I was preparing cut vegetables for our family dinner that day, and I was doing it fast as my younger kids were waking up soon from their naps and I wanted some time to myself after cooking to work on a project.
And to have a piece of cake in peace.
Okay, so the latter was a bigger motivating factor for me.
I poured out the steamed vegetables into a plastic container, and while it was steaming I headed over to my fridge and took a block of butter out.
It was still cold and formed a nice rectangular shape on the metal butter tray we kept it in.
I took my butter knife out, cut diagonally into it, and threw that piece of butter onto my hot vegetables. I quickly closed the lid of the vegetable container and tossed and shook it around till the butter had melted its goodness all over the surface of our vegetables.
Then I looked down at my now irregularly shaped block of butter, it now appeared in a trapezium shape, no longer that of a rectangle.
Then I thought about how this would upset my husband, maybe just a bit, as it disrupted his usual orderly, organized way of life.
He would have wanted me to cut it from the end of the block in a straight line, well, the usual way others would have done it.
And I remember too how impulsive and messy I can be compared to him, and that as much as I had to have patience with him, he too had compromised his ways to fit mine and allow me to still have my ‘mark’ on things around the house.
We had our differences, and things like the way we fold clothes, hang our laundry, keep our cutleries, or squeeze out our tubes of toothpaste could have been a squabble between us in the paste.
We have now been married for over 10 years, and it had definitely been harder in the earlier years when we started living together and had to adapt to each other’s habits and quirks.
Of course, we had our common ground too, especially in our view of finances, children, faith, and family.
The point is, we still argue, we talk things through, we learn more about each other and we compromise to make things work between us, making sure we don’t take each other for granted.
And it has worked, it’s now our 12th year together and I can safely say that it has taken both parties to make a marriage successful.
We had become more sensitive to each other and knew where the lines were drawn.
I snapped back to my current, and placed our trapezium-shaped butter back into the fridge, wondering what he would say about it later, but without fear of any ensuing arguments.