The On Again Off Again Romance

The first hint that Husband and I might actually be able to get away together - for one whole day and a half - was when I got a memo from Daughter's school about her upcoming fifth grade trip. Daughter, who won't sleep out ever, no matter what, will also not miss a class trip, no matter how much she can't stand letting me out of her sight.

So, being a shameless opportunist, I thought, Maybe we can go out of town while she's gone! But then I thought, But what will we do with Bar Mitzvahzilla?

The next four weeks were a wild, rocky roller coaster, not knowing from one day to the next if our trip was on or off.

We couldn't go. After all, Bar Mitzvahzilla had to go to school each day. And football practice. And Hebrew High.

We could go. Bar Mitzvahzilla, it turned out, was on Fall Break the very same week as Daughter's trip. No school and we'd wiggle out of football practice and one session of Hebrew High.

We couldn't go. Who would keep him overnight?

We could go. My sister.

We couldn't go. My sister was moving and, just our luck, had moved forty miles from our house the day before we were leaving.

We could go. She'd meet us half way to get Bar Mitzvahzilla.

We couldn't go. Daughter started worrying about the trip. Her stomach started acting up.

We could go. Psychosomatic illness.

We couldn't go. Daughter, now crazed with separation anxiety, kept herself up half the night before her trip worrying about missing me. (Somehow she never worries about missing Husband.)

We could go. Planted her on a bunch of pillows on the floor next to my bed and let her watch me all night.

And we did go. We both saw her off at school, carefully, like delicate china, since by then we had non-refundable reservations at a hotel. Then Husband drove Bar Mitzvahzilla to the drop off point, dropped him off, and we took off like a flash.

The next day, rejuvenated, newly back in love, back in our halcyon days of honeymoon and romance, we drove back into town and met Daughter after her return from her trip. Within seconds our romance fled out the windows of the car. We became The Parents once again. Then we picked up Bar Mitzvahzilla so the two of them could bicker at each other. And then we were complete: one bickering couple in the front seat and another bickering in the back.

But there's still that memory. I can live on that for awhile.

Do you ever get away without kids? Do you have to plot and sneak to do it? Does getting away rejuvenate your relationship? What do you do about fighting kids? Any nervious children?  

The Zen of Football

Okay, so I've now gone to two of Bar Mitzvahzilla's Freshman high school football games. This hasn't been without some great effort. Being a bit football challenged, just showing up took a lot of resolve. I knew that good moms go to their kid's games. So I had to go. That was that. No matter that each of the games have been away games, and I mean away - like the first one thirty miles north and the second one thirty miles south. And no matter that I soon learned a cruel fact of being the visiting team: our stands invariably face west into the setting sun in the 100 degree Arizona heat. But it's football, right? Suffering's part of the game.

So far our team lost one game and won another. Yesterday I found myself actually enjoying myself, sitting next to Husband and jumping up and down with all the other lunatic parents. The only thing I can't stand is Husband's preachy philosophizing about the game: what plays the coach should have played, what plays he might play, all the possibilities in the world, apparently, that have to be muttered into anyone's ear nearby. Considering that and the guy yelling "'Go Birds" intermittently, I think ear plugs could make this really good.

By the end of the two games Husband was muttering about something else: Bar Mitzvahzilla hadn't played. Today after practice he told me he doesn't expect to. Husband hit the roof but I chose to look at it in a more Zen-like manner.

When I was watching the game yesterday I forgot that my son hadn't actually been on the field because it seemed to me that just being a part of a team was something too - that his team playing was him playing. There were about four injuries during the overall game, moments during which both sides got down wordlessly on one knee and they and the spectators all showed respect for the injured player by clapping as he was taken off the field. Where would Bar Mitzvahzilla have gotten that experience, exactly, if not for football? That kind of reverence, of control, of understanding that sometimes you're a part of something bigger than just yourself. These are lessons I didn't learn till I was forty - that sometimes you just have to do a whole bunch of work and never know if there will be a payoff. That the work itself has meaning.

Also, football's brought some unexpected benefits. There's the fact that he got to start high school knowing a lot of kids, and coming from private school that was a big deal. There's the fourteen pounds of pure muscle he's packed on his frame. There's the fact that on game day he gets to strut around campus in his jersey. And, not least of all, he gets to look up from his position - yes, right now his position seems to be standing and not playing - and see two parents and a sister who love him enough to schlep all over the planet to show support for his team and his endeavor. And sweat.

He can also see his mother who's learning, after nearly eighteen years of marriage to a football fanatic, to enjoy the game.

Do you ever feel like you should keep a list of all the things you did to show love to your kids that they don't appreciate? Giving out any sage advice to children lately? Football anyone? 

Husband Goes Gaga

I've been married nearly eighteen years so there's a bit of amused tolerance that goes on in my marriage. Husband, on the one hand, has gotten accustomed to the fact that I have more shoes in my closet than a normal human being could reasonably expect to wear in a year and that, while I have bright ambitions for the clothes I buy, later I can't quite remember what they were and end up dressing like an idiot every day.

