Marriage is about Loving Burnt Cookies

“come to the dark side, we have (burnt) cookies” 

Let me go ahead and say this. I’m not a red eyed, fanged feminatzi or anything...   

I like kids at the grocery store, I make stupid noises and faces at chubby babies, and I wear a vintage apron with flowers and lace on it when I’m baking cookies and biscuits (sometimes homemade). I’m not against painted fingernails, curling eye lashes, perfume, or giggling, but none-the-less, I’ve been persuaded to the “dark side.” 

They don’t have the prettiest cookies, but the upsides of the dark side are pretty good. I’m talking about being a skeptic. 

That’s right.  Skeptic. And what kind of skeptic belongs on the dark side when living in the good ole south? The skeptic of marriage. 

I know that it is- apparently- against my gender, and southern culture, to not daydream about weddings, and white dresses, and blue birds helping me to make up the bed or wash dishes, but I don’t. Though I admittedly have daydreamed about birds helping me clean…that’d be awesome.  

Quite frankly, marriage scares the hell out of me. And it should scare the hell out of you too. But I think that’s why divorce rates are so high. There are more people way too comfortable with the idea of getting married than people uncomfortable, and as terrible as it may sound to admit that marriage is scary, thinking it is a magical land of happy white dresses and breakfastes in bed is a lot scarier to me.  

Because one is real, the other is not. One is attainable, the other is not. 

I’ve thought this for awhile now, but Donald Miller’s admittance to the same thing in “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” made me feel like I had someone baking cookies with me in the dark. 

“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”  

That’s some of my favorite combinations of words from the book Atonement.  

You see, misunderstanding that your other is as “real” or as “human” as you should be an incomprehensible mistake. A person who has bad breath in the morning, is selfish or forgetful, and burns their toast regularly should remind you that if they actually had a red cape somewhere in their closet, it’d have holes, tears, black spots, and would look really unremarkable if they put it on.

Marriage is about loving the flawed, dork with geeky glasses, embarrassing stories, and ugly scars, not the buff, shiny dude who tells good jokes and bounces pain and hard things off his glorious chest without discomfort.

Knowing that other people are as human as me can be scary. And realizing that two people willingly attach themselves to one another permanently is just as terrifying.

One person is messy, two people is like handing a toddler paint and then leaving them alone in a room with white carpet. Do you get what I’m saying? Marriage could be a complete and total disaster, because whether it has occurred to you or not, we’re kind of individual disasters.

Because marriage is about doing the seemingly impossible; loving someone else despite their humanness, unconditionally. Marriage is about grace, and mercy, and that kind of “my mind can’t fully grasp it” love that God has for his church. I mean, I’m supposed to love someone the way God loves the church, except I’m not God, I’m 5 feet and 1 inch of Martha Lee Anne, and the “church” is another person. 

But, that’s why I love a wedding (yes, you can be a skeptic and still love weddings). Because knowing that two people can love each other’s flaws, and dorky glasses, and embarrassing stories makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Seeing old couples wearing glasses, or arguing over something as ridiculous as socks, or step on each other’s toes when dancing makes me even warmer and fuzzier.

Watching a person love another person, a selfish, messy, quirky, wimpy, person makes marriage look good, really good. But all that other stuff- the white dresses, and cake, and pictures of seemingly perfect couples on fireplace mantles- worries me.

 Because, let’s face it, I’ll get dirt on my dress, eat all the cake, and I’m not such a photogenic person. But I’m selfish, messy, quirky, and wimpy, and if that is all that is expected of me in marriage, if they know they are just marrying another person, then I’m okay with that, in fact, I’m more than okay with that. 

I’m burning cookies in a flowered apron on the dark side, because eventually, there’s going to be some flawed, anti-hero who’s going to want to burn cookies with me. And if we burn them, we’ll eat them anyway, and laugh about it later, because that’s what marriage is about… 

I guess I could have just said, “marriage is about loving burnt cookies.”

I like Birds

 

 

I like birds, and Walt, and Whit, and Whitman. I like kindred spirits- especially when found between the lines of Ann of Green Gables, they're my favorites if I haven't mentioned. I like books, and crushing looks, like the ones in “silly” fables. I like the strings at the end of my sleeves and tugging on them with my fingers. I like standing still on sidewalks before the light turns green, I sway and sing, to the pedometer of cars driving, and passing, and honking, and creeping.

I like wind that pushes my hair into my face, even on good hair days, because it takes me back to better days, and better ways, before I found out about the other. I like seeing kids do weird things at the store, while their mothers look bored, and when we smile at one another, I know we know something their mothers forgot because they were taught to forget along the way. So I say hey to the kid who says he’s a vegetable. And I laugh when his head becomes a bed of cucumbers and lettuce as he leans under the spraying water in the produce section. And when he’s pushed away by the bored pilot of his cart, his lettuce head bobbing down the aisles, I remember to remember to laugh at my kid when he does the same thing.

I like twelve o’clock when the sun meets me at my window, and the thirty minutes or so it takes it to pass. I like imagining strawberries growing in snow, because it’s unusually beautiful the white against red, and maybe it’s just all up in my head, but it seems it should happen as so.  I like kicking acorns down the road, and crunching the others below my shoes. I like pretending I’m somewhere far away just before I reach my drive. And in those few seconds when I imagine “he” is at my door, my heart has never felt more alive.

Sometimes I like getting lost in my car on a street I'm supposed to know. When the signs and houses have changed, but I feel the same, in a good way. Other times I like when I'm so different, it seems appropriate to meet the street I walked on with bare feet as a kid.

I like the winter more than the spring, when the trees become dead looking and white things. I like the sleepy quiet, my disapearing white breaths. I like cold fingers and toes, because I know when I get home, there's a fire and cover and family there. And I like the cold stars that are really far and white and bright and quiet. I like plaid flannel shirts and coats and socks, especially the ones that reach my knees, and save them from the freeze of January, when snow flakes could fall.

I like the nights when I cuddle like a cat in the downy chair in my room, or my living tomb, where I’ve kept my life so near. My piano and guitar, my books and writing desk, my tin lid with holes from when I went shooting guns with ken, the Alabama hat that was my great uncle Jim's, my Bigdaddy’s carved birds, the locket and pictures and postcards and paintings, all of it I hold so dear.

I like the time after I close my eyes, not the minutes before. I like feeling the warm in my bed, the pillow under my head, and knowing everything else is shut out behind my door. I like thinking and dreaming before I am sleeping, and I’ll do it for as long as I can. And then I’m waking again, the light warm on the bed, and I try to lie still and hold on to it all while listening to the clicking of my fan. I try not to move, so I don’t ruin the visions I had of you, because somewhere between the night and the day, when I was quietly slipping away, you’re all my thoughts knew.