“I have a real conundrum”, was how he answered my standard nightly inquiry which goes something like this:
Me: “How was your day?”
Husband: “It was (fill in the blank).”
Usually, he says “good.” Other times I can tell by his face that I shouldn’t ask. More often than not there’s a story or a funny anecdote that starts a conversation that carries us through dinner.
But never, in the almost seventeen years I’ve asked the question has it been answered this way.
“Wow, really? A conundrum. What happened?”
He hedged.
I don’t like hedging. Hedging makes me anxious.
“I’ll feed the dog,” he volunteered.
When it comes to eating our dog is probably a lot like yours. Since she comprehends any sentence that has the word food or feed or treat in it — the “spinning around the kitchen” phase of the evening begins as she excitedly waits for her dish to be prepared.
“Come on! Tell me what’s up!” I urged as he shoveled kibble into warm water.
When he bent down to give our whirling dervish her dinner, I spotted some residual unsteadiness left over from the bout of vertigo he’s been battling for the past couple of weeks.
Slowly, he came back to standing, leaning on the kitchen counter directly across from me.
Those corners in the kitchen, those are sacred. Over the years they have become our preferred conversation spots.
If I think about it, almost every conversation, big or small, has a least started in those corners.
We may shift back and forth while we prepare dinner but it all begins in those corners.
If things get tense, we maintain our distance, like fighters in the ring.
But I have laughed my ass off and been flooded with tears (often at the same time) in the corners of our kitchen.
We hug a lot there too.I don’t know why, but kitchen corners are conducive to hugging.
Anyway, it took a while for him to explain.
“I wanted to get you a tree,” he said looking at me sheepishly.
“I wanted to surprise you…with a Christmas tree.”
“What?”
You see, since we met, Christmastime at our house can be…complicated.
For me, it is the BEST time of year. You can find me Ho, Ho, Ho-ing my way through December.
For my husband—not so much. No, No, No-ing is more like it for him.
It could be due to his horrible, Jesuit boarding school, Oliver Twisted childhood—no one knows for sure.
All I DO know is that Christmas can be a minefield, a subject we have litigated into the ground only to come away without any reasonable solution as to how we can navigate without blowing somebody up.
If you read my last blog post you know that I’ve decided to go treeless this year. It was a compromise I’ve never been willing to make—until no——made easy by some brilliantly timed post-holiday travel.
In an act of holiday self-care (which,I highly recommend for everyone) I decorated my sister’s tree on Tuesday which was a fix for this Christmas Junkie.
So, I’m good with it. Really.
And that’s the part that confused him.
He continued, “On Monday, I finally felt up to driving to that awesome nursery where we saw those live trees,” he said.
“The ones with the silver needles you like?
He could see the bewildered expression on my face but he kept going.
“So I had it in the back of my van and I was going to set it up this morning…until I read your blog.”
I still wasn’t following so he continued.
“You said you were happy that you didn’t have a tree. That you liked the ease and simplicity…”
“Well, yeah…but…”
“So I drove back there to return it, but they don’t take back Christmas trees.” I could see a look of chagrin trying to hide behind his sexy, white beard.
I started to laugh. “What? No you didn’t!”
“Yep,” he said, starting to see the humor. “You are the proud owner of a living, silver pine tree which has been driven all over hell and back the past two days and is now lurking in the back of my van trying not to feel rejected.”
“Awwwwww, come on! You did not!” My eyes filled with tears as I launched myself into his arms. I told you those corners were for hugging.
“Lemme see him!” I squealed.
“I’m sorry.” He nuzzled his face in my neck. “I just can’t seem to get it right.”
“Don’t be sorry. Ya did good.”
Sometimes when you let something go. Like really let it go with no residual bullshit–it hunts you down and lurks in a van in your driveway.
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough, and what might seem a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.” ~ Lemoney Snicket
Sunday morning dawned not with its usual slothful inertia, but with the same flurry of activity that had swarmed around me since he’d been admitted to Cedars Sinai late Saturday night. An endless stream of texts and phone calls double-teamed me, rendering me all at once distracted, informed, comforted, and overwhelmed.
In a nutshell, after a week of spiking fevers, some as high as 102.6 degrees, at the urging of our indispensable doctor friend, Jeff, Raphael had finally agreed to stop under-reacting, and “Just go to the damn emergency room!” Thursday he’d been put on a pretty gnarly antibiotic but not much had improved. Come to find out, the bacteria that had spent the week ravaging his immune system was antibiotic-resistant. Cue the BIG GUNS. A drug so strong it took seven doctors to reach consensus to even prescribe it. It had to be given as an IV drip and his blood and urine had to be monitored. Around the clock. For at least the first three days of the nine-day treatment.
So much for the quickie emergency room visit we both believed would chew up maybe two hours of his Saturday afternoon.
Clearly, we are two of the most clueless Pollyanna’s you’d ever have the misfortune to know. We also believe ice cream is good for you, dogs understand English, and the truth will always prevail. When you look up the word naive in the dictionary you see a picture of the two us, accompanied by the sound of uproarious laughter.
Anyhow, it was all so unexpected and laden with fuckery that by Sunday morning I was feeling a bit…unmoored. So, you ask, what do I do when I feel like that?
Buy donuts.
Into Ralph’s I marched, wallet and keys in hand. Laser focused as I strode down the aisle, past the produce, past the dairy section, looking for…what was I looking for? Head down, reading a text that was attempting to explain something unexplainable to anyone without a medical degree, I suddenly remembered why I was there—donuts. Pivoting in place, I swung a hasty 180— promptly knocking over a free standing display of Peet’s coffee that only a few seconds before had been loitering there, minding its own business. Shit, shit, shit, shit! Laying on its side, its guts spilled everywhere, it shamed me as I bent over to pick up all the bags of Peet’s.
Get your head in the game, Janet! It sneered. Get off your phone!
Slow down!
Pay attention!
You’re acting like the sky is falling, Chicken Little.
He’s fine!
That’s when I noticed the additional set of hands helping me pick up the mess on aisle five.
“Oh, thank you, I’m so clumsy,” I said, just assuming the hands belonged to a store employee.
I could not have been more wrong.
Down on my knees, my hands filled with Peet’s, I looked up and smiled directly into the face of—a scary clown. SERIOUSLY! A SCARY CLOWN!
