Advice From An Unreliable Source

I was told by a well-meaning friend that, if I want to drive more traffic to my obscure and seldom read blog, that I need to add practical content.  Apparently, my rants about motherhood and cleaning out the trash compactor (which was seriously going to be my topic for the day) aren’t helpful in any way.  If I really want readership, then I have to give usable advice—a terrifying prospect considering the fact that my advice is sketchy at best.  But, thankfully, I write on the internet where all content is questionable and generally begins with, “I read somewhere,” rather than citing a credible source.  So I’m going to jump into the advice pool with both feet and the warning that following said advice could leave you wet.

Things you should do in September:

1.      Stock up on school supplies—but make sure you hide them on the top shelf.  It’s true that pens, paper, notebooks and even staplers are the cheapest they’re going to get this time of year.  The problem with stocking up is that my kids will burn through all those supplies until we’re left digging under couch cushions for broken pencils before spring break.  So you have to hide them and ration them like a communist with cheese.

2.      Buy plants because you know that they’re going to die.  I’m just like you.  I lose interest in my yard by the time school buses start circling the suburbs.  I have to start bribing my kids to water the plants and I have to threaten horrible repercussions if they don’t mow the lawn before the cats are unable to make it back to the house.  That’s probably why half of my expensive spring shrub and flower purchases are now dead.  If I were you I’d stock up in the fall when nurseries and Kmart mark down the plants by 80%.  Plant twice as many for half the price and by this time next year, you’ll have the same yard and half the price (assuming half die).

3.      Give up on having a date night until November.  Summer dries up my flower beds, my cuticles and my date nights.  We’re surrounded by children, projects, and family reunions that just don’t let up.  So, I’m always super-excited when the kids start school because I think that I’m going to get back my date nights once the routine shakes out.  Wrong-o!  Fall brings sports, which breeds practices, which spawn jam-packed nights.  If you don’t have kids in sports, then you have the televised variety—which is just as destructive to date nights.  Do yourself a favor and give up.  Plan a date night in November when his favorite team is out of the playoffs and your kids have moved on to writing out their Christmas lists.  You can guilt him into taking you to one of those award-winning films that you love by reminding him that you haven’t had a date since May.  It’s a total win.

So tell me.  How’d I do with the advice?  I probably had better research “usable advice” before you answer.

The Great Procrastinator

My husband has a paper that’s due this week. He’s gone back to school and I’m pretty sure he’s not liking it. I don’t think he realized that it would be hard work or that he would struggle to put thoughts onto paper, but it’s been an eye-opener for him. My eyes have been opened in another way. Up to this point, I’ve always felt like a slacker next to my husband. He remodels a room, washes our family’s pile of dirty clothing and manages to jump on the trampoline with the kids in the time it takes me to think up something to make for dinner (that I have the ingredients for.) But now he is going to extraordinary lengths to procrastinate working on this paper. It’s a whole new side of my husband that I never knew existed.


He’s turned avoiding the computer into an art form. Last night he scrubbed the fingerprints off our walls, sat down with me to watch a Lifetime channel movie, and willingly did Yoga with me. The night before he volunteered to help with my son’s Scout project and he used a backhoe to dig a fountain out of the front yard. When he came in for dinner, he asked if I wanted him to bathe the cats. For the record, he doesn’t even like the cats.

When he finally sits in front of the computer to work on the paper he winds up surfing ads for garage sales or luxury cars. And, although he denies ordering it, a humungous tube-slide showed up at my front door courtesy of a local Craigslist advertiser. If I find out that we belong to the jam-of-the-month-club, or if a box of Omaha Steaks shows up in the mail, I’m going to kill him.

What is it about the stuff we just don’t want to do that scares us so badly? When you think about it, if he had just done the paper right away then he never would have had to dust the tops of the kitchen cabinets or vacuum the coil in the refrigerator. Or take his daughter pants shopping, or try his hand at buzz-cutting our son’s hair. But this entire series of bizarre chores were born out of his desire to put off today that which is due tomorrow. All I know is that I’m no longer going to feel guilty about curling up on the couch with a book or going out to the movies with my friends, especially since I’m not much of a procrastinator. After all, I already have my taxes done.

Newsflash - I Actually Like My Husband

I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage lately, as I always do this time of year because I get to meet with couples to discuss their financial history of the past year. Each couple interacts differently and I can never tell, just by watching them, how long they’ve been married or if they’re happy together—which basically proves that choosing accounting over counseling was a smart career move on my part. The only thing I do know is that some couples really make it work.


So far, my husband and I are one of those couples and the fact that we work doesn’t make much sense, at least on the surface. Firstly, besides the children, we don’t have much in common. I’m a thinker, my husband’s a doer. I like music and he can’t name a single singer or group that debuted after 1985. I try to have a well thought out wardrobe and my husband considers any article of clothing that doesn’t have holes as his “good clothes.” My husband is fun and playful and great at parties. My mouth is naturally turned down at the corners so, unless I remember to walk around with a smile plastered on my face, I always look a little peeved. If marriage was a simple checklist, we’d fail.

But, we don’t fail at all. As a matter of a fact, we work rather well. Where one of us is lacking, the other picks up the slack, and we don’t have to discuss whether it’s fair—we just do it. As a family, we like to go boating but I can’t back up a trailer to save my life. Thankfully, my husband can parallel park a trailer. He can’t drive the boat without taking out docks like they were bowling pins, but I can drive and dock a boat so it all works out in the end. We handle parenting in much the same way. I hate playing with the kids. I played with Barbies when I was young and that was plenty for me but my husband loves to tickle and tease and they love being tickled and teased. He hates doing the homework, and I don’t mind it too much.

He’s also adapted to my strange ideas of courtship. I love dates, but I don’t love eating out or watching movies unless I’m excited about a particular movie—which only happens a handful of times each year. So we’ve been known to wander furniture stores where we can’t afford a welcome mat, check out thrift stores, take bike rides or even exercise together and call it a date.