And I have amused tolerance for his music. He's a rock and roller and a music snob. He loves classic rock, which, of course, I was raised on too, and has in turn raised our kids on the Beatles, the Stones and all sorts of other 1960s music. He also took up guitar lessons about a year and a half ago and began composing songs that seemed a little personal, odes to me, with names like, "She's Impossible" and things like that. Okay, fine. I could live with all that.

But lately he's gone gaga for Lady Gaga and this, I have to say, is unexpected.

This didn't happen overnight. It also didn't happen without some resistance on his part, and complete investigation of the Gaga oeuvre, as it were. And even though he's confident about his fan status he's still connected enough to reality to be shamefaced about it, to his credit. After all, it certainly didn't happen because she wore a bunch of funky masks to award shoes or outfits that looked like performance art, which is more something I could appreciate. It happened because of raw talent.

First he heard her song Poker Face. An acoustic version that appeared on the BBC. Then he realized that she wrote it and all her own songs. Then he started searching YouTube (note to self: should never have shown Husband that YouTube existed) and he found videos of Lady Gaga in her former life as Stefani Germanotti sitting at a grand piano playing beautifully and singing riffs of her own songs with a scope and talent not exactly born of her years.

And that was it. The next thing I'm expecting is to open the mailbox and find one of those fan club packets I used to get in the 1960s for the Partridge Family or the Monkees. You know, with a button, and ID card, and a fake autographed picture of the object of your obsession.

Yesterday - like my life has become a cartoon or something - my fifty-five-year-old husband says to me, "Did you know that Lady Gaga was here in concert on July 31st? We could have gone!" In slow motion I look at him. I lift my hand to see if maybe he's running a fever. I've spent my entire married life trying to avoid all the concerts he wants me to go to - John Fogarty, Bob Dylan over and over again, and I went, even when Dylan didn't sing at all the entire concert. One time, years ago, he made me go to The Grateful Dead. And now he wants me to go to Lady Gaga?

I try to see the bright side of it. At least it's something we can go to with the kids. Right?

What do you have to look on with amused tolerance at with your spouse or partner? Have you fallen in love with any music lately that seems younger than your age but love it anyway? What about this Lady Gaga thing?

Counting Sheep

Here's what happens on a routine night when Husband and I go to sleep. He's ready for bed. I'm ready for bed. But I have something important to do first. I have to handle my pills.

I used to just have asthma. That was really easy. I had a pill a day to take and a couple of nebulizers: one for emergencies and one for maintenance.

Then I got my brain tumor in 2001 and things got a little punchy. There's just something about having a hole in your head filled with titanium mesh and screws. Some permanent pain and some tuning in of Radio Indonesia if I tilt my head just so. 

Turns out that when you've had a brain tumor and been left with some problems a pill organizer is your best friend. A really big one.

So I have a twenty-eight-day organizer. Each month I fill up all the little boxes, which have individual doors. The asthma stuff (now two pills), the post-brain tumor stuff (five pills), the osteopenia/porosis stuff (two), aspirin, multi-vitamins - who knows what? Let's just say that the gigantic organizer my mother uses with shoebox-sized compartments is starting to look attractive.

So I shake out that night's and the morning's pills and stare at them for a minute. It takes some brain power to figure out exactly which ones I take when. This is not work meant for a sleepy woman. If I take the wrong ones, I could end up staying up all night and sleeping all day. So I pick, pick, pick through them, swallow enough to choke a horse, use the inhaler, and turn off the light.

Husband and I say goodnight. On the count of five he's sleeping. I am stunned. How dare he fall asleep so fast? I'm wide awake, staring in the darkness, waiting for one of the pills to make my eyes shut.

Despite your best efforts, do you find your body falling to pieces as you age? Any insomnia issues? Do you find you ever have to be an amateur pharmacist? Do you have a husband/partner who sleeps like a hibernating bear?

Midlife, Bad Wife

As Husband and I have aged, I've been waiting for him to have a midlife crisis. Fully expecting it, really. I've been on red alert for convertibles, for blondes, for suspicious behavior, for coming home with a gigantic toupee. Anything.

What I didn't expect - what completely caught me off guard - is that the only one in this family having a midlife crisis is me.

He turned fifty. Then he turned fifty-five. Not a blip on the radar screen. He's steady, he's loving, he's home every night. No convertibles, no blondes. Devoted to his family. Gets up everyday like a robot to work at our store. Impulsive purchase of the year? A spiffy new box truck for the store. Not really a midlife crisis vehicle.

But I am a different story. Through a combination of hormones draining out of my body and, apparently, pooling on the ground, and having a recent disappointment with my book, I found myself falling into a gloom of midlife despair. What was the answer? Maybe I needed to disappear to a deserted island for six months to work on my book. After all, all marriages involve compromise and maybe I'd been compromising my writing too much. Did I need to put my writing before my marriage?

When I was a kid in Chicago I had a lot of aunts, but there was one in particular who was a handful. If something popped in her head, she said it, no matter what, even if she thought one of us was fat or ugly or stupid, she'd say it. She was mean and scary. With my midlife menopause upon me, that's how I felt. Mean and scary. If I thought it, I said it. I suddenly understood what it must have been like to be this aunt of mine; to have almost no control over what was coming out of her mouth. Was it just reflecting the negativity that was playing in her brain?

