I MARRIED THE RIGHT PERSON

For the past few years, I have been researching and contemplating modern marriage. My book about what I’ve learned during my investigation comes out next month. Normally the weeks leading up to a book release are filled with me racking my brain for ways to get a bunch of pre-orders and a lot of fantasizing about hitting best-seller lists. This lead up has been a bit different because my mom is dying.

The experience of losing my mom has been surreal for multiple reasons. For starters, her disease is incredibly rare, fast-acting and untreatable. The rate that she has declined since she visited me in July in Los Angeles is hard for people to comprehend. It’s also been surreal because it has caused me to put my own marriage to the test in a way I had hoped wouldn’t happen for another decade (at least).

I wrote an entire chapter in my book about hardship and how to predict if you are in the type of marriage that can withstand life’s worst moments. I discovered through talking to therapists and couples that unfortunately you don’t really know how someone will behave in a certain situation until that situation happens. You can look for clues—like how they handle daily stressors—but you can’t know for certain until the shit has actually hit the fan.

Well, I’m unhappy to announce the shit has officially hit the fan for us—multiple times. If it wasn’t bad enough for my mom to be battling CJD, my father has had to be rushed to the ER in an ambulance two different times for chest pain. The pain and stress he is under seems to be quite literally breaking his heart. (Or if not breaking, damaging in some considerable way.) As I write this on the floor of my parents’ bedroom next to my mother’s hospital bed, my husband, John, is sitting at the ER with my father for the second time in four days. The first time he stayed until almost one in the morning. And, I should note, he hasn’t complained once.

For the majority of my life, I assumed I wouldn’t be able to survive without my parents’ support. They have been my rock and closest friends. If my mom had be diagnosed before I was happily married, I do not think I would be handling this as well as I am. I actually don’t think I would be able to handle it all. The world would have seemed too scary and lonely without the bond tying me to my mom. She, along with my dad, has always been my anchor and safe space.

Yet, somehow in these last three and a half years of knowing John, and especially during our first year of marriage, he has come to occupy the same, intimate role as my parents. I depend on and trust him in a way that, at least for me, is reserved for family. So, when I left for New York before him, not realizing how serious my mom’s condition was, I didn’t hesitate to tell him to join me earlier than we had planned. And he didn’t hesitate to come.

I know that it is unusual for a husband to move into his in-laws’ house for weeks to care for his wife as she cares for her mother. Most people don’t have the luxury to be away that long. But John is in the position to be here, so he is. And he’s not just here taking up space. He is collecting our garbage and preparing our food. He is taking my father to the hospital and making my mother laugh when no one else really can at this point.

I came out of a podcast recording the other week to find John straining a bowl of soup for me. It had come with unwelcome bacon and trying to eat around it wasn’t working. He had decided to meticulously remove all the bacon while I was working so I could enjoy the soup once I was done. Seeing him at the counter tending to me in that way confirmed everything I had been suspecting: I had married the right guy.

But before I got a chance to express this feeling to him, he expressed it to me. We got away for a quick dinner a few nights ago and as I sat shoveling my face with Greek food, he said “I married the right person.” This was a bit shocking to hear considering what my family has been putting him through since August, but I suppose he has seen how I show up during a crisis and felt the relief I feel.  I instantly replied, “I had been thinking the same thing!”

I believe we are heavily shaped by the marriages we grow up around. And I have been lucky to witness what genuine partnership looks like through my parents.  My dad’s devotion to my mother during this time has set the bar for what it means to truly love and care for someone. Mixed in with my shock and sadness is a sense of gratitude that I have managed to find someone who is interested in building the type of marriage my parents have had. One that is filled with love, laughter and enormous heaps of support—even when it would be easier to run away.

While it is impossible to know what will come and who we become, I feel lucky that the marriage we have now is one that is strong enough to get me through my greatest fear coming true.

xoxo,

Allison

P.S. You can preorder my new book I DO (I THINK): Conversations About Modern Marriage here. It includes interviews with my parents and more insight into their life together. (I can hear my mom’s voice telling me I have to keep promoting this thing despite everything. She is my biggest champion.)

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