The Body of a Mid-life Marriage
A week before the pandemic I turned in an article to Christianity Today on the yearly viral “Mom Bod” posts that circulate. My thesis: Our bodies are not beautiful because they have born children, they are beautiful because God called them good. It was slated to publish mid-April. You know, after we’d been wearing sweat pants and t-shirts for a month with no end in sight. No one was thinking about bikini bodies this summer, let alone sharing viral photos of their mom-bods. It was a Christmas miracle. But the thesis of my (still unpublished) piece hasn’t let me go. As well as its antithesis: Our bodies are not broken down because they have born children, but because we are not God and therefore not immortal.
This will be a shortish post because I’ve committed to the writerly gym these next few weeks and the point is simply to write, not be glorious or anything. (I mean, who are we kidding? That’s what I usually do except I haven’t been doing it a lot this year.)
I married 15 years behind most of my peers and, though it's a wonderful marriage, as time goes on, it looks more like that of the empty nesters than one of newlyweds. We make our tea, turn on an episode of West Wing or (recently) Ted Lasso, go to sleep early, and sleep mostly uninterrupted. Neither of us feel sexy or attractive very often. We take our windowsill line-up of vitamins in the morning, lots of Ds and Bs and Omega3s. We do not have youthful arguments, ours are infrequent and usually because one of us was mumbling or forgetful.
I wonder if the geriatricness of our marriage is because my husband was married for a decade before and so one half of us has already done the newlywed thing and found it wanting, but I don't have any other experience to compare with it. Here's what I know, though, I am just as tired as my mama-peers, just as aged, just as worn thin, just as surprised by the time having gone by so quickly. My still unmarried friends experience this too. This reminds me these are human experiences and not parental ones exclusively.
I bristle unwillingly and flinch subconsciously when a mama-friend blames her weariness or body changes or hormones or hair loss on her babies. I do not have the babies we lost in arms, but my body experiences many of the same things. A smaller or weaker bladder, lines forming around my eyes, hair tuffs in my brush more frequently, missed periods, and more. But I do not have babies to blame the breakdown of my body on. I just have . . . me. Aging me.
Similarly, I do not have the school of babies born, raised, grown, and shown the door to blame on the mid-lifeness of our marriage. I think, more and more, our marriage feels like a middle age one because it is a middle age one, two units—one a month from turning 40 and the other nearly midway through his 40s. Most of us don’t live to 100 (although my Grandmother is, glory be), so this is the decade we have to middle through. While our friends kiss kids off to college and welcome them home on holidays and marry them off to sweethearts and begin the sweet journey of grandchildren, we will feel like perpetual empty-nesters, in these strange middle-age bodies with none of the fruit of the womb or loins to share with it. If that sounds sad, well, it’s because it is.
I talked with a friend this past week, married 15 years longer than Nate and me (when our peers were all making like rabbits . . . ), and he shared some struggles they’re facing, somewhat similar to some of our own struggles. I won’t give the details but they are the mire of a mid-life marriage, common, I think, to most of us at this age. I didn’t have answers for him and I don’t think he was looking for them. Just to be heard and to hear, “Me too,” for a moment is helpful. Even though the circumstances of our marriage couldn’t be more different. We humans, both of us, the same.
And so, I don’t know, maybe this is my “Me too,” to you, too. You too? Me too.
