Please Give Me a Syllabus (and then an A)

I got married on December 19, which was also when my last paper was due. Last semester, writing felt like drawing my own blood, and final papers were bleeding the life out of me. Towards the end, when I was home and drafting over and over again, driving my sister to and from work and school was one of my few non-school, non-wedding prep activities. Elle and I would give each other bullet-pointed recaps of what was happening in our lives, and I’d play Elle thirty-second snippets of as many songs as we could fit in from my reception playlist. I required a lot of validation regarding the individual song choice and overall quality of the playlist, because making it had caused me a lot of stress.

One morning, after I’d dropped Elle off, I was driving back to my parent’s house, still listening to the playlist. Phillip Phillips’s (I’ve just googled it and that is, in fact, his given name, which might be worse than the alternative) “Gone Gone Gone” was playing, and there’s this one line that goes, “I surrender honestly, you’ve always done the same for me.”

I started crying. Which isn’t surprising at all.

I was so intensely stressed right before I got married. The real downside of not turning in your last final until the day before your wedding is not the shadows under your eyes in your wedding pictures and getting sick on your honeymoon, it’s that you spend your time feeling finals stress and not feeling wedding stress until you’re listening to Philip Phillips and you’re sobbing on a Tuesday morning.

I wanted to marry Austin so badly, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me. Not that I was thinking of not marrying him, just that I couldn’t think through what marrying him would mean, and I wasn’t sure I was capable of what it would mean, I wasn’t sure I could do it well, I wanted so badly to do it well, and when I thought about doing it badly I felt panic rise like bile. But I couldn’t feel any of that, because I had to figure out what was going on with Emily Dickinson and why she was so fixated on doors and also decide how much/if we were using Christmas lights at the reception.

Except that, suddenly, Phillip Phillips was singing and I was feeling all of that, half way up the hill to my parent’s house, the sun rising behind me. I’m not sure I like equating marriage with surrendering, but I think the line struck me because it felt like I was laying all of my defenses down, and I felt so desperately exposed. And because, over and over again, Austin had lowered his defenses with me, even when I hid behind mine.

When Austin first told me he liked me, that he wanted to date me, I was in finals, the reservoirs of stress deep and focused on medieval mystics and one-volume histories of American religion. It was freezing cold and we were walking down the street we live on now, and he said, “I’m not sure if this has been obvious or not, but I have a crush on you.”

I said, “That’s so nice of you.” And he just nodded like, thought you ought to know.

Two days later, I said “I don’t know how I feel, but I’ll let you know when I do,” and he nodded again and he told me to call him if I got bored over winter break. And I thought that if he could figure out how to give me room to not know and sit in that vulnerability, then I could probably figure out how to be vulnerable enough to date him. I finished my finals, gave him a call, argued about Harry Potter for an hour and then, just as we were hanging up said, “Cool, also, by the way, I like you and would like to date you. Have fun at dinner!” I hung up, breathing hard.

Pre-marriage stressed me out more than pre-dating, which I guess make sense. It’s a matter of degrees.

After weeks of fear and sleeping badly, marrying Austin was such a relief. It was a glorious, giddy feeling, walking out of the ceremony: it was done, I’d managed it, I was vulnerable, I surrendered. I’m grateful for the feeling, especially because it didn’t last very long. I’ve had to breathe through vulnerability that made me cry and shake a lot in the last month. Some days I wake up feeling as giddy as I did walking out of the sealing room, and some days I wake up scared all over again. I’m not sure I knew that the second thing would keep happening, at least not this much this soon.

At church last week we were talking about Lehi’s vision: Lehi has an angel appear to him; he wanders in darkness; he finds a tree with fruit that is the love of God; he wants everyone to have the fruit; some people come, some people don’t, some people come and then wander off. I’ve read this vision so many times, I couldn’t think of anything to say about it, and I did not feel confident I’d hear anything new. But this rather reserved lady in front of me a raised her hand and said that she’d been thinking about trees, and how Adam and Eve were ashamed after they ate from the Tree of Life, because they were exposed. And some of the people who wandered away from the tree in Lehi’s vision were ashamed because they were exposed. She said that, in these stories, partaking of the fruit makes you vulnerable and changes you, and it makes sense to be scared of that.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the fruit represents knowledge of good and evil and in the second story the fruit represents God’s love. Both of these fruits, then, ushered the eater into higher realities, realities that were more beautiful than the ones they’d lived in before, but also more complicated and confusing. They came to know reality and God and each other better as they ate the fruit, and they also knew themselves better.

