Asters & Dandelions

She has the power everyday to build him up or tear him down. Every wife is a King Maker.

mathewljacobson.com

Time to tell my favorite fairy tale: my own! My husband and I met 2 weeks before my fifteenth birthday. We went to the same school but never spoke until he got a job at the McDonald’s I worked at. From the moment we met, we were best friends. We tore up anything in sight doing all the things that are implied when ‘those crazy kids’ is ever said aloud. Eventually, our management stopped letting us work the same stations together because of all the chaos that would ensue. Later that year, I moved in with my boyfriend. Obviously, that didn’t workout because, well, fifteen. I went to my mother in panic and told her Ben had kicked me out where she responded ‘I don’t know what to tell you’. During this time, Germain (my sweet husband) was going through the process of enlisting in the army. I was so sad and cried and begged him most days not to go. My adolescent self couldn’t see the big picture he was building for himself at the time. He sat with me as I cried and contemplated ending my life after about 2 weeks of nowhere to call home and said ‘I’m doing this (army) and one day I’m going to have my own house and you’ll always have a home.’

Life went on, Germain left for the army, I eventually moved in with my aunt and uncle for a year that would change the entire trajectory of my life (but that’s a different story). We stayed close through these years. I remember during his first deployment, I didn’t have a camera on my computer and video chat on a phone was not a thing yet. I received a webcam for Christmas that year and sobbed and sobbed. After that brilliant Christmas gift we video chatted every single day during his deployment. He didn’t know it then but I was in the trenches of a pretty abusive relationship. Most days I was struggling to leave my bed but Germain would video call; repeatedly if I didn’t answer. So here he was, giving me hope in my darkness again.

He returned from his deployment and Uncle Sam decided to move him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. We are from Virginia and I was living on my own by this point in life so he decided to stop by on his way to Fort Bragg. Finally! We had, at this point, went three years without seeing each other face to face. So like any 19 year old would do, I rented a room at a trashy motel and we partied. Man did we party. I was so happy to see him. It was exactly like picking up where we left off. We were those two kids intentionally fucking up anything we could at McDonald’s all over again. And then it happened, somewhere between the third or fourth party guest leaving and the ninth or tenth beer, we kissed. Romantic, I know. No matter how trashy this motel was or how trashy our sobriety had been, I’ll never forget that moment. Before then, we had never even held hands. He was simply my best friend. But in that moment, he wasn’t that goofy kid in high school anymore. Somewhere between leaving for the army, his deployment, his move back to the east coast, he had become a man. I saw him in a new light. He left the next day and I cried and sobbed; I felt like that homeless kid all over again, not wanting him to leave. I didn’t realize it in that moment yet, but Germain has always been the only home where I’ve truly felt safe.

The weekend ended, he moved on to Bragg but he was back the next weekend, and every weekend after that. And the end of each weekend never got any easier. Every Sunday I’d stand on my front porch and cry and he’d hold me and tell me he’d be back. One weekend, I just knew something was different, something big was coming. I knew he was going to propose. I even rifled through his bag but found nothing. The next night I saw it for myself. There he was, on both knees, in my bedroom, asking me to marry him. I said yes, we went out and celebrated and we were married the next weekend. There was no wedding, no reception, no dress. We got married at the magistrate’s office. We were the couple in front of us’ witnesses and they were ours. It wasn’t romantic in itself but the thoughts of a future with him was beautiful enough. We left the courthouse and went to sign the lease on our apartment. And there we were, in a tiny one bedroom apartment on Morganton Rd, beginning the rest of our lives.

At this point I had known my husband for six years. I knew him better than I knew myself most days. This. Meant. Nothing. Until you share a bathroom with someone, you do not know them! Our first year was full of fall outs, broken dishes, broken hearts some nights, and plenty of makeup s….songs, and talks, and oh yeah, crazy sex too. I said it. We spent our first year filthy. Rolling around in the mud of unsaid expectations of what we thought marriage was supposed to be, getting our hands dirty with boundaries and learning how to respect and nurture pieces of ourselves that made us who we are as individuals, and aching backs from bending over backwards trying to build trust in places we never knew we had trust issues. This entire first year was the year of construction. While we were fighting and crying and breaking things, we didn’t know it then, but we had been working hard and building the foundation of our marriage.

