In one year of being married once again, I have come to realize that when people such as DB and I come together in a second marriage, most of our energies are expended in navigating minefields. A certain tone of voice, a gesture, a mannerism, food habit or what have you will trigger a bad memory. Suddenly, the past will come into the foreground with vengeance, completely obscuring what little you have built together with pain-staking effort. Like a friend of ours said, a new marriage (even it is the second time for both) is a like a messy, kicking, screaming infant and we would be well advised to treat it as such instead of expecting adult behavior from it. Yet, more frequently than not, we expect the other person to "know better" given the lessons learned from mistakes past. We expect adult behavior from the bawling, unreasonable infant that is our marriage. When expectations are not met we are quick to indulge in self-pity, give up on the partner's ability to ever c
crossings as in traversals, contradictions, counterpoints of the heart though often not..