I love to bring up all this strangeness like it proves something remarkable about our marriage, but it doesn’t. The truth is that we’re fond of each other and we appreciate each other. That’s our big secret. The rest of it is just compromise and we’re only willing to compromise because we still like each other enough to give something up for the other person. I realize that I’m not a fancy psychologist with a bunch of degrees but I think the secret to a good marriage is actually liking the person you’re married to. If you like them, then all the little things work themselves out. What do you think?

What's a Stuffed Bear that Sings "Wild Thing" Have To Do With Valentine's Day?

Valentine’s Day has hit my home and I can only conclude that it’s the most confusing of holidays. I woke up secretly wishing that my husband would present me with some obscenely large and mostly red display of his affection. Dozens of roses in beautiful vases like Reece Witherspoon got from Patrick Dempsey in “Sweet Home Alabama” perhaps, or a date where we travel around, fulfilling my secret wish list like Shane West did for Mandy Moore in “A Walk To Remember.” I would even have been thrilled with a photo-shopped album showing our future children like Kate Hudson presented Matthew McConaughey in “How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days,” except we already know what our children look like. But the truth is that romantic comedies have set our men up to fail and set us up to be disappointed. I doubt my husband is going to run in front of a plane for me (“The Proposal”) or follow me around Venice trying to convince me that we’re meant to be together (“Only You.”) And yet I do know that he wants to be with me because he shows up every day and wades through mountains of laundry with me, paints Styrofoam balls to resemble planets with our kids, and gallantly hands over his paycheck knowing that it’s going to be spent on lots of un-fun things like packaged chicken, big bags of potato chips, and electricity.

It should be enough, but Valentine’s Day makes us want more. The problem is that I’m not planning anything amazing for him either. I can’t surprise him with a trip to New York even though I know he’d love it because it requires months of planning and money I just don’t have. We don’t live in a town with any professional sports teams and the movie theaters will be packed with other uninventive people like me trying to show that we care, but not enough to put much effort into it.

So, here I am without anything. My husband already dropped by the office on Friday and brought me flowers, promising a nice date night. I’m sweating and a little panicked. I already ran through the Valentine’s Day gauntlet at Walmart and I just don’t think cupcakes, monster-sized cookies or animatronic bears that sing “Wild Thing” are the right expression of love. Plus, I just hate spending money on dumb stuff. So I headed home, empty handed.

I walked into my daughter’s bedroom where she was bent over her little desk, working intently on another coloring project. She smiled up at me, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom.” She hands me one of the papers from the stack in front of her and I smile as I read her handmade card, “I love you Mom and Dad. You mak me relly hape.” I hug her, “You make me happy, too sweetheart.” She giggles and shows me her project which is a stack of handmade cards with big misshapen hearts on the front and inside is the sentiment, “You are my friend.” She’s copied this sentence carefully no less than twenty times and tells me that she’s going to take them to school and give them to all her friends. Then she jumps up and says, “Oh, I almost forgot! I got a Valentine for Sue!” She grabs the Valentine and runs out the front door. I stand on the porch and watch as she runs up the stairs of the house next door and rings the doorbell with her handmade card in her hand. Sue, our elderly neighbor, answers the door and walks out on the porch to get her valentine. My daughter stands on that porch and talks to Sue for over half an hour and I realize that I’ve just witnessed the best valentine ever. No screenwriter could ever duplicate the sweetness of that moment.

By the way, my husband took me to a very nice dinner and we laughed and talked just like we do every other night at dinner, except this time we didn’t have to do the dishes. It wasn’t a room full of roses, but this year I didn’t mind. Valentines isn’t about a once-a-year display of love, it’s about remembering to tell those we love how much they bring to every other day of the year.

Unapologetic

When it comes to being a woman, there are a few things that I’m never going to apologize for. Believe me, I say “I’m sorry” more times a day than is healthy but there are just some things that are never going to change so it seems counterproductive to apologize for them.

I will not apologize for:

1. Being unwilling to commit to a car pool. I don’t want to drive car pool to a child’s extracurricular activity because it’s extra—meaning that there will be days when I simply don’t feel like fighting my kid about the need to earn a merit badge or practice hitting a ball. If they don’t want to go, I’m okay with it and I don’t want to be committed to take some other person’s kid anyway.

2. Locking the bathroom door. Granted the act of giving birth to a baby abolishes all previously conceived notions of modesty or privacy, but I don’t think it’s much to ask that I get the bathroom to myself. And I will stoop to pretending I’m not there when little fingers waggle under the door, even when they cry and say, “I know you’re in there, Mom!”

3. Not getting up to clean even though my husband is on a cleaning rampage. It never fails that the one night I get home from work and I don’t start picking up backpacks and loading the dishwasher and vacuuming up the after school snack, my husband does. He walks around the house with an annoyed look on his face, a dishcloth slung over his shoulder and a squirt bottle of Windex in his hand. And I know he wants me to feel guilty, get up and pitch in but I’m not going to. I will be kind enough to lift my feet when he tries to vacuum the rug under them.

4. Sneaking upstairs before bedtime. There are nights when I can’t handle tucking the kids into bed. The reasons vary, but it usually boils down to the fact that I want to lay in bed and read early enough that I’m not too tired to remember what I just read. I figure my husband can take a break from fantasy football at least one night a week to handle good night kisses.

5. Serving finger foods for dinner. I’m absolutely convinced that my family has no idea the stress dinner causes me. I don’t get stressed preparing dinner, I get stressed trying to come up with an idea for dinner every single night. I’m not that creative—believe me. Since my family is never any help with ideas, I have been known slice bread and cheese and drop olives and pickles on a plate and call it dinner. They hate it, but it works for me.

What about you? I have a feeling you can add to my list. I’d love to hear it.

