Who We Are, Really

It has been a long-standing joke on my dad’s side of the family that my husband is Eeyore. He is not merely like Eeyore, or at least those aren’t the words people use to convey this thought to me. He is the donkey about whose existence all the creatures in the Hundred Acre Woods seem to forget, and who, in turn, is very, very sullen.

When I was a blue-haired and much-pierced teen of about fifteen years old, I loved Eeyore. I loved him because no one else seemed to, and because I’ve always held the notion that the things which don’t get enough love from everyone else deserve the lion’s share of my affection. While, unlike Eeyore, my husband is loved by many people, I still wonder if my long-ago love of the depressed donkey had something to do with my falling in love with the man who ironically shares his name and character traits.

To be fair, my husband is not morose or depressing. But he does spend a good deal of time lamenting silly things with the people inside his tight social circle. I think the similarity most people see, including those who came up with his nickname, is to the way my husband speaks: rarely and sometimes in a laughably defeatist tone. 

My husband is absurdly quiet. When we go out in public together, he prefers to observe social interactions from the sidelines. Though neither of us is naturally extroverted, I am a crowd-worker and social butterfly extraordinaire compared to my husband.

In private, others sometimes get confused about my husband’s quietness. Their faces become clouded with consternation and hushed concern that he is, perhaps, feeling down. No, no, I reassure them. He is just an introvert. That is not enough in and of itself to wipe the looks of concern from the faces of my conversation partners. He’s just not a big talker, I explain quietly. He likes to listen. Eventually, I manage to smooth over their ruffled feathers, and we can then move on to topics I can discuss publicly and with less invested emotion.

In groups, my husband stands and listens intently. When he has something to say, it is sharp and humorous. People laugh. Then he retreats back into himself and commences again to listen. People don’t ever seem to realize that the quiet man in their midst is paying fierce attention to everything that goes on around him.  The engineer in him wants to understand how and why things work, but his method of doing so is based on observation rather than interaction.  With his eyes and ears, he probably discerns more about the talkers, like myself, than we might be comfortable with.  He gets all the benefit of understanding without any of the painful conversation.

I am not sure Eeyore was a real thinker and observer, and he was certainly not an engineer. My husband has those things over him.

But sometimes the Eeyore moniker really makes sense. At home, my husband is very verbal. Normally, he uses his words to complain about the things that irritate him (they are many and varied) and decry the fact that he might be forced to leave his house and interact socially. This always makes me laugh. In fact, it is when he bemoans petty grievances that my husband most resembles Eeyore.

The other day, my husband made a particularly Eeyore remark, a generic complaint about something or other being pointless.  

“What’s the point, Pooh?” I asked in the best Eeyore voice I could muster.

He laughed at me and snapped out of his funk. “Eeyore never said that,” he responded.

I took out my iPhone to show him how right I was. Together, we searched through a handful of quotations about the poor, maligned donkey, and discovered that, indeed, Eeyore does say things remarkably akin to the depressing line I’d pulled from the thin air in our basement.

“Well, you’re Piglet,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh, d-d-d-dear.”

In a mere ten seconds, my husband managed once again shattered my understanding of myself.  He’s been making remarkably astute observations about me since before we were even dating, so I’ve gotten used to them.

As it turns out, I didn’t really know myself very well when I met my husband. I’d gotten swept so terribly far away by my perpetual desire to please others that I never took the time to figure out who I was as a person. It turns out, pleasing others is a gigantic part of the person I am, but there are other pieces, too.  My friend, turned boyfriend, turned fiancé, turned husband has been helping me get to know myself better during every step of our journey together.  

Because he’s so perceptive and spends so much time learning things about his surroundings in silence, I have no doubt that he knows more about the person I am than I do.

But Piglet? Was I really Piglet?

Piglet is adorably tiny and soft-spoken. I am often loud and brash, and I have never been accused of being tiny.  So in those ways, I am not at all like little Piglet.

But Piglet’s most discernible personality trait is neither his size nor the way he speaks. Piglet suffers from an absolute fear of everything. And it is this trait to which my husband refers when he calls me Piglet.

