Alone

A few years ago, I accused him of abandoning me. I have trust issues and as such, devote myself to a select few. I, in turn, hope for the undivided attention of my devoted ones. He told me he would get busy. He said to expect less time together. He told me that he doesn't do to well at performing multiple tasks at the same time and asked for my permission to devote a season to this intense activity. He hoped that the fruits of this would greatly out weigh the sacrifice we were going to make. I agreed. I said I would support him. I tried and failed miserably. I remember hearing this song on the radio once and thinking it reflected how I felt about him leaving, instead of leading.

Before we got married, one of my aunts asked if I was ready to risk our marriage so soon after the wedding. She actually advised that it would be best to wait till I had a more stable schedule in order to start this journey. Her point, and a very valid one if I might add, was that marriage has enough challenges of its own without adding geography to the mix. It's tough enough to get through the first few years  of adjusting to each other's rhythms without having to deal with months apart, and weeks of no contact because I am in a remote part of the world. 

There are too many articles about the working woman and the work-family balance. There's countless advice about how to balance the need to breed and the need to succeed. I'm constantly revisiting the mathematics of my maternal clock, re-assessing the various available methods of contraception, while determining how close to the age edge I can get without falling off. I have to stay healthy, because having children becomes more risky with age [I do not mind being healthy. I just don't do well with pressure of any sort]. I have to calculate how many months or years I need to dedicate to nurturing our children before and after their birth. My boss and I had this conversation as soon as I told him I was going to get married and right after the honeymoon. He was sure I would quit right away. I guess he would have expected the same from his wife. 

After almost 3 years of my nomad travels, we are still finding our rhythm. It never stops hurting. You see, men were designed to leave. That's why there are songs to convince them to come back home. Men are more successful at shutting out the pain and ploughing through their days, with the hope that they will return to their loved ones soon enough. Women, on the other hand, are expected to stay and keep house. We are designed to feel everything deeply, which is why we should feel these things in a safe place, where if we do fail and fall, we will be shielded from the glares and expectations of others. Here, I must be ready to face whatever comes my way with an amount of courage that I did not know I was capable of experiencing. I saw my mother do it. She sacrificed years in a foreign land so that she could save up enough to put me through school. I will never ever be able to thank her enough for that. However, her pain did not prepare me for my own. [I did visit her for a while during those years and knew her pain too well. For now I shall forget that I was a rebellious brat at the time.] 

Don't want to leave him hungry for love

Chasing things that I could give up 

 I'll show him I'm willing to fight

That he's still the love of my life

So we can call this our home

Lead me, 'cause I can't do this alone 

Father, lead me, 'cause I can't do this alone

[I just remembered how  amazed I was when I discovered that I could do a simple search for song lyrics on the internet. Until then, I had to listen and hope to catch the right words off the TV or radio or pray that the song in the Sunday paper was one that I actually wanted to collect.]