The Worst Gift I Ever Got

Start talking about presents this time of year and the ghosts of bad presents past haunt everyone whether they’re Scrooge or Bob Cratchet. It always starts off with flashbacks to a time when you opened a gift that was a total miss and you wonder just what in your DNA made your husband believe that pink-handled tools were “made for you.” News flash—we really want you to hang the picture, not give us tools so that we can hang it ourselves. There’s also the present with a not so hidden meaning. My friend’s future mother-in-law gave her the Zone Diet book for Christmas, saying excitedly “whenever I need to lose a few pounds this is my go-to Bible for it!” Nice. I guess it’s a good thing they never got married. A lot of laughs came from presents that weren’t really for the recipient, but for the giver. Case in point, a friend received a Mexican cookbook even though her husband knew she was allergic to chilies. I also think that’s why a big television isn’t really a gift at all because it wasn’t me that wanted to watch the football game in HD—I was hoping for Sleepless in Seattle.


But the hardest gift to understand is the one where you can’t begin to imagine what they were thinking. I remember one year when I had dropped hint after hint about a CD I wanted from a particular artist. Imagine my surprise when I opened my present to find a country artist instead of the rock artist I had asked for. Thank goodness for gift receipts.

Still I appreciate the effort. Gift cards seem easy and I can understand the draw since the shipping often exceeds the cost of the gift, but there’s something special about knowing that someone tried. It’s sort of like a leap of faith. You take a shot that the recipient will agree that you have just anticipated a want or need they hadn’t identified on a list. When you’re right, it’s magic. But you have to take the chance that you’re going to crash and burn and actually pick out a present. That’s why the CD I mentioned earlier is still one of my favorite gifts. My husband explained that he picked it out because one of the songs just always made him think of me. Ah, magic.

Where Are The Princes?

So we took our family to see “Tangled,” the new Disney animated princess movie. Thankfully my children have advanced past the throw popcorn, fidget when they’re bored in a movie stage—my husband has not. Middle aged and he still acts middle school—I came home with popcorn in my bra. So I’m very aware of the fact that men and women are fundamentally different, but I don’t think that our fairy tales need to change just because it’s easier for women to be the adult.


We laughed as an animated princess saved her prince from multiple tight squeezes, coaxed him into remembering his dream, and trudged her way toward her dream even if she had to pull the prince along behind her. But it made me a little sad. I know that I’m a capable woman and I can, and do make dinner in high heels, help with homework while working on a spreadsheet, get everyone to school and bed on time and remember to show my husband some womanly attention even if I’m dead dog tired. If I felt so inclined I could manage my life and my family life single handedly while my husband flipped channels in his recliner—no assistance necessary. But, here’s the thing, men need to take care of the women in their lives. If they didn’t have that responsibility they could easily cross to the dark side where selfishness mingles with endless hours of online gaming. And we need to be taken care of because women tend to take care of everyone else.

I’m raising two sons into what I hope will be two good young men and I make them crazy by forcing them to hold the door open for the old woman shuffling into the grocery store with her walker. I also remind them that it’s not okay to hit girls—even if their sister wrote her name all over his homework (she’s just learning and so she writes her name everywhere!) I make them get me a drink when I’m thirsty and clear my dishes from the table. They perform all these duties with an obvious roll of the eye, but I want them to be actual princes to their future wives.

I’m a strong woman and I want my daughter to be strong, but I don’t want her to confuse the ability to handle everything with the need to do it all. I’m all for a modern princess as long as the prince remains chivalrous. That’s the thing about happily ever after—it works best when two people are working for it rather than just one.

100 Reasons To Give Thanks

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my 100th post is on Thanksgiving Day—and I didn’t even plan it. I can’t believe how far this blog has come. When I started it, I was scared to admit that I long to write and I was downright terrified to put it out into the world to be judged. It was like going back to High School again—a leap I wouldn’t take on a bet. But everyone has been kind and I haven’t had one dream where I went to school naked since I started this blog (that’s my go-to scary dream and it’s not a pretty one.) I appreciate every one of you who take the time out of your busy days to see what’s on my mind. It’s humbling for me.


I can’t begin to tell you how thankful I am for opinionatedbaroness.com. It’s turned me into a lighter person. I look at my days with a sense of humor and wonder because I know that I’m going to have to wax poetic about my everyday life each night. It’s made me appreciate the children I’ve been given by God. They’re full of life and personality and they were obviously put here to challenge and entertain me. My husband is supportive and a true partner in a life that we couldn’t have imagined when we were kids picking out an engagement ring and believing that every dream would come true. He rolls with the punches and nibbles on my ear whenever I get too serious and he’s my biggest fan. Thanks to this blog I’m excited to get up in the morning and I can’t wait to see what the next 100 posts will bring.

There’s just so much to be thankful for—and you are at the top of my list today. Thank you all for being my cheering section—I really wish I could send a marching band to your door. I hope that you gather your family and friends around you this weekend and let them know how much they enliven your life because you inspire mine. Thank you.

For My Other Sister aka Fun With Aging

I finally caught up with my ultra-busy sister on the phone today. We’re closer in age and definitely aging. Between the two of us we have some hard-won experience behind us that has given us a resilient sense of humor—especially about that topic that women hate the most—aging.


I never would have guessed many years ago when we were children roller-skating around the basement and memorizing the lines to “Zorro, The Gay Blade” (we thought gay meant happy back then) that we’d be talking about varicose veins (mine, not hers) and push-up bras (hers, not mine.) But those seem to be hot button topics for us these days. We also swap favorites in the fun and fancy world of makeup primers, under-eye circle removers and spray-on pantyhose. Thanks to some unfortunate genes we received from my father who looked like Kenny Rogers at the ripe age of 30, we’re also ridiculously experienced at dying our hair. Between the two of us we’ve been every hair color in the book, but my sister was the one who sported the truly creative dos including lavender highlights and black and white striped hair. Rest assured she is a responsible adult these days with normal colored hair. I’m the one that went a little tipsy with the red hair color this time, embarrassing as it may be.

