I have come to take thee…into a strange land…which thou knowest not of…

Nearly five years ago, long before I had researched and written Wife for Life: The Power to Succeed in Marriage, I had a blog called “Mona’s Musings With a Hint of Romance”. It’s purpose was to share my own marriage with readers in the hopes that it would inspire them, and the very first entry in that blog is the announcement that my husband was taking me to London to live for a year on corporate assignment. 

For years and years I had supported Honey — the million-miler-traveling-man — in his quest — from home.  The idea of being with him, so exclusively, so consistently, so exotically, was a dream come true for me – but would also include a great deal of sacrifice. It scared me deep deep down to leave everything and everyone I loved.

I am sharing all this with you today, including a reprint of that original post/announcement, because just last night, Honey made another announcement: we’re going back. To London. Only for a week this time, but what a precious week it will be as it falls directly on our 38th wedding anniversary, and I can say now — after living there for over a year, and after being gone from there for so long since — that the dearest memories and associations of course displaced my original fears.

To assure you that every sacrifice was “worth it”, would be a woeful understatement; just as my constant assurance to you that every effort to achieve a grand, lifelong marriage is worth it — is a woeful understatement. You may just have take my word(s) for it…

Winter 2010

Major changes always come with premonitions…for me. I knew two years ago I would be living on another continent, that I would be carried away, however impossible at the time…

Every so often the vision haunted me, but since — every so often — things turn out splendidly, I let the future, which was just a wisp anyway, take care of itself.

Today is the future and the wisp is whipping into a wind; the kind that turns your umbrella inside-out and scatters your papers across the street: the bluster that shoves you down the sidewalk and makes you spin into people who look at you like, hel-lo, where did you come from?

My Beloved is taking me to Europe. To live. By corporate assignment, we will begin a little life in a London flat this spring. One summer, one fall, and one winter from now, life will be bigger; too big for me to comprehend. I have to suppress the enormity of it, to reduce the world to a plastic globe (which I twirl every night while sitting in bed, using my index finger to trace the forty-fifth parallel: how does London connect to Moscow, to Madrid, to Johannesburg, to home?)

I soaked in the drama of it all one night, sitting in the tub no less, weeping on the phone to my friend: this change is so much…too much. She absorbed my fear like a soft towel, wrung it out, and then wrote me:

“I can’t help but think how glorious it will be for you to be WITH Dale when the time comes – the two of you have always been the epitome of soul mates and while I know you are each so powerful… as individuals with works to focus on, there is the WE-ness of “Dale and Mona” that is honestly so very unique in this world, and it just doesn’t seem right for you not to be together.

I think how it will be for you – oh – like a long drink of cool water after a desert sojourn! You will never tire of it, it will never become mundane – if ever it may have, after all these years so often apart, it will never cease to feel the most tremendous blessing – little moments when you are traveling together on a train or something, getting ready for the day, sitting across the table from him during a meal – just having you with him, oh how I know he will appreciate it beyond what words can describe, and vice versa.

So whatever pangs you may ever feel, darling, remember that. Mother that you are, Mona Mona Mona – oh to give your-all again to just being a wife! That part of yourself – that very best part of yourself. I have to admit that I’ve never even tasted that at all in my life, and there is something akin to reading a marvelous romance novel – that vicarious experience you anticipate with deep emotion when the hero and heroine finally are together.

I am serious. You must do this Mona – for yourselves and the world that pines for unrequited love. And then you must write about it.”

Decades ago, he promised me a “beautiful life”; his prophecy, put together one day at a time – ten thousand mornings spun down into ten thousand nights. Here is another day in our story; an intimate revolution…on our plastic globe.

Epilogue: Sacrifice comes in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s worth it or not just depends on where you are in the world…and in your marriage.