Everyday Canvas

The Surprise of My Life: Men are great guys!

Prompt: What has surprised you the most about your life or life in general?

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So many things came as a surprise in my life, but the most surprising of them all was that I have a happy marriage, in all fifty years of it. What is so surprising about it, one may ask since many marriages make it to fifty years and beyond.

Mine is a surprise to me because of the earlier negative opinions I had about marriage. My parents in their thirteen years of married life spent more time apart than together, and when together, they argued all the time, until my father died when I was six years old. My mother never married again. All her friends and practically all the older women in my young life, with the exception of one of my grandmothers, complained of men, making them into monsters. Although I had wonderful and caring uncles in my mother’s extended family, I too became wary of men, and I sort of wrote them off together with the idea of marriage.

Then I met my husband…

Lo and behold! In hindsight, I find my initial opinion to have been so wrong. Not only is my marriage good, but in my life, I found men, practically all men I had anything to do with to be very nice and helpful to me. Maybe I was extremely lucky with my experience with men, be it as friends, teachers, uncles, co-workers, neighbors…etc.

If anything, any negativity that existed in my life was caused by women, but this is my experience and definitely not true for all women. I am not badmouthing women at all because I also find wonderful, lifelong friends in women, and I do understand the troubles they go through when coupled with guys who are abusive and not-caring.

As to the surprising things in life in general, quite a few things have gotten my attention. When I think about it, on top of everything, I find the organization of life--the different species on earth, the earth itself, and everything else in the cosmos--to be awesome, however in a repetitive way sometimes, and I only wish nothing and no living being would get its sustenance from other living things. I don’t like the idea that living things have to eat each other to stay alive, be it animals or plants. For these reasons, Shock and Awe should be the nickname given to life instead of a war initiative, in my opinion.