Tag: married life

The Week in Review – This is Why We Walk Edition

On By BekkiIn The Weekly ReviewLeave a comment

1. Avon 39 reflections. There’s a lot I could write about: all the people on the route who cheered us on, including the San Jose bike cops and a local motorcycle club; the fact that I could barely walk on Monday; the incredible rush of finishing and seeing D and M right at the line waiting for us. But what I want to leave you with is this: In among all the cheering, sandwiched between the tutus and the rhinestones and the boobie jokes, was real, unadulterated loss. People walked with pictures, with names, with messages for their dead. We met a woman and her stepdaughter at breakfast. “Her mother died of breast cancer,” the stepmother said. “We’re doing this for her.”

11-112. 5 years and counting. Let’s face it, marriage is hard. It’s learning to live with all of your spouse’s tics and all of your own. It’s compromise, endless compromise, long after you’ve given in to all the things you said you wouldn’t do. And it is glorious. It’s that smile you share in the morning, when you know all is right with the world because you’ve woken up next to each other. It’s the way your pace changes when you walk next to each other, so that your strides are exactly the same length. It’s striving, constantly, to be a better wife, a better husband, a better parent, a better person. Marriage is change, and it is growth, and it is a celebration of the little victories, day after day.

3. Shut up and write. I made my way to a writing group on Sunday, after a series of messages with a fellow writer that culminated in the realization that the only way I’ll ever have time to write is if I take it. So I did, and got almost 3,000 words down in an hour and a half. Good words. I think I’m setting myself up to fail if I try to make it every week, but once a month would be a good thing.

4. How we speak. I grew up in the era of the phone call, of the enviable coolness of the kids who had their own phone line, of paying the long distance bill for spending hours talking to my friends who lived on the other side of the state. I thought nothing of calling someone just to say hey, while scrupulously observing the 10 am to 10 pm rule. These days? I don’t call unless I have something important to say. I’ll text at all hours of the night, confident that if whomever I’m messaging is asleep, they’ve put their phone on silent. Conversations can take hours or days, snatched in between folding laundry and doing dishes. It changes the way we speak, the way we think about speaking. We are always on, always available – and rarely present.

5. Grace. I’ve moved around too much to have a giant group of friends. Instead, I’ve held onto a few people from each place I’ve lived. The kind of friends I can go without talking to for years, and then fall right back into where we were the next time we see each other. This has been a rough year, with lots of soul searching and self doubt and wondering if I’ve made the right decisions. And just when I needed it, one of those friends came back into my life and said exactly what I needed to hear.

The Monday Review – Short Form

On By BekkiIn The Weekly Review1 Comment

A brought the Montezuma’s Revenge to Mexico, and ended up being ridiculously sick while we were on vacation. We have spent the last week and change in and out of Mexican and American hospitals. He’s finally feeling a little better, but he’s had a rough time of it.

Simultaneously, Z picked up a cold that has knocked me flat for the past few days. That, combined with a general lack of sleep, has wiped my ability to do much more than keep the two of us fed and dressed and entertained. She and I are also tentatively planning to go to OKC for my grandfather’s 90th birthday a little later this week.

My dad flew out to help us keep things together. It really does take a village.

There may be a longer blog post when all this is done. There may not. I make no guarantees about my ability to get blog posts out for the rest of the month. We’re all going to focus on getting better and getting back to normal.

On the positive side, Mexico was lovely.

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“Money for Nothing”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

Starting Monday, I’m off from work for two weeks.  So it’s understandable that when I complained about how much I have to get done before my husband and I leave for vacation on Thursday, his response was, “Relax, you’re on vacation.”

To which I replied, “Are you kidding?”

Because while I might be off from Job #1, the job that pays the bills and the health insurance and the mortgage, there’s still Job #2 to think about.  That’s the job that doesn’t earn me any money – yet.  It’s the job I wake up at 6 am every morning for.  The one I do at nights, and on weekends.  The one I am hoping to make into a full-time, paid position.

No, I don’t intern.  I’m a writer.

Writing doesn’t mean I sit down at the computer and type for a few hours and have something magical to share with the rest of the world.  It’s not something I do in my spare time, like knitting or baking.  It is emphatically not a “jobby.”  It is a profession.  A career.  A job.

It hasn’t always been.  For years I fiddled.  Dabbled.  Wrote a few lines here and there.  Did NaNo for a year, then didn’t write anything else for the next twelve months.  It’s different now.  For me, the key is this:

I sit down and write even when I don’t want to.  I sit down and write when I’ve been up late the night before and want to sleep in an extra hour.  I sit down and write when I’ve worked an 80 hour week and want to do nothing more than veg on the couch and watch Gossip Girl.

I’ll leave you with this.

“All This and Heaven Too”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

My husband and I have been married just shy of a year and a half.  Before that, we dated for for years.  Before that, we were coworkers and friends.  I am still learning how to communicate with him.

For me, this is the most challenging, maddening part of marriage.  How is it that this man who I have known for so long, who is the other half of my soul, doesn’t instantly understand what I mean?  How is it that I, writer, poet, mistress of all things written, cannot make myself understood?

We fit together so perfectly that I forget, all too often, what different worlds we come from:  I from a family of bookworms and PBS programming; he from the world of pop culture and fast cars.  I spend my days crafting arguments; he spends his crafting meals.  I speak quickly, in half formed thoughts.  He deliberates, settling on his words with care before saying them out loud.

When we argue, our words fly by each other, meaningless as babble without our own frames of reference.

This too, I am learning: you can choose not to fight.  To say, I am too tired, too hungry, too stressed to have this conversation.  And you can say, yes, ok, we can talk about it later.

It is these small things, I think, on which the marriage is built.

“Let’s Go Fly a Kite”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

Saturday, A and i went down to the kite festival in Wildwood. He got me into kites right after we started dating. The first time, I spent almost an hour just trying to get the kite off the ground. If you ever tried to fly a kite as a kid, you probably remember the intense frustration of running around in circles holding the kite while somebody else held onto the string and shouted directions at you. It was like that, except that stunt kites take off from the ground, and you get it into the air not by holding it and praying the wind picks it up but by waiting for a good gust and pulling the right way on the string.

Then I got it up into the air – and spent the next hour or so crashing it. Eventually, A took pity on me and we went home, but not before I’d caught a taste of the kite bug. We tried to keep a kite or two in the car, and when he sent me a care package while I was in Den Haag, he packed a kite.

Last year he discovered the kite festival in Wildwood, almost by happenstance, and we went and had an incredible day. This year, we both made sure we were off work for it. There seemed to be less kites this year than last, perhaps because the wind was a bit light. Still, it picked up enough toward the end that I had to work to keep the Flexis in the air and myself on the ground.

Then today, it was brilliantly, wonderfully, summer-y hot, so I made snickerdoodle ice-cream. Recipe to follow if it turns out well.