Barnmaven

Yes I would

 

A very smelly dog who hasn't had a bath yet is lying almost entirely on my pillow as my husband sleeps, oblivious.  The stitches from her surgery haven't come out yet, so we haven't been able to give her a much-needed bath. 

Exasperated, I kiss the dog on the head and shake my husband awake.  "You want to move the dog?" I ask.  "If you're going to let her stink up the bed, let it be on your side." 

For a moment I think "He's lucky I love him."  It only takes a moment or two for me to remember that I'm pretty lucky he loves me.

Sometimes its something powerful that causes you to consider the depth of your feelings for someone; other times its the mundane.  Considering how often we annoy the shit out of each other, its amazing we remember at all.  But remember we do.

The other day I'm sitting in the living room quietly minding my own business and he feels the need to come in, change the channel to some band I've never heard of doing a live concert and then turn the volume waaayyyyyy up. 

Annoyed, I gather my things and change rooms, grumbling the whole way about how I live here too, you know, and not everyone wants to listen to music all the time.  Then again, its likely he feels the same way about my tendency to try on every outfit I own and leave all the stuff I decided against piled up in the middle of the bed for him to deal with after I leave for work, or to wake him up at 5:00 in the morning because I something large and furry went scurrying when I opened the garage door and I needed him to prove it was a kitten and not a rat.  And he even went along with me when I suggested that if it was actually a kitten we should probably start feeding it. 

This morning I'm putting on my makeup and he comes and leans against the bathroom doorjamb, watching.

"Why do you watch this?" I ask.  "How am I supposed to maintain any sense of mystery?  Not that there's a lot left to the imagination at this point..."

"A woman's personality is always a source of mystery" he says, laughing and kissing me.

I am lucky that my dear husband is a forgiving sort of fellow, he likewise that I am a woman inclined to seek the good.  We're both old enough to be at peace with our respective faults, which makes it far easier to accept them in others. When I finally reached a point in my life where my self-love was greater than my self-loathing, that's when I met the person who could love me as I am.  Perhaps the fact that I had come to accept and even at times celebrate my own strengths and acknowledge and forgive my own weaknesses made it easier for someone else to come along and love me too.

Even though life is busy and like most people I invest too much of my time and energy slogging through the daily grind of work, chores and bills, there are times on my long commute that I turn off the radio and pay attention.  Driving through the frozen desert and the stubbled, winter-barren crop circles, I reflect on the mystery of us and one more time am humbled by just how lucky I am, at this stage in my life, to know this kind of love.

 

I would marry this man again in a heartbeat.  Yes, I would.

First

SG and I got married a year ago today.  Yay us!

I'm very distressed, though, because the gift that I made sure I picked out and mailed early enough to reach him has not yet found its way to his hotel.  Interestingly enough, the absentee ballot I also mailed to him on the same day got there two days ago, so I'm a bit perturbed. 

His gift to me arrived on time, of course, in the form a a beautiful dozen long-stemmed roses.  I'm not normally a flowers-and-jewelry form of female, but even cynical me has to admit red roses are really the most romantic bouquet a man could ever give a woman.  I love them.  I'd trade them in a heartbeat to have him home, but since that option is not available to me I'll just enjoy the roses and look forward to seeing him in a few weeks.

I've wondered a few times before and since if we rushed into things, getting married just a hair under a year after we first met.  I've always been a creature of impulse, but as I've aged I've learned to question myself.  Oh, I still do ALL THE STUPID THINGS but at least I question myself while I'm doing them. 

I'm not one of those who thinks that every venture in life can be carefully planned so as to avoid making any mistakes.  So we didn't date for ten years or have a five year engagement. At this stage of our lives, are we beyond that sort of thing?  Is it OK to just say the heart wants what it wants, you make my girl parts hum with joy and you love me and you love me kids and all of that put together adds up to more than enough?  So we hitched our wagons together and we learn as we go, we grow as we learn, and over time we come together more easily because we've built a future on a base of love, trust and very real passion.  The faults we didn't recognize in one another we are learning to accept and forgive. 

Being a little older, besides giving me a nice antique feel, helps me understand that life and relationships have a degree of ebb and flow  SG and I, we accept that there are days we won't click or feel very close, and we have acquired the patience to get through those days with the sure knowledge that the tide will change and we will soon be back in sync.  We are in sync far more often than we are not. The not-syncing times can be unpleasant - we are smart, we are emotional, we both think we're right and we're both alpha types.  That makes for some pretty spectacular clashes, but the making up part is also pretty spectacular.

