Geez, people.  CAN’T OUR MOM BRAINS GET JUST ONE WEEK OFF?!  First the hot chick on TIME breastfeeding her kid, now this.  I feel like I’m about 2.5 seconds away from imploding from the sheer exhaustion of swirling around the media’s porcelian bowl.  On the other hand, this topic totally sparks my interest because we’re in that stage right now where we’re molding our little family, deciding what works for us.

I love Doug & Harrison in unique ways to what they bring to my life.  I love them for the different people that they are.  I love Doug for the strong partner he is & that’s not something Harrison can provide.  But I love Harrison for softness he gives my life & that’s not something Doug can do for me.  If there was a burning fire & I could only save one of them, I’d stand & sob that I couldn’t choose until Doug told me that he wants me to save Harry.

I’d do that because I know that’s what Doug would want, what I would want if it was Doug having to choose, but I wouldn’t be okay with it.

On the other hand, I put Doug first in our family & I hope that Harrison understands & respects that.

When Doug walks in the door, my goal is to greet him.  When Doug needs to talk, I give Harrison an independent activity.  If I’m serving up dinner, I serve Doug’s plate first.  (Doug does the same for me.)  I don’t always do it perfectly & I get distracted & sometimes Harrison is sick & demands my full attention.  Little spurts of life happen, but I try to focus on the bigger picture of our relationships.

I remember as a little girl watching my parents do the same & it never filled me with resentment, but rather a peace knowing that no matter what happened, my parents would be there together.  Their solid marriage was a comfort & coming home was a comfort.

For me, putting our marriage before children says “Hey babe, I know this is rough but I’m on your side.”  Parenting is work. Marriage is work, hard work.  So in the hustle & bustle of coming years, from more babies to new houses & soccer practices, I remind myself that it will all fade soon.  My babies will grow & take on their own life adventures & their own families; once again, it will just be me & Doug.

I don’t want to wonder in 20 years who I’m married to & whether he only liked me because I was the mother of his children.  I don’t want to wish back these years of babies & cling to the past.

I want to look at him & say, “Holy cow.  Look at this life we built together.”

But it sounded whiney & frankly, that pissed me off because living apart 5 nights per week isn’t ideal, but it’s far from troublesome.  Military spouses do far worse.  & having a queen-sized bed to myself isn’t so bad.

Except when I roll over at 4am to find a two-year-old staring at me like the child of the corn & there’s nobody there to hold me while I scream.  Because that totally happened the other night.

I wrote a post on Babble about how I completely freaked when I thought Harrison’s class was having a “Mother’s Day Tea” that I would have to miss due to work, but there’s a tiny piece in that article that speaks huge volumes:

THIS is the work-life balance that I fought so hard to get as a working mom – the ability to do my office job well, but have time to be the wife and momma my family deserves. 

These days, we wake up at 7am & have breakfast together.  I get Harrison dressed & out the door & I’m in my office at 9am.  I’m not frantic or exhausted or stressed because I haven’t spent an hour in the car with a screaming toddler.  I work, walk/run on my lunch break since my boss doesn’t mind me being sweaty the rest of the afternoon.  I pull into the driveway at 5:30pm.  No more bumper-to-bumper traffic with an exhuasted kiddo.  No more 6:30pm arrival times with dinner & bathtime looming.  Instead, we took a walk last night before dinner & it was lovely.

Which is why seeing “contingent” next to our house listing gives me happy tingles.

It’s like I got 3 hours back in my day.

p.s. why doesn’t doug stay with us? other than getting mail & keeping an eye on the house, he just does not sleep well at my parents house. doug sleeping well = i don’t sleep well.  us not sleeping well together = cranky.  cranky = me not a nice wife, not an efficient worker, not a patient momma.  as hard as it is to be apart, this is the best solution overall.

So I got my hands on a iBooks copy & settled down into Chapter 1.

An hour later, I woke up my husband for sex.

Since then I have finished all three books & perhaps coincidentally, Doug has taken to bringing me flowers & wine in the evenings.

 The writing leaves a lot to be desired, there are blatant grammatical errors, & it feels a little wrong that this chick is making cash money off twisting Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight characters into literary porn stars.  I felt incredibly naughty reading it & not in the naughty minx way but in the oh shit, I am so glad nobody can see me reading this.  On the airplane the other day, I felt like whispering to the gal three rows in front that while everyone else on the plane thought she may have been reading a thriller mystery based on the black & white tie cover, I knew she was reading about some mealy-mouthed chick being tied to a table.