There we were, ten thirty on a Sunday morning, and a woman over six feet tall, wearing a bright orange wig, her face painted like the joker, was helping me pick up coffee! Me: dropping the coffee—Holy shit! You’re a scary clown! SC:I am. Me:Well, thank you…scary clown…for…wait…how are you a scary clown? SC: smiling through painted black tears— Because sometimes scary clowns are there when you need ‘em.
MIC DROP
Scooping up the remaining bags of coffee, my brain surged into overdrive. How…why…what…huh?
Satisfied that the Peet’s coffee display would live to sell another bag, I brushed myself off and looked around only to watch the back of scary clown leave aisle five. “Thanks again!” I yelled, muttering the rest under my breath, “…freakin’ Sunday morning scary clown.
I think we can all agree, my life is absurd.
A random series of magical realities strung together like gumdrops, embellishing the Christmas tree that masquerades as my life.
Super deep universal truths delivered by scary clowns in supermarkets are absurd.
An antibiotic resistant bacteria that plays hide and seek for a week is absurd!
So is hospital food and compression socks and showers with non-existent water pressure.
So is fear. Fear is absurd.
It’s all a fucking clown show my friends—but it’s my life.
I prefer to live in a “drama-free” zone. So does my husband. Even our dog hides when a voice is raised at our house.
Now, that doesn’t mean our life is 24/7 Kumbaya or completely void of passion. It’s just that, after the past two years, I can hardly imagine what could be more dramatic than a persistent pandemic actively seeking to infect us all the goddamn time. One that gleefully throws a curve-ball into, well, every plan, every chance it gets. Self-certified experts at rolling with punches, the two of us are officially all out of shits to give, making it nearly impossible to be, “emotionally surprised by events or circumstance— which is how Miriam Webster defines drama.
Enter 2022.
Last Monday night, as we engaged in some not at all sexy tandem teeth-brushing, my husband informed me that he might have to visit Urgent Care at 3am.
“Why don’t we go now and save ourselves some drama?” I asked, with a mouth full of paste.
“Because right now I’m fine. I want to observe.”
Let me just say, we observed the shit out of his condition——if observing is snoring with your eyes closed for seven hours.
The next morning, everything appeared under control. I even got my new dryer delivered six weeks late, a day early.
All was right with the world.
“Why don’t you pay urgent care a preemptive visit today?” I suggested, while loading perfectly clean clothes into the washer so I could give my new dryer a test spin.
“Good idea!” he replied.
So he did. That’s when things went sideways.
“Urgent Care can’t fix the problem so they’re sending me to my doctor,” he said, from his car speaker-phone.
“Mmmmmkay,” I shouted over the loud kerplunk of jeans in the dryer, “lemme know how it goes.”
“I’m getting worried.” I texted two hours later. A short time after that, he called me. “I need emergency surgery,” he said. He sounded like shit.
“I’m coming!”
“You can’t. No outside visitors allowed. Covid.”
“Fuck.”
“I know.”
The surgery went well. I know that because the doctor told me so. My husband, on the other hand, texted me from recovery which was…well, if you ask me, I think they give them their phones too soon, you know, because they can’t have visitors and let’s just say—— I don’t recommend it.
Alone in bed that night, I petitioned god for a referendum on any further drama. We’d had an agreement and she’d broken it. “That’s it!” I declared. “You get one thing. And you blew it all in January so, that’s it for 2022. No more drama.”
Did you know you get to do that?
I learned this trick from my shaman after the California earthquake of 1994.
Terrified of aftershocks, I’d feel every damn one while he felt NONE OF THEM.
NADA.
Zip.
Zero.
It was beyond infuriating!
“I didn’t feel a thing,” he remarked after one particularly strong tremor that sent me diving under the dining room table. Apparently, the kitchen, a mere ten feet away, was not prone to aftershocks. “Remove yourself from the drama,” he advised, “you lived the initial trauma, you don’t have to keep re-living it. Ask to sleep through them.”
So I asked. And from that day forward, I was impervious to aftershocks. I slept, or drove, or simply ladeedah’d my way through them. Seriously.
At 9:30 Friday night, there was a fire across the street. Another one! Except this one was inside the house and it was enormous. Five fire trucks. The home fully engulfed, with flames shooting ten feet in the air. Thick, black smoke. I saw the pictures and I’d have to say it was the highest drama possible without anyone being hurt.
And we had no idea. None.
Our neighbors knocked for us, but when we didn’t answer, they assumed we were out of town.
Stranger yet, you know who hears and smells all of that? All the sirens, smoke, raised voices, and door knocking——Our dog.
Did she hear a thing that night? Nope.
The three of us were blissfully ignorant inside a drama-free bubble in the back of our house. Indulging in comfort food, watching The Prisoner of Azkaban. Spells are magic. Agreements are nonbreakable. God is a mensch.
The phone was ringing. That’s odd, I thought, trying to clear away that cotton candy that inhabits your brain after you’ve just fallen asleep.
Only minutes earlier I’d turned off the light after struggling to stay awake while reading my latest self-help book, “The Road Less Traveled.”
It has to be late, I mumbled, rolling on my side to get a look at the time on the digital clock radio next to the bed. It was half past eleven.
Now it is my experience that NO good news is EVER on the other end of a phone that rings after eleven. Ever!
Either that person is drunk and dialing, picking a fight about something that happened a week ago, telling you that someone is sick—or there’s been an accident.
This call ended up kicking all of those things to the curb.
“Janet, sorry, are you awake? I know it’s late.” It was my friend Rita (not her real name).
Rita is one of the “herd”, as we were called. We were given that moniker because of the level of noise that entered a room wherever we showed up, and because there were always seven of us. Seven teenage girls attached at the hip through all four years of Catholic high school.
I’m sure you can imagine.
We shared everything teenage girls share—all the firsts.
First periods, first cigarettes, first joint, first drunk/sick night, first loves and all the trouble, chaos and complications that boyfriends bring to a young girl’s life.
Now we were in our late twenties. Everyone was pairing up, I was the first, already married and divorced, Rita, the smart, choosy one, was the last. Several of us had left LA, but the following weekend there would be a reunion of sorts.
Rita was getting married.
“Yeah, sure, no problem, I’m awake…what’s up?” I sat up in bed.
“I think Marco’s cheating on me” she started to cry.
“What? Noooooo.” I said, lighting a cigarette. I was up now, sitting on the edge of the bed. This was in the days before mobile phones, although I did have a fifteen-foot cord on my yellow push button telephone – so I could wander.
