To the Dreamer Who Married a Dreamer

It’s been 3 weeks since I blogged… yikes! Consistency is not one of my gifting. I thrive on ideas, creativity, and have always leaned on family and friends who could help keep me organized. Which brings me to this post, because recently it occurred to me that not only is my husband a dreaming artist, but so am I.  And there in lies our biggest struggles.

I’ve been sitting on this half-written bit of thoughts for a month, which I’ll dedicate to my incredible dearly loved husband of six years. I think that Valentines week is an appropriate time to talk about marriages of creative people that last.

OK, so I’m about to let you all into my little world–my marriage. And that is a pretty scary thought.  But since one of my core values is authenticity (paired with wisdom), it wouldn’t be right for this wife of a Dreamer/Musician/Entrepreneur not to share a little bit of her adventure with you.

Well, now there’s nothing but to do it. So here we go…

There’s something I admire so deeply in a man that motivates him to dream an idea out of seemingly thin air, to go buy a few scraps of leather and some weird looking tools, and with the renowned training of youtube videos, set out to design a leather belt. And not just any belt of course. One made of raw, thick, single-layer leather that will shape to the wearer and last and last, while providing income and the empowerment of creating something good and meaningful to men in India with few opportunities.

Let’s go back to a winter evening in January. I walk into the bedroom and there hovers my husband, crouched over and hammering away on a marble slab in the corner of our bedroom after the kids have gone to bed. With a little lamp beside him and a slew of tools scattered across the carpet.

In this moment I suddenly regret all the times that he shared some far-out idea with me and inside I rolled my eyes.

Of course there was reason behind my killjoy faces. I’m the wife and mother whose children need food, so my most carnal need is for this husband of mine to do something practical and reliable. And while I’m a daydreamer artist myself, I have spent nearly seven years resenting that my husband was one too, wishing my creative partner would just stick to his day job.

I hold high expectations for others as well as myself, so I had assigned both myself and my husband to the drudgery of administrative, managerial tasks that make our entrepreneurial work happen, but in the end we both turned up miserable.

We both longed for time away from family to return to creative projects. My blogging and writing, even painting and photography that I had walked away from when kids came along—it all called to me. And he would say, “All I want to do is write music.” But we had resigned ourselves to the fact that this season with kids had no room for anything but the tedium and managerial. Neither one of us recognized in our spouse this internal, incessant longing to express and create.  So we didn’t make that creativity a priority for one another– or for ourselves. And the underlying discontent remained.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love our job– especially while in India. Event planning and consulting with the café gave us each opportunities to teach, plan, design, write music, and to interact with loads of fascinating people.  Those months and that cafe felt like a gift from heaven. But the language learning, the culture-figuring-out in cross-cultural business, the baby-raising amidst all of it, all of the making-a-life took over the life-giving activities for each of us.

Well, in these few months in the US there has been a lot of adjustment, settling in, and a lot of just breathing and recovering through the therapy that is “routine”.

And there has been a ton of paperwork. And oh, how we both hate paperwork.

But finally in a beautiful, miraculously productive December, we got “caught up”… and we found the space to think.

And we also found friends who believe in each of our far-out dreams and are egging us on.

And suddenly, in addition to our day job, we’ve found the work we were made for.  The work that makes us both stare off into the distance and daydream.

My husband is working on belts and I’m working on writing. And we are mutually excited to see one another make something of it.

I haven’t done any research on this, but I imagine that while creative dreamer types are naturally drawn to one another (sparks flying everywhere), they have a harder time staying together (enough of the sparks, already!). When everything calms down a lot of us creative types just want to know that while we’re painting masterpieces there’s someone making sure we don’t forget to eat dinner. Or pay the bills. Or send that really important birthday card.

And one of the biggest moments in our marriage has been this revelation that we both love to create, and we both had hoped to marry a manager type to keep life plodding steadily along. So in this revelation has come acceptance that both of us are going to let one another down, and we’re both going to have to do a whole lot of mundane in order for us both to also do the things we love.

And when this happens, there are those magical moments we walk in on the other writing a song or a blog, and we are thrilled by the art our spouse is making, and thrilled that our spouse is happy.

And that is the magic– and the hard work– that makes this marriage of two dreamer entrepreneurs work.