In no particular order. Staying in love is less about evading dramatic catastrophes and more about avoiding death by a thousand paper cuts.
1) Make sure you are loved back. After a while it gets difficult to respect yourself if your love is unrequited.
2) There are many observations best made only inside one's head, particularly concerning annoying but innocuous habits. Do you want to be constantly evaluated? Didn't think so.
3) Quote your loved one back to him or herself when he or she makes an astute observation. Everyone likes to feel heard.
4) Rib only gently and respect the line. It can move from day to day.
5) Always choose your lover over the cat or dog.
6) When evenly matched, whoever cares more about the subject should win the argument.
7) Joke early and often and especially in times of peril.
8) Let your lover hear you compliment him or her to others. Sometimes we forget to do it to their faces.
9) Protect your lover's pride, always. Always.
10) Understand when a hug is needed, when space is needed, and when sex is needed. Try to oblige.
This morning I woke up thinking about falling in love. I'm not sure if it was the end notes of a dream or the cozy feeling of coming off three nights spent alone with Beloved and no little angel, but I woke up with that feeling in my throat of the first time someone says, "I think I love you."
A few minutes ago, I read Schmutzie's post on happiness, and I thought about waking up to thinking about love. My husband and I ran into a college kid on our recent trip, and the kid asked if we were married. "Almost twelve years," I said. And this kid, who up to this point had been bragging about getting 98 percent in a class without ever having cracked the book's spine and getting laid the night before glanced over with utter sincerity and said, "That's cool. That really makes me happy, that you guys have been together so long."
Well, son, I'm glad I restored your faith in humanity. Because let me tell you, being in love -- long-term love -- is awesome. It usually feels a little different than the falling-in-love, though, and that's a tough one to swallow. Falling in love lasts, what, a few months at best? Being in love -- now that's a different story. That can last forever.
There are ways to tap into that first-few-months feeling, though. I spent years thinking about that feeling while I was single and realized part of falling in love is getting to know a new person, but if I'm honest with myself, part of falling in love is finding a new audience for your tired old stories, a new person to feel new around. Part of falling in love is feeling interesting again.
Part of falling in love is falling in love with yourself.
Maybe that's part of why artists and performers and writers are so crazy about our work. Creating something new is like getting to tell your stories again, maybe even stories you just learned yesterday, stories you didn't even know you knew. Or maybe they are old stories but nobody yet has received them quite the way you were hoping for.
Falling in love, I think, has little to do with falling in love in the conventional sense.
Falling in love, I think, is being able to tap into the part of you that finds yourself still interesting after all these years.
Two weeks ago, my husband told me he'd lost his job in a clean, P&L-based cut. And suddenly, that thing I feared ever since we got married and bought a house and birthed another mouth to feed happened, and I wasn't sure if we could live on my salary or not.
Whether or not we should be able to is beside the question. Of course we should be able to. But we weren't. My husband and I earn within a small range of each other's salaries, and we've always been a two-income family. We've both been laid off or about to be laid off three or four times each -- I've been in Internet publishing since 1999, and he's been in sales-related jobs since 2007 -- but only once before was it quite like this, and that was almost twelve years ago, before the little angel, before the mortgage, back when we were 27 and could just stop drinking beer for a week and everything would be fine.
There are other things I'm afraid of -- cancer, other terminal illness, the death of loved ones, finding a possum in my basement, the usual things -- but sudden, unexpected job loss without a back-up plan is something I've been afraid of since I was a little girl and my mom stayed home with us, so in my mind if my dad lost his job, we would immediately starve to death, like within days.
It's been two weeks, and surprisingly, we haven't starved. We haven't even been hungry. And though I have been through the usual gamut of emotions starting with shock and ripping through anger and fear, they didn't last long. I'm not sure why, actually. I cried last night for a completely unrelated reason, but that's the first time I've cried for more than about five seconds in the entire two weeks.
I have no doubt he'll have a new job that he likes eventually. He could probably have one right this minute if he were ready to go out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I've begged him not to do that, to be thoughtful in his journey. We're not spring chickens anymore, and I know as well as anyone that being unhappy with your work will rot your guts and raise your blood pressure. We're at that age where it would be good not to have work stress operate on your innards any more than it has to.
I don't know how long it will take, though. I'm staring at the tattoo on my arm of the word "now" and trying to mind it. It doesn't matter how long it takes, because I can't know, and I can't do anything about it, and right now, right this minute, I'm tapping this away on my laptop and listening to Drops of Jupiter and wondering when the leaves will drop. The grass that was so dormant it hurt your feet a month or so ago is lush again, the only evidence of the worst drought in years left in the dead patches scattered here and there, the lawn's scars from the summer of 2012.