She was crying harder now, rustling papers in the background.
Still groggy, the cigarette was getting me high, had I heard correctly? “What are you talking about? What happened?” I asked. The rustling stopped.
“A woman called me yesterday claiming that she and Marco are in love! That they have been for a long time…she knew my name.” she spit out that last part like she’d bitten into a lemon. I could hear in her voice she was getting mad.
“Oh. My. God.” I replied while frantically searching my drawers for an ashtray, but deciding to settle on a potted plant.
“That’s bullshit, he loves YOU, you’re getting married in less than a week…” She interrupted, her voice agitated, almost yelling, “She told me to check the phone bill for her number. Janet, it’s on here over sixty times just this month, the same with last month and as far back as I…”
“Hold on a second, where is Marco?” They’d been living together since the engagement, but he had a job that took him out-of-town two weeks of every month, so the rest of the herd didn’t really know him all that well.
“He’s in Atlanta until tomorrow night.”
“Did you call him? What did he say?” This I had to hear.
“Of course, the minute I hung up with her.”
“And?…” I was dying to hear his explanation.
“Well he denied it, said she’s a girl from work, that she’s super needy, really insecure and kinda crazy. He explained that her number’s on the bill because he’s her supervisor and they have to talk about work problems. I mean I know things have been super stressful at the office lately, with all the layoffs and personnel changes.” She was quiet for a minute. “He started accusing ME of having cold feet!”
That didn’t sound right, but I stayed on script. “Okay, well let’s see—she’s just a kook from work and he’ll set her straight honey.” I lit a cigarette with a cigarette, something I never did, but this situation called for it.
“That’s what I thought, but she called again tonight, I just got off the phone with her and called you!” Her voice took on a desperate edge.
“Shit.” My blood went ice-cold.
There was a sweater in a pile of folded laundry that was waiting patiently on the chair to be put away. I pulled it on, switching the receiver from hand to hand, turned on the light, and started pacing, wandering the room.
“She’s been here! At MY house! They’ve been here together! She described the condo and she even described me! She’s seen me, she waits for me to leave! Get this – she says that I’m the girl he marries and has children with— but she’s the girl he loves. Fucking bitch!” That sent a jolt of whatthefuckery throughout my entire body. Rita NEVER used the “F-word.”
He was feeding my friend a crap sandwich. And that other woman! It sounded like the asshole was dishing out crap all over the place.
I was speechless. She continued. “She said he’s Latin and that it’s a cultural thing.” She started crying again. “They laugh at me, she says they laugh about how unsuspecting I am, that I think I’m going to get married and ride off into the sunset…they laugh at me, Janet.” As I listened to her sobs, tears filled my eyes and I started to sniffle so I pressed the receiver to my chest so she couldn’t hear me.
After a long time I thought of something to say, “What does she want from you?”
Rita cleared her throat, her exhausted voice barely a whisper.
“She wants me to walk away, to break things off, otherwise at the wedding, when they ask who objects—she’s going to stand up and tell everyone the truth.”
“That’s bullshit!” I yelled. “That only happens on soap operas!” my voice was so loud it actually startled me.
“Janet, what should I do? He’s just going to deny it. So what if she IS just a crazy girl from work, she’s still going to ruin my wedding!”
“Maybe when Marco comes home, you guys have a heart to heart. He has to figure this mess out… I don’t know, maybe postpone things…” Rita jumped in, she was bordering on hysterical. “I can’t call off the wedding! I just wrote the balance check for the hall! This morning was the final fitting on my dress!”
“Okay, I know, listen.” My tone was firm.
“If he’s cheating on you, you sure as hell are NOT going through with this wedding! I don’t care how much money is lost and how embarrassing it is. People will just have to get over themselves.”
Crickets.
“You know I’m right. I’ll help you. I can call people and…” She interrupted me. “I’m tired, I have to go. I’m sure when Marco comes home this will all get settled.”
Her voice turned Stepford.
“I’m sorry I called you so late, you’re right, it’s probably nothing.” What was happening? I never said that. I never said it was nothing. “Goodnight.” The line went dead.
I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night, struggling with whether I should share it with anyone else. If this whole thing didn’t blow up before then, the rest of the herd would be in town by the end of the week so I decided it was best to just zip it.
The next time I saw Rita was at the rehearsal. I was singing Ave Maria and One Hand One Heart from West Side Story at the ceremony, so we did a run through. Rita looked beautiful and happy, all smiles. Even when I searched her eyes while saying our goodbyes after the rehearsal dinner, there was no hint that anything was amiss. Marco sat beaming, surrounded by relatives and friends from out-of-town.
So okay. They’d worked it out. It was one just of those late night calls that you just chalk up to nerves and forget it ever happened.
The next morning, up in the choir loft, after Rita’s entrance in her big, flowing, white gown, I watched from above, scanning the crowd. Marco’s family and friends on the right and Rita’s giant Irish Catholic family on the left – and a mystery woman dressed all in black wearing an enormous hat and standing in the back.
Who was that? I bent waaaay over the ledge to try to catch a glimpse of her face, but short of doing a half gainer with a twist off that balcony – it wasn’t going to happen.
All black. To a wedding? Really bitch? My heart was pounding. Was this the “other woman” all set to ruin Rita’s special day?
I was helpless to do anything. It was time for the Ave Maria. The minute the song was over, the last note still reverberating, riding the incredible church acoustics, I ran back to the ledge, searching for the stranger in black – but she was gone.
I wish this story had a fairy tale ending…
As it turns out Marco did have another woman. Several actually. He let it be known right after Rita told him he was going to have a son. They tried to play happy family for a while, but I think the marriage lasted all of three years.
It’s been about thirty years and Rita hasn’t had a serious relationship since. She’s never been able to let herself trust a man again.
She got the big white dress – but at what price?
The thing that Rita really lost was the trust of her own internal navigation system. She stopped trusting herself. She’d known in her gut what was going on, even when he denied it, but she thought she was too far in to get out. She wanted to save face, to be married, only to be divorced a few years later, as a single mother.
We all do things we know in our hearts are doomed to fail. We stay in situations that we know aren’t right, because we’re deeply invested. But there can be a way out, there’s always way out.
Gut check – intuition – rumors – lies – denials. WE KNOW.
