Yet No Puter.

New m@cbooc to @rrive tomorrow. In the me@n time, here iz photo to bring you h@ppy!

The eightiez were @wezome. I'm the one in pigt@iwz.

Oy vey, I c@n't w@it to get the new puter.

The Honeymooners

This morning started off, almost immediately, with an argument. It wasn't about anything important - even though he DID tell me he was coming back on Friday and it turns out he's coming back on Saturday. Just a matter of detail.

But this always seems to happen. Whenever T is getting ready to head off on a trip to someplace far away (or even near by) we both tense up. Our relationship is both heartily symbiotic and, at times, unhealthily codependent. But what can I say, we're two crazy kids in love. And so we celebrate that love by fighting whenever we face separation. Makes perfect sense, no? No. Yeah, we know.

The funny thing is, it usually greets in the same way on his return. We nearly always start on our way home from the airport and end up bickering in the car. The argument itself is never anything important, and I think of it more as a dispelling of the tension. The only way we both know how to let off some steam, because there aren't the right words to say "I missed you so much I thought my head would explode, and why is the rest of the world so annoying when you're not around?"

The last year has been particularly hard for our relationship. Between work, extensive travel, and full-time school, T has barely had enough time to inhale and exhale between chores - let alone spend any decent amount of quality time curled up with his wife. I'm sure it doesn't help that I've been - you know - me. (which is another way of saying "a big whiner who complains too much and tends to be grumpy for no particular reason").

But we are not usually like this. Our relationship has always given each of us a greater, deeper appreciation and zest for the joy of living. Just being alive together, experiencing a small few of the incredible possibilities, has given me the greatest memories of my life.

One of my favorites is, of course, our honeymoon. After all the stress and running around of getting married, once the deed was done we were in bliss. Married! Alone! On a cruise ship bound for Mexico's sparkling sands and crystal blue waters. We followed up our blissful cruise with a few golden days in New Orleans after docking at port there. That week is the most memorable of my life, to date. All that time together, uninterrupted, and we explored and tasted and breathed in everything around us. I've heard New Orleans is a different place now, and I can't imagine having missed the chance to see it as we did. The moment, though, that stands out the most in my mind - the one that will stick forever as a portrait of our carefree and exuberant youth together - is a moment from the cruise.

We stood on the rear deck of the giant ship, he in his best casual evening wear and me in my chiffon sundress. He held his tumbler of Jack Daniels in one hand, a finely rolled cigar in the other. I sipped my small glass of very good port wine and casually drew from a small brandy-dipped cigar. We stared over the rail, out into the vast darkness of the sea, the wind that whipped around us making my dress dance in the dim glow of the ship lights. We talked about the wedding, about our future, about how we would take many, many more trips like this one. It felt like a scene from an old Hollywood picture, one where the hero and heroine make grand plans that are sure to cut short by tragedy, only to be redeemed by the power of true love. It was a lovely cliche, and I relished the moment.

It has been more than five years since that night on the boat; two (and a half) children, two moves, and an infinite number of adventures (and, yes, tragedies) later, we have never quite recreated the blissfully naive optimism of that moment. What we have done, though, is go from the soft-focus dreaminess of that night to the gritty day-to-day of an actual life together... and kept that same sense of adventure, and found an even greater sense of wonder and joy in this other person we are each bound to for as long as we both live.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is... Sorry for being a royal pain in the arse, honey. Have a great trip, and go ahead and have a smack at a few Czech girls. When in Rome and all that. Just make sure you tell them you have a pregnant wife at home who has no qualms about flying half way across the globe to give a real whippin' to any woman who tries to get over-friendly with my man. I'll see you when you get back... and I'll even do my best not to pick a fight at the airport.

Standing Still

I have 2 different posts already half-written and now filed away for another day. (Including the meme you tagged me with, sistah S. I'll get there, I promise.)

But at the moment, I am strangely caught up in a feeling of inertia.

My life has been a strange and constant parade of stops and starts, fits and spurts. My growing years consisted of a string of moves every two years or so. There were always siblings going off to college, getting married, having babies.

When I was 9 my dad helped put a bad man in jail, and maybe had a contract put out on his life by some mafia types who weren't happy about it. Police staked out our house and followed us everywhere for days. I only vaguely realized something was happening, and mostly pouted about not being allowed to go ride my bike around the neighborhood for a while.

When I was 13 my Mom's only sister lost her battle with cancer. I remember my last conversation with her; I was baking cookies in our old kitchen in Utah. We talked about her hummingbirds, and whether there were more or less this year than usual. I went to her funeral a few months later; hers was the first dead body I had ever seen. We moved again a few months later.

California was my first settle-down experience. We stayed there for all 4 years I was in high school. Of course, adolescence is hardly a period of stillness. There was puberty to go through, driving to learn, proms to attend, boys to kiss. I got my first real kiss on my eighteenth birthday, which I will forever associate with the preceding loss of 80 pounds. I did a lot of running in those days. It helped to clear my head.

This year marks my tenth year in the DC area. I've moved constantly in that time - as a single girl apartment and house hopping and then as half of a married couple going from a single-bedroom to a tw0-bedroom to make room for baby number one. Finally, as a family we moved to our house here in our country town.

Three and a half years have passed since we came here. We had another baby. We lost a baby. Now we're having another baby. But the big things in our own life have a sense of inevitability to them - a feeling that we're following our plan. Through the struggles here and the joys here, there is a feeling of... resting. A sense that we are standing still. Waiting. As though this is the quiet, sheltered time before life goes haywire once again.

Perhaps it's just that, as a child, the bumps in the road that shaped us unaware begin to get lost in the landscape as we cross the bumps of adulthood. We evolve, and we cope with the present.

Every once in a while, though, there's a moment of absolute stillness. There are moments when the storm of life rages around you, and you glory in it. There come moments in the life of a parent where you must surrender briefly to the chaos, and suddenly find yourself at peace.

When I was 11, we lived in Texas. I stood outside on a chilly early-spring afternoon as a rainstorm threatened the skies above me. The wind blasted in all directions around me, lashing whips of hair across my rosy-cold cheeks. Each gust felt closer to whipping me right up off the ground and spinning me off into the sky. The air was thick with the coming rain and the clouds overhead were dark and menacing in the green-tinted sky. No cars drove the streets and no other soul crossed the horizon in the empty field where I stood. I closed my eyes and raised my arms against the blast, ready to dissolve against the rush of the wind.

Plastic Ghosts of Christmas Past

I was shopping for toys at WalMart the other day, and I saw a whole row of Cabbage Patch Dolls. Apparently they are still as wildly popular as they were in my childhood of the 80's. I am still undecided as to bringing a lawsuit against the toy company for stealing my face and putting it on the dolls. Honestly, am I the only one who sees it??

Alas, there are no little girls in my house begging for dolls this year. I'd buy one for the boys, but so far any doll which has reached their hands becomes a top-heavy weapon, good for swinging or as a surface-to-air missile. Somehow I think this would fail to fulfill my desire to see a child of mine nurture a baby doll with the tender care I lavished on my own.

Maybe 2008 will be our year to add a baby girl to the melee around here. My back should be better by Spring. Then again, having another girl in the house would be an entirely alien experience at this point. Who will teach her to be a girl? Certainly not her mother. *burp*

Christmas 1986.
I was 7 years old.
21 years have since passed.

Good grief, Charlie Brown... where did the time go? And how did I not notice that I had freakishly large feet???