Just in the nick of time my new bio-identical hormone pellets started working. I don't feel like I'm twenty again but I do feel a little more human. And I did some thinking about that agent and the fact that it's not really her fault that I imbued her with so much magic. She's no more magical than a hundred other agents.  The success or failure of my writing still depends on me. 

Now hopefully I can get back to normal. Watching out for blondes and convertibles.

Hormones acting up lately? Midlife, early life or late-in-life crisis? Do you ever find yourself blaming every thing you've never done on someone else?

Escaping From Our Kids

 

Last weekend something amazing happened to Husband and me. I had kind of thought we were going on a date on Saturday night but it didn't look like it was going to work out. The confluence of the stars and the planets didn't align, or something like that. Actually, our dates for the last few years have been something I never can plan. It's like  Bar Mitzvahzilla suddenly disappears on a sleepover somewhere and Daughter gets picked up by her best friend's mom and, whoosh, we're out the door, amazed at our good fortune.

But when the plans fell through this time, Husband and I looked at each other and said, "Let's go out anyway." Here's the deal: Bar Mitzvahzilla is turning fifteen in six weeks. That's older than any babysitter we ever had for both of them. Our most wonderful, regular babysitter, whom we had for years when they were little, started with us when she was twelve and Daughter was in diapers.

Of course, that babysitter was a female. Mature. She lived behind us and so her family could hop over our fence to help should something go awry, not to mention the fact that Husband and I could swoop back home. Bar Mitzvahzilla, of course, is a different creature altogether. So his twelfth year passed by and we couldn't leave the kids alone. Thirteenth and no tomato. Fourteenth and finally I could start going to my exercise class or meetings as the sun was setting knowing that Husband would be home soon.

But fifteen? Duh. We're outta here.

It's like we're waking up after a long sleep, rubbing our eyes and shaking cobwebs out of our hair, like we're Rip Van Winkles, asleep for the last fifteen years. What's happened in the world since we've been trapped in that house with those tiny tyrants? What news is there of the outside world?

We head off to our three hour date, home at ten, holding hands.

How hard is it to put yourself back on the priority list? How tempting is it to bring the kids everywhere, even when they're old enough to stay home? Have you ever had this sweet moment of freedom, or noticed its lack?

By Any Other Name

Because I won the Oh My Blog Award (thank you Robin!) I am going to tell you about my most humiliating moment. In a lifetime of humiliating moments, it was hard to pick one, but I've tried my best. I tried to balance great moment of happiness and triumph with crushing embarassment. That should do it, right?

In late 1992 I was ordering the wedding invitations for my marriage to Husband and was having some trouble with the wording. I had been married before, see, and I had not gone back to my maiden name after my divorce, mostly because I hated it like poison. My dad, an immigrant, had come to this country as Harry Burstein but had changed our last name to Burt. My twenty-six onerous years as Linda Burt (just say that ten times fast and you'll see what I mean) weighed heavily on me when I was getting divorced at twenty-nine. There was no way I was going back to that name. So I kept my ex-husband's name, Maric*.

So how to word the invitations? Linda Jayne Maric? Linda Burt Maric? I did the latter and everything moved forward.

The day of the wedding dawned. I got to the venue. Big sign outside: The Maric/Pressman wedding. I cringed. I could now see that when I kept my ex-husband's name I hadn't quite thought this thing through completely. Like to the next marriage day.

Then we got married. The chuppah. The Rabbi. The rings. Whew. I was officially Linda Pressman. That should be the end of that torment, right?

But then the Best Man stood up to make a toast. To the Marics, whom he thought were my family. Who, of course, were not there since they were my ex-husband's family. Would any woman want the ghost of Husbands Past brought up at the wedding of Husbands Present?

The Best Man's wife gave his coat a hard yank and said in a loud whisper, "Burt! Her family's name is Burt!" and he continued with the toast.

But still.

Have any humiliating moments you'd like to share? Excruciating moments at your wedding? Toast difficulties? Or would you just like to join in the chorus and laugh at me?

*ex-husband's name changed.

I'd like to pass the Oh My Blog award to the following bloggers, all of whom I think may have some fun with this one:

Maria at Mom of Three Seeks Sanity
Amber at Making the Moments Count
mommymommymommy at KISS - Keep It Simple Sister

The rules of the Award are:

1. Get really excited that you got the coolest award EVER!
2. Choose ONE of the following options of accepting the OMB award:
   (a) Get really drunk and blog for 15 minutes straight, or for as long as you can focus.
   (b) Write about your most embarrassing moment.
   (c) Write a “Soundtrack of your childhood” post.
   (d) Make your next blog a ‘vlog’/video blog. Basically, you’re talking to the camera about whatever.
   (e) Take a picture of yourself first thing in the morning, before you do anything else (hair, make up,
        etc) and post it.
3. Pass the award on to at least three, but preferably more, awesome bloggers as yourself.
    Don’t forget to tell them.

Piloting the Pilot

Last Sunday we picked up Bar Mitzvahzilla from the airport after his week long eighth grade trip to Washington DC with his class.

