fashion clothes

Ahhhh, Valentine's Day.

The day that we are told is filled with promises of exquisite jewelry, bouquets of extravagant flowers, wining and dining at the finest of restaurants.

That's what the commercials want us to believe, anyway.

In real life for us, it means lobster and steak cooked at home, eaten in a candlelit dining room after the kids have gone to bed as the dishwasher hums in the background.

There is no new jewelry, except perhaps the most recent bracelet crafted on the Rainbow Loom.

If there are flowers, they come directly from the grocery store, though in all likelihood, the flowers were skipped because we understand that the same flowers that were $10 yesterday and will be $10 tomorrow are $30 today. We've grown too practical to throw money away on frivolous things.

Besides, lobster was on sale, and we all know that is a better use of the money.

There might be a card, if we remember, though at some point we gave up on them too. Seeking out an overpriced piece of paper holding words that are only tangentially relevant to our love seems like a waste of time anymore. There isn't a card that fits us now. Perhaps there never really was, we just wanted to believe that we could fit into the tiny boxes society told us we were supposed to.

Love, real love, isn't about flowers or chocolate or jewelry or fancy dinners.

Real love is nights spent cuddled under blankets on the couch until you fall asleep.

Real love is a call on the way home to ask if you need anything at the store.

Real love is flowers on an ordinary Tuesday just because.

Real love is bringing you a roll of toilet paper when you are trapped in the bathroom.

Real love is asking if you are okay before laughing at how you got hurt.

Real love is shoveling the driveway.

Real love is letting her cry.

Real love is pacing in a waiting room.

Real love is being vulnerable again.

Real love is saying sorry.

Real love is second chances.

Real love is messy.

Real love is beautiful.

Real love is the everyday pieces of who we are, what we do for one another, the unspoken things woven in the tapestry of this connection between two people.

Real love isn't one day.

Real love isn't one moment.

Real love is the spaces in between.

Happy Valentine's Day, my friends.


Mr. Hive, I love you.

In the world of the internet, topics run in cycles. One week, everyone and their brother is writing about bullying, the next week it's gun control, then it's breastfeeding or yoga pant controversies. Right now, it seems that there are more stories about marriage being posted and spread around like wildfire.

I read most of them and shake my head.

I have actually laughed out loud at a few of them, particularly the ones written by newly married people who claim to have it all figured out.

I've been married over fifteen years now,  and have been with my husband for six additional ones before then. Even with all of that, I would never attempt to tell you that I have it figured out.


Here's what I have learned about marriage, most of it the hard way.

- You have to be flexible. Marriage is like any kind of relationship between two people in many ways. To be sustainable, you have to be flexible. Sometimes you need more, sometimes you give more, sometimes you take more, sometimes you are forced to do more. It's hardly ever equal in terms of the amount of effort expended or needed because life is never predictable. Get used to it. Over the long term, it should roughly balance out so that one person isn't always the giver, the other the taker. There has to be some balance, but it's really only possible in the long term. On any given day, the scale is probably going to be tipped one direction or the other. This is part of life. Get used to it.

- You can't keep score. If you've been giving more lately, it's probably because your partner needs more, not because they are just a selfish asshole. (unless, of course, they are a selfish asshole, which I will address later in this post) If you're worried about tallying up what you give, if you're keeping a mental tab open and waiting to cash it in, if you're building resentment against your partner, it's fairly safe to say that you aren't ever going to feel validated. Are you doing things for your spouse because you want cosmic credit for it, or are you doing them because you are supporting your partner? Ask yourself that question before you get pissed off at them.

- Be clear about your expectations. No one is a mind reader, and passive aggression is a tool for manipulating people, not a component of a healthy marriage. Whatever it is that you want or need, say it. Deliberately. Don't hint at it. Don't silently hope they'll figure it out. Don't beat around the bush. If you don't tell someone what you want or need, you don't get to be frustrated when they fail. It's not fair.

