What a week. I HATE weeks like this. Today is better, but not because anything is really resolved. Is ANYTHING ever really resolved in a marriage?

Here are the things I have learned about marriage - and NO ONE talks about this kind of stuff BEFORE you get married, oh, no…

1. You will go through hard, even hating times. You WILL wake up in the middle of the night, look at your spouse, and think, “WHY?” If you are lucky, forgiving, and determined, this will be balanced by the times you look at them and feel profound gratitude that this person is your mate.

2. Your spouse will let you down. They will disappoint you. They will reveal something (or evolve into someone) that would have made you run, run, run if you were just dating.

3. This is the hardest one: you will disappoint your spouse. You will fail. You will see them looking at you with contempt, or distaste, or rage, or pity, or disgust, and you will know that they are thinking, “WHY?”

4. Couples who survive have made a conscious decision to do so. They have looked at each other in the hard times and said, “I’m staying put.” Sometimes, people do this solely to devote their lives to making that other person miserable (You know who you are, guys, and I love you both, but for God’s sake GET THE F#@! OUT before you wind up in the headlines…).

I have done both. I have stuck. And I have run. And I can only tell you that I’ve made the only decisions I felt I could at the time. Everyone is different, and marriage is really, really hard work. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and hang on, and sometimes you have to pry your hands open and fall, fall, fall away into the abyss.

I get scared. If it was just the two of us, that would be different, but there is this whole world of people who could move into the gaping holes of our defenses. Maybe what I hoped to accomplish this week with all my verbal flailing was to point them out, so he is on his guard. God knows, I am always on my mine, because some wounds never heal, and in the words of Kate DiCamillo, this is “…the sad fate, I am afraid, of those whose hearts break and then mend in crooked ways…”

I need to amend my earlier assessment that my husband does not want to be married. I have to believe that he does, and to me, but that what he wants from marriage, from me, does not always match what I have or want to give.

Isn’t that always true? And isn’t “for better or for worse” all about figuring that out?

And so I stay.

I was reading a blip in one of the jillions of magazines I get, and a celebrity mentioned the character description of a part she recently undertook: “the best mom you could ever have.”

This makes me impatient, because I think it feeds into a damaging and dangerous perception we (women? people? Americans?) seem to have that there is one perfect way to parent, one perfect way to be a mother. My Katie will be 20 this coming September, and I can tell you one sure thing about mothering after two decades: Kids. Are. All. Different. In myriad and subtle ways, ways that make even the basics of mothering (feeding, clothing, bathing, sleeping) a challenge to deliver for any given kid. There are no rules, no formulas. You have to FIGURE IT OUT. For every single blessed one of them.

It gets dicey when you have more than one child, which many of us do, because what worked with kid number one may very likely be a disaster with kid number two or three, but might work fine for four… and so on. With my youngest child, my little Tobin, I learned that I did not have any more idea of why he was crying that I did with my first, fourteen years earlier. But I DID know that he wasn’t going to die from crying, and that sooner or later I would figure it out. I was calmer. Not better. Not perfect. Calmer.

I am a good mom. I do my best, every day, to get good food into them at regular intervals, to keep them clean and well-rested, and to make sure they get dirty and out of breath and curious about the world around them. That is the easy stuff, really.

I also try, every day, to be what they need me to be emotionally. Cheerleader. Drill sergeant. Coach. Coddler. A port in the storm. A shove off the cliff. It changes, every day, for every one of my five kids. And this more than any other aspect of mothering just plain wears me out. I fail. Every day. I misread a kid, or get distracted and impatient or just plain angry, and say something I shouldn’t in a way that I shouldn’t . Every day.

“I don’t have TIME for finesse!!” I mentally scream, “JUST BRUSH YOUR DAMN TEETH!!” I am stretched on a mental rack, pulled between what I have to do (work, laundry, dishes, work, cleaning, cooking, work, work, work) and what I have to do (mothering with love and patience).

If you’re hoping for some pat answer at the end of this post, you’re doomed to disappointment. That is kind of the point. There are no pat answers. I don’t have  little bit of wisdom you can tape to your monitor that will guide you through, because your path is different from mine, and requires different skills to navigate.

The closest I can come, I guess, is to say that we each have to discover our own path through the morass of motherhood. Expect to get wet.