Coexist (Photo credit: pbyrne)
My husband and I are very different creatures. I’m the more spiritual, touchy-feely type, where he’s the rational scientist. For years, this schism did not bother me, as I’ve attracted this flavor of person consistently throughout my life. Whether a function of intelligence or my attraction to all that which is dark and cynical, this is the type of person with whom I’ve surrounded myself for quite a long time, for better or worse. Besides, it’s good temperance to my fervor.
As the tale goes, this was all well and good for me – for us – until I got pregnant with my first son. We began to diverge a bit more. I wanted to talk philosophy, he wanted to talk medical science. I was comfortable speculating. He was comfortable looking at test results and calculating probabilities. Our house had become a hotbed the debate between science and religion.
When we got pregnant with twins, we both laughed, as his science met my spirituality. We were both driven up a proverbial creek.
For the past year and a half, however, our life as a family has ceased making sense to me. It all started when we began looking for a house. There was bad piled on top of worse, sprinkled with terrible and uncomfortable, then smeared with unpleasant. The purchase of our house, which, ostensibly, is a momentous life occasion, barely lived up to the hype. And then living here, well, living here has only begun to be enjoyable.
Take that situation plus a rather significant existential crisis with which I’ve been vying for the past several months, and nothing seems to make sense anymore. To me, at least.
My husband’s enduring philosophy that things may happen for no reason at all, I’ve felt, has hidden behind the curtains and taunted me. His frustration in my trying to find meaning and growth from significant events has worn me down.
I’m in the thick of events occurring that I never expected, and a persistent inability to find reasons for any of it. And I’ve been fearing that my husband might be right.
To me, however, this signifies spiritual death. And I simply cannot exist spiritually dead. When the first people die from a new medication or street drug or some malfunction of an automobile, I have to believe it’s to bring awareness of the problem in order to save lives. Sacrifices, if you will. My husband would tell you it’s because A interacted with B, which causes kidney failure, then death. Which is fine. And that may be true. But it doesn’t help me process senseless death. Or senseless violence. Or any other disturbance of peace in this world.
So, we’ve been at an impasse for a few weeks. I’ve hoped (okay, maybe prayed) for things to come around. And things came to a head for me last night.
“Why are you crying?” he asked. I heaved out my concerns between heavy tears.
“Because you have no faith. You need to have faith. You need to have something,” I sobbed.
“I do have faith,” he said. “I have faith in you.“
Whatever that means, wherever that goes, I made a choice at that moment. And my choice was to continue to believe that there’s a fabric that ties us all together, that miracles do happen, and, though right now I can’t see the forest for the trees (and haven’t been able for almost two years), that everything does, indeed, happen for a reason.
Even this.
I simply cannot exist otherwise.