- Marriage isn't about you or them. It's about both of you AND this thing you have between you. It isn't about what you want or need all the time, just like it can't always be about the other person, and it can never just be about the marriage because that ignores the truth that a marriage is a legal construct between two people. Once you have kids, it's about them too. There is give and take in any relationship, there are compromises and sacrifices that need to be made for the benefit of the marriage or family unit. Everyone has to be willing to make those sacrifices. If there is a breakdown in communication, if one person suppresses issues, it will eventually effect everyone. For a marriage to survive, you have to be willing to think about the consequences of your choices, not just for you, but for them, and you must be willing to alter your behavior accordingly. You are different people with different philosophies, different approaches, different goals...they will not match up all the time.

- Fight fair. That not keeping score thing comes in here too. You will have disagreements. There will be conflicts. If you drag every shitty thing they have ever done from out of the closet, you're not fighting fair. If you drag other people (usually their immediate family) into it, you're not fighting fair. If you aren't being honest about what is really bothering you, you aren't fighting fair.

- Listen. I cannot stress this one enough. Put the phone down. Get off the computer. Turn off the television. Remove all the other distractions from your life and just listen to your spouse.  Hearing what someone is saying is not always the same as listening.

- Respect your individuality. If he likes to fish and you can't stomach the thought, tell him to go with a buddy or a brother. If you want to spend all day in the park taking pictures, but he wants to do something else, go without him. No couple shares all the same interests, and there is nothing wrong with having interests totally different than your partner. Do not give up the things you love. Don't force them to do it either. Do what you love, even if you need to do it alone. Stay passionate about your hobbies. Do not sacrifice who you are to be part of a couple. Likewise, don't sacrifice it to be a parent either. You may need to trim back or alter the way you engage in the things you love, but don't give it up. Stay true to yourself.

- Marriage is work. Hard, ugly, awful work. Sometimes it just plain sucks. There will be times, for sure, that divorce will seem like a better option. I've filled out those papers more than once, myself. When you first get married, most people do it for love and hope and the future and all things optimistic. It's idealistic, it's the stuff of dreams. If you're lucky, you can ride that high for a while. But know this truth - the high always ends. Always.

- When marriage gets hard is when it matters the most. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone can do the better, richer, in health times pretty easily. The worse, poorer, sicker times, not so much. Life is filled with worse, poorer, sicker, and how you weather those times will be far more indicative of whether your marriage will last. Crises have a way of bringing people together or pushing them apart. Remember that you didn't just sign on for the good stuff, you agreed to be there for each other even and especially when it's bad. I can tell you from experience, the sicker is probably the hardest, particularly if you are dealing with any kind of mental illness. Living though cancer was a piece of cake compared to dealing with depression, PTSD and anxiety in a marriage. You will find that what started out about love will evolve and that there will be many times in your marriage where love is wholly irrelevant. Marriage isn't about love...not in the long run. Love won't keep you together. There has to be more.

- Own your shit. Both of you. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes bad decisions. Everyone does things that hurt their partner, sometimes as an unintended consequence, sometimes on purpose. Everyone. You are not immune to this, nor is your spouse. This will happen, of that I will give you a 100% guarantee, no matter how totally blissfully happy and in love you may be right in this moment. It will happen. What you do afterwards matters more. Don't lie, don't cover things up, don't minimize it, don't deflect blame. Don't. Own your shit. Admit it when you screw up and hurt them. Apologize and mean it. Learn from your mistakes and don't do it again.

- Counseling won't work unless you do the work. Being habitual, showing up for appointments and going through the motions isn't enough. Unless you are committed to working on improving your marriage, nothing will change no matter how long you are in counseling. In fact, it'll probably get worse. I know from experience. Far more important than marriage counseling is individual therapy. The vast majority of problems within a marriage come from unresolved issues that one person has going on. Or that they both have. Fix yourself first. Until and unless you do that, marriage counseling is a complete waste of your time. We tried marriage counseling for a while. It was an abysmal failure. We both had other things to deal with individually, and are still working on that.

