image: Eric Zener "Air" oil/canvas Gallery Henoch

Jane: 

So last week found me lagging in my reading of Committed.  Lots to do around the house, with the kids,  I wasn’t making the time to sit and read.  As opposed to the way I devoured the spiritual travelogue that was Eat Pray Love.  This is the reverse of Lizzie, who couldn’t completely get into Eat Pray Love but couldn’t stop reading Committed?  And what does that say about where we two are along the marriage spectrum?  As Lizzie so beautifully recounts here, she has been separated from her husband, awaiting the legal finalization of her divorce.  As for me, well,  I’m on the other side of the shore – swimming along, sometimes floating, sometimes sinking, in the high and low tides of my 11 year old marriage.   And as I write this, I am actually away, no kids or hubster, for the first time in way too long.  Finally, there is time to read.  Time to consider.  I’m a little more than half-way through the book – but ready to comment.  

Committed finds Elizabeth Gilbert traveling for a year with her soon to be husband, Felipe.  Various immigration snafus and rules are at once forcing the marriage, as well as delaying it.  Gilbert’s goal during that time is to examine marriage.  To conquer her fears of.  One of her first stops in this year long journey through Southeast Asia, is a small town in the mountains of North Vietnam, near the Chinese border, where she visits with some Hmong women.  

Gilbert describes the Hmong as a "small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call ‘an original people’) who inhabit the highest peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and China… nomads, storytellers, warriors, natural-born anticonformists and a terrible bane to any nation that has ever tried to control them."

Here, Gilbert questions the women of this beautiful and remote river valley.  She discovers an extended family where the well-being of a married couple is intrinsically tied to the well-being of the community.   Questions about how couples met, when they first knew they were in love, and most of all about happy marriages, are met at first with polite bafflement, then twinkle-eyed mirth, and finally with out and out howling laughter.  Men and women, whose paths either crossed or not, married.  If they didn’t know each other prior, they did after the marriage.  They didn’t spend tons of time together, they were too busy doing what needed to be done.  Gilbert realizes the language and concept of Hmong marriage is vastly different than Western marriage. 

We want our spouse to be the perfect reflection of the best parts of ourselves.  We often expect our spouse to be our emotional support, primary source of satisfaction, lover, best friend, confidant, entertainment, co-procreator and co-parent of our children, sometimes even a source of income and economic stability; most often, a definition of who we are.  This is a mighty tall order.  And come to think of it, a mighty impossible order.  Perhaps it’s only in contrast to a people and community like the Hmong, that Gilbert even realizes this.  Certainly the contrast hits the concept home for her.  

As for myself, I have always been blessed with the ability to create family around me.  This is a skill born out of necessity, from a very early age.  So I went into my marriage knowing that I had a pretty good safety net of friends and created family – especially necessary in the glaring almost absence of blood relatives.  But I probably hoisted many of the above expectations upon Landeaux.  (I am still not wholly sure what his expectations were when we first married).

Lizzie and I often discuss the various seasons of our lives.  Different stages of parenting, of relationships, of friendships, of our own personal development.  This would seem ridiculous to the Hmong granny who laughed and was puzzled by Elizabeth Gilbert’s list of questions.  It is self versus community.  Individual emotional well-being versus functioning as one part of many.  

As Lizzie  is embarking upon and moving out of one season to the next, unknown and exciting time of her life, I am struggling to define myself within the current season of my marriage, as a wife  and mother.  Where did the lost parts of my identity go?  Which of those do I want back?  How can I retrieve them, and are some of them irretrievable?  As my children are growing out of the youngest, physically neediest parts of their childhood, how must my parenting change and how can I optimize this opportunity to change myself?  (note to Lizzie: this also requires a pause to suck down a long swig of Diet Coke!) 

The book is hitting close to home, indeed.  In a totally different way than it’s hitting Lizzie, but close to home nonetheless.  

part 1

part 2