Erica y Jordan's Blog
I went down to the lobby to make a small call out.
So I finally lugged the girls downtown on the train yesterday afternoon, through many toils and snares (the CTA attendant and her insane broken card dispensing machines for one), and got to my cheap eyewear provider, America's Best. Jordan got out of work to watch the girls so that I could have a few intimate moments alone with the eye doctor. So I started explaining that my eyes had suddenly gone from bad to frighteningly bad to the "doctor" and she gave me the routine exam. Eventually, she realized that sometimes my eyes were working and sometimes they weren't, and she asked to look at them with some different machine. Suffice it to say that due to extending the two-week limit on my short-term contacts immeasurably, I have damaged my eyes. So much for being thrifty; it almost caused me permanent vision loss. The doctor said that my eyes should get all the way better if I take my eye steroids and don't make the same mistake again. So that's good.
I am now babysitting Emilio and his younger sister Faye, and somehow, everyone (Iris and Sophia too) are all sleeping, as they were one other time when I blogged. Though it still feels miraculous, it feels slightly less miraculous than it did last time. I guess that's how repeat mirales go. Like the manna. Now it will only feel really miraculous if they all sleep for four or ten hours.
I have really wanted to blog about this friend (I'll call her Josephine) who just got in touch with her birth mother for the first time in her life. She was adopted as a newborn, and after 20+ years decided that she was at a place in her life where she was ready to contact her biological mother. I can't stop thinking about it. I am having a hard time deciding if I should really blog about it, however, because it really is her story. So I think I will keep thinking about it in my own head for a while and let her keep the story as private as she wants to keep it. Let me say that so far everything is turning out as positively as it possibly could, which is amazing. So I think that instead of writing about all the fascinating details and all the questions it makes me wonder, I will write about how arbitrary it makes me feel like my life and everyone else's lives are. Josephine just learned that her birth mother is alive and kind and normal and had a family, and she (Eudora) could have just as easily been raised in that one as she was her own. It's mind-boggling. I actually think it is one of those concepts that is impossible to understand because it is beyond the grasp of finite human minds--that we could have had any life. That we could have been born into any time, any place, any family, any race, any religion... it's unfathomable. And stressful.
This idea is also really hard when it comes to marriage, because marriage is something that we choose. But the people we meet in life when we're at that marrying time and age and the situations in which we find ourselves are just as arbitrary as those into which we are born. So, although we do "choose" who we are going to marry, it's also very based on outside events and circumstances and coincidences that we have very little control over. I am a firm believer in the unromantic notion that you could marry anyone and that there is no one person you were meant to be with (though obviously there are some people we are each more compatible with and attracted to than others). So it's difficult when you are having a hard time with your family or your life to just imagine that it could have been easier in an alternate universe of marriage (akin to the idea that life would be easier if you were born into a wealthier family or something). But this thinking is horrible, because it just causes more problems.
I am becoming more and more aware of just how messed up our Western ideas of "matches made in heaven" or "love at first sight" are. I believe they are largely responsible for so many bad and broken marriages. Because, like it or not, you have to work at being content in marriage and staying "in love" (if that's important to you) with someone until you die. I remember hearing how arranged marriages have higher success rates than unnarranged ones, and now that I am a few years into marriage, I understand why.
This morning, on our way to Emilio's house, I saw a middle-school-aged boy and girl--obviously not siblings--walking to school together, and I could tell that they liked each other. (You don't need perfect eyesight to sense these things if you are hyper-intuitive about this stuff.) The boy was really cute (dark and athletic) and you could tell he was cool. I was imagining how the girl probably thought about him as this cool, cute basketball player or whatever he does. But she probably has no idea of what he is like when he is at home (a jerk to his sister, beat up on by his older brother, abused by his relative, the main family caretaker, really into video games or stamp collecting, who knows?). It's like this one-dimensional way of seeing a person. I really don't know how to explain what I am trying to say. I guess I feel like love--like the way you should feel about someone you are married to--should be so much more than that. That boy isn't just a cute basketball player--he is a real person, which is scary. So when you get married you are choosing to share your life and death with someone--some arbitrary person who you bumped into along the journey of your life somewhere--who is just as human and full of memories and questions and desires and needs as you are. It's crazy that we ever choose to do it, because it makes life so much more complex. Someone--my mother-in-law or sister or both--just said something like how "relationsips are compromise," which is cliched but true, like most cliches. When we join our lives with someone else's we choose to give up our ability to do whatever we want whenever we want to, and I feel like that is the idea our romantic conceptualization of marriage (Cinderella, etc.) ignores. I feel like if we started out marriage thinking it was going to suck as opposed to thinking we had just won the lottery, everyone would have such better marriages, because then we would actually work and negotiate at making them great and fun regardless of who we were with instead of spending the rest of our lives thinking we had gotten a raw deal or ending it (the marriage not the life, though I guess it could be either) altogether. I guess the same could be said of where we find ourselves in life, in general. If I decided today that no matter what I was going to make my life right here right now in Oak Park the best life I could possibly have, things would probably go a lot better for me than if I kept feeling sorry for myself for not living on the beach in the tropics and living the fantasy surfer life I deserved, if that makes sense.
Now, I am tempted to delete all that stuff about marriage since it makes it sound like I am unhappily married which might make you think I was somehow betraying Jordan, but the truth is that he totally agrees with m about all of this. He even told the same stuff to a group of college kids, horrifying all of them, a while ago. And I am trying to be my most honest self possible.
Well, the four-month-old is up.But one final note. I keep thinking about this quotation from the TV show Mad Men that I watched with my in-laws in Connecticut last week. This guy has just cheated on his wife with his coworker and he is trying to explain to his coworker (actually, I think she is his secretary) that his marriage just isn't that great or something. He's trying to explain why he is cheating on his wife. Anyway, he says something like, "this woman who just cares about curtains and I are supposed to be one." The idea bothered me because it did seem like a good excuse somehow, but now I feel like I get what is wrong with it.
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