Everything went well, or just as expected. We got to the airport and found all the other parents milling around waiting for the kids. We spotted our boy, who seemed to have grown five inches in the one week he was gone. I got tearful, of course. Daughter was in quite an awkward spot. They normally live in a constant battlezone but she had actually missed him like crazy and spoken with him on the phone like a normal human sister, so what would their new relationship be like? Humans or opposing armies? Awkward or back to normal?

I warned her, "One day you and your brother are going to be grown ups and you're going to have to speak to each other like real people, not like fighting siblings all the time. Start now."

Then we got back in the car, drove out of the parking structure. Suddenly my husband starts fumbling with something. I see it's a walkie talkie. From like 1972. It's gigantic and has an antenna and he has to almost hang it out of the car window in order to get some reception. This is as modern as he gets in the day and age of iPhone and iPads. A Vietnam-Era walkie talkie so that he can listen to the pilots talking to the control tower.

The kids and I all look at him like he sprouted horns. Then we look at each other, all of us thinking what a geek Husband is because, of course, a trip to the airport means one thing only to him: listening to the gigantic walkie talkies and being at one with all the pilot lingo. Husband was a licensed pilot before he was a licensed driver, though he hasn't flown in all the years I've known him. Right now, unfortunately, the closest he's getting to a pilot is that we're actually driving his Honda Pilot.

I think of his other hobbies. The weather maps always pulled up on our computer at home so he can predict what the day will be like. The collection of albums that he's absolutely, positively going to transfer onto CDs, except that now CDs are out of date.
I sigh and think of my advice to my daughter. One day the kids will be out of the house and Husband and I will be alone so I'd better start treating him like a real person right now, not just a geek.

I say, "Cool, honey. Watch the road."

Does your spouse or partner have any hobbies that border on the geeky? Anything that makes you want to roll your eyes?

Learning How to Lust

At Bar Mitzvahzilla's Bar Mitzvah

When my ex-husband and I walked into our marriage counselor's office in early 1988, the counselor quickly figured out our problem. Was it that we were sitting apart from each other? That there were no random touches or fleeting glances of intimacy? That we fought repeatedly and with unalleviated hatred?

She guessed our problem quickly. She asked us about sex.

We looked at each other like we were ten-year-olds. Sex?

Yes, sex, she said. How much sex do you have?

We hemmed and hawed our way into a lie - maybe once every two weeks or so. Yes, that was it. We nodded. Our first and only agreement in what would end up being ten months of marriage counseling.

In 1988 we actually had sex once the entire year.

I knew I was supposed to have sex. I was 28, for goodness sakes. And married. Married people were supposed to have sex. And I was raised in the seventies, a time period when virginity wasn't a prized asset, it was more like a barrier between myself and my full life as a woman.

The only problem was that before I met my ex-husband every time I tried to experience life as a "full woman" I erred. Used and dumped. Waiting by the phone. Dating guys who wanted me but whom I didn't want. Choosing guys for all the wrong reasons all the time.

Finally I met my ex-husband and he became my refuge. Not much in the sex department, but still. He called. He didn't use me. He would be there - like a Gila Monster, he'd be there clamped onto me.

How hard is it to leave a marriage when you've run from the sexual side of life, when you're afraid that you don't stack up, that maybe something about you just isn't good enough to have someone call and be there?  Someone normal?

I wasn't trampy after my divorce. I'd already been through my trampy phase. I was all tramped out. But I knew I needed a guy with a little oomph, some drive, some lust. I wasn't planning on laying alone and untouched on my side of the bed for the rest of my life as I had been during my first marriage.

So lust? Got it. Troublesome husband in the middle of the night? Got it. Passionate kisses out of sight of the kids but getting caught anyway? Got it. A husband who never let himself come second to crying babies, babies parked in our room, children coming to sleep in our room? Got all that.

A relationship that's strong enough, romantic enough, and, yes, lustful enough, that one day when the kids dash off to college, hopefully we'll remember why we're married.

This post is part of Momalom's Five for Ten series and the fourth topic - Lust. Click on over and join the community!

A Pintele Yid

My parents weren't very into Judaism while I was growing up. Because of the Holocaust, because of seeing things during the war that they felt were incompatible with the existence of any God, none of that was part of the Jewishness I grew up with. Food was, Yiddish was, and, of course, the Holocaust was. As a matter of fact, instead of my parents picking between Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, they simply made up their own denomination: Holocaust Judaism. Our worship consisted mainly of repeating over and over again all of the horrors our parents lived through during the war, until we all ran shrieking from the house into the arms of non-Jewish spouses.

But I had a longing for more. I had a pintele yid - a little Jewish spark inside me.

In 1989, I got divorced from my first husband. There were a lot of reasons for this but they can be boiled down to the most important one: I was dying inside my marriage. That's all. My pintele yid reared its head hopefully. Could the little Jew come out again? I didn't know anyone in the Jewish community, I hadn't been to a synagogue in years - I'd been hiding in fact, believing I didn't belong. But I also believed one thing absolutely: if I had to start all over again I was going to get exactly the life I wanted.

