My life has changed.

Where once I slept soundly and alone in my sister’s basement and woke to three of her children marching around the breakfast table singing, “I’m in the Lord’s Army!” I now sleep tossingly next to my new and also-not-sleeping husband and wake each morning to make him breakfast and send him off to work saying, “Have fun in the Army!  The real Army!”

Where once I ran through canopied sidewalks in a mid-sized Minnesota town where the breeze filled my mind with new ideas and creativity, I now have no place to run and the humidity and thickness of tiny-town Louisiana stifles my drive to write, music or otherwise.

Where once I bustled through busy days teaching gads of teenagers to sing together and casting visions for them of living highly creative and personable lives, I now barely believe in art and speak with no one younger than 24.  In fact, I hardly speak with anyone at all.

The quiet, married days I once longed for, I now have in abundance and they are very quiet.  I am alone most days, all day.  My husband works long hours and hates his job.  He’s gotten leaps better at not complaining at the house.  He leaves work at work most of the time now, but I feel it.  I feel his remorse for being stuck in terrible position, for being put upon by unthinking leadership.  He is bitter and has no other idea what to do.  Not really.  So I am quiet and quietly try to take care of the house and cook him meals, but it wears on me.

I wonder how other wives really feel.  I wonder if they are near tears or in full deluge of tears as much as I.  I wonder if it’s just my disability to adjust to these changes that makes my 5-week old marriage so difficult.  I wonder if my husband hears me.  I wonder if he would know what to do if he did hear me.

Do I even know what to do?  I am a get-involved sort.  I’m already making strides in that area, but it’s nothing.  It feels like nothing.  In little moments, it feels like life, but in the rest of the moments, the most of the time, it feels like not-really-me.

I feel like not me.

But in the midst of this, I tell myself that change, new things, take you out of your old shell and make a new shell around you.  It is reasonable, then, to expect to feel quite vulnerable and unlike yourself in that time.  The best thing I can do is let the change happen around me, with me, even through me.  If I fight it, I will only end up feeling such oddity and sadness for longer.

It is okay to take a while to change, but not if its because of fighting.  This only creates scars, mostly of resentment.

(*some dealings from September 2012)