That Time I Got Married and Wound Up Hiding

I wait for him to finish in the restroom so that we can switch, and I replay the day in my head. Did we get all of the groceries that we needed? I think we spent too much money, but there's nothing we can do about it now. I wonder if he held my hand on the way home, and I just want it to be tomorrow already. I lie down in the bed that's used to just the one rhythm of sleeping breaths but makes more sense balancing two. I slide the duvet over my shoulders, but I can't make myself like a cocoon anymore, tucking each corner underneath the weight of myself so that no air can get in. Instead, I stare up at my weird, new fan and keep my arms at my side. I feel the little girl emerging that doesn't like to be forgotten, and I try to stuff her back in like the too-much toothpaste that somehow got out. This always happens. I tell her silently that she's grown up now and that she doesn't have to worry and I bargain with her to please not screw this up - it's late, and it's only been two weeks. How are we already two weeks old? Goodness. It's funny, isn't it, how we can feel so excitedly fresh in the same instance of feeling expired. Just go to sleep.

"Do you feel happy?" 

You can imagine me frantically scooping up the words as they each fall out on top of the one before it. The second I say it, I have this picture of a lady, poised and polished - she's starting to gray but she can't be over sixty. She walks straight like her back has never bothered her, and she carries a lipstick wherever she goes. She has tact, but she's not afraid to offend you if it means sparing you the public embarrassment. She scoots over to me from across the sidewalk and, out of pure concern, taps me on the back and whispers, Excuse me, Miss. Your insecurity is showing. 

Of course, I don't mean the question like it sounds. We're married and we have a home and, as of two hours ago, we have enough food to fill it. So, what did I mean? He asks the same thing. 

"I don't know. It's been a really busy couple of days settling in, and we haven't had much time to connect. You seem quiet and you didn't say that I was pretty today." In perfect little girl fashion, I do the proverbial hair-behind-the-ear tuck, recounting several earlier moments when he had adored me but casting those to the side. "I just wonder if it's possible to slip into normalcy so soon that the pursuit kind of stops."  

You know those times when you cannonball into the pool of vulnerability and all you want is for the receiving end to nod their head? To say that they'd been chewing on the same sourness and that they know exactly what you're tasting here. However sucky the affirmation may feel, it's better to know that you're both on the same page? This was one of those times, and I only looked up at him to see if he was nodding, and when he wasn't, I wished I had been asleep an hour ago. He said that he was sorry he had let me feel this way, and he opened his arms wide to invite me in, making up for the perceived farawayness that had created an apparently one-sided wedge. An ocean between us that only I could see. Watching him attempt to make better something that he hadn't noticed in the first place made me cower. I turned my back on his drawing me closer, and I hoped that we would shut up for the night. 

"Hey, don't run." He has my attention at this point.

"Sometimes, you become brave enough to admit feeling pushed aside, and then just as I'm fixing it, I see that you've hidden again. I'll chase you, but I don't have to. I've always just been right here." Okay. Hey, Jesus. I see you. 

I was so taken back at the accuracy of that remark, and I got quiet for the first time so that those words might wash over me and entirely sink in, silencing my stubbornness, and saturating my stiffness. My eyes searched the room, grasping for anything to say back that would invalidate what he'd found out, and there was nothing. I felt completely known and a little bit humiliated for it. I expressed how silly it was to be desperate and that I'd rather be sought after than left tugging on his coattail and that even wives want to be tended to. 

. . .

I'm reading a book right now by Lysa TerKeurst called Uninvited. It's about living loved when you feel less-than, left out or lonely, and it makes me mad how right she is about our fears of being rejected. She says that "we run at a breakneck pace to try and achieve what God simply wants us to slow down enough to receive." She says that there's an abundance and a fullness of Love that won't leave us begging others for scraps of their love. She sets forth the notion that this love welcomes our sharpness and esteems our riskiness to be honest with Him but that to love Him is to cooperate with His grace in return. What a concept.

Ryan and I were under no assumption that marriage would fix us or take away our stuff - the pangs of his shame and my inadequacy. But I figured that they might manifest in different ways, taking on shapes and sounds and personalities that I hadn't known before, and I was right. That night, I felt exposed and caught, wincing beneath fig leaves. I cried those tears that only you cry when Jesus finds you curled up in the closet and kneels down to tell you that he'll chase you but that he doesn't have to.  That he's always been right there and how he so delights in that tugging on his coattail. Who would have thought that I'd be two weeks married, hiding from a fickle, human husband and a perfectly faithful Father that won't stop running until I'm out of breath, hands on my knees, undeniably cooperating with their grace. And let me tell you, what I'm learning hurts so good.