WIFE-HOME

The bride home celebrates the coming together of two totally different humans and learning to love, to find friendship, to raise children and to listen in new ways to the earth and thus each other. The bride is made of donated slide cabinets that house thousands of art history slides from a university art department. Each division of history has been painstakingly organized, labeled, and stored for safekeeping. It was difficult to disrupt. The disruption reminded me of my marriage and the ruffling of feathers we have had to do independently and together to understand how to navigate a life together and a part. The drawers are open because they hold no secrets. Everything is open for seeing, if you dare, you may touch and disrupt. I dare you to take a slide out of order and participate in making the soldiers cross on the floor as the bride’s shadow. What does that feel like?

Marriage means you are no longer just you. You become redefined as much as you desire. The reality of military marriage is that you are one, then you are two, you are one, then you are two, you are one, then you are two and like an eye test, you just want the results. In all of it there is an expectation to be beautiful, to remain married yet alone. Temporary singleness is hard to describe and harder to relate to.

The bride, celebrated, revered, and assumed.

 

WIFE-SEPARATED

The bride away feels obligated to continue to be available and supportive yet she is drained and depleted.  She becomes a foreigner in a foreign land.  Talked about, a figure that only exists in photos and the occasional What’s App photo call.  What do you talk about to someone giving their life and their own freedom to serve?  Do you complain about the broken fence, the leak in the roof and how none of the kids would eat dinner?  Is the mundane enough to stay connected.  Do you become two people, pretending to be one?  Then there is a moment you can’t do it anymore.  One goes through days, months, thinking about how to be solo, how to be alone.  One becomes pretty good at it.  Just as you get the swing of it, you are married again and everything is split that once was all on you.  The ebb and flow, the ebb and flow, the drowning.  Then there is a moment when you choose, one chooses…you choose to run it solo or with someone.  When there was choice, it felt good to make it.  To choose to be together.  I learned I could do it alone but wanted to do it with someone else.  Rather than fight what was intended for two people, marriage and raising children I taught myself to be two people, one away and one here, one that does it alone but prefers to do it together.  

In December I met the Afghan generals wife that flew over on that one plane that got out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over.  She brought almost nothing with her but one thing she brought was for me.  She knew we would meet and she brought me what Afghan women wear.  I felt so connected to her.  To her loss, to her pain, to her joy in being reunited and to her future of finding out who she is alone as well as with her husband. This work is for her and her children.