Despite our efforts to push back the clock—at least on our faces and bodies—we’ve both acknowledged that our biological clocks are broken and we’re not really sad about it. We’re both astonished that we’re still chasing small children around when we could easily injure ourselves in the process. At least I’m done with diapers—she’s not so I get the last laugh. We’re the picture perfect older moms. When our kids throw fits, we pretend that we don’t know them and we walk away. When they’re cranky and demanding we turn off the lights and wander off to bed—at least that’s what I do. We’re bad about discipline because it’s a big fat pain. If I ground my teenager then I’m also grounding the babysitter that lets me grocery shop without being followed by whiny kids who dump bags of Doritos into my cart when they think I’m not looking. When she puts her boy in time out, then she’s the one that has to keep taking him back into the room after he tries to escape. Kids in time out are like prisoners in Alcatraz—they’ll use a spoon to dig out if they have to. There is one advantage to the broken biological clock, though, we never get baby hungry. Sure, they look cute from afar but I have no desire to walk around with spit-up running down the back of my blazer and I will spare you the stories about other bodily fluids that have covered my clothes thanks to that cute chubby baby. When my friends bring their babies to the house, I think they’re adorable and I’m so glad that they’re not spending the night with me. I can’t even remember three years of my life because I was so sleep deprived from being up with children all night.

Just for fun I told my husband that I was thinking about having another baby. He took it pretty well, all things considered, but he banned sex until I’m safely through menopause.

Reflections on Happily Ever After

When I first started this blog I promised my husband that I wouldn’t really write about him specifically. I think he was worried that I’d embarrass him, but I’m plenty embarrassing for the both of us. I’m flummoxed by the thought of cleaning a microwave and this morning’s rush to school looked like a fire drill gone horribly, horribly wrong. But we just hit our twentieth wedding anniversary and it’s a pretty big accomplishment these days, and I feel like I should say something to mark the occasion.


What has been rattling around my head this week is how different Happily Ever After looks from this side. I was a young bride, full of romantic notions, big plans and dreams that played more like a black and white movie than real life. But real life is messy, confusing and often down right boring. We’ve zigzagged between times when we act like a couple of newlyweds, all touchy feely and generally terribly embarrassing to our offspring, to times when we act more like partners in the business of family life than lovers. Thankfully we’ve stuck it out—even when it felt pointless to continue. And it feels like I’ve hit my Happily Ever After.

I just didn’t think it would look like this. I didn’t realize that I would still get all tingly watching my husband sleep or that I would be happy to sacrifice my couple time so that he could catch up on his sleep. I never pictured us spending so much time working on the house, or the children, or the minutia of life and I never thought that I could be at peace with that. I also never thought I could love him more than I did on our wedding day—but I do. I love him much more because I’m in love with the sacrifices he makes for me and our children.

I also didn’t realize how much my children would contribute to my Happily Ever After. Somehow I had pictured them more as paper dolls with cute interchangeable outfits than little people with complete and engaging personalities. I love watching them grow and stretch and try new things. I’m happy to be a football-wrestling-dancing fan when it comes to my children. I love teenagers. They’re so interesting and enthusiastic and their mood swings are a sight to behold. They’re as passionate about politics as they are about perfecting rubber band launching from their fingers.

I also thought that Happily Ever After was a destination rather than a journey. I could blame Disney for always ending the fairy tale on her wedding day, but it’s best that I didn’t really know. I’m not sure I would have signed on otherwise and then I’d never be living my Happily Ever After twenty years later.

Time Marches On

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Anniversaries are always bittersweet and I’m coming up on a rather big one.  I like the solid quality of an anniversary.  There’s something comforting about being able to put one foot in front of the other and mark off significant days along the way.  The death of a loved one’s anniversary passes and you realize that time is healing, even if it’s sad that memory fades along the way.  When you mark a happy occasion such as a birthday or wedding anniversary, then you’re always glad that you counted the time because it’s surprising how fast it all sped by and how much you accomplished along the way. 

What I don’t like about marking anniversaries is the way that I’m painfully reminded how fast time marches along and how quickly all of this will be over.  It’s like the song, “100 years”, says “I’m fifteen for a moment.”  Then I’m twenty for a moment and thirty-five for a moment and forty for a moment.  But no matter where I am in my life, I’m only there for a moment.  Any parent realizes this when you look at a photo album of your children growing and you marvel at how it feels like just yesterday that they were small.  Time, it’s the one thing we all have in common and it’s often out of our control.

When my husband approaches a birthday, he’s always disappointed.  He looks back on the passing years as opportunities missed and goals not met.  But I really only think these feelings hit us once we have quite a few years under our belts.  When we’re young we feel like we have time for absolutely anything.  We can gaze at stars and watch a worm inch its way across a sidewalk.  We know that we have time to recover from our mistakes so we’re more open to taking chances. 

This anniversary I plan to go about my day like I’m still young.  I’m not going to reflect on what I have or haven’t done I’m just going to live.  I’m going to hold my daughter on my lap while she talks in circles about her favorite toys and I’m going to listen to my teenager’s recounting of great general’s battles in history without wishing I was somewhere else, getting something like laundry done.  And I’m going to kiss my husband like when we were dating because I remember that it was fun back when.

Marriage--The Great Negotiation

Marriage is a negotiation that rivals deals made at U.N. In some unions the jobs are generally divided along traditional gender lines. My parents marriage was one such example for many years. Dad’s domain was work and the garage, mom was in charge of the rest of the house and anything that fell under that particular umbrella. She handled all the housework and cleaning, cooking and dishes, diapers and bedtime stories. Dad made sure the oil got changed in the car and the lawn was mowed. He went so far as to proudly proclaim that he had never changed a diaper (a condition remedied when he babysat the grandchildren.) This all changed when I was in High School. Women were renegotiating almost everything in life. More women were working outside the home, and their daughters were prolonging marriage. It was a natural transition for me. Although I knew that my dad didn’t cook, clean or do dishes, I also knew that my future husband was going to be more hands-on when it came to family duties. All my friends felt the same way—and we didn’t feel that we were being rebellious at all—it was just the new expectation.


