The Marriage-Ladder
“Sometimes you got to get knocked down, but there’s a lot more satisfaction climbing the ladder again when you’ve been knocked off.” – Aaron Boone
Marriage is like a ladder. Two independent sides bound together by metaphorically labeled rungs. LOVE, DEVOTION, PATIENCE, COMMITMENT, COMPROMISE, LOYALTY and the list goes on for as long as your marriage.
The longer you are married, the higher your ladder goes. No matter how high your ladder gets, those foundational rungs will always be there. They will support you WHEN something goes wrong. The most important rung, however, is TRUST. No matter how many rungs you have or where the TRUST rung is located on the ladder, if that rung breaks, you will fall.
Speaking of marriage and ladders and trust and falling reminds of a couple of related stories.
My wife, Cindy, and I have been adding rungs to our marriage-ladder for many years. We’ve built a structure that’s completely resolute regardless of the stability of the ground it’s set upon. Very much UNLIKE a non-metaphorical, very real ladder that we no doubt inherited from a fifty-year-old house we bought, found along the side of a highway or purchased at a garage sale for a too-good-to-be-true price.
We have never actually owned a ‘new’ ladder and we have quite a variety of them; wood ladders, aluminum ladders, step-ladders, A-frame ladders, extension ladders. My favorite is a rickety wooden ladder. It was hanging on the outside of our garage when we bought our latest house. The house was built in 1977 and likely so was the ladder. I’m no ladder expert but I’m pretty sure at least two of the legs should be the same length. None of our ladders fit this particular specification.
The first of our ‘Trust-Fall Exercise’ stories takes place in October of 2021. We were building the lean-to along the north side of our barn. The slope of the lean-to has a 3/12 pitch and it was time to put the metal roof sheets on. We didn’t have enough screws so we had to go to town to get more. The problem was, we were running out of time. There was a storm coming! Rain and high winds were expected so we had to get the roof screwed down and fast.
On our way home, Cindy and I bickered about how we could maximize our efforts to shorten our construction time. Before the metal was screwed down, we had to put up drip edges on either side. They had to be painted, but did they really though? She hates painting but not as bad as what was about to happen.
Cindy expressed her worry about being on the roof when the rain started so I offered to get up on the roof and told her she could paint and attach the drip edges. Cindy insisted that she would just wrap herself in Vet-Tape so she would stick to the metal roof and not slide off. I believe the discussion went something like:
Me: “I’ll get up on the roof if you’re too scared to get up there because you’re afraid you’re going to slide off.”
Cindy: “What makes you think you can do it and I can’t? You always think you can do things better than me, (not true)!”
Me: “Because I’m not wrapping myself in Vet-Tape that’s why! I feel very comfortable on a metal roof even if it gets wet, (also not true)!”
Cindy: <Huff> “Well I’m getting on the roof and screwing in the metal roof sheets; you paint and put up the drip edge!” <More Huffing>
* Look, this is my story I’ll tell it the way I remember it. There are three sides to every story; my side, her side and reality which lies somewhere in the middle but much, much closer to my side.*
We made it home just in time for the very dark and foreboding clouds to begin collecting directly over our barn. The winds were starting to stir. At Cindy’s direction, we placed the ladder centered at the west end of the lean-to with the feet of the ladder against a temporary fence. I held the ladder as she climbed and got herself onto the roof. Immediately I took to painting and attaching the drip edges. She was screwing the metal sheets as fast as she could as we began to feel the first drops of doom… I mean rain.
Cindy started to feel more uneasy with every drop of rain. She is in emergency dismount mode. I know this because she starts yelling at me excitedly, “Get the drill-driver from me or I’m going to throw it!”
Honestly, I was a little irritated, partially because I was stuck painting and she got to perform all the cool stunts. I reminded her that there was a third option which might be, “Just leave the drill-driver there and I will get it when I’m done.”
She then yells, “Catch the screws!”, and slides both boxes down two separate valleys of the sloped roof at the same time. One box was open and as it jettisoned off the roof, metal screws went flying everywhere like metallic confetti.
Grumbling, I tasked myself with picking up 500 screws from the cows grazing area wondering, <Insert eye-roll emoji>, ‘Why are you panicking? You wrapped yourself in Vet-Tape!!!?’ While I’m crouched down, I hear Cindy scuttling across the metal roof towards the ladder on her two good but soon to be one good knees.
The rain is coming down pretty steadily now. Cindy requests that I come over and hold the ladder. I’m still rolling my eyes thinking, ‘THIS is why I think I can do it better than you, you’re panicking and I’d still be (theoretically) calm!’ But what I said was, “Hold on honey, I’m picking up all of YOUR screw…” I broke off because I looked up and saw that she had already started to attempt a debarkation from the lean-to/waterslide.
I saw her left foot dangling over the side and her right foot searching erratically for a rung on the extension ladder. Admittedly there was more eye-rolling and grumbling on my part muttering something about, “Why ask me to hold the ladder if you’re already hanging off the roof?”
I made my way to the ladder as Cindy kicked about with her right foot searching for a foothold. Straddling the ladder wedged between the ladder and the temporary fence, I realized that I was at a great disadvantage IF somethi…WHEN something goes wrong.
I moved around to the underside of the ladder so I could move it closer to her. I placed my left hand on the ladder and before I could grab the other side with my right hand, Cindy kicked the ladder out to my left. In my peripheral, I saw Cindy drop like lead balloon. Luckily, her fall was broken by thick layers of jagged two-inch rock we had just laid down.