Happy First Anniversary, babe.  I'm looking forward to many more.

 

Dog + Bone = Me

As much as I throw it out there that letting go of things is a healthy way to exist, I'm not always so good at being a person who lets go of things.  I have a tendency to perseverate.  My husband and I will have a disagreement over something, and days later I am still stuck on a particular thing he said that I thought was wrong, and having repeated conversations with myself where in I roleplay both of us and stick my point to him over and over until he falls over from the sheer brilliance of my superior mind. 

Or some drama on the internet will settle hooks into my gray matter and no matter how useless it may be, I find myself idly drawn to hunting down more tidbits of information or opinion.  Sometimes its not even an issue I particularly take sides in, but part of me just can't help but watch it unfold.  I pick up nuance and opinion and data and start playing them on an endless background loop. 

My shrink said that I do this in order to distract myself from my deeper feelings of fear and loss, of self-loathing and shame.  I would counter that as I age I find less to loathe about myself, but I can't help but admit that I still struggle with all of those things.

If life were fair and if life unfolded according to my plan...probably we'd all fall off the surface of the planet because I would have forgotten to make sure we always had gravity turned on.

So then you'll agree its probably best I'm not in charge of this whole shebang.

I'm struggling lately with feelings of loneliness and fear.  By the time my husband comes home from this job he will have been gone...a lot.  Putting numbers on it doesn't really do anything but make it seem worse.  Lets just say gone more than he's been home.  And I'm selfish.  Even when I know that he, as a capital-M Man has the same drive that I have to shoot the biggest mammoth I can in order to provide for my family, I still at the bottom most layer of it just really want him to not be gone.  I want someone besides the Betta Fish on my kitchen counter to talk to in evenings when the kids are at their dads.  I want to go out to breakfast with SG, not alone and certainly not with the kids.  I want to come home to my husband's arms and his being glad to see me at the end of the day.   

And I find myself being childish and petulant about it. 

I think of my son, upset because he can't play his beloved game.  He makes it into a Supreme Court Case.  "If you really loved me you'd let me play."   "My life is ruined right now and nothing will make it better."  "I hate you."  "Global warming will end if you just let me play my game."  (No, he didn't really say that.  I made it up.  But how cool would it be if he DID say that? How utterly cool?)

I catch myself being dramatic even in my thoughts. 

I'm always alone.

No one will ever really love me.

We're all going to die in a fiery explosion because I have to be celibate for three months.

IF HE REALLY LOVED ME HE'D GIVE UP EVERYTHING JUST TO BE WITH ME.

You know, stuff along those lines.  Real sane, level-headed, purposeful CLEAR thinking.  Ha, I crack myself up.

And I'm not really sure how to make that thought cycle stop. 

Help.

Kill a groundhog, save our sanity

We woke up a week ago tomorrow to three inches of snow on the ground and frozen, crappy roads about half the way of my 45 mile commute to work.  The irony of this is that it wasn't that long ago I was begging for snow, and the minute I woke up and looked out the window, all I could think of was strangling a small burrowing mammal in Pennsylvania.

Over it now.  Enough with the winter already.

And then yesterday and today, I've had to drive with my windows down because its so warm.

Ahhh.  Spring.  Or as we like to call it in the Tri-Cities, mud season.

The arrival of snow was mitigated by the arrival of my parents, who returned this week from their annual winter sojourn in Yuma.  This was the last one for a while, my dad is increasingly less mobile, it takes an act of God to get him on an airplane, and the 1200 mile drive is getting increasingly more difficult for him.   I'm selfish enough to be grateful for this.  Their annual October departure is really hard, and not having family nearby makes me feel a little empty in the middle.   Now they're home, and not surprisingly I notice the absence of my brother far more acutely.  There's an empty seat at the table, we all know it, and we all struggle with it in our own way.  They're back though, that's what really matters right now.

Their timing was excellent, as SG left Friday for a six week job in Arizona.  (ARIZONA:  You are on notice.  Please stop borrowing the people I love. Thank you very much.)  I hope this is the last road trip.   He's starting a new venture when he gets back, and I'm hopeful that it will work out well enough to keep him from ever needing to do another outage.  Life is full of The Crazy as it is, and not having him here to balance out the Doing of Things That Need Doing makes for a very busy me.   Plus, the last couple of road jobs had him gone so very long, it was really a low time for me.  I'm struggling with it, I suppose I should know better, but there it is.  I hate it when he's gone.