Two months before our celebration of surviving each other for a solid year, we received our next great challenge: our son. July 18, 2013, Riley made his grand debut and we set out on our next great adventure that we never could have been prepared for. Germain and I definitely didn’t grow up in the suburbs but there’s arguably no hood scarier than parenthood. I delivered Riley at Womack Army Medical Center and from the moment Germain made it to the room, barely in time to witness the grand reveal, he has been by my side. I will never forget the moment I was sobbing, my breasts so engorged with milk and my sweet clueless husband giving me hot diapers to put on them, hand expressing milk, giving me words of encouragement that I can do this, calling my lactation consultant and demanding the soonest possible appointment. He has always been my biggest fan, in every challenge I face.

With motherhood, came all kinds of fears and accomplishments. I grew to know my son better than anyone I’ve ever met. I knew what each cry meant, when he was hungry, mimicking his coos like a mad man. As a stay at home mom, he had instantly become my very best friend, something that still stands true to this day. With Germain by my side supporting our home financially and my choice to stay home and raise our son, came a confidence I’d never experienced. This confidence became overbearing on my marriage though. My know how in parenthood drove me to madness. I unintentionally was micromanaging every detail of Riley’s life and in the process of what felt like an act of love, my marriage was suffering. I had gotten so whisked away in parenting our son that I almost forgot I was not alone in this. Every diaper change, bath time, and bedtime routine there I was ‘do it this way’ ‘that’s not right’. I was succeeding by all the parenting books guidelines but I was failing my husband and robbing him of the paternal experience he was entitled to. Never in my life could I have imagined that being a mama bear would create an environment that emasculated and took pieces and joys of parenting away from my greatest partner in life. I had to take a step back and realize different isn’t wrong. Every mom can attest that a dad is definitely just going to overcome parenting obstacles much differently than a mom will. Different isn’t wrong. I had never once lost faith in who Germain was as a husband or a father but my actions had shown otherwise. I spent the following couple years forcing myself to bite my tongue, watch them grow together, and revel in the small victories and alone time I could steal while they survived in their own ways.

A couple years of domestic bliss had passed. I had slowly ventured back into the real world and was working two jobs when our time at Bragg was coming to an end. As we prepared for our next great adventure on the other side of the world, Korea, we started to make plans for what our next chapter would look like. We realized I wouldn’t be working for the next couple of years and Riley was growing and becoming more independent everyday. After his second birthday, we decided all the stars were aligned and this was the perfect time for baby number 2! We made our move and ended up somewhere past the Ville and down the street in a Korean neighborhood. Somewhere between exploring the area and waiting for our belongings to arrive, we saw those two pink lines. I was pregnant! So begins our next phase of life.

Then it happened: one night as my boys were fast asleep, I was binging some sort of trash tv and I felt something, blood, running down my legs. I woke Germain up, we got ourselves and Riley ready as fast as possible and rushed off to Good Morning Hospital. On the 45 minute drive we were quiet and soft but discussed rationally what we both knew was true. We had decided maybe we should wait until we were back in the states to try again for a baby. We got to the hospital, hand gestured and google translated our way to labor and delivery, and finally there I was, alone in the stirrups with two women who spoke less than twenty words of English. They poked around my belly for what seemed like forever and spoke Korean over top of me. They finally turned to me to fill me in but the language barrier was thick and nothing was being conveyed. They awkwardly spoke Korean to each other and at one point actually laughed. In that moment, I broke. Right there in that hospital bed on top of the overly starched bed sheets, I began yelling something about what’s going on and bedside manner, I’m positive of which they had no idea what I was saying. In a bit of a panicked effort to calm me down they said ‘heartbeat good’ which was followed by more awkward Korean conversation and then ‘two heartbeats’. ‘TWINS?!’ I said and as if I had just replaced a broken light bulb, they both lit up. ‘Yes! Twins!’. I told my husband and they printed out ultrasounds of our two tiny dots in my womb and sent us on our way. The ride back was quiet. Relief, shock, tiredness filled us to the brim. We just kept saying it out loud over and over. We’d take turns ‘twins’ ….’twins’ ….’twins’. It was as if we had to convince ourselves it was real.