When I was twenty-seven and this happened (again in a crazy P&L, lost-client situation), I was terrified and angry and took it all out on him. Even though it wasn't his fault, I thought he should've seen it coming, should've known, should've warned me so I could prepare myself. Then time passed, and the year 2000 happened, when I had three jobs, and then I heard a few jobs ago that I was going to get canned, and then I went somewhere else and lost projects and contracts and all manner of things until I guess I came to the place in which I currently reside: the place that knows there is no safety in the world of work, but there is usually a new gig around somewhere. There is no soft place, there are only places. Which sounds horrific but I find extremely comforting. Because if there are no soft places, then there are no hard places, either.
There are just places.
There. I just touched my "now" again, because in five minutes I might not feel so chill about our situation. I'm minute-to-minute with my anxiety disorder, but we don't have to be in a hard situation for that to happen. My anxiety disorder doesn't give one shit whether we just won the lottery or whether we just got sued for $100,000. It's all, HEY, YO, YOU AWAKE? LET'S FREAK OUT.
My thirty-eight-year-old self wants to grab my twenty-seven-year-old self and tell her what's the what: Two months from now, you and Beloved will get married. He'll have a new job within a week. He'll change careers twice again. He'll end up in the exact same place in eleven years. But you, my friend, will have lost or left SIX JOBS in eleven years. The bubble will burst. The economy will get shredded. You'll buy a house. You will love the house. You will invest money in the house. You will bring a baby home to the house. You will lose money when you sell the house. You will buy another house. Your cat will die. You will love the house. Your replacement cat will die. You will remodel the house, slowly, room by room. You will get yet another cat. You will teach yourself to garden. And then, when you're tempted to bemoan the fact that sometimes it feels like you're right back where you were in this minute, right now, twenty-seven-year-old self, you will realize that you and Beloved stuck through it together, every minute of it, and that's all that matters.
We're all the heroes in our own stories, and every story needs obstacles or they're fucking boring.
This post was recognized by Five Star Friday. I'm honored.
Today's post was going to be a series of blurry photographs of Miss Elephant and her new outfits. Miss Elephant came from the circus, and her outfits came from the sewing scrap pile. Don't worry, they're still coming, but there's something else I realized I have to write first.
Two events came crashing together this morning, launched by another last night. I tell you this because sometimes I myself wonder how I got the idea to do something. One was the launch of the BlogHer Book Club discussion of Brene Brown's new book, Daring Greatly. The other was a text conversation I had with a friend who's been going through a very extended trough in her life. During the course of our conversation, she wrote, "Sounds like you're doing well from your blog, though. Yay!" And for the most part, I am, and I was glad she was happy for me in the midst of her hard place, which is truly who she is, a very generous and lovely person. I would like to be more generous and lovely, myself, so I appreciate it when I see it in others.
But I felt like such a liar.
We discussed Kansas author Laura Moriarty's book The Chaperone in BlogHer Book Club a while back, and since I realized she teaches at KU and lives in Lawrence just right down the road from me, I decided to check out her backlist. Wow. I totally went fangirl and read them all. Laura Moriarty writes books that are painful to read because they are so fucking real. Last night around midnight I finished The Rest of Her Life, which is a book about the relationship between a mother and her daughter after the daughter accidentally kills a schoolmate by hitting her with her car.
And there are about a million passages in this book that made me gasp and examine myself and freak out. And this was one of them:
"'Oh," Pam said. It was all she said, that one word, but her voice held so much ache and sympathy that it seemed to Leigh her sister might have actually been there at the market and seen Diane Kletchka's misery and insanity for herself. Leigh relayed the entire confrontation, and her sister's face grew more distressed. It was hard to tell who she was feeling sorry for -- Bethany's mother, or Kara, or Gary, or Leigh herself. And that made sense. Leigh knew this even as she was talking, even as she felt a resurgence of fear just describing the scene. There were, after all, no underdogs in the scene, no winners or losers to root for. It was a miserable situation for everyone involved. An objective bystander could only wish they would all get through it." - p. 248
I read that last night, and it lodged somewhere in my mind, a piece of the puzzle sliding into place. And that's why I texted my friend this morning, because there are no underdogs in her story, either. Just a trough and a hard time, and I wanted to let her know I was thinking of her.
This new book of Brene's is all about vulnerability and not being afraid to get in the arena and show people who you really are, even though that can make you look incompetent (you think) or ineffective or sort of vindictive or unfair.
For almost a year now, Beloved's been traveling for work. A lot. Like a several times a week. And I knew with him taking this job it would put new challenges in my road. Most days I handle them well enough. Last night, though, last night, I could feel myself getting sick, and I was standing at the counter getting that dizzy/tingly/oh fuck feeling, and the little angel was asking about dinner and the movie I promised to watch with her, and the trash needed to be taken out, and the cat was protesting for her dinner, and I wasn't quite done with work for the day, and it Felt.Like.Too.Much. As it often does.