I've managed (as usual) to complicate things by taking on two horses on a care lease.  I wouldn't have normally done this, because we all know I don't need two more horses.  These girls, though, are in need of some TLC.  Their owner is a very young woman who has had some issues and some difficulty, and they haven't been receiving the level of care they need.  They're severely underweight and need some vet care.  Sweet mares, both of them. 

Its never not a zoo around here.  Sometimes it surprises me how well SG has adapted to my chaotic life.  I think he has nerves of steel.  Or perhaps he can cope with it because he knows he can run away every few months and get a little vacay from the cray cray.  God knows I wish I could have one.

SG's departure and the bigger sense of loss I've felt around my brother with my parents return have me thinking about loss and the changing nature of life.    As David Richo reminds us in The Five Things We Cannot Change, "everything begins and ends," and you know - the beginning is always the easy part.  The ending not so much.  I took Tasha, my brother's dachshund, to my parents today so that they can care for her while SG is gone.  (She's used to having someone home, she's elderly, and I am gone 11+ hours a day when I'm working.  She needs someone to keep company with).  She's doing really well, considering, but we all know its a matter of time with her.  Truth is, its just a matter of time for all of us - and for all things  in our lives and in our world. 

Everything changes and ends.  Its a simple fact of life that its hard to embrace some days.  But I know that fighting it only leads to increased pain and stress.  Accepting it just means I can grieve and then, at some point, let go.

Its just...the last few months seem to have been so filled with loss.  My brother, SG's grandma, a close family friend, Hercules, a smart and talented blogger, someone's husband, someone's father, someone's wife, someone's child I read about in the paper. Half my chickens.  Even famous people who I normally wouldn't think twice about, but when your mind is dwelling on loss, their passing seems to only compound the egregiousness of it all.  I'd just like us all to have a break, thanks, even knowing that its not at all likely.

The changing and ending aren't always bad things.  Winter ends so spring can arrive with the scent of growing things on the warm breezes and the return of the birds and eggs in the chicken coop on a regular basis.  Spring ends so we can bask in the heat of summer and enjoy the great outdoors in all her glory, and then summer bows her head and gives way to the lovely burnished hues of fall.   

The seasons and all of nature, they just roll with it.  As should we all.

Different and the same

Christmas this year outdid itself in being a reflection of pretty much all of this year - a study in contrast. Joy and sorrow, tremendous love and tremendous heartache.  With and without the people we love.

I did not send Christmas cards this year.  I had created a personalized card with our wedding photo and some pictures of the kids, and had printed them out the morning of the day my niece found her dad's body.  When I came home I could not even bear to look at them, much less mail them to other people.  They are still in a stack on top of the printer.  I don't know when I will deal with them, but I'm assuming at some point I'm going to want to use the printer again.  Maybe I'll just move them to another temporary storage location for a while, perhaps the top of the toilet tank or underneath my stack of incoming-and-undealt-with mail.

Our first Christmas together as a married couple.  That was awesome.  It was the first Christmas of the rest of the Christmases of my life without my brother.  That sucked.

The kids had an awesome Christmas.  I cleaned both of their rooms thoroughly beforehand, discarding old toys and organizing bookshelves and shampooing carpets.  I gently put the gifts they had gotten from their uncle last Christmas in their respective places (Ken, I said it then and I'll say it now -- a BARBIE MAKEUP KIT for a nine year old?  REALLY?  But you're right, she DID love it.  Fine, I'll shut up now.) and the heavy rock that's been sitting on my chest since three weeks ago got suddenly harder to bear.  And then on Christmas morning, in standard kid-fashion, they ripped through the wrapping paper on a few hundred dollars worth of toys and then inquired if those were really ALL the presents? in a most incredulous tone of voice.   I laughed, and then sobered as it occurred to me that there would have been two more presents underneath that tree.   And then I spent the day enjoying the sound of them enjoying their loot, even if it was tremendously annoying to have to get up every five minutes to help assemble something, put batteries in something, or keep one or more dogs from DIS-assembling something.

