Recipes for a Perfect Marriage Read Free Page B

stage I would have the drama of a cancelled wedding on my hands, and I am not a dramatic sort of woman. Under that lay the fear that had put me in this position in the first place. The fear that Dan—even if he wasn’t “The One”—was the closest I was going to get to sharing my life with somebody. If I was afraid I was doing the wrong thing in marrying him, my fear of being alone was greater.
    We had a traditional Catholic service in Dan’s local church in Yonkers, and Niamh walked me down the aisle and gave me away. Doreen was my maid of honor. As I stood at the top of the aisle in my big dress, I knew that this was what I had always wanted. At the same time, there was a disbelief that it was really happening. Looking back at me, smiling, was everyone I knew. It was the most overwhelming moment of my life. Better, bigger than anything I had ever experienced. I was part of a fairy tale I thought I had left behind long ago, and now realized had just been lying dormant inside me. Hope had been growing bigger and was buried deeper with each passing year. It all came flooding out as I sobbed my way down that walkway to the rest of my life. Dan was the man who had made that happen for me.
    *
    Dan was sure he could make me happy, but he was wrong. You can’t make other people happy; they have to make themselves happy. Dan loved me, but I now know that it wasn’t enough. I needed to love him back.
    And let’s face it—you can’t force yourself to love somebody if the chemistry just isn’t there.

FaIiochtar, Parish of Achadh Mor, County Mayo, Ireland, 1932

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    When love is pure, it is easy. It comes as fast and hard as a shower of hail and often passes as quickly. It fills your heart and when it’s gone you feel as hollow as an empty cave.
    Then there is the other kind of love. The one that comes so slow that you think it isn’t love at all. Each day it grows, but by such small measure that you hardly notice. Once your heart is filled with this perennial love, it will never be empty again.
    I have known both, and still I would not like to choose one over the other.
    Although for the longest time I thought I had.
    *
    The moment my eyes fell on Michael Tuffy, every love and loyalty I had experienced up to that point was rendered meaningless. I could feel the heat of my own blood just looking at him. The first time his eyes met mine they branded me; from then on I would be defined by my love for him.
    In all my life—which has been long and textured with the emotions of wife, mother, grandmother—I have never forgotten what it felt like to fall so immediately and so completely in love. I would have followed him to the other side of the world. It all but destroyed my youthful optimism when I realized that I couldn’t.
    Our first meeting was at a spraoi in Kitty Conlan’s house. Kitty had the knack of matching, and there was nothing to do in Achadh Mor back then—only work and wait. Bad, unyielding land, and a hard history blighted with famine and the messy, bloody politics of occupation meant that emigration to England and America from our area was an almost foregone conclusion. Those of us left behind were half a community, not knowing whether we were lucky to be still at home when the greater number of our family and neighbors were in New York or London. Sometimes it felt as if the hundreds of thousands who had left since the famine had each brought a handful of Mayo earth with them and unsettled the very ground from under us. We waited for our men to return from summer’s potato picking in Yorkshire, adventure implied in their new jackets, and affluence in their shiny brown wallets. In the meantime we had to draw whatever entertainment we could from looking at one another.
    I didn’t mind being looked at. I was brazen by nature. Some people thought me spoiled, even my own mother at times.
    “She wants jam on everything!” I remember her saying it to Aunt Ann the summer her sister returned from