Sharing the Laptop

After 5 years of marriage, I am finally learning how to share with my husband.

Since the beginning, Alex and I have been busy doing life. We have channeled our inner-alpha-female-and-male and taken on the world. As a married couple, we have both completed graduate school, began our careers, and accomplished personal successes, like ordination and licensure and marathons and etc.

While living in the same house and eating the same food, we have worked out our grown-up lives relatively separately. Similar to most working couples in the United States, our paths have rarely crossed between the hours of 7 AM and 6 PM on a weekday. Sure, we have great weekend adventures and complete marginally successful household projects together, but there is always a highly structured personal routine to fall back into. And plenty of “me” time.

Spain is amazing. We are taking on new challenges, and exploring new locales; spending that truly invaluable quality time together like never before! And who wouldn’t want to spend every waking moment of every day with the man of her dreams? However, if I am completely honest about my recent experiences, I will admit that 24/7 together time has been both a blessing and a challenge.

Baggage rules deemed it necessary to travel light, so what has become a well-oiled machine in the past 5 years is now not so simple. We must “share” one laptop.

What? Share? Never!

But of course, we have many important things to do on the laptop every single day. We must check our email, correspond with friends and family, and read about current events. Alex must practice GRE math. I must document our adventures. Then there are exciting blogs and extra articles to read. Did I mention job searching and social networking?

I need the computer now. I’ve been waiting an hour.

I was going to check my email.

How much longer are you going to be?

I have nothing else to do.

Seriously, I am that two-year-old at your kid’s birthday party.

While previously we completed our individual computer tasks whenever we wanted because we had our own computers, now we must share. And be flexible and gracious and lay down our own needs for the other person.

I am chuckling as I write, because the couple that is failing miserably at sharing a first world luxury like a laptop, also deeply desires to live in community with others. The same couple that has lived with multiple roommates and hopes to plant a community garden one day.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest who lives in, and writes about, community. He and a few other provocative authors have caused me extra consternation as I grapple with the future. His book “Simplicity” is a must read, and today’s trial on sharing caused me to return to these words:

“I really believe the Gospel calls the whole world to a kind of community, to the possibility of a life that can be shared… The secret lies in the way you let other people get to you, and the way you go out of yourself. This is, of course, at once the mystery of spirituality and the mystery of vulnerability and powerlessness.”

Thanks, Richard Rohr. I needed that.

I am/we are a work in progress. We are these creative, individual selves living in the community of marriage. We are more than our individual selves, but we are so ridiculously human as we try to flesh it all out. I pray for grace in the midst.

And now, I am going to give Alex a turn at the laptop because he let me use it all afternoon.

Grace and peace!