When the children are gone

There's a post over at Chef Penny's where she's talking about what life is like when the children have gone. Her children aren't gone yet, and she was referencing someone elses blog. (Beth at livingproofministries.blogspot.com)

Anyway, formalities and reasonings behind the existence of this post over, the post itself.

She was writing about the need to keep the marriage alive, even through the children, so that when there are no children, the marriage is still there and the parents don't look at each other like strangers. She was writing about the work that it needs to keep a marriage going.

Now, as the Dear Reader already knows, I'm not married to R. I've been married twice. The first time, I married my best friend, and we thought that would be enough. We were wrong.

The second time, I married the father of my imminently arriving Adorable Child. I thought that that would be enough. I was wrong.

This time? This time there is just R and me and the boy. This time there is a knowledge, not given to us by our parents, but learnt by hard work, and loss, and rejection, and the fearful fact that all *can* be lost. Because it already has, for him and for me.

So what do we do? What can we do? We work at our relationship, that's what we do. How? There's the question. There are so many small ways, small things that we do for each other, everything, from cups of tea to remembering things for each other, to helping out, to touching on the way past.

We have both lost so much.

We will not lose it again.

Both our pasts speak of feelings of neglect, and of not knowing what to do about it, and so each of us withdrew from our respective partners - until we were accused of neglect in return. We didn't talk, thinking that we were being strong and brave and that turned out to be the wrong thing because we were not sharing ourselves. It didn't matter that we had been ignored and not listened to when we did speak, it didn't matter that our opinions didn't matter. we made the wrong choice, and marriages fell.

So we talk. We talk a lot and more importantly, we listen. We listen and pay attention and love.

Love is the vital part. He is not a competition prize or a trophy, he is R. I am not his bit of skinny blonde, or his "tits and ass", I am just me. We love. We love with a passion, physically, actively and, (and this is vital) regularly. We were both so rejected, physically, by our previous partners, that individually we had begun to think there was something wrong with us, that we wanted it, enjoyed it too much.

And then we found each other, and realised that for us, this is normal. Now we have something that is amazing, that is all about us and the physicality is a huge part of that.

We have each other. And when the AC grows up, there will still be us. We have lost too much to let a chance like us go. So we'll work on it, not let it to fate, not let us decay like we did before, and enjoy being with someone who loves us just for us.

It's all good.