My father’s world changed one day when we were on vacation and my dad said to my mom, “Honey, I’m thirsty. Can you get me a Pepsi?” My mom didn’t miss a beat, “Why? Are your legs painted on?” This response was so completely out of character for my mother that I stopped dead in my tracks and stared. My dad was equally as stunned. My mother continued to slowly turn the pages of her magazine as if nothing was different—but it was very different. You’ll have to ask my mom what made her snap and what the ensuing years were like for her. For me it was like watching a slow car crash. My mom would want my dad to change and my dad would dig in his heels, but neither wanted to give any ground. I watched my mom blossom and take on more leadership roles outside of our home while my dad seemed to silently stew in his recliner while watching golf on television. I’m sure it was hard on both of them.

My marriage is still in negotiation although I still think my mom’s was more difficult. I married a man who knew how to clean a toilet and didn’t assume that it was my job to do it all the time. We split housework pretty evenly since both of us hate to do it but we both need to live in a fairly clean space, and now we have capable children who are forced to contribute in the form of clean bathrooms and vacuumed floors. But a more equal gender-neutral marriage isn’t all sunshine and roses either. There are jobs that neither one of us like to do (organizing comes to mind), and since it doesn’t naturally fall into either of our wheelhouses, mainly because we’ve built our wheelhouses from the ground up rather than from tradition, then those jobs get pushed (sometimes literally) into the closet where they can marinate for decades.

Then there’s the money dilemma. You’d think two incomes would make it easier, but we argue about the same things that my parents argued about when it came to money—mainly what are we going to purchase with it—except now we can pout and pull the “it’s my money and I’ll do what I want with it.” This approach rarely works, of course, unless you’re willing to sacrifice your retirement savings so that you can have the new kitchen AND he can buy the big screen. Generally we act more like adults than children (thank heaven) but our five-year-old personas have been known to throw a couple of raspberries at each other from time to time.

I have friends who even negotiate when it comes to sex. I’m not really going to touch that topic except to say that when sex becomes a weapon or currency it’s no longer fun. Sex that isn’t fun translates into bad sex. Bad sex ruins marriages—enough said.

Maybe all of life is a negotiation but marriage is definitely the trickiest. When I yell at my drycleaner and demand a refund, I’m not emotionally invested and I’m more than willing to move on to the cleaner down the street. But when it comes to my marriage I’m not willing to blow it to bits over the day to day bumps. I have to walk tenderly because I want my husband to be tender with me. After all, a clean bathroom is nice, but at the end of the day I can live with a dirty sink—I can’t live without the pillow talk that makes me remember that this marriage wasn’t a business deal, it was a sweet deal and I intend to keep it that way.

Love Letters

I was reading some beautiful love letters that were written by powerful and famous men written to their wives. Men like John Adams, Beethoven, Winston Churchill and Napoleon. They often expressed the sentiment that their lives would have no real value without their love. It’s quite interesting considering how much we value their accomplishments in the fields of music, politics, and military strategy. It was these accomplishments that made them famous enough that we know their names still today, but they didn’t value those as much as they valued their wives.


Most of these men spent long weeks or even long years away from their wives and the letters speak of the longing they have to be together again. They talk about how they are almost unable to bear another moment apart. My husband have had to spend periods of our lives with his job taking him away and I can attest to the fact that when your love isn’t nearby that life starts to lose its sheen. Slowly, things that you thought were important enough to bicker about when you were both under the same roof stop mattering at all. Then more and more things lose their value as your mind is consumed with the loss of the person you care most about.

I read in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” about a friend who wanted to counsel refugees. These were people who had been through the hardest of lives and had experienced unthinkable losses and she was very worried about being able to help them, but she found out that the only thing they really wanted to discuss was love. The “I met this man on the boat” kinds of things. Matters of the heart are what connect us and make us human.

I’m sure that someone, somewhere has tried to study love—dissect it, break it down, make some connection to brain function in order to sterilize the process and make it seem scientific instead of special. But it is special because it’s deeply personal. John Wooden, famous basketball coach, continued to write love letters to his wife of 53 years even after her death. He leaves them in piles on her gravesite and, to this day, not even his children know what they say. That’s special and no scientist is ever going to convince me it’s not.

Martha Stewart Mystique

What is it about the allure of Martha Stewart and her glossy artsy photo spreads of white-wrapped boxes with grosgrain ribbons? Women thumb through her magazines marveling at the zoo animal sugar cookies with perfectly piped border frosting and wreaths made of natural materials only available in some obscure part of the country.


We plop down our credit card to purchase spring-form pans, willing to fork over money in exchange for the promise of perfection even if, in real life, we can’t make a cake from a box. We buy into the still-life dream of a simple lifestyle punctuated by elegance normally reserved for women of means with a large full-time staff--when, in fact, we can’t manage to keep a bathroom counter free from toothpaste streaks let alone wrap our antique tablecloths (if we owned them) in tissue paper to prevent creasing. I’m also pretty certain that I will never find the time or the desire to move my foodstuffs into matching stainless steel jars with chalkboard-paint labels even though the photo of her matching pantry makes me believe for a moment that I just having those jars in my pantry would improve my culinary skills.

The hectic housewives of today may long for a simpler life, especially one as stylish as the one presented on the pages of Martha’s magazines, but we haven’t a clue how to go back and the hallmarks of the simple life of yester-year would be positively infuriating today. One of the reasons why women managed their homes with efficiency and skill was because they only owned a single car and their husband had taken it to work—there was no where else to go. Then there was the household budget. Because families were operating on a single income, women were generally only given control over the grocery budget. Managing that budget required creative accounting if you had any hope of saving a few dollars for yourself. I’m not sure we’d be as willing to embrace simplicity if it meant having the mini-van taken away and carving our mad money out of the household grocery budget.

