Contemptible Familiarity

Having the luxury of long-term friends, working at the same place my entire adult life, and a twenty-year marriage, I sometimes consider whether there is truth in the old adage, familiarity breeds contempt.

Friends from a lifetime ago remember a different me than I am now.  I remember them as they were, and rejoice in the people they've become.  I'm sure they would say the same about me!  I once studied the ethic of care during my undergraduate tenure at the College of St Catherine.  The philosophers concur:  evolving from the one cared for and becoming the care giver impacts how a person relates to nearly everything in the world.

My employment in a family business has long been a struggle in surprising ways.  The work is one thing.  The family component...  I've often thought my parents look at me and see the same me they saw when I was a child.  I know when I make a mistake, they responded in the same ways they would have when I was a minor.  The dynamic of the family home carried over to the work place for decades, and really only changed when mother left first the business and then her marriage.

And then there's my twenty-five year relationship - twenty-year marriage - with Joe.  We are so not the same people we were when we were sixteen and seventeen!  Yet vestiges of those people remain.

Joe continues to play baseball.  He loves sugar in any form.  He has the best work ethic of any person I've ever met.  He can do anything, anything he chooses to do.  He loves deeply and quietly.  And the man accepts people as they are - valuing individual strengths and ignoring weaknesses.

My first loves, education and stories, remain.  I have always loved balance in the things that matter to me, and my priorities never changed:  faith, family, and friends.  I can never hold anger, and am the first to offer forgiveness when hurt or mistreated. 

The marriage preparation courses we completed prior to marrying indicated an unholy trinity that would cause us the greatest distress over the years - finances, religion, and communication.  At the time, we thought the "testing" was silly; looking back, we're a little impressed with its accuracy.  Perhaps knowing those things would be an issue was pre-warning of sorts that allowed us to weather some upheaval - not always prettily, but successfully nonetheless. 

There is no one more familiar to me than Joe.  That wasn't always true.  The babies that grew in my body were as familiar to me as self at a time when Joe and I were still learning to know each other.  Of course the babies I so cherished have grown into men separate from me, even their scent their very own and no longer that milky merging of each of them with me.

I know what Joe loves and hates.  Who he was and who he will be.  Where he's been and where he wants to go.  There is no separating that knowledge from the fabric of our lives.  I can no longer look at him and see a stranger.

I don't find contempt in that kind of intimate familiarity. 

I find contentment. 

I hope he does too.