We Got Caroled

We got caroled on last Sunday.  They came in the evening, dressed for Texas Christmas weather and stood at our door and sang at us, for us, with us.  I love it and so does my bride.

Our church, First Presbyterian in Waco, does this for Marty.  They get their merry band of song birds together and get in cars, vans and a bus and go to nursing homes, home bound folks and our house and sing.  It never fails to make Marty smile and when Marty smiles it makes me smile and I suspect it makes the song birds smile just a little.

We got a little Joy to the World, Silent Night, Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.  The voices were strong and mostly in tune and Marty, who is a little self-conscious about her very being and her singing, sang with them, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come”, joy to the world indeed.

Along with the adults and youth there were two young female children, Lily and Ella standing right in the doorway, right in front of Marty, right in her sight line through all of the songs.  They sang but mostly they did what one might call interpretive dance using their arms and legs to proclaim Joy to the World.

After the singing and dancing familiar faces came up to Marty and gave her polite hugs and touched her hand.  In case you need to know, she loves human contact.  The little girls, Lily and Ella stood there and then looked at Marty and said, “Can we give you a hug?”  Marty hesitated, I think a little surprised from the polite request and then said, “Sure.”

I moved Marty’s chair a little closer so these two beautiful children, these two gifts from God could get close enough to hug my wife, the woman who too often is overlooked because she is in a wheelchair, the woman some shy away from because of her brokenness.  

I watched these children; these amazing babies teach all of us a lesson in grace and acceptance as they innocently embraced Marty.

I love kids this age, they are so uninhibited, so full of very simple joy, so full of the happiness of life.  They don’t have hate in their heart; they just wanted to give a little love to a woman with a broken body. They don’t care that we have important people in our world saying hateful things.  They care about the moment, they care about dancing, they care about releasing their joy.

These children and millions like them are the reason we care when important people spew hate and they are the reason it’s important we call out the hatred.  These beautiful children are the reason I have faith that my fellow human travelers will know hate and will fight against it, these children are the sign that God is still with us even in the face of fear, anger and hate.

That Sunday we really were blessed, blessed by the people of our church who would give of their time, blessed by the music they made, blessed by the parents of these precious babies who came to our door, and blessed by the sweetness of youth as they made Marty feel right, normal and important for just a minute on a December Sunday.

Thank you Lily and Ella, you delivered a Christmas gift to a grateful husband and wife.

An "A" From Dr. LungLady

Life marches on…with you or without you…..life continues.  Our journey, while often a bit circuitous and bumpy, is at a good spot.

We went to see Marty’s lung doc and she gave Marty an “A”.  Marty swears to this minute she got an A+.  She was always a grade ho’.

It’s been months since we have seen Providence Hospital.  It hasn’t been a year but the last time we were there we were watching the Super Bowl, and its football season again (yeah).  

Better than that, better than not seeing Great and Wise on a bi-weekly basis, Marty feels good.  Sure there are fatigue issues, salivary duct issues, various snot and phlegm issues, but no major infections, nothing that has required emergency rooms or hospitals or antibiotics.  

It’s almost been good enough so I can breathe deep and lose those anxiety meds, naw; let’s not get crazy, I still need the tension in my life so I can feel normal.

Marty and I have been to countless movies, been to birthdays, celebrated her birthday in a big way and hung out at the lake for days on end.  We have sung songs, been to a wedding, laughed at each other and the oddities of our life.  We have seen our children and their children on a regular basis and celebrated their special days and their successes.

Said children, who are really adults now, though it’s hard for me to see that, are doing great.  They are all gainfully employed, well married and healthy with their own health insurance.  On the whole they like their chosen vocations get along with their mates and are living independently and oh, our baby daughter is pregnant with her 2^nd child and our 4^th grandchild.  Our cup truly runneth over and we have a big cup.  

Our grandkids are beginning to be functioning people and are starting various level of school and generally eager to go.  They are terminally cute, exceedingly smart and all three are what one might call precocious.  We like precocious in our family.