If it feels bad – it probably is.
Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation? It’s not just about weddings. Did you get out? How did you do it?
Carry on,
xox
22 October 2019/
by jbertolus/
in Uncategorized/
Comments Off on The Big White Dress—But At What Price? 2014 REPRISE
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.This is a story we can all relate too, right? Who hasn’t tried to be something they’re not in order to get someone’s love or approval?It was sent to me by one of the miraculous women I’ve had the profound privilege to mentor the past few months. When I took on that task, I was certain it would be a sacred energy exchange—that the wisdom would flow both ways—and boy, was I right! I invite you to take the time to read this women’s beautifully written story of self-discovery—and then do what I did—email it to everyone you love.Carry on,
xox
Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.
Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.
*
I went to Texas to study the whooping crane because I was researching a novel. In my novel there were biologists doing field research about birds and I had no idea what field research actually looked like and so the scientists in my novel draft did things like shuffle around great stacks of papers and frown. The good people of the Earthwatch organization assured me I was welcome on the trip and would get to participate in “real science” during my time on the gulf. But as I waited to be picked up by my team in Corpus Christi, I was nervous—I imagined everyone else would be a scientist or a birder and have daunting binoculars.
The biologist running the trip rolled up in a large white van with a boat hitch and the words BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES stenciled across the side. Jeff was forty-ish, and wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. He had a winter beard and a neon-green cast on his left arm. He’d broken his arm playing hockey with his sons a week before. The first thing Jeff said was, “We’ll head back to camp, but I hope you don’t mind we run by the liquor store first.” I felt more optimistic about my suitability for science.
*
Not long before I’d called off my engagement it was Christmas.
The woman who was supposed to be my mother-in-law was a wildly talented quilter and made stockings with Beatrix Potter characters on them for every family member. The previous Christmas she had asked me what character I wanted to be (my fiancé was Benjamin Bunny). I agonized over the decision. It felt important, like whichever character I chose would represent my role in this new family. I chose Squirrel Nutkin, a squirrel with a blazing red tail—an epic, adventuresome figure who ultimately loses his tail as the price for his daring and pride.
I arrived in Ohio that Christmas and looked to the banister to see where my squirrel had found his place. Instead, I found a mouse. A mouse in a pink dress and apron. A mouse holding a broom and dustpan, serious about sweeping. A mouse named Hunca Munca. The woman who was supposed to become my mother-in-law said, “I was going to do the squirrel but then I thought, that just isn’t CJ. This is CJ.”
What she was offering was so nice. She was so nice. I thanked her and felt ungrateful for having wanted a stocking, but not this stocking. Who was I to be choosy? To say that this nice thing she was offering wasn’t a thing I wanted?
When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was.
*
The whooping crane is one of the oldest living bird species on earth. Our expedition was housed at an old fish camp on the Gulf Coast next to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, where three hundred of the only six hundred whooping cranes left in the world spend their winters. Our trip was a data-collecting expedition to study behavior and gather data about the resources available to the cranes at Aransas.
The ladies bunkhouse was small and smelled woody and the rows of single beds were made up with quilts. Lindsay, the only other scientist, was a grad student in her early twenties from Wisconsin who loved birds so much that when she told you about them she made the shapes of their necks and beaks with her hands—a pantomime of bird life. Jan, another participant, was a retired geophysicist who had worked for oil companies and now taught high school chemistry. Jan was extremely fit and extremely tan and extremely competent. Jan was not a lifelong birder. She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing.
At five o’clock there was a knock on the bunk door and a very old man walked in, followed by Jeff.
“Is it time for cocktail hour?” Warren asked.
Warren was an eighty-four-year-old bachelor from Minnesota. He could not do most of the physical activities required by the trip, but had been on ninety-five Earthwatch expeditions, including this one once before. Warren liked birds okay. What Warren really loved was cocktail hour.
When he came for cocktail hour that first night, his thin, silver hair was damp from the shower and he smelled of shampoo. He was wearing a fresh collared shirt and carrying a bottle of impossibly good scotch.
Jeff took in Warren and Jan and me. “This is a weird group,” Jeff said.
“I like it,” Lindsay said.
*
In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.
One particular time, I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said, “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said, “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”
Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.
That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.
When I found out that he’d slept with our mutual friend a few weeks after we’d first started seeing each other, he told me we hadn’t officially been dating yet so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right. When I found out that he’d kissed another girl on New Year’s Eve months after that, he said that we hadn’t officially discussed monogamy yet, and so I shouldn’t mind. I decided he was right.
I asked to discuss monogamy and, in an effort to be the sort of cool girl who does not have so many inconvenient needs, I said that I didn’t need it. He said he thought we should be monogamous.
*
Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead, we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind.
It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?
Wading through the muck of the Aransas Reserve I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.
If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.
*
More than once I’d said to my fiancé, How am I supposed to know you love me if you’re never affectionate or say nice things or say that you love me.
He reminded me that he’d said “I love you” once or twice before. Why couldn’t I just know that he did in perpetuity?
I told him this was like us going on a hiking trip and him telling me he had water in his backpack but not ever giving it to me and then wondering why I was still thirsty.
He told me water wasn’t like love, and he was right.
There are worse things than not receiving love. There are sadder stories than this. There are species going extinct, and a planet warming. I told myself: who are you to complain, you with these frivolous extracurricular needs?
*
On the gulf, I lost myself in the work. I watched the cranes through binoculars and recorded their behavior patterns and I loved their long necks and splashes of red. The cranes looked elegant and ferocious as they contorted their bodies to preen themselves. From the outside, they did not look like a species fighting to survive.
In the mornings we made each other sandwiches and in the evenings we laughed and lent each other fresh socks. We gave each other space in the bathroom. Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. We helped Warren when he had trouble walking. What I am saying is that we took care of each other. What I am saying is we took pleasure in doing so. It’s hard to confess, but the week after I called off my wedding, the week I spent dirty and tired on the gulf, I was happy.
On our way out of the reserve, we often saw wild pigs, black and pink bristly mothers and their young, scurrying through the scrub and rolling in the dust among the cacti. In the van each night, we made bets on how many wild pigs we might see on our drive home.
One night, halfway through the trip, I bet reasonably. We usually saw four, I hoped for five, but I bet three because I figured it was the most that could be expected.
Warren bet wildly, optimistically, too high.
“Twenty pigs,” Warren said. He rested his interlaced fingers on his soft chest.
