Happy Anniversary

I was perusing facebook, since it has become my way to connect to what other people, some of them even normal the way I used to think of normal, do every day. A friend showed us a beautiful, travel-brochure-perfect picture of a beach to which her husband has just booked their 25th wedding anniversary trip tickets. She was "almost in tears" with the joy of it.

I just let the beachscape soak in for a few minutes before paging on. I don't go to beaches: it is in my ancestry to storm beaches in long boats, heading for the wooded parts of land, not to lie out on them frying. But it was the idea of celebrating, and celebrating being married, and having twenty-five years of it to celebrate, that got to me.

I got married for life, and now I'm getting unmarried for the rest of it. And while we were married, we never really celebrated it. Mostly I think this is because, he didn't find anything particularly awe-inspiring, or spiritually wonderful, or emotionally evocative, about being married. And he never really treated me like part of himself, which is what being married IS.
On the surface, we could say, we can't get away to do much of anything for an anniversary, because we have the farm and can't just leave cows and children with someone else, it's too much to entrust or too much of a burden to hand over. But we did leave the farm for 5 days once, to attend a wedding in the Midwest. So, I bet, if it had mattered as much to commemorate our own, he could have made arrangements for that, too. I have never indulged in mulling over how much I wanted him to show that it mattered to him, to be married to me. I comforted myself with how selfless I was being, to shrug it off and say, it would be too hard to get away, anyway. We can be  happy here with the children. Then, for the last five and a half years of it, he began to talk about taking a trip here or there, and making up plans, and then backing down and somehow finding a way to blame me for that. After this happened twice in a row, having lived with him for many years already, I didn't register much enthusiasm when next he'd mention making a trip....I knew it would all come to nothing, and I always turned out right. And by then he had made himself into someone it made me unhappy to be around at home, and definitely had written himself off my short list of people I'd want to travel somewhere with and entertain.

I'll always have August 3rd to remember, as my wedding anniversary. It was a day of promise for the first 4 years; then my beloved grandmother passed away on my anniversary day and it became a bittersweet sort of day for me. Now it's a day to remember the death of my dream.

And I wonder, about that dream, whether it is worth dreaming again. I find myself with such heartache, you see, not because it has been emptied....but because it is still overfull.