I had a hard time making phone calls and I didn't call everyone I should have, because if I hadn't already talked to them about my brother I didn't want to have to go through any of it again.  I wanted to only have to say things like "this is really hard" to my mom and dad, because it required no additional explanation, and "I'm doing okay" to my sister, because mostly I was and I knew she would accept this and not push me for more.  And yet there was good news to report also, some awesome successes for my son on an anxiety-reducing medication that has in just a short two weeks made a world of difference for him (more on that in a post to follow).

We spent time with the family that was here and missed the family that was elsewhere. 

Where in Christmases past I have taken whole rolls of pictures (and made you look at them all, too), I took maybe four or five.  Some of the kids opening boxes, and some of dogs being tortured with reindeer antlers (T-Bone thinks you ought to call the ASPCA and turn me in).

It was...almost exactly what I expected it would be.  Easy and hard at the same time.  Different than last year, different players, different in some of the mechanics, but similar in our traditions and our enjoyment of children and family.  Just like all the Christmases of all my life have been.  Different and the same.

Making a list and checking it twice

I slogged through work Thursday and Friday with this nasty cold that's going around thinking that the weekend would magically make it go away, except that it didn't, and so I stayed home yesterday and I did my very best imitation of a log.  I didn't do anything.  Almost anything.  Well, okay, maybe I ran the dishwasher.  And fed my animals and my kids, because letting them starve would be very wrong.  And I drove my kids to school and I picked them up from school and I wrapped presents that the kids picked out for their dad's birthday.  And other than that, I made like a very quiet, very motionless log.

I don't sound much better today, but I feel lots better.  And lots better is still marginal, but it beats hell out of how I felt all weekend and yesterday.  Onward and upward!

My husband got laid off this weekend.  Its a long story having to do with industry stuff and basically a whole bunch of guys on this job had to be laid off for technical & budget reasons outside of their control.  We don't know what it means yet in terms of whether he'll go to a different plant between now and March.  There are some other possible options for contracts - some now, some next month, some in February.  He found out today that the soonest possible option won't be until January, so guess what?  HE'S COMING HOME!  I'm probably a lot more excited about it than he is, but he's making tracks west tomorrow, and that's more than enough of a Christmas present in my stocking than I could have dreamed of.

I'm trying to schedule more evaluations for the little guy.  We have one kind of evaluation set up for next week, and I'm trying to work with my insurance company and an out-of-network provider for some other testing.  Unless my insurer can work something out with the doctor, I'm going to have to find $1300 lying around in a drawer somewhere so I can make sure we've covered all bases.  Does anyone have any good connections with the Money Fairy?  Just keep all things crossed.  This doctor does not like to do single-case agreements with the insurers and so typically he would require payment from me and let me wrangle out the final settlement with my insurance.  That's not quite workable for me, so we need some stars and planets to align in our favor.

Now that Christmas is drawing near, we sing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" pretty much all the time.   The little guy was acting up in the car the other day and I said to him, "Shhhhh....Santa's watching. "  He turned to me, wide-eyed and concerned.  "But HOW does Santa know what I'm doing?"  Santa's a stalker, buddy.  I didn't even have to try and answer, Amazon Girl took over.  "I think Santa's just like God.  Except smaller than God.  Just like God is all around us, Santa's kind of like that too.  He's like God's little brother."  She's almost at that age where she should stop believing in Santa.  Every few days she comes home from school bent out of shape because some kids just won't stop talking about how they don't believe in Santa Claus anymore.  I sense that she thinks they're probably right, but that she's not ready yet to give up the fairy tale.  Fine with me - I want her to be a little girl for as long as she can.  The teenage years will be here soon enough, and then she'll know everything and I'll know nothing and my makeup bag will be fair game.  Stay little, baby.

 Tomorrow is Pearl Harbor day.  My Grandpa Smith was a WWII vet.  He retired from the Coast Guard as a Lieutenant Commander, and he was stationed at Annette Island in Ketchikan, AK.  My mother recalls being evacuated from their home in the dead of night to a ship out in the harbor.  I can imagine that to a little girl it was probably pretty exciting, but maybe not so much for my Grandma.  I visited the Pearl Harbor memorial when I was a senior in high school and my mom took me on a trip to Hawaii.  I watched the bubbles of fuel and oil from the sunken ships breaking the surface, and it sobered me to realize that the harbor floor was littered with the skeletons of ships and men, this same harbor where tourists were flocking and enjoying the sunshine and the warm hospitality of the Hawaiian people.  Every year I add "World Peace" to my Christmas list, and every year Santa fails to come through.  Maybe I just wasn't good enough this year.  Next year I'll try harder.