At my next appointment I came equipped with an English speaking liaison and found out that, as with many twin pregnancies, this will not be the normal 9 months of pickles and ice cream. We were instead hit over the head with words like hyperemesis gravidarum and cervical insufficiency. Long gone were my day dreams of a home birth with a Korean midwife. My new reality was appointments every two weeks, researching and deciding on the hospital I will give birth in based on their neonatal intensive care unit, and obsessively reading the mortality rate based on weeks gestation. I walked into that appointment, excited and nervous but walked out a stay at home mom to a rambunctious two year old, on complete bed and pelvic rest. I was a prisoner to my own body. Here I sat on the other side of the world from any form of support team, alone, fighting for my babies’ lives. I spent the next 7 months in a slow downward spiral. I cried most days, hurt most days, slept too much most days, and let Riley’s tablet parent him most days. This wasn’t what I wanted when I said yes to baby number two. And I lied there, in my filthy apartment, with my perfect little toddler, sad and more alone than I had ever been.

Day in and day out I just waited for my sweet husband to come home from work so he could be everything to me. During those times, I cried a lot and he worked so hard; at work and home. His hours at work were late and he always had a list far longer than was possible to accomplish waiting for him when he got home. He was soldier, husband, maid, chef, my only friend, and so much more. I know it was exhausting and I saw his struggles too. I wanted to help but I was barely treading water myself. As unfair as it was, I needed him to be everything. Not just the cleaning and things that had to be done around the house, I was in a foreign country completely alone. I needed him to be my bestie, my gal pal, my punching bag when I was mad at the world. I needed so much more from him than one man could ever be and I sought out my own happiness through him and as much as he tried, the lengths of time he put in, as hard as he worked, it was never enough to pull me out of the dark. I had so much guilt for those times. Failing as a wife, unable to provide for my home or even have sex with my husband. Failing as a mother to Riley, unable to attend play dates or even leave the bed and parent him. Failing as a mother to our girls as they lay growing within me, not knowing when my body would reject them from their home. So much guilt and so much sadness and there wasn’t any room within me to even shower some days much less nurture my marriage. But Germain stood by me. He never once blamed me like I blamed myself day after day. He was there sweating and struggling and crying with me. Marriage isn’t always romantic getaways and fall family photographs with the matching sweaters and boots. Marriage isn’t always soft and fair. This is marriage. Sometimes life surrounds you with dirt and it gets kicked up until there’s so much dust around you, you can’t see through it. Trying to clean away the dirt in times like these is like trying to dry the ocean. All we can do in these moments, is sit side by side, become filthy and dirty together, and wait for it to pass. Germain never walked away from the dust and the dirt. He sat in it with me and held our family together through the storm like one of those underground shelters you wait out the big ones in until they pass.

The twins were born at 34 weeks; perfect and healthy without a single minute spent in the NICU. The storm had finally passed. We brought the girls home and it was like opening the curtains on a pitch black room that was our life. The girls came home and the light was let back into our lives. I was healing from my surgery quickly and we were becoming quite the experts of juggling our new chaos.

Just as fast as my water had broke, the time came when Germain had to go back to work. I never let him see it but I cried that first day; unsure if I could do this without him by my side but Riley and I made quite the team. My sweet little threenager had become my ultimate sidekick. He was always there to help when he could and cuddle me and make me laugh when he couldn’t. I came to realize something I had known all along; I got this. We made friends and began a normal life full of play dates and walks to the grocery store. But we still had those days where it was all too much. Days we didn’t leave the house and the dishes didn’t get done. I still struggled a lot. By the time our year and a half mark had hit of being in Korea I was burned out. I missed working and I missed being my own person. I felt trapped in Korea. But I was so full of guilt for the last year I had spent, literally, in bed, I faked it. I got dressed and was the ‘perfect mom’ and played the part with all of my other stay at home mom friends. It was exhausting and by the time I had juggled twin infants, a threenager, and judging eyes of outsiders, I was barely a shell of who I am most days by the time Germain made it home. I was so busy giving the best parts of myself to the rest of the world, proving how ‘fine’ I was, there were no good parts left for my husband. I was so busy feeding the world that the only parts my husband received were the remnants of a meal that get scraped away from a plate; the trash left over. While the parents in the play dates got to see superwoman me, juggling opening juice boxes and on the go nap times, my husband was left with an exhausted, resentful, shell of a woman. He loved me through my coldness and accepted my shortcomings with such grace and unwavering commitment. He has loved me when I haven’t even loved me and I will spend the rest of my life trying to thank him adequately enough.