My friend Katie and I call this process “leveling up.” You were in one reality and now—oops—you’ve entered another one. The thing about this process is, in my experience, you’re never ready for it. No matter how long God or the serpent sat with Eve, explaining what was about to go down, she would not have understood what the world would look like when it broke out of black and white and into shards of color. And tasting God’s love shifts the ground under your feet in ways that you can’t possibly brace yourself for. In my tradition, we believe both of these things are good things. Eve was not meant to live forever in innocence but to become something more than she was, and knowing God’s love makes us more than we are too. But I think what the lady in Sunday school might have been saying is the fact that these things are good doesn’t meant they’re not scary, and the ways we come to know ourselves in the process sometimes make us feel ashamed. We don’t always like what the light pouring off the tree shows us about ourselves. I don’t, anyway.

I don’t like being bad at things. I like being good at things and then I want to be told I am good at things so that I know it. I think this part of why I like school. I happen to have a skill set that school has decided is important, so if I work really hard then usually I do well, and then someone tells me that I did well, and I like that. I like it so much that I’ve centered myself around it to a degree that my dad has been worried about for years.

I want to get A’s as a wife. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted an A in a class, because the stakes seem so much higher, and I’m more afraid I won’t be able to get it. I don’t know how. I don’t know what the grading criteria is. I keep fixating on things that definitely do not indicate my success as a wife, like: there is no food in our fridge right now, because last time we went grocery shopping we were both so excited about making macrons we basically only bought almond flour and powdered sugar. And I know this isn’t really the measure of how I’m doing as a wife, but I also don’t really know what that measure is. And what I do see right now, what feels evident, is that I am not good at this yet. What feels clear is that I am still selfish and I still have control issues and I am not in control of my anxiety. I didn’t really want to know that about myself, and I really didn’t want Austin to know that.

I’ve been thinking, though, about Lehi’s vulnerability. He was vulnerable and exposed when he stood under the tree, bathed in its light—but he was vulnerable and exposed as he wandered in darkness too, when he wasn’t sure what was happening or where he was going. Lehi passed through light and darkness that interrupted and mottled each other, and the whole time he was exposed and vulnerable, because vulnerability is not an option, it’s the human condition. Whether I stand in the light or in the darkness that stretches in between moments of light, I am vulnerable. In the light and in the dark, I am exposed and at risk. Marriage feels like both of these things at once. It feels like I am exposed to unflattering light and simultaneous in the dark about what is happening and where I’m going.

But also. Light provides agonizing, sanctifying clarity, and darkness has its own beauty. Around Christmas, my school’s holiday service is a celebration of “holy darkness.” Most religions in the world celebrate winter, as the earth tips farther and farther away from the sun and we receive less and less light. They mark the darkness with respect for the unknown things it holds, for the joy of mystery. I believe that there is goodness in light and holiness in darkness—that exposure and unknowing-ness can be consecrated, can be something we choose. It can be an honest surrender: we can give it to our people and to our God.

I woke up feeling scared again today. I was so aware of so many of the things I want to be and am not, but not every day is like today. There are days Austin and I try to make macarons and we burn them and the days we spend six hours building bookcases and they look better than we thought they would. There are days when we talk through our confusion, and I cry and sometimes he does, and I tell him that rubbing tears all over your face is good for your skin, which might not be true, but I heard it once. There are days we edit each other’s writing (I offer a lot of feedback, Austin just say’s it’s good, because he’s too nice to be good at peer review), and when we make tea and watch the Great British Baking Show, and these days are often the same days that I wake up afraid and army crawl, wrestle, free climb my way into joy. I think I can choose that.