Family Squeeze (10 page)

   try another diet, one that “really works”

During midlife, we are constantly trying to make up for lost time. We rush about as if we’re going to find it somewhere, hoping all the while that time is on our side. We get so stressed out we start drinking Maalox like it’s gravy. We wonder,
What would it be like to slow down? And if we slow down, will we have a nervous breakdown?
Materialism and speed have doused the fire in our souls, and it’s time we went looking for matches.

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” wrote the psalmist in Psalm 90:12. And if we number them,
we just may find that we don’t have enough time left for petty stuff like discussing someone else’s failures. Or how the soloist should have tuned up before singing last Sunday. We won’t have time to whine and complain that the previous generation got it wrong and the next generation doesn’t get it at all. We won’t have time for things that are really ugly and disgusting, including much of what’s on tabloids and television. We won’t have time to sit around comparing what can’t be taken to the next world. Things like bank accounts, titles, and achievements.

If we find those matches and reignite that fire in our souls, we will discover that time is precious—that we should spend it brightening someone’s day, helping those less privileged, and loving those who are forgotten. After all, no matter our age, we have less time than we think. Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is an assumption, and this moment that we say we have…just passed.

A wise friend says, “How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Make a mistake with money and it can be fixed, but time is gone.” In her excellent book
Time Peace
, my friend Ellen Vaughn reminds us that “in the end, people’s beliefs—their worldview—determine their attitude toward time.”

As
a Christian, I believe we are stewards of whatever God gives us, including the days we have left. Because of Christ we are promised the riches of eternity where time will be extinct, but for now we are allowed the riches of today. I’d like to spend my remaining days spreading grace and joy around. As A. W. Tozer wrote, “May the knowledge of Thy eternity not be wasted on me!”

Who knows? I might even sign up for those ukulele lessons after all.

Women now have choices. They can be married,
not married, have a job, not have a job, be married
with children, unmarried with children. Men have the
same choice we’ve always had: work, or prison
.

T
IM
A
LLEN

Love at first sight is easy to understand
.
It’s when two people have been looking at each
other for years that it becomes a miracle
.

S
AM
L
EVENSON

I
believe it was the great American theologian Mark Twain who said, “No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.” Mr. Twain may have been onto something there, because the truth is, getting through the Middle Ages happily married doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. The
Daily Mail
reports that “the fastest-growing age group embarking on divorce proceedings is currently the over-fifties.”
¹⁰
They call it late-life divorce. One couple said: “People change and we forgot to tell each
other.” I suppose most couples would admit that they have grounds for divorce. Here are a few stories of how we continue to find grounds for a great marriage.

When Rachael was a three-and-a-half-foot five-year-old with an attitude, she summoned me to her bedroom one night: “Daddy…Haaaalp!”

I found her sitting on the edge of her bed twirling her little green bear and frowning deeply as though I had put cornflakes in her pillow. (Of course, I had not done this. I would do this about five years later.)

“What is it?” I asked.

Lowering the bear, she lifted her head, put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “Are you and Mama gonna get a divorce?” she demanded.

I gulped twice. “Why, honey?”

“I heard you fighting.”

I gulped a third time. “But I love Mama. I, uh—”

“Patty’s mama said the same thing. Now she’s gettin’ a divorce.” It was like she’d picked up a gavel and was about to sentence me.

“No, Your Honor,” I said. “I married Mom for life. Sometimes we don’t agree, but that can be a good thing, don’t you think?”

She wasn’t buying it. “You be nice to her,” she scolded.

“I promise I will,” I said, leaning over and hugging her tightly. “Did you know that seven years before you came along I stood in a great big church and made a promise?”

“Did you look handsome?”

“I had a mustache.”

“Oh.”

“I promised God and about three hundred people that I would be
your mamas sweetheart all my life. And I’d stand up tomorrow and say the same thing.”

“Church is tomorrow,” she said as I tucked her and her bear into bed. “You can do it then.”

I once thought that if we could just get our marriage launched and through the land mines of the toddler years, we could put it in neutral and coast all the way home. Bring on middle age. It would be a walk in the park.

But now Ramona and I find ourselves married a quarter of a century, a little tired, sitting at the dinner table talking about the kids and finishing sentences for each other.

