When I was a child, I walked through my mother’s garden with a sense of awe and wonder. The velvet emerald grass spread under the Chinese elm trees and lilac bushes. The roses in brilliant hues of red and gold climbed the wall of our old ranch house. The sweet peas huddled near the gate and the flocks, morning glories and baby’s breath rambled in the beds near the house. It was a wonderland of beauty at every turn. I didn’t think about the effort it took to make an Eden like that. It just seemed to come alive with the first breath of spring and stay until the first frost.
It wasn’t until I started to grow a flower bed that I realized what backbreaking, heartrending, risk-taking work it was. I put in the effort to make my Eden. I planted the best varieties, I weeded the beds and I watered them just as I had seen my mother do. I even asked her advice and followed it, but my flower garden never looked like hers.
Just as the flowers started to come up, I started weeding. I wasn’t familiar enough with the weeds or the plants, so I took the hoe and chopped up everything that looked like a weed. Weeks later, I wondered why some of my varieties never bloomed. It took me a while to realize that weeds need to be pulled by hand until one can distinguish the weeds from the flowers.
I had other problems that didn’t plague my mother: dogs. I bought pregrown flowers from the nursery and planted them. They looked lovely with their fresh blooms. I was so excited. I would finally have my Eden. Next thing I knew, our big black dog was sleeping on my flowers. After I took the broom and chased him away, I examined my flowers. They were a mass of crushed petals and broken stems.
The dogs weren’t the only problem. I had horses and cows wander by and eat my blossoms and leave unwanted fertilizer piles among my posies. My garden was more of a mess than magic.
Finally, I concluded I needed a fence. Mom had a big, high fence with locking gates, and she kept those gates closed. Anyone who left them open had to face her wrath. She knew the importance of fences and gates. I don’t know why it took me so long to get the picture.
Our society has abandoned and disregarded fences that have stood for centuries in timeworn rules that gave couples hope of a Garden-of-Eden life. In days gone by, there was a fence called marriage. When a couple married, it was expected to last until the death of one spouse or the other. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was a high fence that kept the critters out. In our small community, it was like a funeral when someone filed for divorce.
Now, marriages last about as long as uncomfortable shoes. No one even blinks at the separation. And couples are mystified as to why the Garden of Eden they expected marriage to be turns out to be a playground for wild dogs.
It is easy to look at marriage through Hallmark movies and store windows where red lacy hearts and cupids dance among the heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. Wide-eyed maidens fantasize that Prince Charming will ride out of the sunrise on his huge silver-white charger, dressed in a suit of golden armor to sweep them off their feet. Love at first sight. The happy couple will ride off into the sunset to a glorious castle to live happily ever after. The Hallmark movie ends there. The credits come on, the movie is over and we expect that glorious moment to last forever.
Movies don’t show the morning after and a year down the road. Nobody said anything about the snoring, the endless socks and underwear strewn along the hallway, or worse, the crumpled toothpaste tube and the toilet paper fastened on the roll backward. There are thousands of little annoyances that no one mentioned in the flurry of courtship. It's in that moment of realization that the fences start to come down. “Did I marry my real true love, or did I get duped? My perfect soulmate is out there beyond the fence of marriage. I just have to find him/her.”
Sadly, most movies are not a reflection of reality. Soulmates are as real as the knight in shining armor. Even in fairytales, there is the morning after and the years that follow.
Dale Carnegie in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People said, in effect, that success in marriage isn’t so much in finding the right person as being the right person.
Since I was married when I was 38, I had a long time to try Carnegie’s theory. I developed all the qualities I thought a man would want. I could cook, sew, clean and talk about any subject. I could dress nicely and wear makeup. I was interested in reading, sports and horseback riding. What more could a man want? On the surface, those qualities sound good, but that is just what they are, surface stuff.
When you get right down to it, my husband wanted a woman to understand him from his point of view. He cared about how I looked, but it was more important how I sounded. He wanted a quiet, peaceful voice that knows how and when to shut up. He wanted a woman who didn’t give him advice. It was especially offensive to him to get advice on a subject I knew nothing about, like his job and his car. He wanted a woman who smiled and didn’t lose her temper. Peace was high on his priority list. His home should be a haven of peace.
I couldn’t understand why my husband and I had problems at first. I expected him to say, “I love you.” He would kiss me on the back of the neck and hug me. That was his way of saying, “I love you.” I would pine away thinking he didn’t love me because he chose to spend so much time at work. He would see my frustration and work harder to bring home a bigger paycheck because he thought I needed more of the comforts of life to make me happy. If he came home depressed, I thought I needed to give him advice and encourage him to talk about it. He would get angry because he didn’t think I trusted his ability to solve his own problems. It was a merry-go-round of frustrations because we both had our fantasies of the way things should be.
The proverbial “love is blind and marriage is the eye opener” is true. Before you get married, you can see no faults. After you are married for a few years, you know every fault by heart and have probably discussed each one in detail. The socks on the floor, the twisted toothpaste tube, the roll of toilet paper on the wrong way and the toilet seat problems are all in plain sight, but you can’t tear down the fences and let the critters destroy your garden.
It took me 10 years to realized that before marriage, love is blind; after marriage, you choose to put on blinders if you are going to be successful.
We had an old workhorse when we were growing up. My grandfather would harness him with a bridle with blinders on each side. I wondered why. Now I know. The blinders kept the workhorse from seeing all the rigging and chains that pulled the plow. In effect, the blinders kept him from seeing the problems and kept his eyes focused on the road ahead. With his blinders, the workhorse could only see the barn, the blue sky and the pasture. He was content to wander up and down the rows dreaming of times to come. He never worried about the problems he was dragging behind him.
In marriage, we can choose to focus on the problems, sidestep and kick at every new event, or we can choose to ignore the faults and focus on the barn, the blue sky and the pasture. Remember, if we want a Garden-of-Eden marriage, we must keep the gate locked as God intended it to be.