We laughed and slapped the vinyl van seats at this boldness.
But the thing is, we saw twenty pigs on the drive home that night. And in the thick of our celebrations, I realized how sad it was that I’d bet so low. That I wouldn’t even let myself imagine receiving as much as I’d hoped for.
*
What I learned to do, in my relationship with my fiancé, was to survive on less. At what should have been the breaking point but wasn’t, I learned that he had cheated on me. The woman he’d been sleeping with was a friend of his I’d initially wanted to be friends with, too, but who did not seem to like me, and who he’d gaslit me into being jealous of, and then gaslit me into feeling crazy for being jealous of.
The full course of the gaslighting took a year, so by the time I truly found out what had happened, the infidelity was already a year in the past.
It was new news to me but old news to my fiancé.
Logically, he said, it doesn’t matter anymore.
It had happened a year ago. Why was I getting worked up over ancient history?
I did the mental gymnastics required.
I convinced myself that I was a logical woman who could consider this information about having been cheated on, about his not wearing a condom, and I could separate it from the current reality of our life together.
Why did I need to know that we’d been monogamous? Why did I need to have and discuss inconvenient feelings about this ancient history?
I would not be a woman who needed these things, I decided.
I would need less. And less.
I got very good at this.
*
“The Crane Wife” is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.
*
One night on the gulf, we bought a sack of oysters off a passing fishing boat. We’d spent so long on the water that day I felt like I was still bobbing up and down in the current as I sat in my camp chair. We ate the oysters and drank. Jan took the shucking knife away from me because it kept slipping into my palm. Feral cats trolled the shucked shells and pleaded with us for scraps.
Jeff was playing with the sighting scope we used to watch the birds, and I asked, “What are you looking for in the middle of the night?” He gestured me over and when I looked through the sight the moon swam up close.
I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.
I had never seen the moon so up-close before. What struck me most was how battered she looked. How textured and pocked by impacts. There was a whole story written on her face—her face, which from a distance looked perfect.
*
It’s easy to say that I left my fiancé because he cheated on me. It’s harder to explain the truth. The truth is that I didn’t leave him when I found out. Not even for one night.
I found out about the cheating before we got engaged and I still said yes when he proposed in the park on a day we were meant to be celebrating a job I’d just gotten that morning. Said yes even though I’d told him I was politically opposed to the diamonds he’d convinced me were necessary. Said yes even though he turned our proposal into a joke by making a Bachelor reference and giving me a rose. I am ashamed of all of this.
He hadn’t said one specific thing about me or us during the proposal, and on the long trail walk out of the park I felt robbed of the kind of special declaration I’d hoped a proposal would entail, and, in spite of hating myself for wanting this, hating myself more for fishing for it, I asked him, “Why do you love me? Why do you think we should get married? Really?”
He said he wanted to be with me because I wasn’t annoying or needy. Because I liked beer. Because I was low-maintenance.
I didn’t say anything. A little further down the road he added that he thought I’d make a good mother.
This wasn’t what I hoped he would say. But it was what was being offered. And who was I to want more?
I didn’t leave when he said that the woman he had cheated on me with had told him over the phone that she thought it was unfair that I didn’t want them to be friends anymore, and could they still?
I didn’t leave when he wanted to invite her to our wedding. Or when, after I said she could not come to our wedding, he got frustrated and asked what he was supposed to do when his mother and his friends asked why she wasn’t there.
Reader, I almost married him.
*
Even now I hear the words as shameful: Thirsty. Needy. The worst things a woman can be. Some days I still tell myself to take what is offered, because if it isn’t enough, it is I who wants too much. I am ashamed to be writing about this instead of writing about the whooping cranes, or literal famines, or any of the truer needs of the world.
But what I want to tell you is that I left my fiancé when it was almost too late. And I tell people the story of being cheated on because that story is simple. People know how it goes. But it’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.
*
After cocktail hour one night, in the cabin’s kitchen, I told Lindsay about how I’d blown up my life the week before. I told her because I’d just received a voice mail saying I could get a partial refund for my high-necked wedding gown. The refund would be partial because they had already made the base of the dress but had not done any of the beadwork yet. They said the pieces of the dress could still be unstitched and used for something else. I had caught them just in time.
I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?
Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.
Jeff was sitting outside in front of the cabin with Warren as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.
What he did do was let me drive the boat.
The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.
CJHauser teaches creative writing at Colgate University. Her novel, Family of Origin, is published by Doubleday.
This is for all the unicorns out there. You know who you are. My messege to you four decades later?
It all works out better than okay. Swear to god.
Now, go out there and live life like the lucky anomoly you are! xox
I was married at twenty and divorced by twenty-six.
It was the eighties, the decade of Princess Diana and Madonna, and it seemed everyone was doing it—getting married young and divorcing.
Even my best friend at the time shocked me when she suddenly filed for divorce. When someone close to you calls it quits you take a magnifying glass to your own relationship, searching for the cracks. Well, no close inspection needed for ours, it was shattered to bits; held together with ducktape, spit, and glue.
I have to admit, in the beginning, her divorce left me reeling, after all, they were the perfect couple. But after they’d been apart a while, I saw how happy they both were and that’s when it finally dawned on me that deep down—my husband was probably as miserable as I was. Relationships don’t happen in a vacume. That’s when I decided that for the sake of our continued happiness as human beings—we could not stay married for one. more. minute.
NOBODY LIKES A QUITTER
It was impossible to paint a picture of my ex as an insufferable troll.
People understand when you divorce a man who is a cheater, an addict, or someone who can’t hold a job. It wasn’t him it was me. That line is cliché I know, but some sayings become clichés because they’re so damn true! My ex-husband was/is one of the nicest men on the planet and that sucks even more. I left an all-around-great-guy because I yearned for something more.
“More than what?” my dad asked upon hearing that I wanted a divorce. “What more could you possibly want? It doesn’t seem like anyone can make you happy!” He was right about that. That was my job, only I didn’t know it at the time. I only knew that something profoundly wonderful was missing. Something…untenable, indescribable and indefinable—and I wasn’t able or willing to settle for less.
That made me feel greedy. And wrong.
Other people settle. Why can’t I? It would be so much easier!
God, I had so much to learn! I had gone from living under my father’s roof to living under my husband’s. I identified as someone’s wife. Until I wasn’t.
