Mondays with Mike: This is us

My longtime favorite, and my new favorite. (photo by Robin Brelsford)

As I write, Beth is on her trek in New York City, the biggest training exercise she and her new Seeing Eye Dog Speedo will take before they board a plane for Thursday morning. I’ll take time off to meet them at baggage claim and we’ll head home together.

A few days after Beth left for her stint at The Seeing Eye, a friend asked, “Do you miss her?”

“Not yet,” I answered.

It was an honest question and an honest answer.

Beth and I have been married 35 years. Enough time that, despite us both being pretty distinct individuals, there is a sort of mind meld that has formed. So time away from each other can be disorienting, but also illuminating in a way. When you sign up with each other the terms of one partner’s life necessarily shape the terms of the other’s. And naturally, you start thinking we instead of I. That’s largely as it should be. But you do lose track of the I.

As in, say, “I’m hungry, what do I want to do right now?” And answering without weighing in someone else’s schedule or wants. Or “I think I’ll go out for a beer, coffee, or…” rather than “Wanna go out for a beer, coffee…”.

And when it’s time to go anywhere, just throw on your coat and head out. A minute, maybe two between the impulse and the action. No waiting.

In our relationship, the mechanical terms of Beth’s life have dictated the terms of my life more than mine have hers. In the big picture, when Beth started seeing blobs on sheep on our honeymoon in Scotland lo these many years ago, I was aimed at law school. (I count it as probably having saved me from a life of grey misery.) In the daily grind, her life’s logistics have determined many of my life’s logistics. Beth could function fine without me. But a lot of things are just more practical and faster for me to do, and we function more efficiently that way. Sometimes, frankly, that’s a drag for both of us.

So it’s refreshing to get a glimpse of what it’s like to do just what I want to do, when I want to. To not know that sometime after 8 p.m., I’ll be taking the dog out in the cold for her last constitutional. To going out without waiting for Beth to do whatever it is she does that last 10 minutes between the time I’m ready and we actually leave.

The individuals in any healthy partnership help each other in ways that are obvious and a ton more that are not obvious, that only they know. The ways that I help Beth are more obvious because I can see and she can’t. But there are millions more that are not.

And billions of ways she helps me that are invisible.

And so, yes, enough time has passed that I can answer, “Yes, I miss Beth.”

But more than that, I miss us.