My name is Beth, and I am afraid of the world around me. When I am forced to do anything that could result in my severe injury or loss of life, I am overcome by fear. I hyperventilate and shiver. I cry and shake.  I convince myself that I should certainly not do whatever thing it is I fear at the moment.  

That being said, there have been short bouts of fearlessness in my life. For starters, there were all the times I flung a large yellow ball at high speeds to batters who stood, armed with high-tech metal bats, fewer than forty feet away from me. On several occasions, the ball came back at my head so quickly that I didn’t have time to think about catching it. It was then I discovered the depth of my subconscious desire to stay alive. My reflexes are amazing, enviable even. Then there was the time I loaded and shot hundreds of rounds of live ammo from an M4 without hyperventilating (which was exactly the reaction I had the first time I shot other weapons.) There was also the time I rappelled down a 60-foot tower on a harness I rigged myself from rope. (Truth be told, I only went down the wall because my instructor was threatening to push me out if I didn’t back down myself. Walking back down the stairs, he said, was not an option. And his name, he reminded me, was not God, so I should stop saying it incessantly.) All those things, and probably several others I don’t remember, required immense amounts of courage. But even as I did them - even after I finished doing them - a tiny voice inside my head screamed “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? DON’T YOU KNOW YOU COULD GET HURT?”

I know exactly who taught me the habit of being fearful: my parents. It was an act of love and an offer of protection. My parents taught me to fear things because it was a good way to keep me relatively intact in a dangerous world. Like I lapped up their other tidbits on how to live, I took the fear they proffered and made it a deep and permanent part of my psyche. My sister, on the other hand, didn’t have time for fear (or any parental admonishments or guidance).  She slathered on fear repellent while I lured fear to me and made it a comfortable home. On occasion, I am envious of her ability to live without that gnawing and screeching companion. Most of the time, I’d like to loan her mine. Either way, we are who we are and we partially have our parents to thank for that.

And I am Piglet.

After I got over the initial shock of this admittedly strange realization, I felt sad. I wanted to be Pooh. Sure, his head is full of fluff, but he’s a loveable fellow. A.A. Milne saved all the best and most heartwarming lines for that silly old bear.  But in spite of my tendency towards silliness and romanticism, I am not Pooh. I’m a shivering little wimp. I am Piglet.

I looked at my husband with a mixture of frustration and awe when he told me I was Piglet.

“Go ahead,” he said, nodding his head towards my iPhone. “Look up Piglet quotes.”

And so I did look up Piglet quotes, and my fear of being Piglet was confirmed. And at the same time, I was grateful for being told. I misguidedly thought I wasn’t negatively impacted by my fear, but my husband reminded me of the role the beast plays in every decision I make.

One of the Piglet quotes struck a particular nerve with my husband. Since he discovered it, he now likes to recite it for me every time I start to get nervous or fearful.  He affects his best Piglet, and he really goes for it: “Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?” He delivers his line always with a smile.

His bating is all well and good, because I’ve found the perfect way to quiet my errant husband before he gets too far beneath my skin. “Have you filled your thimble today?” I ask him.  The reference is to a quotation from the Te of Piglet that had us both roaring with laughter because it is so appropriate to describe my husband.  “Unfortunately,” Benjamin Hoff writes, “complaining is one thing Eeyores are not afraid to do. They grudgingly carry their thimbles to the Fountain of Life, then mumble and grumble that they weren't given enough. ”

And so we Baileys spend a good deal of our together time throwing lines about thimbles and falling trees back and forth to one another, all the while loving each other for and in spite of the flaws inherent in our characters.

I don’t think that my husband minds being Eeyore; he embraces it. He enjoys mumbling and grumbling, and probably wouldn’t be the same man if he were deprived those avenues of self-expression. And I am certain he will always loathe forced social functions.

But I am still embarrassed to be Piglet. I am sick of carrying around the excessive fear. Some fear is okay; it has kept me in one piece for twenty-six years. The extra, the unnecessary bits, need to be packed up and sent off to a place where they will cease to bother me. Ultimately, I’d like to be just Pooh. After all, that silly old bear gets all the best lines.