Marital Mondays: A Symphony in Two Parts (Guest Blog)
The much-lauded film Pulp Fiction had character Jules Winnfield
utter an often-repeated quote: “The path of the righteous man is beset
on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil
men.” But what about the path of the righteous couple? What sorts of
challenges lay upon their path?
This is a subject that I have some experience with. There are many
challenges that stand in the way of having hours of romantic stares or
lounging under six hundred thread count sheets. From jockeying
priorities of family commitments to friendships allowed to lay fallow,
professional upheavals and private lessons, weekend rides on the 405
and weeknights in line at Target right before closing — every step is
bracketed by slings and arrows that’d make outrageous fortune
alabaster with terror.
Myshell and I walk this path together, every day. Anyone who has
spent time with me or even had to do business with me knows that I am
a deeply annoying and overwhelmingly challenging person to be around,
so I know that some of those arrowheads and thrown stones happened due
to my foibles and failures. For example, it’s stupidly easy for her
to provoke me with words, be it her “old woman voice” chiding me to
hurry up when we’re running late for something I barely remember or
called upon for help in the imperative instead of the interrogative.
Nothing anyone says matters as much as what comes from her lips, you
see. I am nothing like a perfect man, and I’ve never known anyone who
was. We’re all imperfect people, and I can quickly claim that about
myself.
Part of our foundation, part of what makes these challenges
manageable, is the unshakable love Myshell has for me, the relentless
passion she has to stand at my side. It’s a thing of wonder, a
virtually physical force that can crack the firmament of foreign lands
or pull stars from the sky.
We work on it, every day. We’ve started using The Three Gates of Speech (culled from a lesson at
our eldest daughter’s school) with each other as much as with said
daughter, trying to make our way through decades of snarky comments
with our friends and bitterly bitten back barbs at superiors. We’re
trading off nights ministering bottles of warmed water (before 5AM) to
our teething infant. We’re making it work, every day, choosing each
other and choosing joy over exhaustion, over frustration, over failure
and fear.
I’m grateful for the chance, myself, and I never question the fact
that it is a chance, knowing that it goes wrong for people — smarter
than me, richer than me, better than me — every single day. I have
to keep hitting my free throws, knowing they’ll happen because I will
fail to complete the play. I have to step up, I have to stand strong
not just for the two of us, but for two bright, funny little lights
that deserve a chance to do more than I ever could, as I had the
chance to do more than my father, and so on down the line.
It’s the way life works, and I’m on the job, walking the path through
those challenges. Every single day.
Hannibal Tabu is the proud husband of Myshell Tabu, proud
stepfather to the illustrious Mooch and the equally hilarious Fuss.
He has no expectations that his wife’s readers will become readers of
his blog, but he presents fiction, poetry, rants
and strangled cries for help from his own personal clock tower, the
website The
Operative Network
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http://myshelltabu.com/choose-joy/tuesdays-with-mooch-pats-and-spats/ Myshell Tabu
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