Strong

The weekend was full of highs and lows. Money stress eats away at everything. Your relationship's with friends. Your relationship with your children, and your ability to be a good parent. How you move about during the day is helped or hindered by constant, gnawing, thoughts. Your very freedom is dictated by how much money you have, or have not. A love hate relationship. Constantly. It is simply, at times, maddening, and truly exhausting.

My marriage has not been immune to this constant stress. It has chipped and pecked, slowly at the foundation of it. It has done it very quietly. I think all is well, and suddenly, I step on a weak plank, and one whole part of the floor shifts, and avoids caving in by mere millimeters. Many close calls. Too many to count.

I can see how some marriages cannot continue to stand on such shaky ground. I used to think that they probably never had a firm ground to begin with. They built there life on swamp land, and it was only a matter of time before it all sunk, and was swallowed up by the muck of it all. A ticking time bomb.

I don't think that is true anymore. Constant, palpable worry, will weaken even the strongest of foundations. The weakening of it takes a little bit longer. Bit. by bit. Pebble by pebble. Sometimes, just tiny grains are carried away. But eventually, worry's evil excavation will wreak havoc. No one is immune.

But this is the only foundation that I want to stand on. This ground is soft, and in a warm place. I looked for so long to find the perfect plot, in which to build it, and found the best partner, to do it with. So we will continue to get out the mortar. We will patch, and repair. We will shore up the weakest points. Some days all we have is duct tape. The fix is temporary.

Yesterday, we had boulders. And we moved them into place. The ground is still so shaky beneath us. There are quite a few areas I don't trust to walk on yet.

But when the dust settles, it will still be standing.
I know this, for certain.