On Marriage and Mountain Goats

A Love Story

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. As always, I am including an audio recording of this post. I am recording outside in my happy place, so you might hear the sounds of my fountain, or kids playing on the other side of the fence, or squirrels trying to steal my sunflowers. Today, Dan and I are celebrating our 18^th wedding anniversary, so today’s pocket is about love, marriage and of course mountain goats. Dan and I both really love mountain goats, the animals and the band. One of Dan’s gifts to me was tickets to a Mountain Goats concert tomorrow night. My gift to him is this post. You can decide after reading if I need to go shopping. I always pose some questions in the comments. I encourage you to read, heart and respond to the comments of others. It makes people feel seen and builds community. Forgive me if I’m a little late to the conversation today. Dan and I plan to spend the day hiking together.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Every story is a journey, and every journey needs a good mix tape. No one makes a mix tape like my husband. Playlists are his superpower and his love language.

We are heading for the hills on Sunday. I imagine that couples have different ways of returning to each other, but one of ours is hiking. I’m not talking little jaunts around the neighborhood, I’m talking hikes where you feel nauseous at the change in elevation, hikes where the quality of the hike is in direct proportion to how many potholes the road taking you there contains, hikes where you have to avoid stairs for the next week because your calves are cursing you.

Today, we are headed to Scotchman’s Peak, hoping that in addition to all the above, it offers us a chance to forget some of the stuff that’s been stressing us lately and to remember why we married each other. We are also hoping that in addition to climbing almost 4,000 feet, we will catch some views of Lake Pend Oreille, and if we are lucky, we will see some mountain goats.

On the drive there, we laugh and dance and listen to the 80’s playlist Dan has put together for us. Songs we haven’t heard for years, songs we forgot we knew, songs that make us laugh.  Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train,” Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass,” Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” and the real kicker Devo’s “Time Out for Fun,” which feels fitting. All relationships deserve time out for fun.

In an interview I listened to last week, Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley spoke about their relationship. They read love poems they wrote to each other (Andrea’s made me cry, and Megan’s made me laugh) and shared how much fun they have had these past few years in the face of Andrea’s diagnosis. Megan spoke about the two of them driving around the streets of Colorado belting the lyrics to Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” When you play like that together, it allows for a “beautiful earnestness.” Cole Arthur Riley, author of the memoir This Here Flesh says that we have a cultural narrative which refers to some things as “childish” or “juvenile.” We seek the serious and in doing so deny ourselves opportunities for joy.  I think one of the reasons our marriage works is that Dan and I remind each other to stop and play.

We arrive at the hike, and we see a sign that tells us we are entering a mountain goat habitat. We couldn’t be more excited. We are not guaranteed goats, but we are hopeful that they will find us. We are also hopeful that we will be able to work through some of the hard things we have been circling around lately, hopeful that out here, we will gain a little more perspective.

It is easy to lose perspective in marriage. Finding perspective is something you have to work at. Hiking together helps us do that. The mountains have a way of shifting things.

Andrea and Megan share how they used to fight all the time. In fact, they almost took pride in how much they fought, but Andrea’s diagnosis changed that. It gave them perspective. Life- threatening illnesses have a way of doing that.

Even in the mountains, though, we can lose perspective. Even in the face of a terminal diagnosis, we can lose perspective. I think of perspective as stepping back to see more clearly. I see it as a reminder to focus on what really matters rather than what doesn’t. Perspective, though, is also simply the way we see things. It is our point of view, and sometimes our point of view is different from our partner’s.

For example, on the way up the mountain, I share with Dan something I read in Alex Elle’s “Gratitude Journal” earlier that week. It was something about how you can’t always see growth. Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening, but there is so much going on underground. Dan doesn’t skip a beat. He looks at me and says, sometimes things are actually decaying underground, and you can’t see that either.

He is truly the yin for my yang.

A few days ago, while Dan and I are driving to Hart Field to watch Anna’s soccer game, we get a call that shifts our perspective. I imagine she is calling to ask me if I can grab something from the house she has forgotten, but she is crying, and she tells me she got hurt in the warm-up. It is hard to make out what she is saying because she is so upset. “I hurt my foot. I heard a snap,” she says. “The athletic trainer thinks it’s broken.”