Cindy cut her lip open on the metal edge of the roofing as she slid off. She fell about eight feet and landed on her left side completely obliterating her ACL in her left knee. Her face was bleeding and she was in excruciating pain. I had enough sense to know this was a very bad time to mention how badly my eyeballs hurt from rolling then so much.
All of the rungs of our marriage-ladder were now present… except TRUST, trust was gone.
I did learn that the newer rungs added to the marriage-ladder sometimes take on unexpected tropes as the marriage goes on. From LOVE, DEVOTION, COMMITMENT etc. to RETRIBUTION, HYPOCRISY and DISAPPOINTMENT. All I heard after the Great Ladder Incident of 2021 was, “I can’t wait until you fall off a ladder and blow out your ACL.”
I truly felt bad about the whole thing……… Not responsible mind you, after all she was wrapped in Vet-Tape but, just terrible that it happened at all. I never like to see Cindy get hurt but, it sure sounded like she was looking forward to some retribution. Maybe it was because I could still run, jump and walk.
All I heard for years after this event was how it was my fault for not holding the ladder. It’s not like I wasn’t making an effort.
Well, I never like to DISSAPOINT, which brings us to our second “Trust-Fall Exercise”. It was December 21, of 2024. Our new house was built and almost finished. We had a lot of little things to do like trim work. My parents were set to visit for Christmas and we wanted to get as much done as possible before they arrived.
One thing I was committed to doing was to trim out the edge of the loft that was visible from the living room and kitchen. It’s eleven feet above the main living area so, I broke out our slightly twisted aluminum extension ladder with bent feet. I set it up on the newly laid Luxurious Vinyl floor.
I had my pneumatic nail gun with a convenient fifty-foot air hose to make life simpler and safer. Using the loft’s ships-ladder, I was able to secure one side of my ten-foot trim piece. I didn’t think that was very safe but, as it turns out, it was a lot safer than what was about to happen.
Having ascended my extension ladder, I rested my nail gun on the loft platform for easy reach. The trim piece had a substantial downward bow in it. I bent down slightly and pushed up on the trim piece a couple of times to see how much effort it would take to straighten it out before attempting to nail it in place. After my second test-push, Cindy entered the room. She glares up at me and says, “That doesn’t look safe at all.” She then adds, “Why don’t you get one of those non-slip pads and put it under the ladder so it doesn’t slide out from under you?”
Cindy clearly saw an unsafe situation and even offered a remedy to make it safer. She KNEW what would happen! We had a lawyer that worked for the Highway Patrol who used to say, “If it’s predictable, it’s preventable!” She was fully aware of this moto and quickly sprang into action, entering the laundry room to do her laundry leaving me up on this obvious death perch. Well, I’m up there so there’s no sense getting down now to implement any of her safety protocols.
I bent down one last, and I do mean last, time and began pressing up on the trim piece as I reached for the nail gun resting at the edge of the loft. I think a large construction crane collapsing would make a similar sound to what I heard just before hearing our living room and entryway furniture being moved about willy nilly.
Like Wiley Coyote, I hung in mid air for what seemed like… well, long enough to realize that my ladder had in fact slid out from under me and I was about to hear, yet again, another marital “I told you So!” That idiom alone should make up half the rungs in the marriage-ladder.
During my freefall all I could think was, ‘I don’t care what I break, just as long as I don’t blow out my ACL.’ I landed on my right side on top of my fallen ladder. Pumped full of adrenaline I knew things weren’t right but couldn’t feel any real pain. I slowly moved various parts of my body hoping I didn’t have any extra hinges in my arms, legs, back or neck. Then I slowly moved my knees to make sure, if nothing else, they were still intact.
Cindy was awfully quiet in the laundry room. I knew she’d be making an entrance soon with her I-told-you-so! shit, so I jumped up and gave an extra hop just as she turned the corner.
“I’m okay! Nothing happened!” I said it like a small child who knew he had just done something he wasn’t supposed to and no matter how bad it hurt he was going to try to convince everyone he was alright. But wait a minute, did I do something wrong? I mean, after all, the self-appointed household safety inspector failed to act on an obvious and predictable so it’s preventable safety violation.
All I can do is stand there, shaking from adrenaline and stare at my wife through tunnel vision. I had a pinpoint view of her pointing her finger at me saying, “You fell from the ladder, didn’t you? I told you it wasn’t safe!” …. And yet she chose to do laundry instead of holding my ladder? Total HYPOCRISY! Or was it RETRIBUTION. Either way, our ladder rung of TRUST was quickly replaced with thse lesser-valued rungs.
Then I realized, she must have seen my little hop as she rounded the corner. All I could think was that she was DISSAPOINTED that I hadn’t blown my ACLs to smithereens.
Flabbergasted that she could possibly be looking forward to such an oddly specific event, I took a step back and immediately felt the air-hose attached to my nail gun under my left heel. The hose went slack as the nail gun was pulled from the loft. The nail gun grazed the back of my head then travel down my back before hitting the floor and punching a large hole in our newly laid Luxurious Vinyl Flooring. I might have pooped myself a little.
As it turned out, I did end up with two tears in my right rotator cuff and several abrasions to both of my shins and calves. I guess there was some Karma in all of this after all. It feels like a certain balance was restored. Our marriage-ladder is still solid with all of the foundation rungs still holding strong.
The TRUST rung, however, now has a disclaimer. TRUST is null and void any time a real ladder is in use.
