Beech Tree News Network

“Chapter Two” is one of my favorite plays, written by one of my favorite playwrights, Neil Simon.   (It was adapted to film in 1979.)  The play is semi-autobiographical, and centers around Simon’s struggle to move on with his life after his first wife died.  In the storyline, Simon decides to try dating again, and gets caught up in a whirlwind romance with his soon-to-be second wife, Marsha Mason.  Simon puts on the brakes when he realizes he is still grieving the death of his first wife.  He says to Mason, “I resent everything you want out of marriage that I’ve already had, and for making me reach so deep inside to give it to you again.  I resent being at L or M and having to go back to A!”
    I want to go on record as saying, if my husband, Garey, dies before I do, I will never go back to A.  I will never go back to A because I don’t have the mental, emotional or physical strength to tackle the areas of marriage that require younger and stronger wits.
    For one, I never want to do the money thing with another spouse.  The financial advisor, Dave Ramsey, says money is very emotional, and he’s right.  Money involves obligation, responsibility and priority.  Each person in a marriage has his or her own ideas about how it should be handled, and it is a rare marriage in which both people are in total agreement on the subject.  More times than not it is one of those “never the twain shall meet” situations.
    Also, I never want to help raise kids with another spouse—not my own, not his, not adopted, not foster, not grand—and it has nothing to do with how I feel about children.  I love mine and most everybody else’s.  I just don’t have the wherewithal to argue with, teach or give direction to people who are smarter than me.  There’s a reason God gives kids to young people.  They still have most of their brain cells intact.
    In the miscellaneous category, I never want to have to pick up after anybody ever again—I don’t even like picking up after myself—and I never want to be in charge of figuring out what’s for dinner every evening.  I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, if women didn’t have to worry about what’s for dinner every night, we’d rule the world.
    This brings me to the last and most compelling reason for never going back to A: I never want to have to share a bathroom with another spouse.  All of your stuff gets muddled into the other person’s stuff when you or the other person are rifling through the collective stuff trying to find what inadvertently got mixed together.
Among relationship counselors, the consensus is that most marriages that break up do so because of problems in the areas of sex or money.  I think we need to add the third category of sharing a bathroom.  When I read in the paper that a couple is celebrating a fifty-year or more wedding anniversary, I say to myself, I sure hope they make it another year sharing a bathroom.  It is the true litmus test of all marriages.
    Some of the biggest misunderstandings in my own marriage happened in the bathroom.  There were countless times when Garey couldn’t find his green comb or razor or nail clippers, and he was convinced I had moved them—I probably did—and it took me forever to get Garey not to grab my hair towel to wipe fog from the mirrors or water from the counter.
    In November, our marriage will be thirty-eight years old.  We haven’t arrived by a long shot, but we’ve finally reached the point where every little difference in opinion isn’t a major point of contention.  I’d like to think it’s because we’ve matured, but it’s probably more like we’re just too tired to take a stand over anything less than a life-threatening issue.  Most days go pretty smoothly.  We’ve worked out a budget, our kids are grown, and our granddaughter will soon be three and hopefully out of the terrible-two phase.  I’ve come to terms with picking up after everybody and coming up with a menu for dinner every evening.  Now, if I could have my own bathroom, we might just make it.