- Don't be a selfish asshole. We are all selfish at times, we are all assholes at times. It's part of life. If it becomes more than occasional, you need to take a step back and re-evaluate what you're doing. Take a long, hard look in the mirror. Strip it down and get ugly with it. If you are even for a moment contemplating an affair, ask yourself why and be totally honest about it. If you're blaming your partner, I can promise that you are wrong. It is never the proper way to deal with unhappiness in a marriage. You will, unequivocally and without doubt, make everything worse. If you are an alcoholic or drug user, you are kidding yourself if you think it doesn't hurt anyone else. If you have depression or other mental health issues going on and don't seek help for them, you aren't just damaging yourself, you are hurting others. If you are rationalizing any of this stuff right now, stop it. This isn't just about you anymore. It's no one else's job to fix you, and even if they wanted to, they can't. Fix yourself...you're the only one who can.

- Things change, people change. Whoever you are married to now isn't the person you married all those years ago. People evolve. They change. You change. Relationships must as well as a direct consequence.

- Remember why you married them. Sure, it's hell being married sometimes, but you did this for a reason, right? Woo your spouse, even when you can't stand them. Tell them you love them, even when you hate them - those two emotions are most definitely not mutually exclusive. Kiss each other goodnight, even when you've been screaming at one another for hours. At the end of the day, you chose this person for a reason. Try and remember that.

I leave you with this. I've seen things, you guys. My marriage is far from perfect, but it's closer now than it has been in a very long time.

My husband likes to steal my cell phone and change my ringtones when I'm not looking. When this song came out, he set this as his ringtone on my phone.

Because he knows just how perfectly this describes us.

He's not wrong.

Not actually, of course.

Before this gets weird, I must remind everyone that the man I am married to bears absolutely no relation to anyone in my family except by marriage, and that my father died two years ago.

And yet, a few nights ago, when my husband took the kids upstairs at bedtime to help brush teeth and tuck them in, I heard my Dad.

Someone had left a window open for the sole purpose of air conditioning the outside.

Someone else had left all the lights on just to run up the electricity bill.

I laughed, because I grew up hearing the same things from someone else a long time ago. Posted a status to that effect on my Facebook page, which elicited many comments from people experiencing a similar phenomenon.

My 24th birthday - 2001 My Dad on the left, husband on the right.

At some point yesterday, my husband said something about how my comment upset him.

A bit confused, I asked why.

He assumed that any comparison between him and my father was bad.

I shook my head. Quite the contrary.

Then I looked him in the eyes and asked him a few simple questions, ones that he should be well equipped to answer having known me over twenty years, most of that time having my father as a presence in my life.

Have I ever acted like anything my father did was wrong? Have I ever talked about things he did in a negative way? Have I complained about him?

He replied that I hadn't.

Then I asked him another question. Then why would you assume it's a bad thing that you're like him?

He understood. Or at least I think so.

My father was a good man. He was far from perfect, this much is true. There were rough times in my childhood and adolescence with him. Sometimes he drank too much, sometimes he yelled too much, sometimes he wanted me to stay young and naive so badly that he tried to control me too much.

Looking back on it all now, with the knowledge and perspective I have now, not just as a parent myself, but with a fuller picture of how his life actually was, I understand. Considering all the things he had to deal with, not just in an episodic way, but on a daily basis, I understand.

He was actually quite remarkable once you put the pieces together, once you see everything he had to do, everything he had to live with from his past. The fact that he was able to keep it together almost all the time says something profound about who he was.

We never fought for long, him and I, not even when I was a teenager. We both had tempers, we both argued, we both fought, but we both would wake up the next morning knowing that it was a new start and that at the end of the day we struggled so much because we were so alike.

My father had a much greater sense of family,of duty, of obligation than I ever appreciated when he was still here. I see it now because of how much things have changed in this world without him.