HIDDEN BENEFITS
I would say the biggest benefit was becoming comfortable with my own independence. I had been half of a couple, a team, and now every decision, every mistake, was mine alone. I needed to figure out who I was and what I wanted from life, and in the process I was forced to wrap my brain around living without a man.
When there was a creepy sound in the middle of the night who checked it out? Me and my trusty baseball bat.
I started taking some risks, teaching myself how to invest money. I bought stocks and bonds, which scared the shit out of my dad, but ended up rewarding my courage with surprising dividends.
I also became skilled at all manner of apartment maintenance and eventually acquired a power drill and a small, red toolbox. Woof!
DATING
I had a hard time with the label divorcee. Every form I filled out asked me my marital status and checking the DIVORCED box reminded that I had failed at one of life’s most cherished milestones.
In my twenties.
Guys aren’t sure what to make of a twenty-six year old divorcee. No wild-eyed desperation or ticking time clock here. Some of them acted relieved. Many seemed a bit bewildered. Truth be told, it scared the bejesus out of most of them.
I don’t know where all the other twenty-something divorcees went to date—but in my circle, I was as rare as a Unicorn.
A twenty-six year old divorced Unicorn.
TRANSITION IN MY THIRTIES
Once I realized, much to the amazement of my single girlfriends, this controversial fact: that most of the men out there really did want to get married and have babies; and that a divorcee was way too much of a wild card for them at that stage of the game—I was able to formulate a game plan.
I dyed my blonde hair red, which narrowed the field even further. Only serious, artsy guys need apply.
I decided that unless I met someone extraordinary, marriage and children would probably not be a reality for me; and except for about a month when I was thirty-three and everyone around me was having babies—I was more than okay with that.
I made a great life for myself. I had a career I loved; great friends, wonderful family and I made foreign travel my passion.
That all felt amazing. Until it didn’t.
EVEN UNICORNS GET A SECOND CHANCE
After I turned forty, stability became my middle name. I settled down, bought a house in the burbs, let my hair grow longer and went back to being a blonde.
I started dating. Seriously, and a lot. Eighteen unmarried years had gone by and men my age and older couldn’t have cared less that I got divorced in my twenties. Most of them were on their second or even third divorce.
I was no longer an anomaly, an outsider.
I decided to go on a blind dating binge and that’s how I met the extraordinary man I married at forty-three—he was definitely worth the wait. At last I found that indescribable, indefinable something I’d spent nearly two decades searching for—and he found me.
Isn’t timing everything? Ain’t love grand? Maybe it was greed. I don’t know; I think it was all just dumb luck.
He was SO mad at me. Furious. How could I tell? Because he told me right to my face.
I’m glad you’re home safe,” he said. He looked stoned but I knew better. That was his sleepy face. His way-past-my-bedtime face.
“Really? ‘Cause you seem pissed,” I quipped. It was pretty obvious as he stomped around in his bare feet and blue, flannel jammie pants, slamming drawers and doors and anything within reach that he could slam on his way back to bed.
No hug.
No kiss.
No eye contact.
No kidding.
Even the little brown dog had picked sides, staying put, warm and cozy back in our bedroom, her brain having been filled with anti-mommy propaganda for the past couple of hours.
“Wow! You’re mad?”
“Yes I’m mad!” He snapped. I think I saw smoke billow from of his nostrils.
“I can’t believe…”
“Well, believe it because I am! (Insert dramatic pause) You know I texted you…and you didn’t answer.”
“You did?” I started looking for my phone.
“Yes, I did. When I was going to bed, around eleven.”
He turned around without looking me in the eye which I took as the ‘silent eye treatment’ and stomped away. It was impressive.
But I could hardly keep from laughing. I know that sounds insensitive but this is a man who NEVERworries about me when I’m out. I suppose I should take it as a compliment but it’s always been a little disconcerting, this faith he has in my ability to make the good decisions, you know, the ones that have led me, so far, to remain…not dead. Since we didn’t even meet until we were both well into our forties, he believes me to be capable of defending myself and figuring shit out as proven to him by the fact that I rarely call him to bail me out of any jam that I may or MAY NOT get myself into. (Psssst…I have Auto Club and our friend Ernie on speed dial.)
Unfortunately, that door does not swing both ways. I make him (and by ‘make him’ I mean it’s written in Chapter One of The Husband Manual that he read and signed before we sealed the deal) I make him text me when he’s off the motorcycle.
Because that’s a fucking dangerous hobby and I have this habit of liking to know he’s still alive.
Since the scariest thing I do is karaoke in Korea town, occasionally, I think to text him when I leave because fair is fair, you know, goose and gander stuff, but he’s always led me to believe that it’s kind of adorable—but completely unnecessary.
“On my way home,” I’ll text, letting him know that I didn’t choke on the microphone or accidentally drown on my own spit.
CRICKETS…
Or, a simple ‘thumbs up’ emoji—meaning that I had momentarily interrupted his pizza, beer, and violent movie night by stating the obvious.
I have to admit, the evening had run later than I’d told him it would by about an hour and a half. I was at the Forum in Inglewood with my sister, having the spiritual experience of #becoming with Michelle Obama and eight thousand of her most rapturous admirers. The night was a lot of things. It was transformative. It was inspirational. But it was NOT punctual. So when I told him I’d be home by eleven and the event didn’t let out until then—and in my post Michelle-taking-me-into-her-confidence-coma, I neglected to think to correct that with a text…
THAT was a mistake.
As a matter of fact, unbeknownst to me, my phone, which was zipped securely inside the pocket of my purse, (because she was THAT good), had long since gone into ‘sleep mode’.
This meant his text vibrated silently, unseen in the dark.
TEXT: 11:09 pm — Is everything ok? It’s late. I’m going to bed (kiss face emoji)
Holy mother of all things hyperbolic and hysterical!
You have no idea how over-the-top dramatic this is! It may seem completely innocent to you but this, you guys, this is a five alarm fire. This is a scream into the void. This is my husband absolutely freaking out!
And I missed it.
I was too busy fan-girling, re-living over and over every tasty morsel of juicy girl-talk Michelle had spoon fed us all night. We quoted back to each other every word. The story about falling in lust with Barack. About therapy and in-vitro. We laughed again at every joke and implied jab at the current administration as we wove our way in and out of post-Michelle traffic. It took us a good thirty minutes to find the freeway and when we did—it was choked with traffic. Don’t look at me like that, it’s LA! There’s always traffic in LA at 11pm (or so I’ve heard).
