Family Circles

Sorry we haven’t updated in the last week. It was my turn and I kept promising Kristi I’d do it soon, and one by one the days slipped away.

Things are going well. We got the tuxes sorted out and taken care of. Her veil arrived today and sits waiting to be picked up. We’ve chosen the rings and are preparing to buy them in the next week or so. Business is picking up; it’s only the sixth and I’ve already logged two-thirds of my hour quota for the month (we love paying contracts around here). Slowly the big stress hairball that was December is receding and we’re settling into a comfortable, peaceful domestic life.

The weekend was busy, but a good busy. Saturday we made good on a promise to Kristi’s parents and drove over to the local Salvation Army Child Development Center. They had eight or nine computers in unknown working order, scattered in disarray around the building; Kristi and I went over, checked them out and cleaned them up and got them working again for the preschool there. Luckily they were all very salvagable, most having nothing at all wrong with them – they’d just suffered some neglect over time, but nothing that couldn’t be quickly mended.

On Sunday we went over to the Jepsons’ house for their Super Bowl party. It was a blast – lots of great food, a dozen of the Jepson’s best friends eating, joking, laughing at commercials, venting at political ads, and trying to mentally will a football up and down an Arizona astroturf. And as you probably know, it was a great game. It was just a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Driving home that evening, Kristi and I were talking about family. Namely, our families. She has a huge circle of family both biological and extended – three generations of relatives in the same town, many in the same church, and a wide circle of friends that includes many who have known Kristi all her life. It’s a circle that to my eyes just seems to widen and widen, and there’s something awfully comforting in that: there’s this vast support structure here that is utterly unlike anything I knew in my own life before meeting her. Don and Kathy and everyone else in that circle have gone out of their way to welcome me into their midst, and I appreciate that. It’s calm and peaceful and stable and sane, and I’m getting to really like it a lot.

Sometimes it seems like my own family circle, rather than spreading out, just keeps going round and round. Over the same territories, over the same bumps, over the same pointless nonsense, never even noticing that it’s not actually getting anywhere. The contrast between the two family experiences is jarring for both of us; it’s forced us both to examine our own lives a bit more objectively and to better assess what we each underappreciate and overindulge. And brought us each to ask how much of either family experience we want to bring into our new marriage, not to mention the lives of our future children.

That’s been a particular issue this week as a simmering situation in the greater Warren clan has threatened to explode into a full-blown drama down in Florida. Pointless nonsense. The same round-and-rounds. The same trip around the same circle for the same reasons and heading to the same places, and it doesn’t need to be but it will anyway. Because that’s what my family does: they go round in circles, never leaving nor arriving, probably until the end of time. It’s all just such a waste, because it doesn’t have to be that way. It can stop. But people have to be willing to stop it, and they’re not. And so they take another trip around.

I told Kristi the other night, as we discussed and reflected on the situation, that more than anything that’s why I came here. Why I asked her to marry me. Why I love her. In addition to all her wonderful qualities – and she has many – Kristi offered me something that no one had credibly offered before: hope. Hope that marriage and children and family and friends could all be happy and healthy things. Hope that people can be who they appear to be, and can be honest and caring without some sort of ulterior motive behind it. Hope that there was a real way off the endless roundabout.

That hope is a fragile thing. A sacred thing. A thing worth working, fighting and sacrificing greatly to protect. For some reason Kristi saw fit to entrust it to my care. I’m deeply honored by that, and intend to live up to that honor best I can.