Team We

 

Team Me We

For our sixteenth wedding anniversary, my wife got me a card from the Dollar Store. That sounds callous and pathetic; however, we have a mutual agreement to only do Dollar Store cards because all the cards are overpriced, the Hallmark cards at least, and they are all cheesy anyway so it just simplifies things. I got her card from the Dollar Store too, and picked flowers from around the yard to make her a bouquet which I arranged and put in a vase on the kitchen table. We didn't go out to eat or to a movie or even have a date because I was feeling low, a kind of suicidal low, and everything would have been tainted by that no matter what we did to celebrate. 

So we postponed until we were at the beach visiting my parents and brother the following week. Even then, too, I was feeling awful--anxious, weepy, irrational and still suicidal. We did go out in town, walked along the beach and then to the wharf to sit on a bench. We wanted coffee but it was late, so we settled at a bar and had a Coke and a Twisted Tea. It was fine, it was good, but I felt bad not being able to show her how much she meant to me, to be happy about it and actually celebrate those sixteen years. Because she is great, she understood and squeezed my hand to let me know it was okay, as if I were an invalid in a hospital bed, which was how I felt at least.

Anyway, back to that card. Most of the cards we have to choose from are either gag worthy flowery, probably AI generated sonnets, or the "funny" cards that are lighthearted and stupid. But this one she got me this time was just right. All it said on the front was:

I'm on team YOU!

And inside she said there was no other team she'd rather be on than Team Me.

She has the card sitting on the bay window sill in the kitchen where I can see it, next to an orchid some friends got us that has died and come back to life each year for four years now, maybe to remind me that there is in fact a Resurrection, that it is not a myth or a dream, that things will not always be awful and I will not always want to die, that things can come back from the brink and bloom and flower and be just as gorgeous and intricate and beautiful as that orchid is each spring when it blooms, leaving the previous year's pale colored stalk like a tentacle of death on the plant, like the rings of a tree you can ascertain its age by. I know it is in its fourth year of blooming because there are three of those spindly tentacles protruding from the main stem. 

And we do nothing to this plant except a tablespoon of water every few days; no fertilizer or care. I would have thought it would have used up or exhausted the soil in the small white pot, but it has not. As if something so beautiful demands an intensive input, managed care, to come back year after year as radiant as the year before. As if it does not deserve to live or be beautiful because of that lack of care.

And yet, it lives. 

And so I'm reading the cover of this card from my wife--mind you, not even the handwritten contents on the inside, and fighting back tears because inside I'm thinking "You piece of trash. Look at you, using up the food and the oxygen in the air. You don't deserve it. You are a loser." And other such self-recriminating thoughts. 

And yet here is this woman, this gift to my life, who would care to disagree with those statements. I am on your team, she says. I choose you. You and I are in this together. I am on team You. 

And of course, I want to say, you've made a mistake, I'm a lousy bet, a bad horse, and yet she won't be deterred. She pours into me, believes in me and the family we have created together. And there is no force stronger on earth for a man than a wife who believes in her husband. I cleave to her too, because she is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. And it does not occur to me in the throws of all these self-accusations of worthlessness and being a loser that I am accusing her of those things as well because we are one flesh, what's hers is mine and what's mine is hers. 

She doesn't deserve those self-defacing titles. And neither do I. They come from the Accuser under the guise of my own voice, like some kind of AI hack, a counterfeit trying to steal my identity. Because I am a child of God. I belong to Christ, I am not my own. I rebuke the demon but the echoes of the voices remain.

That exclamation mark at the end of the "You" on the cover of the card, I think that's what pushed my tears over the edge to spill out the corner of my eye. So juvenile, but it underscored that my wife was not begrudgingly choosing me as if I were the last kid left on the court and resigned to being on Team Rob, but she was in fact enthusiastic about it, believes in me, in us. Not that I will carry her her whole life, but that she will shoulder me when I am hurt and wounded, throw me over her five-foot-four frame and not give up on me or leave me for dead just because I cannot walk on my own in this war. It's a given that I would do the same for her, but to know that she would do it for me--a nurse, a soldier, doing whatever needs to be done for the team. Team Us.

There is a mural I painted that hangs in our bedroom. I painted it when we were engaged, stretching the canvas myself on scrap 1x2s and using cheap little tubes of acrylic paint. It is based on a poem that the boxer Muhammad Ali composed and recited spontaneously, the shortest in history:

Me. We.

The "me" is small, in black print, while the "We" sweeps up, the tentacle of the "W" diving the "m" and the "e" in "me." The "me" is tenuous on its own and easily split apart, but the "We" is indivisible, even while one would think a "we" would be more easily divided in two because it is made up of two parts, while the "me," or self, is a single entity.

While the card from my wife moved me--that she would entrust her future to someone as fragile and ill-equipped for life as myself (Team Me)--in her I see the potential for something elementally stronger, like a water molecule, a fusion of hydrogen and oxygen. Team We. The chemical fissure, the atomic glue, the spiritual epoxy is the sacramental grace of our marriage that not even the pope can dissolve, for no man should tear asunder what God has joined together. I would rather be a single drop of water in an ocean with her than an entire atmosphere of either hydrogen or oxygen alone by itself. 

For God can keep an orchid alive with a drop of water a day, and not only keep it alive but resurrect it year after year, bringing it back from death again and again and into new, radiant life. There are sixteen stalks, sixteen tentacles on our stem, giving testament to our life together, and I pray for the grace of sixty more.