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the only story we know how to tell

2 Comments

He slid three pamphlets across his desk toward us.

“You have to pick one of these for your pre-wedding retreat.”

They all looked the same. Glossy photos, smiling couples, cheesy quotes.

I was tired from this tedious meeting of wedding planning and a long day of work. I really didn’t care which one we picked.

“Most couples I work with didn’t like the first one. I don’t know anything about the second. But the third one’s supposed to be good. It’s long, but it’s worth it if you can make the dates work.”

I looked at my fiance. He shrugged. I shrugged, too.

“I guess we’ll take the third.”

. . .

The terrifying thing about hindsight is how arbitrary certain decisions can seem.

We picked that retreat because the dates worked.

Yet after the obvious impact of our parents’ long-lasting marriages, I am certain that nothing has influenced our own marriage more than the choice we made that sunny afternoon in the deacon’s office.

When we picked one brochure instead of the other two.

We signed up for the Engaged Encounter and thought nothing more of it, after checking one more box off our wedding to-do list. Several months later, we tossed overnight bags in the trunk and drove through the winter dark to a tiny retreat center. The team couples waved as we approached, offered to carry our bags from the car, led us into the dimly lit and charmingly run-down old convent.

We had no idea what to expect.

What happened next is something that has happened more times than I can count. One by one, engaged couples trickled downstairs into the basement meeting room, choosing chairs two by two, joking nervously to each other, waiting to begin. Then the team couples opened their overstuffed binders and began to talk.

They began to tell us their stories.

. . .

Nearly a decade later, I am convinced that this is the brilliance behind the pedagogy of Engaged Encounter. One couple sharing deeply from their own experience invites other couples to do the same with each other.

Unsurprisingly, this mirrors the best advice I ever received for writing: dig deep into the well of your own particularity, and you will tap into the aquifer of human experience.

Because sharing stories is what transforms us. It creates channels for communication. It changes choices into commitments.

wedding - bw

I guarantee that if you asked that fiance-turned-husband and me, what was the best advice we heard on our Engaged Encounter weekend? We couldn’t tell you a single wise word.

But we could tell you handfuls of stories from the team couples. That hysterical story from the couple in their sixties about the time their grandchild almost discovered them in flagrante delicto. That heart-breaking story from the couple in their thirties about the death of the husband’s best friend from high school. That eye-opening story from the newly married couple about how natural family planning wasn’t what they expected.

All of their stories nudged us to think differently about our own relationship. And when the team couples passed around the volunteer sheets at the end of the weekend, we looked each other and shrugged, why not?

Over our years as a team couple, we have sat in front of more engaged couples than I can count. We have told stories about sex and parenting and fighting over our finances. We have told stories about work and temperaments and disagreeing over household chores. We have told stories from the young, tender side of marriage.

We have told the only stories we know.

. . .

Nine years ago today, we said “I do.”

Nine years is a blink in a marriage’s story. I have learned only enough to know that marriage must be practiced daily, humbly, and gratefully. It is an everyday sacrament.

Once again our anniversary arrives in the midst of a maelstrom swirling around marriage. Once again no one lacks for strong opinions about the present state and future prospects of marriage.

But once again beyond the headlines, the everyday love and work of marriage go on as before. And this is the story I want to hear. How real couples make marriage work.

Because even though marrying my spouse remains the most important choice of my life, it also remains a choice to be renewed each morning.

It is the story we are writing together.

Today we will celebrate by telling stories. With each other, with our kids, with our families and friends who faithfully remember this day, too. Stories about the wedding and the reception and the honeymoon. Stories we laugh about every year and maybe, if we’re lucky, a new gem of a story that we’ve never discovered.

Nine years into marriage, I am not sure I have a single piece of advice about the institution thereof. But I have plenty of stories. Stories from couples married decades longer, stories from every Engaged Encounter we have served, stories that have shaped our marriage in defining ways.

Sharing stories is what keeps our marriage alive. For ourselves, for our families, and for all those we’re called to serve.

What is your story? Who needs to hear it?

. . .

For more anniversary stories, check out:

Before-Kids and After-Kids: Two Halves of a Marriage

A Summer Bride, Seven Years Later: Did We Know Enough?

When The Marriage Dust Settles

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Comments

  1. Anne O'Shields says

    8 July 2015 at 10:21 am

    Happy Anniversary! My husband and I just celebrated 9 years in May! I think telling our real stories is so important. It shows that we aren’t perfect but it is still OK to hold ourselves to a higher standard, the sacrament of marriage. I would love to share/write my marriage story sometime! Maybe that will be my 10 year anniversary project 🙂

    Reply
    • motheringspirit says

      9 July 2015 at 7:12 am

      Anne, what a beautiful idea to celebrate your anniversary! I hope you do this – what a gift to share and to remember for yourself all the beauty of the day and the sacrament!

      Reply

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

Mother, writer, wonderer.
Seeker of God in chaos & life with kids.
Author of Everyday Sacrament & Grieving Together.
Glimpses of grace & gratitude.

thismessygrace
Now you'd be three, I said to myself, seeing a chi Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

From "Majority" by Dana Gioia, a poet-father who knows.

2.27.2016.
Always a birthday.
Even when not happy.
I am standing in a fluorescent-lit gym, dingy mesh I am standing in a fluorescent-lit gym, dingy mesh tank top hanging off my scrawny shoulders. I am eleven years old, listening to a grey-haired coach with a whistle round his neck.

"Here is how you pivot," he says, grabbing the ball & crouching down. "Plant your foot, solid like a rock. Don't ever move it."