Warmth

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, my mother started a birthday tradition for me.  Every year she would buy me a brand new flannel nightgown and matching slippers.  Neck to floor flannel. 

I loved it.

My ex hated it.

He called it my yearly dose of birth control.

Mom stopped buying the flannel nightgowns, but I don't think she knew how much I missed getting them.  I love flannel.  Nightgowns, sheets, pajamas, slippers...you name it, if its flannel, I adore it.  There's nothing like putting on your warm flannel nightgown and your comfiest slippers and curling up on the couch with a steaming hot cup of cocoa to watch a movie on a cold winter's night while the Christmas lights twinkle merrily on your tree.

I just love being warm.  Who doesn't love that?

In a flannel nightgown I can crawl into bed in the dead of winter with all of the bedroom windows wide open to the freezing night air and I can sleep completely warm and insulated, happily oblivious to the icicles forming on the lamp on my nightstand. 

In a flannel nightgown, I AM THE SEXY. 

You're going to have to trust me on this.

I don't remember when I mentioned my love of flannel nightgowns to SG, but obviously I did.

A few days ago he casually mentioned I would probably be seeing a package in the mail and that I could open it when I got it.

"Is it my Christmas present?  I don't want to open my Christmas present until Christmas!"

"No, its not your Christmas present.  Its just something I wanted to send you."

I came home from work last night, grumpy from my head cold and hating the thought of being alone in an empty house.  There were boxes piled up on the stoop, since I've been ordering Christmas presents for the everyone and things are arriving daily.

On the top of the pile was a square package sealed in plastic.  It was soft.  It was from LL Bean.

I brought all the packages in, dumped them unceremoniously on the dining room table, grabbed my scissors and cut the end off the package to find...

this:

 

It was accompanied by a note:

So there you have it:  Actual proof that MEN LISTEN.

At least some do.  Mine does.

I'm slurping down my morning coffee - dosed with milk and eggnog - and I am snug as a bug in a rug in my tartan flannel nightgown.

I love you too, babe. 

Picking Scabs

I find myself circling in the center of the room, holding patterns, avoiding the loss swept into the corners.  So much pain there, so little of it truly resolved.  I pushed it away to forget it, and this new life keeps asking me to sift through those painful memories and feel them all over again, this time really feel them, so I can grieve them and let them go.

I like the center, I like the pretending part where even though I was hurt, I was tougher than the hurt and the pain didn't really touch me.  I like the middle of the room where I imagine that these things today are not monsters I helped create but that they are all somebody else's fault.  I fear getting lost down the rabbit hole of black, jagged edges where everything I was supposed to be able to trust in wasn't ever really real.  I don't want to be confronted with those feelings yet.  I wanted to wait to deal with them, wait forever as if that's all it would take to make them less painful.

That's the tricky thing about them.  You would think that time would blunt them, burn down the hard and sharp parts, soften the clout to the side of my head and ease the squeeze of the fist on my heart.  And then I find that no, there has been not one iota of change in those feelings of helplessness and grief and anger and excruciating pain.  Not one shred of lessening of the feeling that it wouldn't have happened if I had been better, if I had less ugly, less messy, less self-absorbed. 

Thousands of miles between you and I and there's no comfort to be found, no shoulder to hide my face in, no enabler to help me pretend the past isn't real and that now and the tomorrow is all there ever was or ever will be.  No strong hand to hold to reassure me that this time its different, that you are not the other one.  Every shattered nerve, every thread of anxiety that loops itself through my gut adds more miles to what already exists between us.  But really, its only me putting them there. 

Where do I find the balance between unfocusing enough to make the time pass more quickly and crawling into the hole with old grief and letting it burn its way out of my core?  How do I keep myself from dropping - no, throwing down - the lines of connection so that we can still be reached?

Trust comes so hard for me.  No, you are not the other. I know that.   Never have I had any reason to do anything other than trust you. But the ugly voice from the corners reminds me:  There was a time when I didn't have any reason not to trust him, either.  Open and transparent-seeming eyes looked straight at me, reasonable voices comforted me, soothed me and fed me buckets of steaming lies.  Which part is the part where I can distinguish between the real and the construct?  

And so I avoid the corners.  Let the things swept there lie a while longer.  