My parents are doing great, going and blowing and doing their thing.  We just celebrated their 86^th birthdays, sorry Mom; the word is out on your age.  They are healthy, able to do what they want to do, and in a word amazing, and in another word, inspiring.

I know, I know, this is starting to sound like your basic Christmas letter, my kids and my grandkids and even my parents are better than yours, nanna, nanna, boo, boo.  Sorry about that, this is short, deal with it.

There was a time in our most recent journey where it was hard to find the bright spots, where life seemed to be closing in on us and it felt like the aftermath of Marty’s strokes was oppressive and so over powering we could not live a rewarding life.

Marty is better, I am better at my job, we are both more accepting and so grateful for the hours, days and months of good health and favor.  

We used to have one of those kitschy signs in our kitchen that read, “When Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”  For us it should be, “When Momma feels good, we all feel good.”  

Today, Momma feels good, hey; she got an A from Dr. LungLady.

Mother Marty

Marty is a mother.  It’s more than a little enlightening to see the young woman who became your wife make the transition from girl friend to wife to mother.  We all evolve, daughters become wives, and wives become mothers.  

Marty made the transition, not seamlessly, not gracefully, not perfectly.  She wasn’t the perfect mother; she wasn’t “earth mother”.  Marty smoked, she cussed, she slept late, she was over bearing, she was loud, and at times I’m sure she was a bit embarrassing for our two children. 

 But Marty loved fiercely and Matt and Erin grew up knowing that fierce love.  They grew up knowing Marty was always and forever in their corner and on their side and they could come to her for anything.

She raised our children to know anything was possible.  As they watched Marty work for her doctorate they saw you could do life differently, even a little non-traditionally.  They saw how important education was and they saw how you could choose a goal and achieve it.  They saw how you could make major life changes and succeed.

Our children knew Marty was behind them and would always be there to help with ideas or advise.  She was there to help them be who they were and succeed.  

She helped Matt make a remote control paper-mâché shark and had the scratches and scars from the chicken wire they used for the skeleton of the shark to prove it.  

She helped Erin make her first (and maybe only) career video by giving her direction and running the camera and getting her access to doctors’ offices and equipment for the video.  

Marty wiped their faces, doled out medicine and made sure they were at the right doctor’s offices when the kids were sick.  She once held an infant Erin close during an exam for chronic urinary tract infections.  When they came out she couldn’t figure out why Erin had blood on her head….it was from Marty’s lip, Marty had bit through her own lip while holding her infant daughter.  

To this day I believe she saved Matt’s leg because she was persistent in ensuring he got first class care when he contracted a staph infection that moved to cellulitis.  She then did wet dry packs in the open wound for weeks.  I couldn’t do it.

Marty was at her best with the problems, whether it was school, love life, faith or a broken down car.  She was one of the world’s great problems solvers.  The kids came to her because she almost always offered solutions, solutions without judgment, well, maybe not too much judgment.

It wasn’t just our kids either.  Our house had a variety of other kids running in and out because they felt welcome by the mother of the house.  Marty was deeply involved in our church’s youth program and the young girls would go to her, the somewhat crass, loud woman with the warm heart.  They would go to her for reassurance, they would go to her for acceptance, and they would go to her for love.  

Marty always, always had love for her children and the children of others.  She was and is mother to many because of that love, because of that sometimes frail, sometimes brittle, always enduring love of a mother.

The strokes, the brain injury have not changed that.  She can’t do some of the things she once did, she can’t do many of the things she once did, she is not as expressive or demonstrative as she once was, but I know, I know Marty, I know her heart; I know she loves her kids with the same intensity and the same depth she always has.  

It is, in spite of life getting in the way, a mother’s love and that is not changed by anything.

Surrender? Don't Think So

When we left St. Catherine’s to come home in June of 2006 it felt like surrender, it felt like we were leaving too soon with too much still to learn and to do.