The women we are today just aren’t built for the simple life. We manage homes, high-stress jobs, and super-busy kids while keeping our marriages hot and our retirement accounts growing. Martha Stewart sells the dream and we live the reality. I’ll probably keep my subscription, but I’m officially giving up the idea that I’m going to replicate anything I see on the pages of the magazine.

Storms, Exhaustion and the Helping Hand

We spent the weekend at the lake enjoying sun-filled skies and warm sandy beaches with long stretches of complete relaxation—batteries fully recharged. When it was time to head back home the skies had clouded over and the winds began to blow, whipping up white-capped waves blasting chilly sprays of water over the boat hull. We made our way slowly to the boat ramp, cautiously picking our way over the waves where I dropped the men off and was left with my two youngest children in the boat to wait. With the kids safely packed in the cuddy cabin of the boat, oblivious to the storm outside while they watched a movie, I executed a holding pattern waiting for my ride to arrive, not knowing that it would be a long wait.


While I was thrashed about the lake, I had to keep a diligent watch. There were lots of boats waiting to be pulled from the foamy mass, and some operators were obviously more experienced than others. One boat seemed completely out of control like a pin-ball bouncing off the houseboats that were riding out the storm attached to mooring buoys, while others expertly controlled their vessels, weaving in and out of the masses. I’ve been driving a boat for as long as I can remember and I consider myself to be quite competent, but the storm was introducing me to new challenges. Knowing I was about to load the boat on the trailer, I practiced maneuvering in the relentless headwind and was very anxious when I discovered that I had absolutely no steering control when running at a very slow speed. Since you don’t trailer a boat at any speed except ultra-slow, I was terrified. How was I going to safely dock the boat while being tossed about helplessly by the wind?

While I dwelt on my upcoming dilemma, the waves pummeled all of us who were watching boat after boat approach the loading ramp only to be blown into the dock or other boats. Tempers were high while they struggled to get control. Husbands and wives screamed at each other, drivers threw up their hands in defeat and watched their boats smack the dock, and meanwhile I was left to drift.

I learned something that day. The storm exhausted me. The waves rolled, pitching the boat all directions. After a while my back hurt and my stomach turned. The wind burned my eyes and made my head hurt. By the time my trailer arrived and it was my turn, I was tired and my nerves were fried. I had two little kids tucked in the cabin of the boat who had no idea that I was fighting the wind like a shadowy samurai and scared that I was going to hurt my husband who looked tiny as he fought to pull us in. I made it. It only took two attempts, but it took everything I had in that moment to keep everyone and everything safe. And I was lucky. Boats were overturned and damaged that day. I honestly believe that the only reason I fared so well was because, at the moment I was pulling in, my husband remained calm and steadfast. He never lost his cool—even when the boat blew completely asunder and we had to start all over again. It’s like he knew that I was exhausted and he wasn’t going to let me go through it alone.

I had a friend, who had been through a difficult divorce, tell me that when you’re constantly under attack there comes a time when you’re too exhausted to fight and you give up. You accept child support that wouldn’t sustain your cat—let alone three young children, and you cash him out of the house in the middle of a recession. You are so tired from the constant hits that you finally accept your roll as punching bag, then you spend the next fifteen years fuming over the injustices that you accepted because you were too tired to do anything else. She said that she wished that just one friend would have fought for her during that year—a single person, emotionally separate from he divorce that would have said, “I know you’re exhausted, but I’m not letting you take that ridiculous child support offer.” Someone to be her second in the duel against the person she used to love more than anything, who was now trying to take her down. I’ve heard the same sentiment from women fighting cancer, and women struggling with depression. We may look strong, we may even be strong, but spend enough time in the center of a hurricane….

I have always been blessed to be surrounded by strong, capable women, but I think we’ve become blinded by our abilities and we believe that we can and should handle everything on our own. I’ve heard heartbreaking stories from women I consider to be my close friends where I have found out that they have had a breast cancer scare, battled depression for more than a year, and have been too exhausted to get out of bed for months. Maybe I’m just a really bad listener, but I don’t think so. I think that we don’t want to ask for help with our problems and we don’t want to step in for someone else without being asked, so we’ve created a Catch 22 where women are the losers every time. Routinely, when I ask a friend why they didn’t tell me about it sooner, I’m told that I’m busy enough for three women and they didn’t want to burden me with their problems. But busy is not the same thing as exhausted and terrified and, let’s face it, when you’re dog-tired you don’t know what to ask for anyway.

I’m going to make a better effort to keep an eye on my friends, recognizing that we are all very good at hiding things we don’t want others to know. And I’m sure that if I spot a friend in crisis I’ll have absolutely no idea what to do to help, but I’m going to try anyway. I love men and their complete willingness to fix things, but there are things in the world of women that can’t be fixed. That’s where we need to step up and remember the storm and vow that we aren’t going to let our friend fight the fury alone—even it the only thing we can think to do is to take their kids off their hands for a few hours.

All The Blessed Things We Didn't Know When We Got Married

My friend’s daughter is planning her wedding. The bride-to-be has visualized every detail of her big day. There will be fences draped in icicle lights and tiny bow-topped boxes filled with treats for their guests. They have tested several flavors of punch searching for the perfect color to match the already-purchased tangerine rock-candy swizzle sticks. The limousine-golf-cart has been rented for escorting guests from the off-site parking lot to the reception. Now all they need is 300 guests, lots of flash photography and a splashy getaway in a vintage car with tin cans tied tastefully to the bumper and they will be off on the really big adventure—marriage.


