Not the theoretical kind. Not the wisdom you read in books or absorb from well-meaning advice or collect from the cautionary tales of other people’s marriages. The practical kind, the earned kind, the kind that lives in the body like a scar you’ve learned to work around — the wisdom that says: I have been here before. I know exactly how this ends if you do what you’re about to do. Put the phone down. Sit.
My mother had this kind of wisdom.
I would come to understand this in the weeks and months after my wedding, as I watched her specific, patient, methodical approach to a situation that I had been ready to detonate with my bare hands. I would come to understand it more fully over the next three years of marriage, as the full picture of what she had done — and what she had understood that I had