We had been at St. Catherine’s, a sub acute care and rehab center, for a total of four months and we had spent a turbulent six weeks at Pate rehab in Dallas.   All in all Marty had not seen the inside of our house for six months.  

As I sat in the social worker’s office listening and thinking about our options, trying to come to grips with our new reality, I finally just gave in to what I saw as inevitable and I said, “It’s time to go home.”

I never would have thought it but going home felt like surrender, leaving rehab without accomplishing some or really any of our recovery goals felt like total failure.  We had spent months trying to find answers and see some real improvement in Marty’s physical and cognitive abilities.  I felt like we had made very little progress and as I said those words, “let’s go home”, it felt like acquiescence to the strokes, it felt like I was quitting on Marty.

Before the strokes Marty was a musician, a teacher, a therapist, a mentor to young women, a house painter, a detailed but painfully slow wall paperer and the financial manager for our house.  She presented seminal papers at conventions and helped revitalize a youth program at our church, she helped our oldest put together a remote powered, Paper Mache shark and guided our youngest through the travails of adolescence.  

Before the strokes Marty managed to get a couple of degrees, one a doctorate, while raising two very successful children and supporting a husband in a job that was somewhat nomadic.  She had done big stuff and seen big stuff, she was accomplished.

The strokes and the recovery from the assault of the strokes made everything she had done seem pretty small.   As we walked out of St. Catherine’s for the last time we were faced with giving up on rehab, we were being forced to take unacceptable losses, we were going home to learn to live and accept.

Over the years my accomplished wife has taught me a lot of stuff, over our years together she has helped me grow into something better.  How she has lived her new life, what she has taught me by her gracious acceptance of that new life, has been nothing short of inspiring and maybe her biggest achievement.  Marty has taught me that what I saw as surrender that June was really just the beginnings of acceptance without surrender.

Marty, my wounded wife, taught me.  She quietly led us both to acceptance, to accept the disability, to accept the new life, to accept the massive changes brought on by the strokes, to accept it all, but to never surrender to any of it. 

She has continued to fight for every little piece of improvement, every tiny memory, every number, every address, every name.  She has very simply and quietly fought for improvement.  Marty has embraced the rehab adage, “I’m better today than I was yesterday, I will be better tomorrow than I am today.” 

She has lived the credo, acceptance without surrender.

Marty has done all of this quietly, without complaining and with all of the dignity one can have when your body and parts of your mind are so broken by a disease.  She has accepted with dignity and grace a body that does not necessarily lend itself to either.  In her living she has taught everyone who knows her about grace and acceptance.

Marty was always stubborn, dogmatic, determined in everything she faced, in everything she wanted to do.  She wasn’t ever really compliant or graceful in her life.  The strokes forced us both to find a way to accept a new life.  

She was not forced to live her life without complaint, she just does.  She was not forced to continue to seek improvement, she just does.  She was not forced to live with grace and dignity, she was not forced to fight surrender she just does every day.   

She embodies acceptance without surrender.

Evolution is Real

I met her in October of 1973 at Susie’s birthday party.  It was a college birthday party with good, like-minded friends, you get the picture.  She was going out with a friend of mine who was studying architecture, I was a free agent and we eventually found each other.

Over the ensuing 35+ years, our marriage, like most, has gone from the thrill of young love and new caresses to the precipice of marital disaster.  Unlike some it has morphed into a steady, unrelenting faith in each other.  Over the past decades Marty and I have loved, fought, cried and laughed, often, often all on the same day, as our relationship evolved.

I met Marty at the party, I got to know her when I drove her to David and Susie’s wedding in Dallas and got to know her even better after my friend, her boyfriend, left Texas Tech.  Our friendship evolved over the weeks and months and slowly became something much deeper and I found all I wanted to do was hang with and talk with this rather unique woman.

