We are always enhancing ourselves and our surroundings. Nothing is ever good enough in its natural state (don't get me wrong, I wouldn't step foot in Starbucks without at the very least having applied mascara, and coffee is meant to have chocolate in it); the very things that keep us waking up every morning and finding purpose to continue doing so, like our relationships, are up for relentless scrutiny. You'd think we'd learn to appreciate some of the things we have in our lives (as Mark Darcy would say) just as they are; but of course, we don't.
My relationship with my husband has recently been on the chopping block for reasons that are purely circumstantial; meaning reasons that are actually unimportant. Circumstances change, people not so much -- not really anyways. I've come to realize I don't want to change my husband, or even the way he has chosen to interact with me since the beginning of his inhumanly taxing foray into becoming a surgeon. I don't want him to change his professional aspirations either; I want to change the circumstances in which we have been forced to achieve them. I want to have him home, awake and communicative more than an hour or two at a time. I want him to make more than five dollars an hour for laboring until he is undernourished and suffering exhaustion. I want him to find the time and energy to exercise again so he might resemble someone closer to Thor than Scott Pilgrim.
I know some of the things I want for him and us will come to fruition when the insanity of residency is over. I just have to remember -- these things I feel need fixing are results of circumstance, not of who he is and what we have or don't have in our relationship. We're not broken; we just need to take a few deep breaths together -- naked, sipping margaritas on a beach in Mexico, remembering how we came together in the first place.
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