Amy Lu's View

Chad freed me yesterday from any responsibility for taking our Christmas tree down. 

It was mid-morning on a Saturday and we were enjoying our Saturday routine: Listening to our favorite podcast Too Beautiful to Live while hanging out (which for me usually involves latch hooking, as was the case this day). Chad told me that he was going to take the tree down, and unless I wanted to participate, I didn’t have to help. 

I did NOT want to participate. I generally find undecorating the Christmas tree and putting all the ornaments away a big pain in the ass. 

So I just kept on latch hooking, and didn’t contribute to the endeavor in any way. I felt a smidge guilty for shirking my domestic duties, but consoled my conscience by telling myself it was probably easier and less stressful for Chad to just do it himself. Besides, I would earn my keep by dragging the bag of used cat litter up from the basement and out to the garbage (which I did today). 

Ah, the successful and equitable division of domestic chores–the key to a happy, liberated marriage. 

Or something like that. Okay, really, I’m just grasping for a way to introduce this post about our church’s worship theme for January: Liberating Love (and yes, I somehow landed on defunct Christmas trees and litter boxes). 

It did sincerely feel very freeing not to worry about the Christmas tree, and to just let Chad handle the de-Christmasing project. It felt even more freeing to not feel too guilty about letting him do all the work–to trust in the sincerity of his offer (and know he wouldn’t act martyred about it), and to trust in the dynamics of give and take in our relationship. 

“Liberating Love” can, and should, mean so many different things. There are a plethora of ways to feel and express love, and so many types of liberation. During Martin Luther King Day time, it feels especially necessary to consider how I might be inspired by love to contribute to liberation from white supremacy. 

I am thinking about that, but that’s not what this blog post is about. When I consider liberating love, the first thought and the most powerful feelings I have are about how being loved by Chad and loving Chad has been and continues to be liberating for me. 

My opening anecdote about our Christmas tree probably isn’t the most poetic or powerful example of this liberation, but it does fit. It is these small, unglamorous daily moments that change and shape us (and most importantly for a blog post, this is something I could think of). And it’s fitting because a bigger, more far-reaching thing I’ve been liberated from is the idea of a perfect couple, that marriage and romantic love is supposed to be constantly exciting and glamorous. Sure, sometimes it is, but usually it’s mundane and quiet and funny and even awkward. Comforting, but not necessarily attractive. To be a bit prickly, it’s not always (or in our case, ever) smiling couple photos on Facebook. 

I keep going back to a lyric from one of my all-time favorite songs, the Indigo Girls “Power of Two”

“The closer I’m bound in love with you, the closer I am to free.” 

–”Power of Two” by the Indigo Girls

Interestingly, I always hear this as “The closer I’m bounded up with you, the closer I am to free.” Is bounded even a word? (checking Google)… yes, “bounded” is indeed a word, having to do with a mathematical delineation, or boundaries in a larger sense. Whoa, that does seem very appropriate for a relationship, boundaries are indeed good. But what I’ve always thought of with “bounded” in my misheard lyric is something similar to “tangled”–being “bounded up” with someone else is a bit messy. 

Yes, yes, yes–a connection, a relationship that is limiting and confining in many ways leads to expansion and freedom in the bigger picture. 

This doesn’t have to and shouldn’t only happen with marriage, and I’m sure there are marriages that are more confining than liberating or aren’t liberating in any sense. But for me, being loved in the unique way and by the unique person that is Chad and being part of this Chamy thing makes me braver and bolder. That’s liberating love. 

It’s liberating to be myself, which sometimes means being my familiar comfortable self doing familiar comfortable things, and sometimes means being pushed and challenged to reconsider who I am and what I want and what I can do.