Me: So I was gonna—

She: But we don’t need lettuce—

Me: All right, then I’ll—

She: Good, because I was hoping—

Me: Don’t worry. I wouldn’t—

She: But last time you—

Me: I know. But I promise I won’t forget—

She: Chocolate.

Me: Dark chocolate.

Back in 1999,
www.over50s.com
launched an online dating service. It now boasts more than 250,000 registered users, many of them guys who woke up one Saturday and stood before the mirror, thinking out loud:

“I have been teaching school to eighth graders for twenty-six years, and if I see even
one
more eighth grader this weekend, I am going to go stark raving mad and crash my grocery cart into the watermelons. What was I thinking when I was twenty-two? I didn’t even like eighth grade, for Pete’s sake. I don’t even know who Pete is. I wanna be a… um…a mechanic. Yes, I love cars. In fact, I think I’ll go buy a little red
convertible right now. I think I’ll put on some extra cologne. Buy an iPod. Maybe a Speedo. Do Speedos come in size fifty-two? I’ll bet they do. The sky’s the limit for me. There’s nothing I can’t do. I am so excited. Ouch! I think I pulled some fat.”

I personally have had trouble completely embracing the midlife crisis, although I will admit that I do drive a really hot-looking silver Pontiac Sunfire. But when I see guys my age with women half their age, I get to wondering, what am I doing watching another Clint Eastwood movie? And when I see them in real life, I wonder what they talk about when they sit around the dinner table and the swagger has become a shuffle.

Him: Hey, do you remember back when…oh, never mind.

Her: Did you hear that Britney and Paris had their hair done the same way the same week?

Him: No, but I was reading—

Her: Like in a book?

Him: Yeah. A book about Vladimir Lenin—

Her: I never really liked the Beatles. But I was like thinking that, like, I might wanna go and like get my nails done and, like, finish looking at the pictures in
Us
magazine.

Him: I was thinking I might want to call my kids.

Her: But they won’t, like, talk to you anymore. Remember?

Him: I was thinking that I’m gonna be sick.

Sadly, I meet so many who have discarded a marriage thinking something lustrous was waiting, only to find out it wasn’t what they thought—like a greyhound that finally catches a mechanical rabbit.

In church recently we were singing “It’s All About You.” I heard a shrill little girl’s voice behind me. She had changed the words ever so slightly to reflect what many of us sing with our lives: “It’s All About
Me”

A hospital chaplain told me of the lonely, alienated people he tries to comfort. Folks who at some point started singing the song that way.
One recently abandoned his forty-four-year marriage, which seems to me a little like shipwreck survivors diving off the lifeboat within sight of land. Five years later, he was alone when a doctor delivered the news that he had Alzheimer’s, and though I don’t know what kind of cargo he lugged around with him those forty-four years, I can’t help wondering who would have been there to nurse him and love him had he stuck around when everything within yelled “Run!”

There is something that may sound dull and old-fashioned, but I think we lose before we’ve started if we don’t introduce it to our children. It is the beautiful concept of faithfulness. I have seen it in the faces of the aged, in a glance or a wink. It can start today, because God’s mercies are new every morning. It can start when we sit across from our spouse and choose thanksgiving over griping and forgiveness over holding a grudge.

For my wife, it happens when I admit to her that I’d like to pick out some clothes that make me look “younger,” and she doesn’t roll her eyes at all, just helps me pick them out. A few weeks ago I told her I’d love to have one of those little red convertibles, and instead of waking up in the middle of the night to put Super Glue on my eyelids, she bought me a little model Corvette at Costco for $12.99.

For marriage to be a success, every woman and
every man should have his or her own bathroom
.

C
ATHERINE
Z
ETA-JONES

A good marriage is like an incredible retirement fund
.
You put everything you have into it during your productive
life, and over the years it turns from silver to gold to platinum
.

W
ILLARD
S
COTT

M
y wife is eight months older than me. No one believes this. You see the two of us together and you’ll see why. One of us looks like George Burns, and the other like, well, like my wife. Ramona was standing in the grocery store the other day, and a lady asked, “Is it your dad who writes those books?”

“Yes,” she replied, past a widening smile.

One day my wife looked at my white hair and said, “When I agreed to grow old with you, I didn’t mean this rapidly.”

Last August we celebrated twenty-five years of married life—most of them good ones. When I was a boy, the only people celebrating twenty-fifth
anniversaries were very old people with ample wrinkles, high foreheads, and starchy clothing—people who were so old they had reached their forties and needed help getting up stairs. Most of them seemed happy. Others looked like love was a dream and marriage was the alarm clock.