Anyway, there it sat, the unanswered text, stewing in its own juices for another forty minutes or so. And there he sat back at home—marinating in worrying. Wondering whether I’d fallen victim to a mugger in a dark parking lot, or gotten into a car accident and was lying unattended in the hallway of County Hospital. Or maybe a carjacking had occurred, or a drive-by shooting, or my sister had finally reached her limit with me, stuffed me into the trunk of her car, put it in neutral, and pushed it off a cliff.
As it turns out he’d texted a preview of what was to come. Look at that. He was all set to worry. Who knew?
Who had created this monster? In retrospect, I blame myself. Maybe it’s the fact that lately, with the whole #MeToo thing, I’d been talking to him a lot about the fact that just living in the world as a woman is akin to walking naked through a sketchy neighborhood. A lot of stuff that he never gives a thought to—is out to harm or even kill us. The fact that my guard is never down. I have to park my car in a well-lit area, lock my doors the minute I get into the car, and walk with my keys woven in and out of my fingers like a weapon. The fact that his only concern is protecting the money in his wallet and that my purse is the least of my worries when I’m out at night. That’s because my most valuable asset will always be MY ENTIRE BODY.
Men don’t think about that kind of stuff until we educate them. And then they worry, like, all the time. They slam things and get mad when we don’t answer texts late at night—which they have every right to do because we’ve scared the bejesus out of ‘em.
Later, when I got into bed, I snuggled up close to him, but I could feel him tense up. He wasn’t done being mad.
I know that feeling of loving someone or something (a pet) so much that the mere thought of anything happening to them shatters the veneer of complacency we all wear—and then the vulnerability leaks out all over the place like a big, wet, mess, and the only thing that can keep you from embarrassing yourself and losing your shit altogether—is anger.
Hey guys,
I get texts and emails all year around requesting this post which is consistently in the top five most viewed every year. “Re-post the one about your husband stealing Thanksgiving from your mom!” They’ll write. Or, “What is the name of that one about your husband and his disrespect for the turkey?”
But mostly they request his recipe for the leek bread pudding (Which, unfortunately, I am not at liberty to reveal since that recipe resides in his head and that is a neighborhood too dangerous for me to visit!)
Anyhow, I like to wait for the appropriate time of year‚ which is now, to lovingly harass the big guy. So, take a look. If you know him you’re going to smile and if you don’t, well, I think you’ll want to.
Here’s to the big French guy who stole my heart — and then hijacked my favorite meal! Cheers!
PS. REAL men always use pink rubber oven mitts!
Carry on & Happy Thanksgiving! xox
JB
It happened over several years, with the subtle finesse we’ve come to expect from the French.
He entered our family just under fifteen years ago. He is a gourmand extraordinaire and an accomplished cook in his own right; but he ingratiated himself in the beginning, acting as the sous chef for my mother who is the culinary queen of our family—then slowly, skillfully, and sneakily—He hijacked Thanksgiving.
The only demand he acquiesces to is that it must be an ORGANIC turkey.
“No antibiotics, no hormones…no taste” he sing-songs sarcastically under his breath as he places the order every year.
I suppose we should be grateful that he hasn’t decided to switch fowl on us yet. Next year it could be pheasant or duck in the center of the table.
See, that’s the thing, we, my siblings and I, we LOVE and crave all year ‘round, my mom’s traditional Thanksgiving feast. The one we ate as kids. The meal whose perfection is so sublime it should never be messed with. EVER.
Yet…the now reigning chef in our holiday kitchen—the one with the red passport—HE little by little, year after year, has modified each dish so completely that it bears little if any, resemblance to the original.
And my mom doesn’t give a hoot!
She’s just so thrilled that someone has taken over the culinary heavy lifting; along with the fact that I finally found a husband—and he’s French—that she sits back and happily eats what she is served; doling out the compliments like Tic-Tacs at a cigar shop.
Benedict Arnold.
This European guy feels no sense of urgency—he doesn’t start the turkey until late morning.
I remember waking up as a child, the entire house already heavy scented with the aroma of a turkey that had been in the oven for hours. Now I sit and watch the Thanksgiving parade, eyeing him suspiciously as he lingers over his coffee and Sudoku.
You can’t rush the French—about anything, most especially cooking—it shows disrespect and they just won’t stand for it.
And yet…he shows the old hen no respect. He’s rude to her, slathering her with butter and olive oil and then flinging her, breast down, legs in the air (the turkey, not my mother) into a 500-degree oven for the first twenty minutes.
His mashed potatoes are loaded with creme Fraiche, truffle salt, and a pound of butter…yet oddly enough—not a single calorie. Oh, the French.
His vegetable of choice is the brussel sprout. The recipe is so elaborate, with shredded bacon and Gruyère in a balsamic reduction; that he’s only allowed to make them every other year.
That allows us to have the green beans in mushroom soup with the dried onion rings on top for the alternating years. He would never deign to eat that slop. We, on the other hand, squeal with delight in gleeful anticipation of this mushy mess of soupy goodness while his face assumes that pinched look of French disapproval.
Maybe the worst atrocity against the holiday is the stuffing; or lack thereof. He was raised in France. They don’t know from stuffing. They have bread pudding.
This year he is repeating the mushroom and leek bread pudding that he served last Thanksgiving. It really is delicious, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not my mom’s stuffing and it doesn’t go well with gravy – if you can imagine that.
As long as we’re talking gravy. His gravy is ridiculously smooth and savory, I’ll hand him that. No one can figure out how he does it and I still haven’t caught him in the act of making it. I’m convinced it is delivered by Trappist monks to the back door just before we sit down.
He doesn’t care much for cranberry sauce so my mom still makes hers, which is not that crap in the can. Hers has chunks of real berries, more like a chutney and…oh sorry, I drooled.
Yams and sweet potatoes are not his things either so he’s given us the okay to make my mom’s killer Sweet Potato Casserole. It is heart-stoppingly delicious. La petite mort— it is THAT good.
Then there was the year he decided no pumpkin pie. Instead, he whipped up a pumpkin-ish, cheese-cakey, soufflé sort of thing—and a Tarte Tartan.
It’s been ten years, and I’m just getting over it.
His last act of hijackery is the fact that he does not deliver to the table a perfectly browned bird ready to be carved.