In short?  OH. MY.  ::fans self with tulips::

That ain’t happening.  My sanity can’t take it & my Twitter stream cannot handle any more LOOK HOW LONG IT TOOK ME TO GET HOME! that they had this past winter.

So to cut back the time by roughly an hour each way, Harrison & I will be living out of suitcases on work nights & then trudging back to our home for the weekends.  Doug will be doing a 50/50 dance of checking on the house & staying with us.  I’m not looking forward to being without my husband so much, but we know it’s temporary.

This is the room I’ll be staying in – one of the guest rooms that has zero of the personality it used to have with college banners & football trophies from when my brother lived in here.  I’ll be moving in my desk & computer & I switched out one of the nightstands for a bookcase (I love having my books close).  The Momma is clearing out space in the closet as I type.  But I’m at a loss as to what to do…I’ll be here 5 nights out of the week without my husband for who knows how long & I am wondering if I should try to bring a little of “us” to this room.  Bring pictures of our little family, use a bedspread from home.

I’ll need to remember to bring over Harry’s favorite bedtime books & toys for the evenings.  I’ll need to leave a post-it note reminding Doug to water the garden every night.  It’s going to be crazy-weird living under my parent’s roof again, except now I’m an adult & it’s so temporary.  Hopefully our house will sell this spring so that we can put all this nasty commuting mess behind us for good.

But for now, I guess I’m moving back to the homestead.

Y’all.

It was a gorgeous spring night where the flowers bloomed.  I slipped into a little black dress long-forgotten in my closet & curled my hair.  Doug pulled a polo shirt over his head for the first time since…well, I can’t remember.

He tells me I look pretty & I smile.

Sometimes I forget how handsome he is.

Sometimes it takes breaking away from our house to remember how much he does for us & that load of dishes he took care of & how pretty our lawn looks thanks to his hard work.

I like watching him try new beers with dinner & he always teases me until I take a taste, too.  It makes me feel 21 again at Corner Bar – that time when I told him that I could never marry a man that wouldn’t say prayers with my children & now he kneels beside Harry’s bed every night.

I forget how he drives with one hand on the steering wheel & one hand holding mine & I wonder if we’ll be like this in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years.

I forget that we’re more than Momma & Daddy, more than another load of laundry & a “for sale” sign in the front yard.  That the day-to-day can wear us down but our marriage makes that routine feel magical.

But only if I let it.

If I remember the small things that I fell in love with, like the way he gets wrinkles beside his eyes when he smiles or how his idea of a perfect dessert is to swing through Krispy Kreme after an expensive dinner.  If I roll down the windows & pretend for a moment that nothing in this world exists outside of us; we’re still the same ten years later but with a few more pounds & responsibilites.

I cheer for Carolina & Doug cheers for Kansas & Roy Williams is a particularly sore subject in our marriage.  But after almost six years of marriage, we are both coming around to co-cheering each other’s teams – Doug wears Carolina shorts & I have a KU tshirt.

This is on our front door.  Team spirit, baby.

But if the Heels & Jayhawks end up facing off this coming weekend, one of us is going to have to leave the house.  So who has a couch I can crash on?

Harrison opens the bedroom door & cracks a smile, finding me in the dark because it’s been ten hours since I settled in when the daylight was enough.  I’ve been working eight hours, ten hours, & it’s looking like I will hit twelve before my presentation is complete with an 8pm deadline.

I wonder if Doug is disappointed that I have no Valentine for him.  I wonder if he knows that like every year, I had the best of intentions but they slipped right through my fingers.  That I adore the pink roses he brought me on Sunday & I regret that I have nothing to give him in return.   I wonder if he minds that I’ll wear yoga pants to dinner, where I’ll serve up a frozen lasagna with an apologetic smile.

At least there will be wine.

Because love doesn’t know dates & red heart candy, as delicious as it is.  Love knows & gives with the hard days & sweatpants & the pulled up half-smile that says, “I’m sorry, but this is the best I can do right now.”  Love relaxes into that unpredictable life rhythm & messy hair by candlelight becomes romance.

I love you, Douglas.  Thank you for loving me.

So when Harrison starts screaming at bedtime & I’ve told him firmly to get back in bed three separate times, he stares up at me with tears falling & says, “Up!!”  oh, my heart.