I had somehow crawled my way through our time in Korea. Germain was home most days by now preparing everything for our move back stateside. The movers came and all of our belongings were on a boat making their way to Fort Lewis. We spent our days in our empty home, binge watching Netflix and hanging out with our kids. All of our belongings were gone but so much more was finally feeling like it was coming back to us. I was happy to be headed back to the states. The girls were getting older and easier to juggle. Riley was always just Riley, so easy to please and kind beyond his years. Korea was such a dark time in my life and such a dark time in our marriage. These last few weeks we spent in our empty home were pure marital bliss. We cuddled, we did nothing, we slept, we talked about our future, we house hunted, we were just at peace with all of the hell we had endured over the last couple years. We had come out the other side.

We landed at SEATAC and immediately knew we were home. After spending the last two years in a country with trash lining the sides of the streets and the air quality too poor for trips to the park most days, we stepped off the plane and had a literal breath of fresh air. The air was so clean and Washington is so beautiful. It was the perfect next step in our lives.

We had settled in to a cute house in a suburb about twenty minutes from post. Life seemed to be moving along smoothly just as our marriage hit another speed bump. Our marriage fell prey to social media. Neither of us were talking to other people, no physical interaction had occurred but there’s still time, energy, interest spent away from a marriage. Everyone can see something beautiful on the internet and ‘like’ it. The dangerous part of today’s social media and algorithms is so you ‘like’ it, then you ‘follow’ it, then the internet says ‘I have more’ and shows you more, then there’s another ‘like’, another ‘follow’ and what had been at once a quick scroll and like now takes up hours of your life. An entire catalogue of temptation at your fingertips. Even if one never partakes in any emotional or physical acts, isn’t that time and energy spent on another a betrayal? I never knew this was even a thing but once I knew, I could never unknow. My eyes were opened and my life was changed. As much as I know this is not how it should be, my self worth was changed. When I got married, I was a 150 lb twenty year old but somewhere between three kids and three duty stations, I had become a 260 lb 26 year old who looked nothing like the women in the ads and on the internet. I had no glorious career, no bulging muscles or curves, no luxurious lifestyle. How could I ever live up to social media’s impossible standards of beauty and success?

Sometimes you can hurt someone you love without a malicious heart. This is where I was in my marriage. I knew this wasn’t a reflection of how my husband viewed me. I knew this wasn’t some grand sign of his unhappiness or discontent in our marriage, sex life, or his image of me, my body, my drive. None the less, this is how I was left to feel. This particular bump in the road had left me feeling beyond inadequate in every aspect of my life. I felt unworthy of love, unfulfilled in my career, undesired physically. So from there, I decided if I hate everything about myself, it was up to me to change it. I started my weight loss journey because I hated my body. In the first few weeks I was eating 2 boiled eggs a day and a salad; that’s it. I knew it was unhealthy, I felt my body yell out and growl in hunger but my hunger for change, and if I’m being honest for some self deprecation, was louder. After the first 2 weeks of this routine and an instant 14 lb loss those first 2 weeks, I took the next step and began working out. After the first month, I also decided it was time for me to go back to work. You can’t put so much effort and hard work into something and not begin to fall in love with it and through out this process, I realized I was no longer doing this because I hated my body and began working harder and pushing further because I was falling in love with my body for the first time in my life. My marriage had taken the back burner in the beginning days of my journey. During the early days of this awakening when the repairs were starting, I could not bring myself to be undressed or even change clothes in front of my husband. Went so many nights without touching one another. I knew all along how pure my husband’s soul is and his love for me was unwavering but my heart had been hurt and who I was as a person had been questioned internally. As I began to heal my own self image, my marriage followed suit. I needed to take this time and heal on my own. My husband being the man he is, sat by, hurting on his own as I lay wounded beside him, in the same bed but further than I had ever been from him in our marriage. He took so much blame for this even though this was never his intentions. He carried that burden and I didn’t have it in me to tell him ‘it’s okay’ when frankly it wasn’t. I healed and am still continually fighting the contradicting love I have for my body. I am, on one hand, so proud of my body and it’s journey. My body has been through hell and back carrying the lives of three of my most favorite human beings, shedding 100 lbs of fat, and still carrying me on to my ever growing goals and adventures and on the other hand resenting it because I work so hard day in and day out, pushing my body further and further seeking perfection and strength yet it still carries the extra skin my fat once lived within, the scars, puckers, stretch marks, and cellulite from it’s past. I’ll never look how I feel even at my strongest. Sometimes you have to heal together in a marriage and sometimes you have to heal alone. Having the grace and the fortitude to not only heal, but to let the person you love heal on their own terms is both a burden and a blessing. Germain has loved me since I was a child, loved me at my biggest, loved me when I was broken, both physically and emotionally, and loves me as I continue to better myself and heal myself; even when it is at his expense. That is selfless and strength and beauty. That is love in it’s most purest form.

