Some ways we were fortunate

This morning the CBC's Sunday Edition is broadcasting a feature on separation and divorce of couples who have been married for many years -- 40 or more years in almost all cases. I realize that's another way in which Wendy and I were so fortunate. Looking back on our marriage I can see that it fell into several fairly well defined phases. Our first two years of married life were stormy. There were many times when I doubted that our marriage would survive. Then it got better. We were 30 when we married, rather set in our ways, and we had quite a hard time adjusting to sharing our life with someone else who in many ways was a stranger. It got better because we learnt to share, because each of us had a problem, a crisis, that required a team effort by the pair of us to surmount the crisis. Wendy's crisis was the condition often called postpartum depression, I think, but it was more complex than a psychiatric condition.  It involved me and my evolving conviction that I had to leave family practice where I was so comfortable, and my difficulty confiding my doubts about my career choice to Wendy.  Once I'd made that choice, decided to leave family practice and embark on a scholarly career, Wendy and I grew closer together. We shared and enjoyed the great adventure of exploring the nooks and crannies of my new career in epidemiology, medical sociology, and their application in elementary and higher education. Those years of travel, exploring new horizons, mixing and mingling with the top people in the world in my new specialty, were one of the pinnacles of our lives, perhaps the highest.

We couldn't advance my new career in the backwater that Adelaide was in the early and middle 1960s so another feature of my career change was that it forced us to travel. To call it 'forced' puts it in a bad light: Wendy and I eagerly embraced the need to travel and although encumbered by two little toddlers, then two young children and a delicate baby with a very severe congenital heart defect, we enjoyed it enormously. Jonathan's heart defect and its successful surgical treatment was another crisis that drew Wendy and me closer together. Our migration to Canada was another crisis, another adventure in which we shared equally. At first we looked upon our move from Edinburgh to Ottawa as a stage: Ottawa was a stepping stone on our eventual return to Australia (or to New Zealand). But Wendy and I both flourished, we both had successful and enjoyable lives and careers in Canada. After about five, then ten years in Ottawa - mutually supportive years - we imperceptibly became Canadian, shed enough of our Antipodean roots to feel that we belonged in Canada. That's another way we were fortunate: if one of us had embraced the fact of becoming Canadian and the other hadn't, our family life would have been stormy and almost certainly not sustainable.

Finally, in our 80s, we continued to grow closer together. At our 50th wedding anniversary banquet Wendy read a poem she'd written for the occasion. I heard it for the first time that evening. Here are the final lines:

... humour and sympathy
For each other's shortcomings,
Love and admiration
For fine qualities developed 
In advancing years,
Add up to fifty years
Of a good marriage.

             Janet Wendy Last February 14 2007

(I could replace 'good' in the last line of this poem with other, multisyllabic adjectives that convey more accurately and completely what our marriage meant to Wendy and me, but they wouldn't scan).