I remember being her. I remember nights when I couldn’t keep my eyes open but I didn’t want to hang up the phone because talking to my fiancé was my absolute favorite pastime. We dreamed of where we’d live and the adventures we would have. We talked about our perfect future family in the perfect house where we would cuddle every night and count our blessings that our lives had turned out so perfect. Like most young couples we were big on dreams and short on plans. And, in retrospect, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

As we drove home ridiculously late from another one of our children’s sporting events, I wondered if the me of today had handed the me of my youth an audio-tape of my children fighting in the backseat if it would have made any difference. Would I have believed that my children could behave like caged animals whenever they were placed in the cage known as the family car? And if I did believe, would the young me have had the presence of mind to run far-far away?

If God were to show me a trailer of my upcoming life, would I honestly go through with it? I’d see the great parts of my life, but I’d also see the excruciatingly hard parts that everyone, with enough years behind them to have wrinkles, has experienced. The struggles may look different, but they are life-changing challenges all the same. My bet is that I wouldn’t have willingly signed that marriage certificate had I known—which is the very reason why we shouldn’t know.

I recall a well-meaning aunt or two trying to talk me out of marrying. I was too young to saddle myself with a man, they’d say. Was I sure that this guy wouldn’t stomp on my heart in ten years when he ran off with his nubile secretary? Or what if he turned out to be a deadbeat who couldn’t hold down a job—what then? I remember smiling at them and wondering why my mother had insisted we put such sticks-in-the-mud on the guest list.

In the end, without having any concept of the reality of my future life, I stepped up and I said “I do.” And the next day we got started on all those dreams we’d spent hours discussing over the phone in the wee hours of the morning. A few dreams panned out, but most of them crashed and burned or became obsolete (I’m not raising my children in Africa no matter how much good I could accomplish with the native people.) And the in-betweens have been a roller-coaster ride that, for all the bumps and drops, I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Those experiences made me who I am, they made my husband who he is, and they made us into the family we are today, even if the best solution I’ve found to the backseat battles is to turn the radio up louder.

Thank goodness that we don’t know what we’re in for. If we did, then we’d never take the first step. I also firmly believe there’s a reason why that first step is toward husband in a beautiful white dress, with fantastic lighting and the smell of flowers floating in the air. The entire wedding day feels like a blessing of promise for the future. Tonight I’m lying in bed next to my husband wearing a ratty t-shirt and sweat pants and we’re discussing our son’s performance at his first football game, a sport his dad excelled at in high school.

“So, what’d you think of the game?” I ask.

“It was great,” he said with a big smile, “It was like nothing I’d ever imagined. I never would have dreamed that I’d love watching him play more than I liked playing myself.” And I find myself looking at my husband with more love than I felt the day I wore that beautiful white dress. Tonight, for this moment, it’s a perfect life.

Men are Mind Readers

Some days I just want my husband to read my mind. Okay, so I don’t really want him to read my mind. That could be embarrassing and potentially hazardous, but there are situations where ESP is not required. For instance, say I want to go to a concert with my husband. I’ve laid all the ground work. The newspaper with the article describing the concert has been carefully laid out on the kitchen table, on top of the sports section so he sees it first, with the box office phone number highlighted in hot pink. At this point he should be reading my mind like an audio-book, but he doesn’t. As a matter of a fact, when I mention the concert later he asks, “Who? I’ve never heard of them.” To which my brain screams, “You’ve never heard of them? You spilled your cereal on a picture of them this morning! Don’t you read?”


I quietly fume for a few days, eliciting curious stares from him as he desperately tries to read my mind, which thankfully he can’t because this is one time when it would be best for our marriage if he didn’t know what I was thinking. Finally he just gives up and asks what’s wrong and I tell him. His answer is simple, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have taken you if I’d known that you wanted to go.” I did everything I could think of to hint, to suggest, that I wanted to go to the concert but I never asked.

Several years ago I came to the epiphany that while women are tuned into each other better than a GPS system, men don’t operate on any known female frequencies. My mother determined, by unloading my dishwasher once, that I needed new silverware and she bought me a box for Christmas. A girlfriend I hardly see knew that I was remodeling and gave me a subscription to a home magazine for my birthday. My next door neighbor brought over a pillow-sized bag of goldfish crackers because she’d seen my children eating boxes of them by the swimming pool and knew they liked them. Dissecting subtle clues about what the people around us want or need is our gift, but it’s non-existent in the male DNA.

Men want to solve problems and fix things. If our needs fall outside that category then they have to be told what we want, generally several times, and usually with visual aids. When my Dad or my father-in-law would come to visit, they’d change light bulbs, haul stuff to the dump, and fix squeaky doors because that’s their way of taking care of me. But when I wanted a Rob Thomas CD for Christmas, I had to tell my husband and write it down on a sticky note so he could carry it in his wallet. Then, as we’re driving along one day before Christmas a song comes over the radio and I smile at him and ask, “So who sings this song?” He answers, “Ricky Martin.” I shake my head, “No, Rob Thomas.” But I did get the CD for Christmas because, in spite of his inability to read my mind (or recognize singers), he wants to please me.

That’s the beauty of men. They’re generally more than willing to lend a helping hand, give us a hug, or tell us that we’re wonderful after we’ve had a bad day. We just have to tell them what we need. My husband is great at getting projects done without being asked because it falls into the “fix things” category. He’s also great about helping with bedtime and doing laundry, but only if I tell him that’s what I need from him.

So now, twenty years later, I have what I’ve always wanted—a man who reads my mind. All I have to do is tell him what my mind is thinking. After a bad day at work I snuggled in next to him on the couch and said, “I need you to tell me something sweet.” He looked at me funny, and kissed me on the lips, “Sweet? That’d be you.” I smiled and then he smiled, “Looks like you’re feeling better.” The man read my mind.

