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The Heart Is A Lonley Hunter
By Carson McCullers
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its strange when you find yourself doing something or being something other than you want to be or ever thought that you would be…something perhaps, that one lazily assumed that they would not be…

secretly, for years, i wanted to be a wife. Someone’s other half, although i had only a vague notion and a sort of abstract idea of what that was meant to be (redundant? yes well..) but i did want to be that, and knowing so, no matter what was ever said (to make myself feel better or to push away the fear that i might very well never be that or the i-am-so-holy-i-may-never-marry-Paul-zealot-time-in-life ) somewhere inside, i knew that i wanted it, so when i find myself just weeks from this reality, this change-your-name-and-share-everything reality, i am not shocked or even mildly surprised at it all.

i am in awe of it, not so much of it as of whom i will marry; my best friend, my love, this guy i initially never thought i would have or could have been friends with or that i might have anything in common with but just happened to get to know and found to be really great, i mean, really great.

but in this there are some real surprises. i find that i struggle with the most basic necessities of relational communication and interdependence. i find fears from years ago that pop up and nag at me until i say something stupid or react in bitter tears to an almost nothing comment, gesture, pause (or what i take to be a pause) or look. (maybe my reactions are not to something he did or did not do at all but to some memory of something else, or by some unnamed expectation of men because of the life i knew ? anyway..)

i find that i fear everything relational; the responsibility, the vulnerability, the reality of trust and the dangers of depending on someone else (although i know in this hard and sometimes shadowy head of mine that i need others) and just letting someone in, letting the role of woman and wife and friend be my real role. i fear it all.

this is what i mean when i say that about, “doing something or being something you never wanted to or thought that you would be” i never thought i would be so weak, so unsteady, so unstable really, in all this day to day finding-out-just-how-to-live-everyday-and-be-a-healthy-contributor-in-a-relationship thing. i never wanted to be so needy, so weak, so afraid. but i am and it surprises me, shocks me really.

i fight it everyday and i hope that one day after all this fighting i will wake up and be the kind of friend and woman and wife that i want to be (the kind that i thought that i would be, oh lazy assumptions) strong, dependable, honest, trusting, able to be myself and let my love, my friend, my husband except me just as i am, able to love him, and to accept him as well (although i think (just now) that i do, hmm, why can’t i believe this is possible for him to do for me?) but i realize that i can’t really get there without him, i realize that i have to let him in, let him help me (and he does) and together (no really) together, we will be ok, better than ok..

even (someday) what God intended us to be, one.