Shifting Perspective

 

Before we were married, I read the book Joy in the Morning, by Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Joy in the Morning is the story of a young couple and their first year of marriage set in the Mid West circa 1928.

  (you can read it too!)

When I read this book the first time, I often found myself judging the characters in one or another, thinking self righteously that I would never behave in such ways, and that I would not tolerate such behavior from my husband.

Haha, well….

I picked it up again about one month into our marriage, with some new and quite different points of view from my first reading when I was nineteen years old.  There were some bizarre, even eerie, parallels between this fictitious couple and us.  I realized that there were moments that I had behaved in ways similar to the wife, ways that I had judged before.  I empathized with the husband based on new understanding of my own hubs.

So, I learned something.  You have to live it to get it.  There’s a new understanding of marriage not only for characters in a novel, but for my parents, Hubs’ parents, grandparents, friends, couples in the park, Hollywood marriages etc.  It’s only seven months worth of understanding, but it’s seven months more than my life up to this point. 

Being married.  We love being married because we love learning.  Learning, living, loving.  Yep.  We’ll be doing that for the next ______(fill in the blank with projected lifespan) years.

~The Wifey!

Side note: listening to Sara Groves while writing blog posts makes me very contemplative.