I consider ours a miracle marriage, especially when you consider that I proposed to Ramona via chain letter. This is what it said:

It was pretty clever stuff for a tenth grader, don’t you think? And four years later, when I summoned the courage to show it to her, she laughed. And agreed to marry me anyway.

In August, we took leave of our teenagers and returned to the same hotel where we first shared a pillow all those years ago. The staff, impressed that a couple could stay together this long, couldn’t spoil us enough. They wheeled in complimentary chocolates, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and a large bottle of champagne on ice, which we mistook for bubble bath and used accordingly.

As we dove into the chocolates, we talked about some pretty sweet years together. I suppose there are a thousand reasons we still share the same phone number and address; here are just a few:

1. We sweat the small stuff. Early on I left mud on the carpet and whiskers in the sink. I even left my underwear where it landed. I’m learning to take care of the small things before they become big ones. If I’m last out of bed, I make it. (I have done this twice.) If I’m late for supper, I call home. We go to bed at the same time even when I’m not tired, and I kiss her lips before I shave each morning. Just the other day, I even—drum roll, please—located the laundry hamper.
   

2. We golf together. Ramona enjoys golf about as much as I enjoy shopping for curtain fabric. Still, she comes along sometimes and cheers as I putt. This is annoying, but I love having her there. One of our anniversaries was even celebrated, at her suggestion, on a golf course. Perhaps that’s why I find it easier to do the dishes, vacuum carpets, bathe the dog, or move furniture whenever she asks—which is often in the middle of the night.
   

3. We eat together. Whenever possible, we eat meals together, believing mealtime to be an enormously important time of the day. We even cook together, though we seldom agree on recipes. Before we had children we were often invited out for meals. (We were invited out only once when our three were small. I imagine that the gracious elderly couple who did the inviting are still chipping food off their walls.) We would be eating some new dish, and Ramona would be savoring each mouthful. “I need to get this recipe,” she would say. And I would be looking at her with horror because I was stuffing bite-sized pieces of sandwich in my pockets whenever our host wasn’t looking. And so we worked out a signal. When we’re invited out and she asks
   for a recipe, and I don’t like the food, I say, “It’s tasty.” Tasty is code for “this tomato flambé tastes exactly like a skunk swam through it. Don’t, under any circumstances, bring home the recipe.”
   

4. We practice forgiveness. One of my favorite quotes comes from Frederick Buechner: “Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
   ¹¹
   My brother Tim likes to put it more simply: “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison, then standing around waiting for the rat to die.”
   

5. We travel together. Whenever possible, Ramona goes along with me on a trip. Sure, it costs money, and I haven’t had a window seat in years, but I’d like to grow old with someone who doesn’t just share my money, she shares my memories.
   

6. We left no alternatives. The first three years of our marriage were miserable. Until I got a divorce. A divorce from loving myself and seeking my own way. I was reading the book of Galatians one night when I stumbled on the verse, “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (2:20), and the most profound thought hit me:
   If I am dead, and Christ lives in me, can my wife see Him there?
   (Here’s a tip: If you want to have a miserable marriage, don’t read the Bible.) Finding the right person, I have since discovered, is less important than
   being
   the right person. The happiest married people I know discovered early on that the “better” comes after the “worse.”
   

7. We pray together. This was one of Ramona’s first wishes for our marriage. And after reading that Bible verse, I came to honor it. We’ve since discovered that couples who pray together regularly report “the most satisfying marriages of all.”
   ¹²
   Lately, Ramona and I have been thanking God at night for His amazing grace. For taking two selfish kids who hardly knew how to spell
   love
   and pulling them close to Himself and to each other.
   

On our way to the hotel I turned on the radio to hear Huey Lewis singing, “I’m happy to be stuck with you.” I tapped my toes (this irritates my wife when I’m driving) and smiled. But glue or chains don’t hold a marriage together. A hundred tiny threads do. Threads like trust, commitment, kindness, humility, gentleness, respect, and finding the laundry hamper.

As we checked in, I told our hostess the significance of this day. Her eyes grew wide. “Wow,” she said, “that’s a long time with one person!”

“Yes,” I replied with a grin, “but it would have been a whole lot longer without her.”