I just got back from San Francisco, and before that New York. I have been home for 6 days of the last 14. To hear my husband tell it, I’ve been gone for two weeks solid and he’s been home alone with our 3 kids and has barely slept a wink. In his defense, he was preparing for a solo showing at the Old Gold Gallery while simultaneously writing a grant proposal and working his full time job… so maybe it felt exactly like he tells it, however distorted the actual facts are.
For me I know that for the next several weeks of our marriage we will passive aggressively needle our way over and back again pushing through everything that could have been done to make our recent artistic endeavors away from one another easier for everyone. For the record, we are both grown up enough to have the conversations necessary to talk about these things, but it doesn’t mean that the residual feelings of “you just don’t understand” won’t remain and resurface, it just means we’ll be prepared for them.
Surely there will be deserved and undeserved blame sewn in, but in the end, I am hopeful that we stitch together an understanding that sometimes it’s hard to be responsible for everyone, and being a driven individual while also caring for a family can and often does suck, but look how well we both did – that’s the stuff on fairy tales, that’s the compromise of happily ever after.