I am trying to learn, because basketball is cool & I am not. I desperately want to be good at shooting, scoring, stealing, anything. But he is teaching me something I will not forget.

“The power of pivoting is you can turn any way you want. You can move where you need to go. You just have to keep this foot planted."

Today I pivot.

One day between birthdays. 24 slim hours to turn from joy to grief.

Yesterday the bouncing babe turned a whole year old. He has seen all sides of the sun by now. He gets to keep going: an ordinary miracle.

Tomorrow his sisters would have turned 5. A ghost of a birthday, shared by twins, lost to us, held & gone all at once.

All I can do is pivot.

Here is my foot planted firmly in the ground of now. I can turn in any direction I want: from joy to sorrow & back again. This is the only power I have, but it is enough for today.

I will wobble. I will feel the frantic rise in my throat of attack coming at me, blocking my view, trying to steal what I hold. For a few desperate moments I will want to pick up both feet & run far away, run fast as I can from what I never wanted.

But my pivot foot is stronger & steadier. It will stay where I have asked it to stay, from when I learned deeper truth.

Pivoting is still movement, still freedom, still control over a small corner of here. You are the one who decides to stop & plant your foot.

And the pivot is not forever. It is part of a move, not the end point. It is an interim, a passage, a survival strategy.

Part of me is forever awkward & eleven, scrawny & uncertain. But more of me is almost-forty, scarred & stronger. Knowing I can stop when I need to stop & go when I want to go, even in a full court press out of my control.

Today I pivot. I never want to forget the strength here too, the potential to turn between all that comes at me. The power of knowing this is not the end.
One day I’ll tell him the story. How after days One day I’ll tell him the story.

How after days of long labor, sick & scary, heaps of drugs to save both our lives, I stared bleary-eyed at the hospital clock: ten to two, clear as night, & made a decision.

How with no midwives in the room—unknown OBs now, nurses we didn’t know, no familiar face among them—and the clock ticking, I had to do what all those strong women I trusted had taught me to do.

How I decided to midwife my own birth.

How with no strength left, I struggled up through fog & pain, fumbled for my phone, scrolled through the dark until I found the song, & turned it up to rise above the beeping & the monitors & the awful alone sounds of awake at 1:50 am in the hospital.

How I closed my eyes & waited for the beat to come & prayed for the strength. To be my own midwife.

Drop beat. Beat drop. Pause.

The battle of Yorktown. 1781.

I cranked one weary smile. Closed my eyes as the song picked up. Turned my clumsy body to the left side to bring on a contraction.

Gotta meet my son.

Breathed through the pain. Timed it. Heaved to the right side to bring on another wave.

The world turned upside down.

Smiled when the night nurse came to check, surprised. Feigned shock when she raised her eyes that things were changing.

How as soon as she left the room, I glared at the clock, hit repeat, turned to one side, then another, kept contractions coming & coming, coaching my body hour after hour to do what I knew it could do.

History will show that this child was born from pitocin for induction & magnesium sulfate for preeclampsia & a failed epidural or two & eight shots of epinephrine when maternal blood pressure tanked.

But I will know that he was born from sheer grit & the strength of every midwife I’ve loved & the back beat of Hamilton at 1:50 am in a lonely hospital room.

The world turned upside down, then 100 more times in the tumultuous first year of his life.

But I did what I had to do & what I could do & I did it all for love of him. That day & every one that followed.

That is a story worth telling.

His birth. (Mine, too.)

2.25.20
A story and a word of thanks. You are amazing huma A story and a word of thanks. You are amazing humans.
Want to do some outrageous good with me? If our d Want to do some outrageous good with me?

If our daughters had lived, they would turn 5 years old this week. Our grief is enormous. But our gratitude for their lives is even bigger.

So in honor of Abby and Maggie's big birthday—one whole hand—I want to do something big.

Hunger has gnawed at my heart for the whole pandemic. It's all around us, growing every day. Yet often it flies under the radar of our concern because it's constant, while a thousand outrages and injustices rise up anew each day.

But I know our neighbors are struggling to put food on their tables. I believe we're called to feed the hungry.

And I'm convinced that in the worst of times, we can show up with our best selves.

So I want to do something outrageous. I want to raise $20,000 for Second Harvest Heartland, one of the largest food banks in the U.S., located right here in our beloved Twin Cities.

Their need has skyrocketed by 30% during the pandemic. Food shelves across the country are seeing record levels of need.

Feeding the hungry is a work of mercy. A work we must take up in earnest.

I know many of you are struggling, too. Stretched thin, worn through, tapped out. Most of us don't have a lot to spare these days. So here's where we can help each other.

If each one of you who follows along to read my words gave $1 to @secondharvestheartland we could meet this crazy goal TODAY.

Could we do it? Should we do something spectacular this week?

I'm willing to try. I bet you are, too. If you give small—or big if you've got it, or simply share this post if you can't give right now—we could do it in HOURS.

That's the power of social media for good. The power of loving our neighbors in tangible ways.

Let's do it. I'm with you. Right now I'm giving in honor of two sweet girls that I wish were swinging their feet at our kitchen table, scarfing down dinner alongside their brothers.

Do it in honor of the kids you love. Or the kids you'll help but never meet.

Make it part of your alms-giving this Lent. Or make it today's small sacrifice: the cost of one cup of coffee.

I'm ready to do some wild good in this hardest week. Thank you for loving with me.
Caught myself dizzy from scrolling here and rememb Caught myself dizzy from scrolling here and remembered—we aren’t an island of misfit toys. We’re one big book of psalms.
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