One day I sat in our bathroom chatting with him as he showered and I lit a joint, hiding from our kids during nap time. We were discussing everything and nothing all at once. Just the what did you do todays and the what we want to do tomorrows when he said ‘Remember when you wanted to join the army? Would you still want to do that? That would be cool.’ My first reaction was to take the defense. In my head — ‘wow, I’m still just not good enough for you (words that had never once came from his mouth but instead manifested from within my own insecurities)’. I reacted by saying ‘FUCK NO’ almost as a knee jerk reaction but the words resonated. They churned around my brain for the remainder of the day like a pot on the back burner on low, slowly simmering and bubbling creating worthy soul food. I, in the end, decided yes. It’s not too late for me. My journey is still far from over. And I began my journey into enlistment. I loved my job at a local restaurant. It was fun and the money was good but I craved more. I left most nights with decent money but there was very little fulfillment in serving our drink specials and happy hour appetizers night after night.

There were many nights I’d get off of work and head to a local bar. I’d go with coworkers or hug the bar rail alone nursing a beer or two while swatting off the local bar flies invading my moments of peace with their poor pitches for my attention. I was alive but I wasn’t really living. I was growing physically and raising my family. Working nights gave me the freedom to be with the twins every single day while Germain was at work and never miss an event at Riley’s school but it also had it’s downfalls. I’d get home late and Germain had been asleep for hours. I’d wake up and he had vacated our bed hours before to begin his day. We got to the point where we were holding our breath waiting for a day I had off. The space had been a lot on our marriage. The late nights I spent at work or the local bars had put so many questions and doubt into my husband’s head. He wondered where my loyalties lied when I’d come home several nights a week in the early hours of the morning; sometimes several beers too deep to retain my sobriety. The time and the space had left my husband feeling unfilled and inadequate in our marriage. It had even led him to question if I was seeking more than a good night of tips and a couple cold beers on those late nights. My husband has always been our bread winner, not just keeping the lights on but being the shining light of our home. He has always been the beekeeper, the captain, the head of our home. He has given our lives, my life in particular, so much more than I felt I ever deserved. I never feel as though I can keep up. I can never pay him back because of the vast amount he invests into me and our home. To know he felt as if he wan’t enough for me, broke me all over again. We sat and we cried together as I told him for the millionth time in the last six years how he made up every good part of me. I realized then that I had to keep improving myself. I had to keep seeking that fulfillment within. I never wanted again for my husband to feel as if he was not enough because of my own short comings.

