Written By: Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

We have become very good at being between houses.  The Colorado house has become my mother’s house, at least for the moment, which is one of those sentences that sounds temporary until you start counting the boxes. Some of the children are further south, and that arrangement has its own logic, including the small but necessary reminder that children eventually become people with houses, one mine and John’s  who can kick us out when they want to “redesign”, (and not keep the house “dry” of mini-kegs when their father is over a decade sober). Another one is in Cape Cod, where independence has become less of an abstract virtue and more of a practical requirement, particularly where John is concerned. Our daughter can’t quite sleep without him, so she’s got a cottage, and an old Silverado to drive until she forgets about him. 

So here we are, two married people with several homes between us and nowhere to sleep. I have to admit there is something almost comic about it, although I am not laughing at all.

Money has a way of making philosophy less interesting. John’s accounts are blocked, my part-time teaching work has dried up, and suddenly the difference between having bills and having money feels like a distinction invented by someone who has never paid a bill. The bills themselves are managed, which is important, but there is no mysterious person waiting behind a curtain with a checkbook when something unexpected happens. We have reached that peculiar adult territory where everything is technically handled and everything still feels precarious. I have always thought of security as something you build slowly, but lately it feels more like something you carry carefully from room to room. You put it down for a second and discover that the floor has moved.

Marriage is interesting under these conditions because romance becomes very difficult to perform. Nobody looks particularly cinematic while trying to solve logistics. John can be funny in the middle of it, which is one of the reasons I married him, although sometimes his humor arrives at precisely the moment I am trying to remain serious. I can become organizationally tedious to the point of irritation, which is another way of saying that I sometimes confuse his anxiety within his organization.

Between the two of us, we have developed a small economy of glances that usually means, Are you seeing this? followed by, Yes, unfortunately. There’s also, “You’re good looking” and “No divorce”.

Then, because life has a sense of humor, I received one of John’s rare texts. It was not about money or houses or children or anything that could be entered into a spreadsheet. It was a message about avoiding boring conversation, about confidence and quick wit, about being playful and keeping him curious, about a little tension and perhaps a little trouble. The funny thing about receiving something like that from your husband when your life is already full of trouble is that you suddenly have to consider the distinction between the kind you chose and the kind you did not. I read it and thought, “The person I married still knows how to interrupt my thinking.”

There are moments when I wonder whether attraction changes when life becomes inconvenient. Not disappears, exactly, but becomes less decorative. You notice that desire is not always candlelight or a planned evening or the version of yourself you have time to prepare. Sometimes it is a sentence arriving on a phone while you are worried about where your clothes are going to live next month. Sometimes it is being reminded that beneath the responsibilities there are still two people who once found each other interesting. That may be one of the more underrated parts of a long (on and off)  marriage: remembering that your spouse is not only the person who knows your passwords, your children, your habits and your worst moods. He is also somebody who can still surprise you.

I think about home differently now. For years, I treated home as a physical proposition: walls, rooms, photographs, books, the particular chair somebody refuses to get rid of, the kitchen where everyone eventually gathers even when there are other perfectly good places to sit. But perhaps home is less stable than that. Perhaps home is the person who knows why you are quiet. Perhaps it is the person who can look at you when you are surrounded by uncertainty and understand that you are not asking to be rescued. You are asking to be accompanied. There is a tremendous difference between those two things.

The children complicate this in the way children are supposed to. We spend years teaching them dependence and then become surprised when independence arrives with opinions, boundaries and occasionally a locked door. I understand the necessity of it, even when I don’t particularly enjoy the emotional weather that comes with it. John has had to learn that being a father does not mean remaining permanently available as infrastructure. There comes a point when love requires you to step back far enough for another person to discover what they can carry. This is one of those lessons that sounds beautiful until you are actually standing in the doorway.

My mother taking over the Colorado house has its own strange poetry. Mothers have a way of occupying space that makes you remember that you were once someone’s child before you became someone’s wife, mother, teacher, writer or anything else. There is something humbling about watching your own childhood architecture become part of another arrangement. I don’t necessarily like it, but I don’t think dislike is the same thing as tragedy. Sometimes adulthood is simply discovering that everybody has needs, including the people who raised you, and that everybody’s needs eventually collide. Perhaps, I’m too understanding, hence the trouble in which we wade.

I keep returning to the word still. Still here. Still married. Still figuring it out. Still making jokes when there is not much to laugh about, still irritated by each other, still attracted to each other, still trying to understand what the next version of our life is supposed to look like. The word has become more interesting to me with age because it doesn’t promise that nothing has changed. Quite the opposite. It admits that everything has changed and asks what remains anyway. That feels much closer to the truth of marriage.

Maybe this is the installment where the house disappears and the marriage becomes visible again. Not because houses don’t matter—they do, enormously—but because a home can be taken over, redesigned, sold, emptied, inherited or temporarily unavailable. Money can become inaccessible. Work can vanish. Children can move south, east, out, or simply beyond the reach of the person who used to solve everything for them. And there we are, John and I, carrying our uncertainty around like two people who forgot to pack lightly. I don’t know where we will be sleeping next, and I don’t have a particularly elegant answer for what happens after that.

But I know this: he texted me.

For the moment, that counts as a room.

I kept the text itself understated rather than reproducing its language verbatim, so it functions as a revealing interruption in the marriage rather than turning the piece into a commentary on that message.