This past Sunday was the Israel Independence Day Fair in Phoenix. Husband and I went and walked among all the tables and booths and I saw what my pintele yid and I had built in the twenty-one years since my divorce, and in the seventeen years since my second marriage.

I wasn't alone anymore; that little Jew inside of me has nothing to hanker for. My synagogue, my Rabbi, my kids' Preschool teachers, their Jewish Day School teachers and staff, their camp, my chavurah friends, the moms and dads I've met, the charities with which we've been involved, and so much more. A rich life. A life that at one time eluded me. From Holocaust Judaism back to Judaism, one step at a time.

The life I dreamed of the day I watched my ex-husband drive away, his car loaded with his belongings.

Did you ever have to start over? After a move, in college, as an adult? Did you ever have to start with nothing but your belief in a different life?

Head Laundress

I've gotten the kids pretty well trained on one task lately: they do their own clothes wash.

I know - this is big. I think when I went away to college at eighteen I had never done my own, but in a household in which I've never done Husband's laundry, it was only a matter of time.

I was going to do Husband's laundry once we got married. Not really because of some dutiful housewife thing, but more because he was so optimistic that since he'd finally married (he was thirty-six) he finally wouldn't have to do it. But, really, hadn't he noticed what he'd been dating for the last year and a half? He couldn't have failed to notice that I had no prowess around the house. 

So we went in the laundry room together because he planned to give me something called "instructions." Apparently, there were instructions - the first death knell for him getting his wash done. One of the instructions was that when his clothes went in the dryer they were only allowed to be tumbled for a few seconds before the shirts would need to be yanked out hung up wet, making sure the collars lay flat. To quote, he didn't want his wash "cooked."

So, long story short, I've never done his laundry. Unless he was interested in the Linda "Stuff-As-Much-Into-A-Washer-As-Can-Fit" and "Dry-Until-It-Burns" methodology, then he obviously wasn't interested in me being his laundress.

But since I have such low standards, the kids and I have been getting along very well in the laundry department. Of course, sometimes they forget to put in soap and have to wash their load again. And then sometimes they forget to transfer the wash to the dryer, leaving everything in there to rot, and, yes, have to wash their load again. But overall, a good deal.

But the other day, Bar Mitzvahzilla left a load in the dryer and I needed it so, huffing and puffing like a martyr, I unloaded it. The minute I opened the door, however, there it was. The most dreaded thing you can ever find in a dryer: the skinny string of tissue. My heart sunk. Of course, I knew what had happened. Bar Mitzvahzilla had left one Kleenex in one pair of jeans and, somehow, somewhere in the mysterious world inside the washer and dryer, that one tissue had multiplied and divided and stringified into thousands and thousands of skinny pieces of one-ply tissues.

Could this have been avoided? I don't know. Would you want to put your hands in the pockets of a fourteen-year-old's clothes to pull used tissues out? Would you even want to get involved if he was doing his own wash? Anyway, the damage was done. I unloaded his laundry, consisting of more tissue than clothes, and left it for him to sort later.

Then I started transferring my wash over and what did I find? Wet tissues.

Do you do your husband/partner's laundry? Does someone do yours? What have you found in the washer or dryer that doesn't belong there?

Husband in a Box

A few weeks ago Husband was very excited. He had bought a new truck.

Maybe you'd think this might be some wild and crazy impetuous action on Husband's part? Maybe some spiffy sport truck, or a special truck for weekend jaunts, or in some way connected to leisure, or a macho image? Like maybe it was a truck with ten-foot-high tires and a lift kit?

But no. This is my husband we're talking about. It was a box truck, for our store. A big, ugly, white cargo truck intended to carry flooring around town and store products while it's parked.

Our store is not located in the best part of town, mostly because we couldn't afford the rent if it was. So Husband immediately became paranoid about parking the truck down there. What if someone stole the box truck? What if someone stole the box truck's battery? What about the myriad other risks, like sprayed on gang symbols, vandalism, etc?

So what did Husband decide to do? He decided that the box truck would be his vehicle now. He'd just drive it to and from work each day and he'd park this monstrosity outside of our house each night so that in the morning it would block out the sun and cast our entire house into darkness.

And this is what I have to say about that: if the biggest fantasy of your husband's life is to drive a box truck to and from work, you can pretty much rest assured that he's not cheating on you. There just aren't that many men picking up their mistresses in gigantic box trucks and going to motels. Nor are there very many men driving enormous box trucks in the red light districts of any cities trying to pick up hookers. The box truck, it turns out, is a huge, and I mean huge, symbol of fidelity.

As with all new things, the newness wore off. Husband finally calmed down. He figured out how to take out the battery so he could park it overnight at our store. Though he'd really had his heart set on the novelty and panache of driving it to and from work each day, he finally understood that he just couldn't. Box trucks belong at stores.

So he drove it on its final journey. The engine rumbled to life, the gears screeched into place, down our street and all the way back to the store. And there it sits now, casting its shadow.

Any mid-life crisis car purchasing going on in your family? Any anti-mid-life crisis car purchasing going on in your family? Does your spouse/partner ever get excited about buying something really dorky? Something that necessitates you having to stand there and say, "Nice box truck, honey. Really."

