Picture Imperfect

Once upon a time, somebody who was very, very bored created a list of appropriate wedding anniversary gifts for each year. For the first, it's paper. For the twenty-fifty, it's silver. For the fiftieth, if you're lucky or crazy enough to make it, gold.

I suppose everything in between is just filler, ordinary scratches on the marital bedpost until you reach a milestone. Or maybe just run out of space. Today is my twenty-sixth. Well, our twenty-sixth. My fifty-second and a half birthday, our twenty sixth wedding anniversary. So confusing, every year. There is no gift guide for half birthdays, no doubt because normal people don't even acknowledge them, and there is no asterisk on the wedding anniversary list to guide those of us who remain technically married after having torn our union asunder, technically married until our divorce attorneys soak every ounce of blood out of an already bloody mess.

The gift for number twenty-six is, according to the guide, pictures. Funny. For the first it's paper, just blank paper, as far as I can tell, an empty page on which a couple barely out of diapers can start to write their story. A quarter century after that, it's a picture. An image, maybe, that says it all better than any Hallmark card can. An image that's taken a lifetime to create -- or, as is the case for me -- about half a lifetime.

As it happens, tonight we are all having dinner together -- our three kids and us. Not, mind you, to celebrate our wedding anniversary; as disturbing as that would seem to most people, just imagine the "ick" factor for our children, who, much to our bafflement, do not seem to look forward to any occasion that involves putting the two of us in the same room. No sense of humor, those three. We are, in fact, gathering together to toast our son, the one brother, on the eve of his year long stint in Japan. To wish him well, to celebrate his new adventure. As parents, we are sending him off with a mix of joy and anxiety; joy that he his pursuing his passion, anxiety at the thought of his taking flight, growing farther away from us. Gosh, sounds a lot like the ambivalence our parents felt twenty-six years ago this very evening. Well, except for my mother, who still had her head in the oven about the whole damn thing. Not a hint of ambivalence for her.

I expect to feel the same thrill I always feel when my three children are together, falling easily into the banter they have always enjoyed with each other. They are good to each other, even though they are different in so many ways. The gap in age between my youngest and the other two means nothing; they love and admire each other, would do anything for each other, flourish in each others company. They have united to brace themselves against the blow of their parents' failed marriage, and they have remained loyal to each of us as well, no matter how much pain we have caused. I think I can speak for us both when I say we feel blessed. Undeservedly blessed, at times.

Back to the picture. I thought about giving my soon to be ex a picture from this past weekend's wedding, a snapshot of his beautiful kids. Unfortunately, I am in most of the pictures, and he is not, which just seems, well, a bit inappropriate for purposes of an anniversary gift. I thought about giving him a picture of just me, to rub in his face the gorgeous (ha) wife he let slip through his fingers. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one, and anyway, that's not entirely the way it happened.

October 2003; the tiny black mark on his head
is not an accident; it's where I had plunged the pushpin!

Then I looked at my bulletin board over my desk, the one I reserve for pictures of my children as well as a few of  me with good friends. Tucked in the upper left hand corner was one of me and my husband, taken at our son's bar mitzvah almost nine years ago. It's posed, and as I recall, we were supposed to look like a loving and proud couple. We are both pulling our heads back; if you drew a line around us, it would look like a heart being tugged apart. Proud as we were, we were never able to look all that loving. We were, however, always able to make each other laugh,which is what we happen to be doing in the picture. Another picture sits framed on a table nearby. We and our three children are wrapped in a group hug, pulled in close. An intact heart, glued together always by our three finest accomplishments.

October 2003

Those are the pictures I am going to hand him tonight. They are the images I'd like us both to have as we discreetly mark the odd anniversary, and as we offer up a heartfelt toast, together, to our son's latest adventure.