I've had more than a few moments since he left us that I realized just how amazing he really was.

All the same could be said about the man I built my family with.

And so, I hope that when I say something about how my husband reminds me of my father, he understands that it comes from a place of love and respect. It comes from a girl who misses her dad, and smiles when she hears something her father used to say to her come from a different voice. That the comparison can never, and will never be anything but a compliment.

It seems at times that I'm officially married to my father, and that's not a bad thing.

Not at all.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that somewhere out there, because of this, my Dad smiling right now.

When we first got married, we had plans. Good plans.

I was going to go to law school, he was going to pass the CPA exam. I'd graduate and work in some ridiculously high paying job long enough to repay my loans. We would travel the world. We'd buy some amazing little house near the beach somewhere, then, only after all that, we would have kids.Two of them. One boy, one girl.

Everything would be fabulous and we wouldn't have anything to worry about.

We had great plans.

Not even halfway through law school, and a couple days before my husband's 23rd birthday, we sat in uncomfortable chairs in a doctor's office and heard the word no one wants to hear.

Cancer.

Life got complicated, in a hurry.

All those plans got tossed aside, life decided we were walking a different path than we ever intended. Given two weeks to try and get pregnant before he underwent radiation treatments, it worked.

I went from an ambitious law school student to a scared wife who clung to the hope of an uncertain future.

Until I lost the baby.

We were left with no child, with the very real possibility of never having them without help, and still with an uncertain future.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have dropped out of school that day.

We tried for almost a year to get pregnant until we sat in another set of chairs in another office and received confirmation that we would not be able to get pregnant without IVF. The radiation had done too much damage.

At that exact moment, I was already pregnant, we just didn't know it yet.

My son was born, premature, three days after I walked across the stage and received my diploma from law school.

Life threw us another curveball.

I kept pressing forward with school, enrolling in an MPH program part time. Still thinking I was destined for greatness in some career someday.

Baby number two came, then number three. We realized in a hurry that we'd outgrown the tiny house we could barely afford that was nowhere near the ocean. We moved to the middle of the country, even though I was one class from finishing the MPH and already enrolled in a teaching credential program.

I left all of it behind.

I'd gone from the ambitious career woman to the one who let it all go, and left it over a thousand miles away, for my kids.

Since moving here, we've had a bonus baby, the one that surprised us all. Even though I didn't think he'd ever be here, I can't imagine my life without him.

I never became that high powered attorney. We never bought that cottage by the beach. We never traveled the world.

Last weekend, though, my husband took me on a trip. One he'd been planning for months. One that lasted just over 24 hours, but that took us to so many of the places we haven't yet been.

He presented me with a passport. Not a real one, but one that held previews of the places we would go, both someday and this weekend. The he gave me tulips, his favorite flower and one of the symbols to the world of his family's native land, The Netherlands.


The first place we went was The Botanical Gardens in Denver, where we sat beside the Monet pond and ate fancy cheese and drank French wine and took pictures of water lilies.






From there, we went to the English style Queen Anne Bed & Breakfast in a historical area of Denver, a home that housed illegal alcohol production during Prohibition and belonged to a woman who was friends with the unsinkable Molly Brown.


After checking in, we left for another unidentified destination, but we got there this way. He rides these bikes all the time for work, and thought it would be fun to travel around town the way so many do over on the other side of the pond.


We rode to an Irish pub where we drank whiskey and listened to music and eavesdropped on old Irish men with old Irish accents.


Then we rode to the 16th Street mall, where we had dinner at Maggiano's. He'd made reservations and told them it was our anniversary, so we got the best booth in the place and free champagne. He ate everything. (I think he's really part Italian).


He timed everything so we would get back to the room just before sunset, which we watched from the hottub on the roof.


The next morning, we ate breakfast on the patio with the squirrels and the birds, then headed out again. He took me back to the central area of Denver, and before I knew it we were here.






This was all part of a traveling exhibit of the reproductions of the works of Michaelangelo and Da Vinci. It was amazing.

