I love to look at pictures on facebook of young friends that have chosen to marry and have families. I love it because I look at them and think: impossible. It's impossible that someone from my generation-- nay, TWO individuals from my generation-- have chosen to come together and wed their lives. And yet there it is. It is baffling exactly because it is so matter-of-fact. There they are. The two of them. Together until death do them part.
And they're smiling about it. How is this possible? Haven't they considered the odds? Don't they know the blackness in their own hearts? And yet they smile. They hold a newborn child in their arms and they laugh. They close their eyes, the emergency room and the nurses' blue smocks disappear, and they laugh together. What will we call her? What name do we give our child?
I look at these facebook pictures and I wonder about the husband's life: what does he do? He gets up, ever day, and goes to work. He works for his child and for his wife. What else?
And this, I suppose, is where politics and religion and everything else come into the picture: what does he do with his days? Is it right, is it good, that he spend his every waking day in front of a computer, a man with a knack for electronics and problem solving, only to come home a few hours a night, a few more hours on the weekends, to spend time with the ones he loves? Is it humane?
It doesn't matter. Such questions place the husband (my imagined self) at the center of the universe. We are not. We give ourselves, partially and then fully, to something we don't entirely understand but love with all our hearts. And the answers come, and come, and come.
How we spend our days is, after all, how we spend our lives.
The work is long, and hard, and the goal is an impossibility: a woman, a man, a child.
And yet.