Boundaries, compassion and coexisting

Play nice.

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

Treat other people the way you want to be treated.

Over and over, all my life, I've heard these adages.  From my parents, my teachers, my mentors, my peers. 

Those phrases are often well-intentioned.  Some people live strictly within them, some ignore them completely.  Both avenues are fraught with peril.  Being overly concerned with the actions of others, particularly when those actions have no bearing on you personally or aren't flagrant violations of the rights of others is an easy way to have a miserable existence, constantly up in arms, consistently and loudly berating others.   It is horribly unhealthy to be able to function when others don't follow the rules you've laid down for them to live by. 

Every pendulum has a dewpoint on the opposite end of the swing, though.  The opposite of being an overly controlling douchecanoe is not rolling over and limply allowing others to trample freely over you. 

There are always going to be times in our lives when other people push our boundaries.  As I grow and learn, I try to distance myself from my initial reactions.  What was done or said?  How does it impact me or those I love?  Does it violate my moral code?  What would I gain if I said something?  What would I lose if I said nothing?  Without being able to guess the intent of the person who violated my boundary, how can I establish that boundary and still have compassion for the person who hurt me?

Any person who has  strong presence will inevitably rub some people the wrong way, and so I have done most of my life.  Part of my maturing process has been to examine my reaction to being considered a downright bitch by an alarming number of folks.  It hurts when people don't like me, but I have to consider that sometimes their reactions to me are a direct byproduct of my own actions.  And there's nothing terribly mature or growth-producing about being proud of being monikered The Wicked Witch of the West by your coworkers.  But there's also not a thing wrong with finding ways to be both strong and compassionate.

I can recognize that others may not be mindful of what they do or say, because they are human and like them, I am not always giving the right amount of attention to how my words or actions impact others.  But when those thoughtless comments or actions directly violate my personal boundaries and beliefs, there's not a thing wrong with me pointing out that what was done or said wasn't OK with me.  And I don't particularly care if you get your feelings hurt because I let you know you crossed a line.  If I've been clear without being mean, then your reaction is your own problem.

That doesn't make me a bitch.

That doesn't mean I don't like you.  It doesn't mean I don't think we can all exist together in a reasonable facsimile of pleasant harmony.

It just means I'd like you to be more considerate of how you interact with me and my family.

Understood?

Three rooms and a hallway left and oh, God, I'm somebody's WIFE

I've been painting.

I've wanted to repaint my kitchen since the day I moved in to the house.  It has had this horribly busy wallpaper, and I avoided doing anything about it like the plague because I had to strip wallpaper before and I would quite honestly rather have my fingernails removed with hot pokers while simultaneously having a root canal.  As if it weren't bad enough, my walls are mostly plaster walls.  Wallpaper on plaster.  Absolutely heinous that someone would do that to me.  Well, I've done the next owner one worse, because I painted over wallpaper on Saturday. 

To be fair, I sanded things really well first. 

I also painted my dining room a few weeks ago, and next up is the living room and the hallway and probably the master bedroom and the little man's room as well.  My daughter's room was the only room we painted when we bought the house, its pink and purple (her choice, not mine) and can stay that way.

Painting adds something extra to help keep the days passing quickly by until SG can come home again, which right now looks to be two days before Christmas for a very quick visit. 

In one of our many phone conversations he was talking about the holidays and he made some comment about the company giving the contractors enough time for the holidays to go home even if it wasn't close.  "Not all of us live a couple of hours drive away, for crying out loud," he said.  "I want to have time to fly home and spend a few days with my wife."

Wife.

HE SAID WIFE.

When my ex and I got married, we had about six months of being engaged.  We had been together two years at that point, and I had plenty of time to process the concept of being married and what it really entailed.  Being a wife.  Having a husband.  Being a "we."  Having in-laws.  And a stepson!  And cousins for my kids!  And exes and all those family relationships that spring into existence when you bind your lives together.

We've been married a whole 19 days so far, and I'm still not quite used to wrapping my mouth around the word Hu-huh-Husband.    

I have to say, its pretty damn awesome. 

Not the being apart, part, of course.  As you can imagine, being a newlywed with your spouse about as geographically far from you as he can get on the continental U.S. is full of the suck.  But awesome in the way of commited, together, not alone on the island anymore, loving someone that much and being loved that much.  All the really great kinds of awesome. 

Getting used to this is really really cool.