I'm not a full-time single mother, but I play one part-time in my life right now. That means my schedule is dictated by my daughter's and husband's, as there is often no one else to watch her or take her where she needs to go. Sometimes that means I can't make plans with friends or answer the phone at certain times of the day. And then I worry I'm hurting the other people in my life by paying them no attention.
Years ago, I would've just blamed this all on my husband, because that's the easy thing to do. I spent much of my early marriage holding him responsible for all manner of things that weren't his fault. And sometimes I find myself tempted to do it now. After all, he's gone while I'm doing the work at home, right? It's not like we're Downton Abbey with staff here. But I know how much he wishes he were here. I know how hard it is for him to be away from us at night, especially when we seem too busy to talk to him, but that's really because everything takes me a million years when I have to do them one at a time, and by the time he calls, we're fried and trying to get to bed. He knows this. I know this.
There are no underdogs here.
So yeah, there has been Miss Elephant this week. And a glorious bike ride on Sunday with my husband and daughter, and she made it nine whole miles and then we went to Cold Stone. But there was also last night, at the counter, with tears running down my face and me emailing my parents to say I WANT MY MOMMY. And then she emailed back with something about making iced tea for my cousin's bridal shower and I was all THAT IS NOT THE RIGHT RESPONSE TO I WANT MY MOMMY. Which she fixed this morning, but in that moment, I just fell apart.
My brain is easily led to intrusive thinking. In the past, this has led me to restrict my eating, to exercise obsessively, to spend hours Googling sleep solutions for my toddler, to become obsessed with sunscreen for my daughter, to worry about the health and well being of my family. When I was a kid, I would become obsessed with the idea of my house burning down during fire safety week and couldn't go to sleep until I had mapped out exactly how I would escape my burning home with all my stuffed animals even though my window opened directly onto the earth.
When my daughter was a baby, we lived in an eighty-year-old home with huge wall grates. The holes in the grates were decorative and large enough for, say, a snake to climb through. So I became obsessed with the idea that a snake would get into our leaky, stone basement and somehow find its way straight up through the grate and up my daughter's crib. I thought about this a lot.
In my first apartment in Kansas City, I became so obsessed with the idea of someone climbing in through my first-floor window I nailed the windows shut. A fire hazard, for sure. But I couldn't sleep until I did it.
I'm a lock-checker, a make-sure-the-oven-is-off fretter. I've been known to turn around five miles from home to make sure I shut the garage door.
The bat thing was funny until someone pointed out my husband could've been bitten by the bat and not even know it. Then I made the mistake of looking up rabies and found it is fatal in humans if not treated immediately. I made Beloved call urgent care to see if they thought he should get rabies shots. They said no. He is not about to do it anyway.
I have thought of nothing but rabies for the past three days, of him dying two months from now and leaving me and the little angel all alone.
I know these are intrusive thoughts. He was not bitten, he swears he didn't touch the bat, and I believe him. He is not an idiot. He swatted it down with a broom, stunned it, captured it under the broom and got it between the broom the bag without touching it. I believe him.
I've got to stop thinking about him dying.
These are intrusive thoughts, and when I think of them, I can feel the adrenaline downloading into my bloodstream as it is this very minute. My heart is pounding, I'm breathing shallowly and I feel like I might throw up.
My daughter is watching Veggie Tales in the next room and I have work deadlines. I have no room in my life for intrusive thoughts.
There. I just took a deep breath.
Last night, I had a dream about having to cross five train tracks set very close together and traversed by high-speed trains that came within seconds of each other. You had to memorize the patterns in order to cross the tracks safely. I was sitting on what I thought was the ground before the tracks and someone turned a light on and I discovered I'd been sitting on a set of hidden tracks. I backed up and made it across, carrying my daughter, who was a toddler squalling to be let down.
That's what anxiety feels like, actually.
The anxiety operates the trains I'm constantly worrying about. They're not ghost trains -- there's plenty in life that can go wrong. Sometimes I think people with anxiety are actually just pragmatic realists -- you could die from just about anything. Thankfully most of the time, we don't, but it's true, you could. It's far better to operate under the illusion that nothing bad will happen -- that you'll get through the entire day safely and in one piece, because ironically, the more you worry about bad things happening, the more likely you'll make a dumb decision thinking it will make things better and actually endanger yourself in some other way than the danger you were trying to avoid in the first place. The fact Keith Richards is still alive proves God protects fools and children.