Laws of Attraction

I was reading my sister’s blog about how she built her marriage, and now her family, on a love of cool cars. I know that their marriage has a lot more going for it than just cars but it illustrates the intricacies of attraction. I met my husband when I was still a dumb kid. Oh, I thought I was an adult and had everything worked out in my life, but that didn’t stop me from falling for him without consulting any sort of “good mate” checklist before saying “I do.” I had met his parents once and I hadn’t run a credit or background check. My parents couldn’t see the attraction—we had nothing in common as far as they could see, but I loved his smell (the animal part of attraction) and I loved him. Case closed. We got married. We’re just a few weeks away from our twentieth anniversary and a lot has happened during those years. We discovered that we have loads in common. My husband lives for the home-improvement project. There is nothing he would love to do more than remodel an old house top to bottom and he’s practically done that with the home we live in today. As it turns out, I love those projects just as much as he does. I plan, he builds. But that’s not the only thing we have in common—actually the list is extensive. We both like boating, and we’re both ridiculously ambitious, we love our kids—but we’re not really baby people, we like our alone time and we love to cultivate friendships.


My question for today is this: How did a dumb kid like me fall for my perfect match without even knowing I was doing it? And how did it take a bunch of analysis for you to fall for your perfect match, or did it just happen?

I read an interesting book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell where he explains that we make a lot of lightning fast calculations in our subconscious before making a decision and that generally, when we try to rationalize that decision we fail miserably. We can’t explain why we know something is right—we just do. Our failure to make a good decision often comes after the fact, when we’ve already made a speedy decision, and we begin to analyze and question that decision in an effort to make sure that we’re making the right one. So maybe that’s the secret to attraction--instantaneous evaluations being made in a part of our brain we hardly know exists. We don’t know why a guy gets us firing on all cylinders—he just does, and as we spend years building a life together we slowly uncover the reasons why our subconscious was so mesmerized with him in the first place. Makes sense to me—what about you?

Bristol's Wedded Bliss

Bristol Palin just called off her wedding to Levi Johnston, the father of her two-year-old and now (apparently) the father of another woman’s baby. This was their second engagement, and they were so scared to tell her parents that they chose to have a gossip magazine make the announcement for them. They had a right to be scared. Between engagement number one and two Levi had publicly badmouthed his future in-laws, starred in a porn movie, and sired other children. Which makes you wonder why Bristol was so hell-bent on marrying the boy in the second place. Actually, I’m not surprised. The feminist movement may have given women permission to active sex lives, but not all of us are cut out for the heart-stomping that comes with that sexual freedom.


I’m convinced that if you could dissect the spirit of a woman’s heart you’d find that it makes a strong, sometimes irrational, connection to the man we share a bed with. This connection leads to all sorts of funky predicaments, especially if you choose the wrong man. Why else would a girl run away with a boy who has no prospects, no money and no facial hair? Why else would she trust that the nude picture she just sent her boyfriend won’t wind up as wallpaper on every screen in the computer lab? Teenagers aren’t the only ones effected by the brain-sex connection. Women routinely spend years with men who will abuse them or cheat on them. And when Levi put that diamond ring on Bristol’s hand, she believed that she could trust him to never star in another porn film. (He didn’t, he just ran off to star in another film—one that mocked her family.) The heart really is blind, and sometimes downright off its rocker.

Watching Bristol claw her way through a swamp full of Levi’s bad behavior in an effort to marry the father of her child makes you realize that feminism comes with a cost. It’s no longer taboo to have sex before you can drive, cohabitate for years before you get married, and have children out of wedlock but those freedoms come with a high price. Our grandmothers may not have been liberated, but they were uncanny. They knew that, in the words of author Caitlin Flanagan, they “didn’t put out until after they had tossed the bouquet [because] they didn’t want to have to put the kibosh on icky sexual fantasies before they’d established joint checking.” I hope that Bristol finds her happiness and gets the white wedding she so obviously desires, but you have to wonder if it’s even possible at this point in the game.

Happy Endings

I love movies. I love the way the men onscreen say the right things at precisely the right time. I love the popcorn and the air-conditioning. But the thing I love most is a good story when a plan comes together. This rarely happens in my own life. Oh, I plan! I’m a planner! I’m a planner with a to-do list. It’s just that, by the time I get to the end of the list, the plan has changed or become obsolete. I can’t replicate anything I see on the cover of Martha Stewart’s magazine either. My husband thinks it’s a talent issue. I just think that Martha has better production assistants than I do.


I can’t execute a long-term plan in my own life and make it look like the package I had envisioned in the beginning. I hope this is just simple evolution. I make a plan, I start down that path, and then I have to make adjustments along the way to contend with obstacles and opportunities that I couldn’t have seen coming. By the time I’m a few years down the path, it looks nothing like picture in the brochure. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad, it’s just frustrating. Which leads me back to movies.

I like a good movie. A well told story performed by talented and capable actors is nice. But what I really like is a flawed movie. A story that starts out with compelling characters or an interesting premise and, for some reason, it steers completely off course crashing into a pile of unrecognizable plot points and loose ends. It’s because what we watch in a mere two hours is some director’s baby that he has poured a year of his life into. Just like our sidetracked plans, he is so close to the process that he has lost sight of what makes a two-hour story great and, because I’m not close to it, I have the opportunity to fix the flaws. I go home and replay it all in my head. I make notes and I re-imagine scenes and dialog. I eliminate uninteresting characters, even if they were played by a big star, and I return to the conventions that were ignored by the director. Sweeping music at the end, check. Lovers embrace, check. Happily ever after, check.

It occurs to me that maybe I just need an outsider to critique my life. You know—an objective opinion that could steer me back on course and, once they showed me where I needed to make changes, I’d happily get started. It would be a smooth road to perfection, except that I’m me and, personally (and I say this with all the love in my heart), I don’t care what you think about my life. Right or wrong it’s my life and your life belongs to you. Perhaps we should leave perfection to the movies because sometimes perfection is plain boring.