I have always been one of those guys who easily fall in love; I fell in love with almost any woman who expressed an interest in me, a little scary for some women.  It was different with Marty because Marty was different.  She was pretty, she was witty, she was whip smart, she was driven, independent, knew what she wanted to do with her life and amazingly irreverent.  I fell in like and then in love with Marty’s mind, with her personality and with her brain.

We married in January of 1976, much too young and much too immature to have any real hope of surviving the wars and ravages of living a life time with someone.

Ultimately we had to raise each other, learn on the fly.  We learned from each other, we fed off each other; we started to slowly grow into full fledged adults with adult like responsibilities.  It was a painful learning process for both of us as we tried to understand the dynamics and emotions of actual living that so often would override the love we clearly had for each other.  We pissed and moaned and argued and fought over the traditional stuff, over the non-traditional stuff, over too many things that didn’t really matter.

When Matt, our first born, was born in Paris we had something else to learn about, a child and how to care for him.  Then we moved to Muenster and we had another child, Erin.  Children, as it happens, in addition to being the hope for the future, incrementally add stress to a growing relationship.  Our marriage, our relationship, those things most important to us was irrevocably changed with children.

Marty, to her undying credit, never let us be sloppy in the marriage, we had to discuss, we had to question, we had to answer, we had to close every stinking argument.  I pushed back and chafed against this unrelenting force of solving all problems, it was exhausting; it was like being in therapy 24 hours a day.  Our pursuit of relationship nirvana didn’t always help, it didn’t always come out right, but it did always keep the third partner in our marriage, the relationship itself, foremost in our minds.

We kept moving to different towns as I received various promotions and opportunities in my career.  Eventually the moving, following my job, became our biggest source of conflict.  Marty was okay with leaving Paris, she was not okay with leaving Muenster, she was really not okay with leaving Hillsboro, and I promised I would not move her from Waco, unless….

In the blink of an eye our partnership once again evolved.  Matt graduated, Erin was on her way out the door when I started working out of Dallas with the thought that once Erin graduated maybe we would just move to Dallas.  That didn’t happen and for four years I spent the week in Dallas and the weekends in Waco.  We were childless and for the most part living apart.  We still talked, every day, we still argued, we still problem solved, we still analyzed but it wasn’t the same.  Distance does not always make the heart grow fonder; sometimes distance adds a chasm that is very difficult to bridge.  It was not a good time, we were both lonely, both angry, both stuck.  Our marriage teetered on a very delicate precipice; this was not a good change.

When I got laid off at the end of 2004 I came home to Marty and a completely new dynamic.  For the first time in 20 years we were in a house together, alone, without children.  We had spent so much time apart the last four years it was hard, it was tentative, it was little scary.  We had hit one of those milestones most long term married people hit, alone at last and a bit afraid of the quiet.  

We were just starting to really feel our way into this new phase of our relationship when she had the first stroke.  Too early and too young we hit a brand new stage where one had to care for the other, where one had to handle everything for the other, where both came face to face with mortality, where both came to grips with vows made 30 years previous.

I can honestly say I know without any doubt at all that I love my wife more today than ever.  I think Marty feels the same.  Our love, our marriage, our relationship, is very different, in some ways harder, in some ways easier.  The up side is there is no conflict; the down side is….there is no conflict, no flint to harden the steel, no one pushing me to continue to find myself, no one challenging me on a daily basis to be a better husband, to be a better man.  How weird is it that I miss that?

Our marriage, though at times very rocky, simply continued to mature, to ripen, to get stronger.  In spite of ourselves, in spite of the time apart, in spite of the strokes, we got better at being together.  We were never good at everything but we really were good at maybe the most important thing, tending and nurturing the marriage.  

Marty’s unrelenting skill at self discovery, my realization that  she didn’t want me to fix everything all of the time and my discovery of the simple phrase, “how do you feel about that,” made both of us better, if not ideal partners.  It’s all different now, I think we have skipped some evolutionary steps but we are where we are, we are what we are and it’s been a fascinating journey so far.