My Seventeenth Anniversary Gift: The Super Bowl

There was this thing just nagging at my brain, something I just couldn't figure out. What was it that was bugging me? I knew it was something important.

There was Husband's hubub - his fury of preparation for the Super Bowl this weekend. How he's been working a lot of weekends in preparation for absolutely, positively having this Sunday off. There's been the usual countdown to the game, the other teams falling away, the kids and him enrapt in each game in our family room while I write in my office.

But something was bugging me. Then I realized what it was: our seventeenth wedding anniversary falls on SuperBowl Sunday.

Being married to whom I am married to, was there even a chance in the world that we were going to go out on Sunday? All of his machinations, all the scheduling and rescheduling, the elaborate dancing about on the calendar - had he even noticed? How big of a shrew would I be exactly to bring this up?

This is what I remember. It was 1992. Husband and I were Very Seriously dating. We were actually in love, which was pretty amazing because I had plunged off the cliff of leaving my first marriage in 1989 not knowing if anyone would ever love me again except for my ex-husband who assured me, as I was leaving, that no one ever would. And then, in 1991, I met Husband, and, by 1992, love indeed. We went shopping for rings. I even kind of designed my ring. Then he went down there and picked up the ring. And then? Nothing happened.

I don't know what he was waiting for. The ring was in the house, I was in the house, but the ring was not on my finger.

Finally, I just picked up the phone and scheduled a fancy dinner out for us at a nice restaurant in North Scottsdale. That seemed to jog his brain into some activity. He brought along the ring and proposed. If I had left it completely up to him, I'm sure seventeen years later I'd still be sitting on his ratty old couch in his ratty old house in Tempe, rolling my eyes and waiting to get that ring because Husband can't actually coordinate anything. Except, apparently, for the Super Bowl. That he can schedule.

So I'm going to have mercy on him. I'll plan our dinner out - on Saturday night, the day before our anniversary. And then on Sunday, my gift to him:  I will sit down like a proper wife and I will stay there, next to him, glued to my seat, watching the Super Bowl.

Any excruciating proposal or engagement stories? Any conflicting special days?

Breaking News

It's a typical nighttime in our house. Husband and I are reading the newspaper together, the kids are both taking showers in different bathrooms, trying to race and see who will use up all the hot water first and deprive the other of an enjoyable shower. After all, any day you can cause misery to your sibling is a good day for either one of them.

Husband got to the paper before me so I'm reading each crinkled up, disheveled section after him, and I'm actually thinking he read each one thoroughly.

I ask my him, "Did you read that story about the real estate blogger who posts pictures of ugly houses on this blog?" 

He looks at me blankly.

I recap the story briefly to jog his memory. He's still blank. I give him a look.

"Did you read the paper?" I ask. He says yes, he just didn't read that one story.

Right. I look at him suspiciously. I know he's really only reading the comics and checking the weather for tomorrow. And we live in Arizona; it's not like there are any dramatic weather changes in store for us. 

Amazing. Here we are, sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, reading the same newspaper, married nearly seventeen years, yet so different that we stare at each other blankly when one of us wants to discuss a particular story with the other. Okay, it's always me who wants to discuss a story and it's always him looking at me blankly.

Nearly seventeen years of mismatched marital bliss.

Yet this time, one thing we agree on, one story we haven't missed - the plea for aid to Haiti. 

Sound the Alarm

Husband and I are different in so many ways. One of the most obvious? How we wake up.

We're sleeping. The room is dark - very dark. We made sure of this by putting up drapes over our wooden blinds. So we have no sense of what time it is by the amount of light.

But then the alarm goes off.

On Husband's side of the bed, things are starting to move. His is the organized side of the bed, which means he actually heard the alarm. The night before, he meticulously set the alarm for twenty minutes before he needs to get out of bed, so when it goes off, an arm claws its way out of the covers, reaches for the clock and he puts it on snooze. Then he snoozes. It goes off again. He puts it on snooze again, now watching it like an alligator, with one eye open beneath the covers. Then it goes off the final time - it is 6:58 AM, time to hop out of bed. And hop he does.

Over on my side of the bed, things are a little less organized. First of all, I don't hear the alarm clock at all, not the first time, nor snooze numbers one, two, or three. This is mainly because Husband has set the alarm to turn on with music, and very quietly, so, in my lazy dreamlike state, I just weave his Classic Rock station into the fabric of my dream.

But he's out of bed, opening the curtains, welcoming the day, waking up the kids, while now I'm staring at the clock in denial. I know I have six minutes till it goes off again and I know the latest time I can make it out of the house with a shower. Then, laying there half dead, I try to do the math to figure out how many snoozes I can have. 
Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter have cross-inherited our tendencies. If I'm waking up the kids, sometimes Daughter surprises me by being fully up and dressed yet laying under the covers in her room tricking me. Okay. That would make her like Husband.

No chance of that with Bar Mitzvahzilla. He can sleep through his light being turned on brightly, his radio blasting, his cover taken away. We can walk in there a half hour later and see his big feet and hairy legs sprawled out on the bed, all of him comatose. And that would mean he takes after me.