Nope, no Norman Rockwell moment at our house.
Instead, with knives so sharp they can slice a tomato, he carves the turkey up in the kitchen like a skilled butcher, arranging it artistically by sections on a white platter; placing the drumsticks on the sides like exclamation points. I’ve actually come to appreciate the expediency of serving the bird this way.
White meat on the left, dark meat on the right. Voila!
But this is a day about giving thanks and although He has hijacked this most American of meals, I must admit that we are lucky and ever so grateful to have this Frenchman in our family.
Every. Single. Year. He takes us on another culinary adventure, expanding our palates by spending weeks shopping, hours chopping and delivering to our family such a carefully thought out and meticulously prepared and delicious feast.
There are some compromises we make in a marriage that keep the wheels from gumming up and sticking. I turn a blind eye to the dirty dishes that sit overnight, while he helps me make the bed every day.
I have a thing about making the bed. I suppose you could say I’m anal about it. What can I say? I like to get into a freshly made bed every night. I even make the bed in hotel rooms. It stems from my childhood as an obedient, little Catholic saint-in-training, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
I know, I know! It’s a habit, but I don’t think it’s one that warrants an apology.
His aversion to a “made” bed is the result of spending his formative years in boarding school, under the Draconian rule of a bunch of Jesuit’s who had nothing better to do than to teach boys how to fold corners of sheets with military precision.
By the time he left, at fifteen, he swore he’d never make another bed. He seriously couldn’t care less if he climbs into a tangle of crumpled blankets and sheets. (Just writing that makes me squirm.)
Then he met me. The bed making nazi.
I’m sensing a pattern here. Something to do with religion and rules and something-or-other.
Never mind…
I also put my dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher when I’m finished with a meal.
Not him. He piles them on the side of the sink and leaves them for the morning. He likes to wash and load while the coffee is brewing.
The thought of waking up to dirty dishes gives me hives.
I tell him that while I try to sneak them into the dishwasher every night. It’s like a dance. By the dim light over the stove (I don’t alert him to the fact by turning on the lights) I soap up the sponge and start to wash. He sneaks up behind me, grabs my soapy hands while suds fly around all willy-nilly, and insists, “I’ll do them in the morning.”
Then we kiss. Like you do at the end of a lovely waltz. As I eyeball the pots and pans on my way to bed, all I can think is “Just kill me now.”
I know he feels obligated to help me make the bed because he tells me so. “It’s my bed too,” he says while he fluffs and karate chops each of the decorative pillows (there are six) just like I taught him to do when we first met.
Recently, after almost seventeen years together, I’ve decide that Sunday can be free-the-bed day. It takes every ounce of willpower I possess, but it remains purposely disheveled, frozen at the exact moment we got out of it…for the entire day.
Once he noticed, he declared, “I love it!”
“It looks inviting, doesn’t it?” He said, grinning broadly as he flopped down backward onto the sheets. The white sheets which that day had fresh, muddy paw-print polka dots all over them. Ruby was grinning too. Like a muddy fool. It didn’t take a pet psychic to tell me that she freakin’ loved free-the-bed day too!
I know when to admit defeat.
There are some compromises we make in a marriage that keep the wheels from gumming up and sticking. If you can’t eventually, after almost two decades together, remove the stick that’s been stuck up your ass and go-with-the-flow, then I suggest a giant vat of WD-40 for the gummy wheeels—and sheets the color of mud.
Once upon a time, there lived a couple. A man and a woman of middle age (if the average lifespan is 120) who’d been together for close to two decades.
Now, truth be told they were generally delightful, sharing many things in common such as their love of dogs and their wiggle butts, foreign travel, and food.
But alas, they also had their differences.
Besides politics—she was a life-long bleeding-heart liberal and well, his heart, although reduced to mush by babies, sappy songs, and car commercials had never shed any blood (politically speaking) so besides that, driving together had begun to come between them.
In all fairness, the man’s job required him to traverse the city of freeways numerous times a day. Frustrated, he operated one notch below full-blown road rage as he shared the streets of LA with the other clueless, dumb-shits, commuters.
She, on the other hand, drove very little; and when she did, a book on tape, podcast or favorite music mix would delight her, making her commute through LA almost…bearable.
When they rode together to dinner, the movies or to see friends all the way in San Diego, great caruments (car arguments) would ensue. There was yelling, tears and bad language and it all started to impede on their compatibility.
The women, feeling more and more like a Crash Test Dummy, may have used the words aggressive and dangerous when describing his driving, He preferred the words assertive and tactical.
When he drove, cars seemed to jump out of nowhere, threatening the poor sucker in the passenger seat (the woman), at an alarming rate. He was oblivious. It was his super power. And as such, he started to find her constant criticism more than mildly annoying. She found herself blaming him for her high anxiety and lack of fingernails.
All of this to say: When they drove together he was an assbite and she was fast becoming a wingnut.
On one such occasion, just the other night, the situation reached critical mass.
Winding their way home through the canyon after a delicious steak dinner and wine with friends, the woman noticed that he was driving uncharacteristically slow. Like pace car slow. Like “rush hour” slow. Like Asian tourist slow.
Curious as to the cause of this anomaly and sensitive to the fact that her nagging caused him to get defensive which never ended well, she delicately broached the subject.
“You’re drunk aren’t you?” she asked. “Otherwise why would you be driving like an old lady?”
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t adjust his speed or move his head. He just stared straight ahead, following the curves in the road at a glacial pace.
He must not have heard her she surmised, so she asked again, only this time louder.
“Is there a problem? Are you drunk? Why are you driving so damn slow?”
Undaunted, he stared straight into the night.
“Hey!”
“I hear you,” he finally replied never taking his eyes off the road. “I’m ignoring you.”
“Why?” She barely got the word out before he continued.
“You’re not happy when I drive fast and you complain when I drive slow,” he replied in an uncharacteristically non-defensive voice. “Besides, I’m a drunk old lady so I can only do one thing at a time.”
His response caught her so off guard that a giant force built inside her until her body could no longer contain it and out it burst. Giant guffaws of laughter filled the car. It must have been contagious because his face broke into a Cheshire grin and slowly he started to laugh too. For ten minutes straight, they laughed and they laughed and before they knew it—they were home.
Where they continue to live happily ever after (unless they discuss Hillary, health care, or how to get anywhere fast on the 405.)