I find myself all sternly inner-dialoguing how I’m setting us up for failure when he’s three as I make my way to the rocking chair.  But then I remember how I’m knee-deep in my uterus & how soon, Harry will be going to sleepovers where he will be embarrassed to ever admit he was rocked to sleep & I can’t help myself.  I sit & I rock & tell him stories about the man on the moon until he’s calm.  His heartbeat slows & his breathing steadies & I know he’s asleep because that’s the kind of thing that mother’s just know.

He’s drooling on my shoulder.  It’s time to put the kiddo to bed, but in his earlier rage, all blankets & pillows ended in a pile on the floor.  Which means that I have to get up from the chair & put the bedding back together with 30 lbs of live ammunition on my shoulder.  Doug to the nursery, I think into the universe.  I wait a few minutes.  Hey, buddy.  To the nursery for pillow recon.

I contemplate the length of my legs, wondering if I can grab the pillow corner with my toes & toss it into the bed.  If I can do that, then I’ll have a legit excuse to run away with the circus.  I feel the drool seeping through my jammies.  The kid stirs & I freeze & send imaginary red flares into the sky. & I’m all WHY IS HE NOT READING MY ESP?!  DOUG TO THE NURSERY!  DOUG TO THE NURSERY!

What good is being married almost six years if he can’t read my mind?

This is us, over two years after we first met. Our first picture together on my 21st birthday in 2004.

He makes my life a love story.

So.

In October, Doug was laid off when the company he worked for closed with no warning.  There was lots of swearing on our parts for about 48 hours, then we buckled down hard.  I dropped out of my project management class to get a refund on the tuition. Doug filed for unemployment.  I picked up the gig at Babble & any sponsored post offered (remember that week in December where there were three in a row?) to help alleviate the dip into our emergency fund.  We put the house on the market, knowing that we’d be in deep water if Doug went jobless for more than a year.  & in this economy, that fear was entirely possible.

Doug & I have always been conservative with our finances, which means that in any environment of uncertainty, we treat it like a crisis.

In the middle of November, we discovered that Doug & Harry were no longer covered by insurance, nor was COBRA an option.  This was after we attended Harrison’s two-year check-up, complete with three vaccines.  Plus six private speech therapy sessions.   On top of missing half our income, now we had a heavy month of uninsured medical expenses.

note: money is hard in marriage, even when there is plenty.  it gets harder when times are tight.

At the same time, we have been oddly happier than we’ve been in a long time.  Living so intentionally has created a sense of empowerment & togetherness.  Simplicity really is a lovely thing when $8.00 Netflix is all you can afford.  Hell, we’ve even been having more sex because…what else are we going to do on a Saturday evening with no money?   In early December, Doug praised my Type A personality because Harrison’s Christmas gifts were purchased before the lay-off, which meant Santa would visit.  We took great joy in splurging for a $3.00 Almond Joy coffee creamer that Doug wanted to buy but felt was unecessary.  The smile on his face made me all warm & fuzzy.  He made me coffee the next morning with the creamer.

I wish I could do justice to how perfect that little $3.00 creamer was for making us smile & realizing that something small to share was even better than a dozen roses or a new set of golf clubs or even a vacation.

Things began looking up again as my new insurance kicked in & the boys were covered again.  We had good feedback on our house.  Doug had several good interviews and began helping his old coworker start-up a company under a new investor (it launched this past week!  he is gainfully employed again!).    I made a bonus & we were able to afford a few Christmas splurges. I still adore my new job.  Then Doug’s dad got sick & everything has turned into a bigger ball of stress since then.

The other night, driving in the dark for an hour with Harrison screaming for his Auntie, I thought I might be reaching a breaking point.  I felt like I was constantly working, never shutting off, with the weight of everything on my shoulders.  I felt that old nemesis trying to creep in, those choking thoughts that pull me under.  You deserve this stress, your baby doesn’t love you, you’re a distracted wife, you have a bitter heart, you’ll never get it right…I think the worst part is that even when I feel good & stable, there is this prodigal twisty part of my soul just lurking.

Waiting for me to slip.  Waiting for me to give just an inch.

But I’m not giving an inch.  I’m fucking making it after all, okay?

.

p.s. we are so lucky, so thankful that doug was able to get a paycheck again after only two months of unemployment.  we are bursting with gratitude towards my new job & the timeliness of babble’s job offer, which gave us security the past few months.  my heart goes out to anyone that feels that stress longer than us & i know there are plenty of you out there. i wish there was more i could do other than simply say that i understand.

p.p.s. it feels so good to get this off my shoulders.  like my body just took a huge cleansing breath.

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