Maintenance

Life is really about maintenance, isn’t it?  If you’re not growing you’re shrinking or maintaining.  Maintenance is not a fun word, sounds much like a chore, work, and unpleasant.  Home maintenance, car maintenance, health maintenance, relationship maintenance.  What is not maintained is lost, maybe not altogether, but at least some.  Take a day off from picking up after your toddler and see what your house looks like.

Since having Persia, my second child, 11 years after my first, so much of my life has suffered from non-maintenance.  From yard work and housework to fitness, friendships, and marriage.  All the time and attention given to maintaining these things and relationships poured into the new baby.  Though my friends are still my friends, they, of course, have not remained stationary for the last 20 months waiting for me to get comfortable being a mother of two.  They’ve gone on living and doing, developing, and maintaining, along with their children.  Sadly, perhaps the saddest situation of all in this, at least to my heart, is that when the friends went on, so did their children–and without mine.  Living 30 miles from our main group of friends is a hardship, especially for an eleven year old, now twelve and a half.  We tried to do as much as we could to help her maintain her relationships, but it wasn’t enough and they’ve all suffered.

Yesterday was a big deal in the maintenance development arenas for our family.  We ventured out together to a home school ice-skating day at the mall.  There were a lot of friends there, friends we’ve not seen, some of them, in 2 years.  Margaux felt very outside of the groups that seemed to form during that period, and we had a long talk about maintaining friendships.  She came out of it with a positive outlook and a plan for rekindling the relationships that have been so important to her for so long.  (Since writing this last week, she has had a sleepover, a study day with her closest friend, and has developed an email pen pal whom she plans on meeting next week…I know her mom.  So, Margaux’s fixed up. )

During ice-skating, Shahram and I took Persia down to a play area for toddlers.  We thought she’d hesitate and feel shy, but she was interacting with many of the children there and having a great time.  So now we know she is ready to start getting out regularly with other kids.

After ice-skating, we brought the girls home and got them ready for our evening absence.  We were going on our first date, a very important date, in years.  Persia didn’t want to nap and I worried that this would pose a difficult evening for Margaux, but if it was difficult, she must have handled it with ease.  She did change her first poopy diaper and was very proud for having done so, even if it did take her twenty wipes to complete the job.  Persia fell asleep on Margaux probably an hour before we got home and she earned $25 for her services. 

Our date.

Our date was slightly awkward.  We often returned to the topic of the kids.  I think this was the case especially because it was the second time Margaux watched Persia alone, and the first time we were out for pleasure and knew we’d be out for many hours.  We worried about both girls, but managed not to call them.  See, here I am still talking about the girls during the “date” portion of this blog entry.  I’ll try again.

We went out to The Cheesecake Factory, just because we wanted to do something quick and we like their Portobello burger, which we split.  Then we went to buy our tickets for It’s Complicated with Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep, and Steve Martin.  Before the theater was open for seating, we sat in the walkway talking.  It was awkward again because most of our talking is about maintenance, or the girls, which is also part of maintenance.  How do we talk about each other and what do we talk about to get close again, to build our relationship? 

I think that a marriage needs constant growth and the maintenance  handled differently.  I don’t have a plan for that, but I think we really need to focus on growth for our relationship–because maintenance feels like a chore, like turning a big crank that’s heavy and rusted and takes a too much effort. 

Marriage, in general… do people really approach it with the knowledge of everything it entails?   I don’t think so, but that’s another blog.