, it's just a more day to day constant of being there for each other in whatever capacity is needed.  I know this.  And yet...and yet I still yearn for that novelty and excitement. 

If someone could bottle those very potent feelings, that person would be a very rich person.  In counseling we talked about the concept of what being in love means.  People talk about falling in and out of love.  But I think the most long lasting and enduring marriages are made between two people who choose each day to stay in love with their spouse.  I'm not saying it's easy.  I'm the last person to judge someone else's relationship.  I know there is a lot of behind the scenes details that aren't apparent to the outside world. 

The fact is the people we are is not static.  We all change and grow in different ways throughout our lives.  It's difficult when five, ten, twenty years into a relationship you may look over at your spouse and wonder at who that person has become.  I think being married takes an awful lot of patience and compassion.  When something is really bugging me about Brigham I have to sit down and think of all the ways I fall short and the actions I either take or don't take to make our union a happy one.  Sometimes in the harsh light of scrutiny I realize I'm doing things to aggravate him on purpose.  I'm kind of a stinker in that way.  Hey, I never claimed to be perfect. 

There are days I get angry about the realities of marriage and family life.  I think to myself Why didn't anyone tell me it would be this way?!  I grew up on the myth of marriage being the end all and be all of a woman's life.  Why in the heck would anyone who claims to care about your well-being not be honest with you?  Although I do have issues with some of the things still taught in my culture pertaining to marriage and motherhood, I also think, even if someone would have said, "Listen, you might want to really think about being married.  He's not always going to tell you how beautiful and fabulous you are each day.  He's going to doing things that annoy the crap out of you, then he's going to get you pregnant and the spawn you created are going to enslave you to their very rigorous demands of well-being.  You're going to have messy little finger prints all over your walls and you just might curse the day you thought to yourself how great it felt to be kissed by the man that became your husband."  Even if someone had told me this, I'm sure I would have thought, yeah, well it might be that way for you, but it's not going to be that way for me. 

I think naivete, denial and a good dose of Vampire literature keeps the human race reproducing.  Seriously though, like everything in life anything worth doing or having is going to take work, lots and lots of work and that includes family life.  I still think the best advice to follow is LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS, Cinderella.  It's interesting to me that real life is almost the complete opposite of the fairytale.  When I grew up in my parents "castle" I had someone who cooked and cleaned for me.  I had someone who worked each day just so I could buy new clothes each year.  Now after I've married my "prince" I'm the one cooking and cleaning for everyone else.  I wear a lot of "rags" all day long and I live in a basement that smells strongly of moth balls and the occasional wafting of sewer. 

Knowing all this, would I still have even given my husband a second glance?  I think I would.  I'd hope I would.  After all, what is the point of life if you have all you ever wanted but no one to share it with?  Relationships with anyone take sacrifice and work.  I wanted to be a mother.  I wanted to be a wife.  I could have been better prepared.  But I wouldn't trade the messy chaos of my life for an empty mansion. 

If you're still reading I really don't know what my point was.  It's just what I've been thinking about over the last couple of days.  I don't know if men analyze marriage as much as women.  I kind of doubt it.  Does anyone else feel the way I do?  I feel guilty for feeling this way.