I absolutely love this page of Ultimate Spider-man #12!
TLDR: Gayle, the sister of Mary Jane visits out of the blue for Thanksgiving and there appears to be a rift between the siblings for some time. Mary Jane tries to reach out while containing her fury but finds out the truth to her sister’s life. Gayle reveals she found out about her husband’s affair and will be getting a divorce. The conversation picks up in the panels above.
Quoting Gayle and Mary Jane in the panels above as written by Jonathan Hickman:
(Added descriptions for dramatization.)
Gayle: “You know compared to what I’m going through to your perfectly normal, perfectly average, bore-me-to-death existence.”
Mary Jane: “…What is wrong with you?”
Gayle: “Haven’t you been paying attention? Plenty. But turns out the joke’s on me.”
Gayle lowers her head in remorse: “I knew your job was going well but… Your kids are amazing. And sure, as much as I didn’t care for you settling for Peter, I have to say… there is something different about him.”
She pauses, her head still lowered, eyes closed with pain and sadness lingering in her thoughts: “I just thought boring was the worst thing someone could be and that you deserved a more exciting life.”
Gayle opens her tear-filled eyes: “What I wouldn’t give for boring right now.”
My newlywed life
“Your Papade and I are married for 68 years already…” Explained my Eurasian grandparents to my wife and I on the day we registered our marriage.
In a previous post, I mentioned that my wife and I grew up under similar family circumstances even though we were from vastly different cultures. She’s Japanese, truly, purely, 100%, first grade Japanese with Japanese beliefs but I’m Singaporean who grew up in a melting pot of cross cultures and I speak English and Mandarin for now. My priority is to learn Japanese to converse fluently with my wife and her family members.
Did I say similar circumstances above? We are only childs with divorced parents, who grew up with our mums, moreover our fathers remarried, and we chose to live by ourselves later in life, which is not a typical Asian thing to do before marriage. Talk about a parallel timestream in the multiverse of life. Putting my geek language aside, we understand what it means to be independent and live life on our terms.
So, for us to choose marriage is like going against our grain, fighting against our nature. But our grandparents are our inspiration because both our paternal grandmothers held their side of the family together and kept their marriages for ‘life’, like LIFE.
Building a fulfilling marriage
My wife loves the 1985 movie, Back to the Future, where changing the future is the theme which rightly expresses our intention to be future changers because we want to build a fulfilling marriage life for ourselves and for each other.
And perhaps the greatest way to do so is by creating a ‘boring’ marriage just like happily married Peter Parker and Mary Jane with their two kids in the ongoing Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series and just like our grandparents who kept large families together (my grandparents had 5 kids and her grandparents had 4 kids) and never gave up, who became our inspiration and hope to have this new life together. Even if we have to grow through our differences, conflicts, miscommunications and pains, we will work out this marriage together, for us, for each other and for our future children, if we have any.