“It is okay,” I say. “It will be okay. We are on our way.” I am driving, so I hand the phone to Dan.

He gets frustrated because he can’t hear what she is saying through the tears and the bad connection, and so he tells her that we will be there in less than five minutes and gets off the phone.

I explain to him that the details of what she is saying don’t matter. He just needs to tell her it will be okay.

I am looking at the forest, and he is looking at the trees.

We pick Anna up from the field and bring her in for an X-ray. Her foot is indeed fractured. The prognosis is good, but the present is not. She will miss the rest of the soccer season. She will need to wear a boot to school, and she will have to use crutches. Anna takes her wardrobe seriously. She plans her fit not only for school, but for everything including apple picking and hiking, so these new additions are concerning. She is also in incredible pain, probably more pain than she has ever experienced.

The next day, when we tell Dan’s mom, who is a retired nurse what is going on, Dan tells her “It is a lateral malleolus, a shallow fracture, but it is jagged. She also badly sprained her ankle.”

I was in the same exam room, but I didn’t catch any of that. He was looking at the trees, while I was taking in the forest. Sometimes the details matter.

Dan’s attention to detail drives me a little crazy sometimes, but it is what makes him such a good lawyer and allows him to protect the vulnerable. It is also what makes him the best cook I know. (You probably think I am exaggerating here out of love, but I am not.) In the waiting room, Dan offers to cook dinner for Anna that night, and she chooses baked ziti.

I wonder if it is too much, if something simpler would be better, if perhaps even eating together tonight is a reach.

At dinner, Anna is in so much pain, she shouts as she sits down at the table, but the familiar food calms all of us. Eating together as a family that night and sharing one of our favorite meals, returns some normalcy to the situation. It puts things back into perspective.

As we circle up the mountain, we circle around some of the harder things. We have to navigate not only our different points of view but our different paces. Hiking is a hobby we both enjoy, but we still have to find balance with one another. Dan likes to move fast. He is a runner, and he still runs miles pretty much every day. I prefer yoga, moving slowly and taking things in. Because of Dan, we see incredible views and we reach heights we probably wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Because of me, we take them in. That is the higher ground perspective, but we have moments in our marriage that devolve into a less gracious understanding of our differences.

As we climb, we talk about the challenges we have faced recently and the challenges we have faced over the years. “We always seem to work together and figure it out,” Dan says.  I agree with him, but I also share that recently, I have realized how I internalize conflict, how when things are not right in our family, I don’t feel well, how this shows up physically. I can’t sleep. My appetite changes, and I just feel kind of awful. I don’t feel better until there is a resolution.

“I didn’t know this,” he says.

Even with someone we have loved for so long, there are new things to learn about them.

Andrea Gibson in the interview I mentioned earlier shares how after their diagnosis, they started seeing Meg as if she were a whole new person. She mentions Mary Oliver’s poem “The Whistler,” and says how “It’s such a beautiful poem” because “it reminds us how “there is so much to uncover in a person, even decades later.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Dan asks. I tell him I don’t have a solution, but it feels good to just talk about it. I notice my physical discomfort dissipating throughout the day.

At the top of the peak, Dan is the first to notice the mountain goat. We are aching and breathless, or at least I am, but we are rewarded for our climb. We watch our new friend from a distance trying to be respectful of his space. We sit down to eat the picnic I packed, and when we eat our apples, he comes closer. “I’m sorry we can’t feed you,” I say.

On the way back down, we continue to talk through all the things, but the memory of that friendly goat is with us the whole way, as is the time out we took for fun. We are no longer in the mountains as we move through the week, but there is more space and grace in how we talk with one another. We try and see the forest and the trees.

We sing more. Dan’s playlists help.

Last night while making dinner, Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” came on. “If this world runs out of lovers, we’ll still have each other.”

“Mannequin” Dan looks at me and smiles.

“Yes!” I say, smiling back.  “We should totally watch it for family movie night.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It might be disturbing now,” and I can’t help but laugh in agreement.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you today? Tell us what songs are on your playlist. Tell us about the people and things you love.