The Merging of Lives

If I do say so myself, I have to give Shaun and I some major credit. It's hard to begin merging your lives when one of those lives is mostly in Texas. He comes home to Michigan on March 15th (probably) by the way. In time for St. Patrick's Day, which he is particularly excited about.

The day to day business of sharing your life with someone is a lot easier when you can just turn to them while you're both sitting on the couch watching tomorrow's weather and say, "Did you remember to pay your cell phone bill this month?" When you never share a couch you tend to forget to ask, over and over again. Then one day you write it down on a post-it while at work, by some miracle of nature you remember to bring the post-it home, and then you go to call them to ask, "Hey, did you remember to pay your cell phone bill?" -- only when you call you get a message that says their phone has been temporarily disconnected. Ostensibly due to non-payment of the aforementioned bill. Thereby rendering the reminder post-it useless. And wasting paper, apologies Mr. Gore.

This situation is hypothetical, of course, as I pay our cell phone bill every month -- mostly on time, when AT&T isn't pissing me off. (They recently overbilled me by $400, took SEVEN phone calls to get it fixed. Oh for the love. Never ever change your plan if you can at all help it.) It's meant to exemplify how difficult it is to communicate about every day matters when you don't see each other every day. But money in particular is an area where Shaun and my communication skills have always seemed to fly out the window at the last second, and leave us screaming at each other, and I find it to be an even more daunting task over such a distance. We resolved to not let this happen anymore (the screaming part), but we definitely still think very differently about that stuff that can't buy love, as Sir Paul once sang.

It boggles my mind a bit how much a calm, honest conversation can accomplish. Shaun and I have had many of those in the past week - we also had some blow up arguments, some of which were through text messaging, which I've determined is the *worst* possible form of communication in existence today. Smoke signals are probably more effective. But I feel like progress is being made. One of us gets upset and we are almost forced to talk about it because we can't do anything else except talk! In that way it's good that we have to speak on the phone so much, but I think we will both appreciate the face to face discussion a lot more than we used to once he is back in Michigan.

Faith

Faith is a best-selling album by George Michael.

It is also these things:

1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.
2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.
3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.
4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.
5. a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.
6. the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.: Failure to appear would be breaking faith.
7. the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one's promise, oath, allegiance, etc.: He was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles.
8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved. —Idiom
9. in faith, in truth; indeed: In faith, he is a fine lad.

[Origin: 1200–50; ME feith, see also: confide]

For me, faith is complicated. I've watched my mom struggle with her faith my whole life. We used to attend mass and she would remain seated when almost everyone else stood up to take communion. When I asked her why she stayed in her seat, she said, "Well, because I'm divorced, and they don't like that." My child's brain thought, But wasn't your ex-husband mean to you? Isn't that why you got divorced? I couldn't understand why God would be mad at her for leaving someone who treated her poorly. At that point it was God vs. Mom, and I was firmly on Mom's side. Any church that didn't like my mom was no church of mine. Then I found out that when I was born she'd met with a priest to see about having me baptized. The priest told her that she wasn't a good Catholic, and couldn't be a good Catholic example to her children, and should consider baptizing them elsewhere. When I found that out, it was pretty much a done deal. Not only had they rejected Mom, they'd rejected me before I could even speak!

In college years later, only a few months after my grandmother died, I found myself starting to wonder about that God who had rejected my mother and I all those years ago. Somehow my mom was still able to lean on her faith to help her through difficult times, and I felt like something was missing from my life, maybe it was faith? With the passing of time I'd learned that not all religions felt the same way about divorce, and I'd started to separate the idea of God from the idea of the different religions and all their rules. (I wonder still what God's opinion of religion is, since it is so often used to divide people.) But seeing as how the overwhelming majority of faithful people the world over feel that God is most easily accessed through religion, I decided to take a religion class. It was about the Old Testament of the Bible, but from an historical perspective. I felt I'd be more comfortable in a classroom environment than in a chruch, but the class was a three hour lecture in a room with no windows in the middle of the summer, about all I learned was that my professor was incredibly sexy. We're talking a modern day Indiana Jones here folks. I enjoyed the lectures, but it was still not the faith I was seeking.

And so that brings me to where I am today. Engaged to a man who is Catholic and who will undoubtedly want our children to be raised Catholic. While there are certainly elements of Catholicism that this pro-choice gal totally disagrees with, I can't deny that my mother's faith has been an immensely important part of her life, and it's helped her to cope with some of the most difficult things humans go through during our short time here. I envy that. If I am going to raise kids a certain way I know I need to learn more about it, so I'm planning to start attending mass as often as I can. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. Maybe all I really need to remember is that of all the people I've ever met in my life, I have the most faith in Shaun. I trust him completely.

Perhaps that's the faith I've been missing.

We're Engaged!

So over the holidays Shaun popped The Question and I said, "Yes!" He's back in Texas now finishing up school and will be home in the Spring. We are hoping that he will be home in mid-March, but it could be April before he's back in Michigan. I'm pulling for March, and I know he is too - he'd hate missing St. Patrick's Day!

Here are some fun pictures for your enjoyment. The wedding will probably be in May 2009, but we're not sure of the day yet.