Yet, somehow, at 8:00 everyday, despite all the smashing of the alarm clocks, all the storming into Bar Mitzvahzilla's bedroom to make sure he's up, all the suspicious questioning about the brushing of the teeth, a car - one or the other - pulls out of the driveway on its way to school, in time for the school's alarm at 8:15.

Dream House

I've lived in my house for almost seventeen years. We built this house as newlyweds and I've been stuck here ever since. I need to just face the fact that I'm never getting out of this house.

I should have known when I met Husband that he wasn't the kind of guy who moved around a lot. He was pretty settled in his own nice little house back then. The fact that it was in a neighborhood that was crumbling around him, with dangerous youth gangs roaming the streets, never fazed him. He wasn't the kind of guy who just up and moved. He had to think about it first for a few decades. Also, he came from a family who didn't like change either, like they'd nail a picture up on the wall in 1946 and that's where it would stay for the next sixty years.

Meanwhile, in my family, my mother spent the sixties repainting, recarpeting, refurbishing. If she ran out of money, she just picked up our furniture and threw it down, like dice, into a new decorating configuration. She could never leave anything alone, except permanent fixtures, like light switches and staircases.

I'm not saying my house isn't great, on the inside. Somehow, in 1993 when we bought it, before we even had kids, we ended up with a house with enough space. Nowadays we use a lot more of that space, but still, we're not squished.

But this great house is plopped on a postage stamp piece of property, and the house takes up most of it. If I reach an arm out the window, I can almost touch my neighbor's house. Our front yards are gravel, like the alleys were back in Chicago. In Arizona this is called "landscaping." Since grass doesn't grow naturally here, our backyard has a combination of dirt and weeds that we like to call a lawn.

So I stalk houses with land. I stalk houses with big kids' bedrooms. I stalk houses with views. I stalk houses in neighborhoods that don't have HOAs. I stalk houses with gigantic laundryrooms that don't have doors to the garage at one end of them. I could settle for a house that had a laundryroom that could actually fit a laundry basket in it.

For right now, I think I'll go rearrange some furniture.

Do you always feel like everything would be perfect if you lived in a different place? Do you live in different circumstances than those you grew up in?

The TV Looks Smashing

Okay, I went to the football game on Sunday. I went, I sat, I ate, I was enthused, I was crestfallen, I stayed till the bitter end.

And I thought, Whew, that wasn't so bad. I'm glad I got that out of the way. Now football is over.

But guess what? Football, apparently is never going to end. There is never enough football.

Before we left for the game, the TV was on in our house - a must-see game. Okay, fine. But certainly once we were done being at the actual game, that would be enough, right?

Well, apparently I don't read minds very well. We came home, on went the TV. There was a Bowl game on - the Soup Bowl, I think. The next day, another Bowl game. And every single day this week, Bowl after Bowl after Bowl. Today is Wednesday. There is a Bowl on TV. Who ever heard of football on a Wednesday?

Normally Husband is such a TV snob that, except for football, he can't stand to have the TV on. The last series we actually followed together and watched on an ongoing basis was Seinfeld. It was a long, long time ago. Because of his TV snobbery, I've missed every major TV show of the last ten years. But for football, he makes an exception.

"Football is real," he tells me. "It's not a bunch of actors spouting lines. This is real drama. You don't know the outcome. It's exciting, things change from minute to minute."

I look at the TV. I see a bunch of top-heavy guys crunching against each other to make their way across a big field of grass.

"Shakespeare is drama," I say. "Not football."

He says, "Anyway, the season's over."

I perk up. "Really?"

"Tomorrow night's the last Bowl game."

"Is that it, then, till the Superbowl?" I am chortling with glee.

"Well, that's it for college football."

Just as I'm about to do a little dance, he continues. "But there are NFL Playoff games every Saturday and Sunday starting this weekend till the SuperBowl."

"Oh."

I glare at him; go back to my office.

The Bearded Stranger

I was driving somewhere with Bar Mitzvahzilla the other day when I looked over at him and I saw not one, not two, but three long, white, meandering hairs growing out of his chin, gleaming in the sunlight.  I said, "What is that?" Then he covered up his chin, refusing to show me. How did those grow there, and grow that long, without me noticing?

We've had our awkward adolescent days. We had last summer when he refused to swim without a shirt on, and I had to wonder what was growing under the shirt. Was it a siamese twin growing out of the side of his body? There are the fangs growing in on both sides of his mouth. There's the routine humiliations of adolescence - the pimples, the braces - things the whole world can see. But a sparse, scraggly, hillbilly-looking blonde beard?

Clearly the fact that this thing exists can be blamed on Husband. Just like I'm always on the look out for Daughter's signs of adolescence ("Do you want a training bra yet? How about now? Now?") it's up to Husband to be on red alert with his responsibilites. He should've noticed scraggly hair number one before it began multiplying. And just because Bar Mitzvahzilla has somehow managed to pop out blonde facial hair in a family of swarthy Jews, that's no excuse for Husband not to notice it.

I grew up watching my dad shave with a double-edged razor and shaving soap in a cup. Because he had a cleft in his chin, each day he'd come away wounded with tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to all the cuts on his face. Not only would he get wounded, but the minute he was done, right after he'd slapped on his Old Spice, his 5:00 shadow was growing back in, he was that hairy.