I began basic training in April of 2019, arrived to Fort Huachuca in June of 2019, and you all know the rest (if not here is a link to an earlier post: https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/astersdandelions.com/44 ). When I left for basic my husband said ‘I’m not worried about you. Basic is going to be easy. I’m going to have the hard job when you’re gone’ and I knew how right he was. While I had been home when he was in the field or away for leadership training, this would be his first time conquering this parenting thing alone. I wasn’t worried. I have watched my husband grow from the undermined parent at my own hand, to a confident dad of our baby boy, to the moment in Korea I had an event to attend and he made a million excuses of why I couldn’t go, I was not understanding his thought process and it evolved into an actual fight. Right at the peak of the argument everything got quiet and tears rolled down my strong man of a husband’s face as he said to me so softly ‘I’m not you. I’m not ready.’ and in that moment my bags were down, the door was locked and the day was over. My husband was not ready to conquer our three children (twin infants in hand) in the real world without me; and that was okay. He has seen me come up short in so many aspects of my life and never seen me as less than amazing and I owed him that same support. As the girls got older, the most specific milestone being that they were no longer breastfeeding and feeling that physical need for me, he was much more confident. Watching my husband grow as a man is an honor in itself but watching him grow as a father is one of my life’s most treasured joys. I knew the man that held me as I cried before leaving my four greatest loves that spring day was completely capable and would raise our children exactly as I would by his side. I never have to question if he’s doing things ‘right’ even if he is doing them different. When I went home on leave before coming to Fort Huachuca I tried to sneak a little snack with Riley before breakfast when he corrected me saying ‘Mom! We can’t have donuts for breakfast! Dad makes us eat fruit before our cereal!’ and in that moment I realized, Germain is killing this parenting game and I may have been kicked off my thrown.

When I was in basic, getting mail was by far my most favorite part of the day. The kids would draw me pictures and I would get sweet sweet love letters from this perfect husband of mine along with as many pictures as he could print. In one of those letters, Germain told me how proud of himself he was that he had taught himself how to braid the girls’ hair. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I sat with a picture of my sweet twins with their hair in neat braided pigtails running down their backs. How lucky am I to share my life and raise my children with such a capable, resilient man? Everyone in my company knew how much hurt I carried in my heart to be away from my family; especially my husband. Yes I said it. As cliche as it may be, I missed my husband more than I missed my children. Yes I missed my children and cried for every Easter and birthday I missed but Germain had them. At the end of the day, Germain had their backs and knowing that he was there was comfort enough. My husband gives me support and safety that my children can never give me. I am their support and safety but everyone needs that someone and God is he my someone. I was known for sleeping with a picture of my husband at all times. There’s absolutely no shame in my marriage game! I missed my man and the world knew it.

Germain deployed in September and the kids were all settled at my father in law’s. I cried and cried until there were no tears. My children barely knew my in laws before his deployment and while this has been such a blessing to everyone involved, my heart ached to know that my children were now left without their mother or their father. My children had been stripped of every security blanket we’d ever build over the last six years because of my career choice. Being a military spouse for seven years, you come to realize that your job as a spouse is to keep things at home in order so he can focus on his mission and accomplishing what the army requires of him. It broke my heart I couldn’t be that for him during this time and it broke my heart even more to watch his heart break as he left our children. Just as I had cried, he had cried and cried. We cried together, we cried alone, we still cry today. We have truly built a life where we feel safe and valued and loved and we have built that for our children as well. Taking it from ourselves hurt but taking it from our children broke us. We have had to hold each other together many nights since his deployment. Group FaceTimes with the kids stitch up our wounds temporarily. Holding us together just long enough to make it back together as a family.

Marriage isn’t always beautiful but it is always worth it. I am so grateful for all of our highs and lows and every wrong turn and surprise that has led us to where we are in our marriage today. Life is hard. I’d go as far as to say our lives may be exponentially harder than most others and there’s no way I could have held myself together, kept our family in tact, or continued to stoke this fire of marriage with anyone other than my husband. There have been times in my marriage where I have lost pieces of myself; pieces I wasn’t always ready or even willing to part with but it has always been worth it.

Marriage is like stained glass. It will take everything you think you are as a person and shatter it. Yes, marriage will break you as a person. But when you take all of those broken pieces of who you thought you were as individuals, and you put them back together, blending all of these pieces of yourselves into one, it creates something infinitely more intricate and beautiful. While you may lose pieces of yourself, in the end you create something more amazing than you could ever create on your own.