It's true my husband could've been bitten by a bat and not know it and end up foaming and leaving me a widow by the time my daughter enters third grade. The man drives 1500 miles a week -- it's far more likely he'll get plowed by a semi or choke eating a cheeseburger in the car. If I allow myself to think of everything that could happen to him, or my daughter or anyone I love, I'll spend my life rocking and crying.
I refuse to live that way.
Intrusive thoughts can be paralyzing. I'm forcing them out now, because I have no control, really, over when my cards or anyone's cards get drawn. Bad things can and will happen in the course of my life, because that's life -- the bad comes with the good -- and it does no good to anticipate everything horrible that could happen. Anticipating those things will most likely cause stress hormones to clog my arteries and overtax my heart, lower my immune system and perhaps bring on a terminal disease.
In the end, it's probably safer to fiddle dee dee and go look at talking animals on the Internet.
In every marriage, there's a moment in which you get to be the one who is right. My moment came on Saturday night.
On Saturday, a series of events led to my victory.
A two-week heatwave was flaming out in a 105-degree burst of glory.
My brother- and sister-in-law and their two daughters were staying the weekend.
A door between the garage and the house was left open.
When I realized the door had been open, I went to look for Petunia. She's never left the garage before, but she has visited it when I've left the kitchen door open, and on the night in question, both doors to the garage were open in an attempt to release the atomic air trapped inside. Since Petunia is terrified of my youngest niece, I assumed she'd be hiding out in the basement.
Halfway down the stairs, I saw something flutter. No, FLAP.
I ran back upstairs and yelled to Beloved there was something with WINGS in the basement.
Beloved: "Wings? Really? Are you sure it's not a cicada?"
I may not be in Mensa, but I know the difference between a cicada and a bird or bat (I wasn't sure which one it was at the time.) There's a slight size differential.
This is a cicada. (image credit: Gardener41 on Flickr)
This is a fucking bat. (image credit: blmurch on Flickr)
Me: IT IS NOT A CICADA.
He dropped whatever he was doing and went downstairs. Seconds later, we heard a loud crash from the basement.
Beloved: JESUS CHRIST! BAT! BAT!
(I may have allowed myself a smile)
I went to get a broom to join my knight in shining armor downstairs. He was crouched in front of the door to the half-finished bathroom, which leads to a half-finished, well, room room that we use as a tornado shelter. Nothing in our basement is finished, so we don't spend a lot of time down there.
Beloved looked back at me, sheer panic in his eyes. I could see the bat flying back and forth between the room-room and the bathroom, looking for all the world like the bat on a string you see on The Muppets.
Beloved: I think he's getting tired.
My BIL came down the stairs and I sent him for a weapon. Then I gave Beloved my broom, because the man was trying to catch a bat with a toy butterfly net. I headed up to re-arm myself when I passed my BIL storming down the basement carrying a shovel. I was pawing through the garage when he reappeared.
BIL: "He says we need something softer."
Me: "Is he worried about the bat?"
BIL: "No, he's worried about the walls."
I handed my BIL two plastic baseball bats and grabbed a bucket. As we re-entered the house, we heard Beloved yelling at the top of his lungs.
Beloved: "WHERE ARE YOU GUYS? A LITTLE HELP HERE???"
We rushed down the stairs, baseball bats swinging, to find Beloved crouched on the floor. Just the tiniest bit of webbed claw showed out from under the broom and butterfly net. BIL and I stared in shock. The bat was chittering away like a pissed-off rat.
Beloved: "GET THE BAG!"
I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did BIL. Then I noticed a paper bag behind BIL. I tried to hand Beloved the bucket, as it seemed way more useful and user-friendly than a paper bag, but Beloved had gone to a place that doesn't hear reason. He is not fond of bats.
Finally BIL handed Beloved the bag and they got the bat out into the yard, where PETA will be glad to hear it was released. I admit at the point at which I heard it cursing us out in bat language, I wasn't too keen to kill it, but I was also thinking CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES, as mothers are wont to do.
The next morning, the bat was gone, so we believe he lived to tell his story on his own blog.
I found out along with the rest of the world this afternoon that Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise. Even though I'm completely slammed at work, I made time to rewatch the video of Tom jumping on the couch and turned quickly to Twitter.
I realize Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise are human beings with feelings, and therefore I feel a little guilty about sharing these and realize completely it is NOT NICE.
The #tomkat feed gives new life to the word "schadenfreude"
Free at last, free at last, Katie Holmes is free at last! Thank goodness. That marriage is what you should see in the cliche dictionary when you look up "Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it."
My parents celebrated their 40th anniversary last weekend, and Beloved and I hit number eleven. I would write some sappy love stuff, but I'm feeling super crazy lazy today and having difficulty motivating myself even to do my job. I think I need a vacation. Or even just a nap.
So here's DJ Nibbles to do my work for me! Hit it!
