This post is very personal. I wrote it over a month ago but am finally ready to share it.
For the past year and a half I have been away from my husband
physically separated from him because he is not able to come here because he does
not have a Visa. I have spent a lot of time experiencing a bunch of different
emotions about our situation but just this morning (June 13th 2020)I
woke up very early and as I lay in bed wondering why I was awake at 4 in the
morning on a Saturday I began to realize something. I have always felt that
there was a bigger meaning to my relationship with my husband. You see my
husband is Dominican and I am American and when I met him, I did not speak
Spanish and he did not and does not speak English. With all the things that are
going on in the world right now it has become clear to me that there is a
bigger purpose for my relationship with my husband. That bigger meaning is just for me, but I have learned so much about love through my
relationship with him. It is not the romantic stuff and I think in my past
relationships I have been a hopeless romantic interested in the gooey stuff
like the flowers and all of those romantic gestures. My relationship with my
husband has not been really any of that for a number of reasons, the
communication challenges, cultural differences things like that.
I think I finally realized that this exercise that I've gone
through with this relationship has been about learning how to love someone that
can't understand you easily. Someone that you can't understand easily. Learning how to love someone whose culture is
completely different than yours who doesn't understand your culture. Learning
how to love someone who is literally thousands of miles away from you most of
the time. I think sometimes we've gotten accustomed to instant gratification in
all aspects of our lives and it's easy to love someone when you can get that
instant gratification meaning they can say a word or they can do something for
you to make you feel better but it's a lot harder to love someone when those
things that are typically easy are difficult. I really think that this
relationship has taught me or is teaching me patience with love and
understanding with people that think and feel differently than I do. It goes
back to a post that I wrote in May called intellectual humility.
I really think that I've always felt that this relationship was just so much bigger than me Terri and my husband Raulin. I've always felt like there was just a much bigger lesson and purpose and I think it finally hit me as far as what that is. Lately my husband and I have been having a lot of challenges with communication not seeing eye-to-eye on things, having a difference of opinion and at the core of it I realized yesterday that I was asking him to be the husband but I wasn't allowing him to be the husband because every suggestion that he gave me for how to solve some problems I would say no we can't do that or no I don't like that. It occurred to me that on the one hand I was asking my husband to be the man to be the problem solver to participate in helping to solve some of our problems but every time he came to me with the suggestion I had a reason why that wouldn't work so I apologized to my husband and I told him that he had to do what he felt was best because he is currently living in an environment that I am not. He is more familiar with his environment than I am, and I need him to do what he feels comfortable with. It is easy for me to sit here in the United States in my comfort zone and tell someone else what to do and how to live for them to be comfortable but they're not in the United States they're in their comfort zone so I've learned a lot in the last 24 hours I realized a lot about myself about my relationship and some things that I need to change and do differently but at the end of the day even though we're not physically together even though it's not easy to communicate with him a lot I love him and I know he loves me and we are figuring it out as we go.
This October we will celebrate
our 3rd wedding anniversary and a few weeks later in November we will celebrate
four years that we've been together. There are a lot of people who can't
understand why I've stuck it out this long why I haven't given up and to those
people I will say that my grandmother who I miss dearly always told me anything
worth having will take work and yes I have been married before twice and those
marriages ended in divorce but this one is different this one is teaching me
that you must have patience. Good things will come to those who wait and even
if my husband doesn't get to come to the United States even if our marriage
doesn't survive in the long run for whatever reason I can tell you that every
day that I have been in a relationship with him or married to him has been an
adventure the days that I spent with him have actually been some of the best
times of my life and not because I was always smiling and happy because I was
learning and I was growing through the process that's what life's about y'all
it's about learning and growing it's about experiencing all the things that
life has to offer some things will make you smile some things will make you cry
but it's about growing through it all so this post is dedicated to my husband
whom I love dearly and I want to thank him for all the love that he's given me,
all the lessons that I've learned from him and I hope that this is just the
beginning for us, not the end.
The bottom line is this. I am Learning and growing through the discomfort of being separated from my hubby.
