Making a home

Wally and Katie,
Sitting in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
First comes love
Then comes marriage
Then comes baby
In a baby carriage!

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Editor’s note:
This is the third post in a series about our 50th anniversary. See also A Year of Jubilee and Falling in Love.

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So we met. We married. We had kids. It’s the natural order of things.

If only we had been prepared.

Sure, we had the basic idea down. Rent a place and make bookshelves with pieces of lumber and concrete blocks. Figure out how to celebrate holidays when your families did it differently. Every marriage is in some. ways a cross-cultural experience.

But we loved each other, in the sense of an ongoing commitment and intentional choice. But there was so much we didn’t know. No premarital counseling. No financial training. No older couple to come along beside us, not even our parents who lived 12 hours away in different directions.

So my misplaced self-confidence met her insecurities, and we muddled through, bringing different unmet expectations to the table without being able to talk about them. It is only by the grace of God we made it, and that doesn’t mean we prayed together or anything like that. We didn’t know how.

We had a few basic commitments. If and when we had kids, she would stay home with them. And, because we did read a book about Abraham, we understood vaguely that we were pilgrims in a strange land. And it was a very strange land.

I worked as a respiratory therapist until I decided not to go to med school, and she worked as an assistant for an optometrist. We rented a house in Chattanooga and then bought one with a down payment from some stocks my maternal grandfather had left me. And then we sold it and moved to Knoxville for me to pursue a master’s degree in English education.

I remember the night we arrived. There was a football game at the university and all the hotels were filled. We had all of our stuff packed into a little AMC Hornet, and it was freezing cold. And raining. I finally found a dumpy room with broken windows in the bathroom and spoiled food in the frig. That’s when the thermostat went out on our car. I stood in the parking lot and cried, unable to care for the woman who had followed me into this nightmare. It was not the darkest moment of our life together. But I may have started to grow up a little.

After a few days, we found a garage apartment where we ate mostly canned tomatoes until I finally picked up a third-shift job in respiratory therapy. I had picked up a second job at a private school by the time we had Margaret, our daughter. I was working both jobs and going to school.

Katie, meanwhile, had many fears. Her dad had not always paid the bills on time, and they frequently had the power turned off in the middle of the winter. And I had moved her to a strange place and eventually into a modular home she didn’t like. She just didn’t know how to tell me.

There was so much I didn’t know about her, and I wasn’t paying attention either. She had other fears I didn’t notice. But when I finished my program, we moved back to Chattanooga where I began teaching full-time at the college where we met. And working nights at the hospital. We had our son Christian, and I plowed on, oblivious to Katie’s loneliness and fears.

I loved her, but I wasn’t very good at it. I even loved her unconditionally, as my father had shown me. But it’s easy to see, as I explained last month, why she didn’t fall in love with me until we had been married ten years, and we moved to Michigan for me to work on my Ph.D. at Michigan State. Again with no job. You can see the pattern here. I may have taken the Abrahamic model too seriously.

Here, as I’ve described, we found time to be together since I went without a full-time job for a year. I was working part-time, and we had a little money from the sale of a house. We went to parks. We went on picnics. We found a church where we were still strangers in many ways, with our Southern ways and foods. But we had some stability. And we had two more kids. Michael and Pilgrim.

In my master’s program in education, there was a lot of buzz about individualized lesson plans, so we (mostly me) decided to homeschool. Neither of us had had a great experience in school growing up, and we figured we could do better. So we were off on a new adventure, books and kites and community theatre, with violin lessons and co-ops. We tried to cultivate their minds and explore their passions.

Homeschooling, as it turns out, is designed entirely to cultivate the character of parents. We had much to learn about patience. And we may not have learned it. We did begin to learn how to create some boundaries and priorities, albeit imperfectly. We could not do everything, and we had to study math eventually. We worked at setting goals for each child and raised smart, productive, and friendly kids. More of God’s grace.

But I’m a slow learner, so I picked up a side gig as a magazine editor. While I was attending classes at MSU and teaching full-time at Spring Arbor University, Katie provided end-of-life care for her mother, two elderly neighbors, and then my mother. The neighbors left us some property, so we remodeled an old farmhouse because we needed something to do.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

And we wouldn’t do it again, at least not the same way. Or advise it. There were too many cold nights that had little to do with Michigan winters. There was stress and silence. And sometimes there was anger and hurt. Family pictures seldom tell the whole story.

Now we sometimes provide the premarital counseling we didn’t get for young couples in our church, and the most practical advice I can offer is to create patterns of life where you privilege time together. Through all of this, there was grace. A merciful God continued to draw us to Himself. We became more intentional about the routines of our lives. We are still learning. We have come to value our time with each other, a story I have yet to write in this series. And we have understood more and more about the covenant we made 50 years ago on the top of a mountain in East Tennessee.

Making a home is mostly about making time for each other, a lesson we learned slowly. And unevenly.

But we were also learning how to keep covenant. Next month at the Daysman.

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How about you? What important lessons did you learn early in your marriage? Comment below.