I can handle all the nitty gritty discussions with Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter about sex, all the generalities about how this works or that, but when it comes down to teaching the boy to shave, Husband's just going to have to take out the stropping blade and teach him. Before scraggly hair number four grows in.

Cardinal Sin

Husband has been off from work since December 24th and that should mean a lot of things: togetherness, bliss, quiet time, romance. Of course, it hasn't.  Instead it's meant this one thing instead:  football.  My nemesis.

Sometimes, in moments of despair, I think, How did this happen to me? How did I end up married to someone whose idea of a really fun, relaxing day is watching football? After all, I'm one of seven sisters, for goodness sakes. That meant no brothers watching football in the house growing up. My father was an immigrant from Poland - that certainly meant no football. He could never understand the importance of American sports - compared to life and death in Siberia during the war? Bah! And because he died right before I turned fifteen, I then lived in an all-female household. No football at all. My whole life was somehow football-free, safely tucked away from the misery of listening to screaming fans on football fields yelling and drinking and eating and throwing punches over the outcomes of games.

Then I married Husband almost seventeen years ago.  Well, actually, I started dating Husband nineteen years ago.  Two years of all the warning signs.  Two years of hugging him and having him position me just so - so he could see the TV with the football game on over my shoulder or over the top of my head. Two years of primitive satellite dishes already beaming football games from all corners of the globe into whatever house we were living in until we moved into this one and a TV that now has about two hundred channels.

And now there's Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter.  Those traitors.  Husband has brainwashed them into loving football. He has taught them all the most minute play information, the philosophical differences between a first down and a fourth down and what you'd want to try for and what you wouldn't if, let's say, you weighed about 300 pounds and wore tight knickers each day to work. And Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter (even my daughter - who should rightfully be shopping with her mom at the mall) sit there glued to the set, analyzing each game with Husband, fascinated by who will make it into the play offs by wins and who will make it by being the wild card.

And to make it much, much worse, Husband has bought tickets to the Cardinals/Green Bay game here in Phoenix this Sunday and nothing, but nothing, will save me from my fate. I have to go. 2:15 kickoff on January 3rd. I can't bring a book and I can't bring my laptop. Bar Mitzvahzilla wants me to wear a cheesehead and Daughter wants me to wear a Cardinal jersey. They should be glad if I get in the car without first being tranquilized.

But here's what I'm going to do: breath deeply, smile happily, know that this should absolutely be the last game I have to go to in my lifetime (I'm averaging one every thirty years), be a good mom/fan/wife for four interminable hours. And then? Never again.

The Snowman Cometh

Up until three days ago, Daughter and Bar Mitzvahzilla had never seen snow.  This is kind of funny because we come from a family with a legacy of snow.  My dad, a Holocaust Survivor, spent the war years living in Siberia. Instead of that making him cautious about the cold, instead that made my dad the opposite, quite flippant. When I was growing up in Chicago, he compared the weather there with the weather in Siberia and found Chicago's weather a heatwave, heading out each day with no hat, no gloves, and a flimsy jacket.

He'd say, "Cold? You think this is cold?" We'd nod because with the wind chill factor it was about twenty below zero. "You should have felt the cold in Siberia! Cold is when you get a bucket of water, throw it in the air and, before it gets to the ground, it freezes!"

My mother, who spent the war living in the Eastern European forest with no coat or shoes, had a different perspective.  She had a terrible fear of being cold. She was the one who'd wrap us in miles of scarves, who crocheted mittens for hours, and who knitted sweaters until all seven of us looked like we were wearing the striped flags of obscure countries, our clothes made out of whichever color yarn she got on sale. 

But Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter know nothing of cold.  They are Arizonans - Phoenix, Arizonans. So we decided to do something different for our winter vacation.  Normally we consider only the bottom half of Arizona for a winter vacation because Husband and I shun the cold.  But this year we decided to introduce the kids to snow.

They had a dreamy idea of what it would be like.  Fluffy maybe, like billowing cotton balls? Tiny doilies skittering through the air?  Like pillow stuffing, feathers? Cold doesn't come into any of their descriptions.

We're driving up the Interstate, we get past a certain elevation and there it is - white stuff just laying on the ground.  Other travelers from Phoenix are pulling over in excitement and letting their kids sled down the roadside hills almost into traffic. We pull over somewhere safe and the kids go plummeting into a snow bank. Fluffy? Yes. Pillowy? Uh, okay. Cold and wet? Yeah.

Here's what I find out on this trip.  I find out that I am apparently not too old to make a complete idiot out of myself sledding down hills and capsizing, over and over again.  I find out that Husband, five years older than me, thinks he can head down a hill like a bullet, but then he pulls all his back muscles.  I find out that it's never a good idea to stay in a hotel with "sleep number" beds because the kids will play with the motors over and over again until they break them and they're stuck in a concave position, further putting out Husband's back.

Tonight is our last night away, the last dinner out, the last bundling on of gloves, hats and gigantic coats just to walk to the car and then from the car into a restaurant.

Three days ago the Snowman Cometh but tomorrow the snowman goeth.