We finished up the day with fish and chips at the Tilted Kilt, then returned home to the land of broken dishwashers and constantly hungry children.

Someday we'll get to Europe for real, but for now, this will do.

Life has changed our plans, but I wouldn't trade this for the world.

I should be preparing for a huge event tonight.

I should be making posters and fairy wands and packing up the car with all the camping gear. I should be gathering donations and working my ass off to hit the fundraising goal. I should be walking around in circles for as long as it takes.

I should be holding my husband's hand on a survivor lap, I should be standing in the middle of the field while my father's picture and name flashes on a giant screen in the dark. I should be quiet and reflective. I should be crying. I should be angry and bitter at this horrible disease that stole his life, and that has changed mine too many times.

I should be.

Tonight is the Relay for Life.

Our team, the Tooth Fairies, named in his honor. If you haven't heard the story of why we are named that, you should read it. 


I should be out there.

I won't be.

I wasn't last year the way I should have been either. Last year was too hard. There was too much else going on outside my control and I couldn't do it.

The year before that, I cried and cried and cried in that field when his picture flashed on the screen for the first time as an in memory of instead of an in support of.

The year before that, we had hope even though it was slipping away a little bit more with every scan.

I should be out there, but I won't be.

My fundraising energies are going to be directed elsewhere this year, to the Light the Night walk in September, our team to be named in support of a little boy fighting leukemia, a little boy that I was there to meet the day he was born. My energies will go to the lung cancer walk in October, where money raised will go directly to research to help increase survivorship for this specific form of cancer.

My energies will go elsewhere this year because I won't be here for the Relay.

And my father would be proud of me, not because of where I won't be, but because of where I will be.

I will be somewhere in downtown Denver, doing something crazy I don't know about yet, with my husband. The husband who planned this surprise anniversary staycation, not realizing it was the same weekend as the Relay. The husband that I need this time with.

Rebuilding my marriage is more important right now, and no one would understand that more than my father, the original Tooth Fairy.

He would tell me to pack my suitcase instead of the camping gear. He would tell me to go to Denver instead of the Relay. He would tell me to hang on to what I still have instead of missing what is gone.

He would tell me that even if I feel like I should be at the Relay, I shouldn't.

I should be where my heart tells me to go.

And my heart pushes me towards this.

Soon, I will be celebrating my anniversary.

I think.

My husband has something secret planned that he's been working on for a while now. I have no idea what he's got up his sleeve, but the fact that there is anything up there means something.

This has not happened before, this planning and intention. It's new and unfamiliar and I'm still not quite sure what to do with it.

Things are just different now.

This year, we will have been married for fifteen years, though whoever I was married to for most of that time doesn't resemble much the man I am married to now. Things aren't just different, he is different.


I want to say that I'm the same I ever was, but I know that to be false. I know that for as much as parts of me have remained unchanged in that time, I have hardened. I have erected shields and barriers and I see the world through rose colored glasses that I didn't want to purchase nor do I want to wear.

I'm trying to take them off.

While it doesn't even seem possible at times that we've been married so long, I know that it must be true simply for the fact that so much has happened to us, to those around us, between us.

Never in a million years could anyone have predicted some of those things, let alone all of them in the combinations they presented themselves in the times and spaces they showed up.

We're here now, though. That's saying something.

I wasn't sure we would be.

We're older, maybe we're wiser. We're definitely more scarred now.

The view from here is not the same I imagined it would be, for certain. Or maybe it is, but I'm just seeing it with eyes that I didn't anticipate having. I'm not sure which, honestly.

That's probably because I'm not sure about much these days.

One thing I am sure of, though is this:

I love him.

Some days that doesn't matter at all anymore, and others it's the only thing that does. It's what has kept us here, what has kept us together, what has forced us to delve into the past, what keeps us pressing forward into an unknown future.

Together.

Happy Anniversary, Tom. I love you.