A Diligent Heart

This past weekend, my husband and I celebrated three years of marriage, but our plans were almost thwarted.

As I stood in the kitchen stuffing my face with a sufganiyot donut for a snack before we left to run our last bit of errands, I heard my husband grunt. It was more of a growl. Like an animal in pain. He did not howl nor scream. He’s as tough as the nails he hammers every day at work, but that growl was loud enough for me to hear it through our closed front door, the living room, and into the kitchen probably 100 feet away.

That growl also told me he was hurt.

Three months ago, he had cut his knuckle on his power saw, so I feared it was a similar situation since he was outside chopping firewood with his hatchet.

It was worse. So much worse.

I’ve never seen so much blood.

He had missed the lumber and taken out a chunk of his left pointer finger. Much to his chagrin, there was no way we were not going to the hospital.

A trip to the ER wasn’t exactly how I saw my vacation beginning. Except as I stood there in my living room, fuming, every scenario running through my mind of how our plans could be altering, by how much, what I would be willing to give up, and what we should just cancel immediately—I paused.

A few minutes earlier, I had said to my husband as he washed off his finger and dressed his wound, trying to staunch the blood, “Whether or not this ruins our weekend depends entirely on how you react.”

What I realised in that moment was that reaction was as much my responsibility as it was his.

A few weeks prior, my husband and I had one of the worst fights of our entire relationship. Caught between the settling dust of Thanksgiving, and bracing ourselves for the oncoming storm that was Chanukkah, I think the toil of the past six months had finally worn us down enough we saw each other as the enemy instead of partners.

What that residual angst stirred in me was the premonition, the fear, our upcoming anniversary vacation would be horrendous. That instead of enjoying each other’s company, we would be loathing it. I had warned him of my fear, and begged him that whatever tension lay between us, we cut it before it was too late.

When I heard my husband’s growl, that fear gripped me, an icy tingle on the nape of my neck. Could my worst fears be coming true?

That’s when I remembered a thought I had after our fight.

You see, our fight felt like a huge set back, that we were regressing to prior behaviours we had worked so diligently in the last three years to overcome that we might better care for one another. That’s what upset me most, the possibility we were losing the growth we had fought so hard to achieve.

Maybe though, I wondered, it wasn’t a set-back at all. Maybe instead—in our hard-won comfort, our contentment—we forgot to be diligent and instead reacted out of laziness. It is our natural state to only think of ourselves; we were alone so long. (That and we’re human, so therefore selfish.) As a result, we became so focused on ourselves we lost sight of the other, and this is what spurred our abysmal fight.

This idea sprung from the memory of something I heard Rabbi Manis Friedman say in a lecture he gave on a successful marriage, that spouses must maintain dignity no matter how close they grow to one another. He then discussed how to maintain it, but my mind wandered past those points to another phrase I had heard once, that familiarity breeds contempt.

Maybe we had just grown too familiar with each other. Maybe we had stopped maintaining our dignity. Maybe we had stopped being diligent to be deferent.

How interesting, then, that I’ve noticed when I’m more focused on loving him, he’s more affectionate with me. If I’m too focused on what I should be receiving, then I get more critical and he feels more distant.

That third trip to the ER this year was more of a wake-up call than a disruption, a reminder that it was ourselves—myself—who had the power to ruin our weekend plans. Not any accident.

Besides, that’s all it was. An accident. Why would my husband willingly avulse his finger whilst chopping wood for our fires and simultaneously disrupt all our plans?

Standing there, I saw two paths: I could focus on what I’d be losing, on how all these plans I’d been making and looking forward to for weeks, months, could be cancelled by one wrongly aimed stroke of a hatchet, or instead just focus on caring for the man I promised to love for all eternity.

Choosing one, I walked into the bedroom where my husband brooded and sat next to him on the bed. I grabbed his [uninjured] hand and held it, apologising for yelling, and explained that I understood now he didn’t deserve my getting angry at him. He just needed me to be there.

He needed me to have a diligent heart.