The difference of a decade

Mother’s Day 2002 was a significant circle of life moment for me. Ed took our girls and our two dogs off for an early hike in the mountains so I could have a quiet morning with coffee and the newspaper.

They were barely gone a half hour when the phone rang. It was my sister with the news that our mom had been accepted to Hospice House. Less than half an hour after than conversation, the phone rang and it was my daughter with the news that I would be a grandmother by Thanksgiving.

Later, on that same Mother’s Day ten years ago, Ed and I had a romantic dinner date overlooking the Willamette River. I often remembered that dinner because only four months later the tenor of our marriage changed as a result of a car accident. But yesterday, we had a great meal overlooking the Deschutes River and for many reasons it had a similar circle of life energy for our personal life and marriage.

I’ve put a lot of research and effort into a memoir I’m writing about my parents 57 year marriage – and my mom was a polio quadriplegic for 46 of those years. Ed and I have been married for 31 years and these past ten years our relationship focus was not all about our sex life. So I’ve often been baffled about the gay-straight-marriage issue.

When I saw the above posted on one of my networks it was the “ashamed”  that struck a chord, and the decade reference. I recently learned about the controversial studies by Brene Brown regarding the importance of SHAME. I’ve posted links to this on March 16th and I’m going to review them again as it is fascinating to me.

I’ve known many, through my life, who were in same-sex relationships and until now I never thought about the amount of shame resilience they had mastered. I admire the commitment and understanding of marriage these humans have achieved because they fought for their right to wed. They fought for their right to create the life of their dreams. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are worth fighting for.

There are loud bullies, once again, proclaiming marriage is defined by biological parameters. Really? I think not. There can be significant change, even in our biology, in ten years. As my brother has stated; in seven years every cell in our body has been replaced with a new cell so we truly are entirely different people at a cellular level.

I can’t imagine how my parents or my marriage would have played out through the decades if we had to fight to be married on top of fighting all the other challenges to stay married. I can state that our biology had no impact on any of it.

I’m happy to know the journey to learn about shame will be a good step forward for these bullies on their road to becoming human.