There are some moments in our lives that we never forget.
I remember that one Saturday afternoon, surrounded by the pale blue painted breeze block walls and grey carpet of our one bedroom flat we decided to get married.
It must have been February or March because we went home to Adelaide in April for Easter and that’s when we chose out my engagement ring together.
I can completely picture the scenes when we made that decision, when we chose my ring, printed our wedding invitations and the yellow pages book we used to find our photographer and wedding cars.
I can’t remember the date and I had to dig around to find the memory where we drove up to the Skye lookout and he put the ring on my finger the night after we chose it together.
I also remember the day, later that year, when I had my final graduate interview.
The mine manager who was interviewing me asked the stock standard question ‘what’s been your greatest achievement*’ to which he added, gesturing to my left hand, ‘I suppose it’s that rock on your finger.’
I was speechless.
I looked at the female HR person who was also conducting the interview.
I felt small and helpless and completely undermined. I honestly don’t think she knew how to respond any more than I did but her face told me she felt just as uncomfortable with the question as I did.
At this point I’d been working onsite for about nine months and I honestly couldn’t see any relevance in the comment.
‘Um…no’ I remember stammering. Feeling derailed and unsure about what to say next.
It’s something I’ve never forgotten, in more vivid detail than that weekend afternoon when we decided to get married.
That’s because it felt so completely offensive to have my life achievements to date judged by a rock on my finger.
Recently this post has been doing the rounds on HuffPo. The title of this post immediately reminds me of the scenario I just described. A manager, the best part of 20 years my senior, felt that being engaged was possibly my greatest life achievement to date.
In reflection, this article suggests that there’s a chance he wasn’t being an arse. Perhaps he genuinely believed that being married was one of life’s greatest achievements. I don’t think I’ll ever know the answer to that.
At the time I certainly didn’t feel that being engaged was anything close to my biggest achievement to date. I mean, I was 21 and had moved a long way from home to embark on a career as a mining engineer. It was 2000 and even then women were very much a minority on site. At that time it was less than 20 years since women were allowed underground in Mount Isa at all. It took union negotiations to allow it.
In essence, I agree with the sentiment, getting married is not an accomplishment.
However, having a good marriage is.
Choosing to live your life in union with another individual is a big thing, choosing wisely is even bigger. But, a good marriage takes two people. It’s not an accomplishment you can have on your own.
Romance is wonderful whilst reality, honestly, is a rollercoaster ride.
Bringing children into the world and raising them. Building a career. Making grown up decisions. Managing finances. Balancing work and play. All of those things are a combination of tough times and cause for elation. There are accomplishments littered amongst these things that outweigh the accomplishment of my wedding day tenfold.
The thing is, and I don’t like to speculate here, without Steven by my side then many of these things may never have been possible. Our lives are what we make them and every single one of my major accomplishments since my wedding day have factored Steven in them in some way.
There are many things that I could not have achieved without his support. I like to think that I chose wisely when I chose my husband because he is a good man. We’re different in complimentary ways.
There have been times when a friend has complained about this thing or that that her husband does or doesn’t do and my thought have quickly been that I wouldn’t put up with it and would never have married him.
Getting to the point in our marriage that we are today is, without a doubt, our greatest accomplishment.
However, I can see where Natalie Brooke is coming from, people put a whole lot of effort into celebrating our nuptials, the birth of our children and milestone birthdays (when we bother to organise a party) but it’s difficult to find cheerleaders for our other, more personal and hard won successes.
I can propose a whole bunch of reasons for why that might be…but at the end of the day…the most important thing is that we celebrate our own accomplishments and the accomplishments of the people in our lives who are important to us.
It’s a moving target and I encourage you to continue to celebrate your family and friend’s successes for a long time to come. Give them as much (or more) in celebration as you do in the down times.
Can you put your finger on your greatest accomplishment? I can’t. I’m a sum total of all my accomplishments and crappy bits.
*In later years, when I was interviewing and employing my own graduate mining engineers my favourite answer to this question was ‘When I finished high school I spent a year in South Africa working with children in orphanages.’ Thankfully it was a phone interview because I was left speechless.
After the site visit we offered this guy a job, which he accepted. He went on to be a brilliant engineer. However, we were also lucky enough to recruit his partner who’d spent a year on one of the most coveted graduate programs an engineer can secure. I remember interviewing her in the middle of the night, she was an equally (if not more so) impressive individual.
