The Man

Nine and a half years ago.
A bistro in Granada.

We'd just finished an argument where he'd told me, "If you were in another country you still wouldn't be far enough away from me," and then, he was interrupting the enjoyment of my ox tail stew while he scrambled around the table.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm looking for something to use as a ring," he said.

Then, he pulled a bit of tin foil (It's in my underwear drawer right now) off a wine bottle, fashioned it into a ring, and said, "Will you marry me?"

"When you get a real ring."

"No, I'm serious. Will You marry me?"

"Sure, when?" Keep in mind, that I had spent the whole week in Spain with my head tipped to the side, gazing at him and giggling like a fool. God, I was smitten.

"Next September. Then, I have time to change my mind if I need to."

"Yes, Yes, I will."

That was in October, six months after we had met, and we got married the next September. Possibly against my better judgement, I took the man forever, and I don't regret a single miserable or good minute of it.

To be honest I'm a terrible wife:
I hate to coddle people.
We have conversations that go like this: Him: Will you take out the trash. Me: (while bursting into tears) I went to college, why would you say that to me.
I've thrown and broken chairs, tables, phones, and other assorted things.
I have mood swings that don't correspond to reality.
The list goes on.

And he stays.

No one has ever made me laugh more. No one has ever made me cry til my eyes hurt or made me wish that my reality were not the one it is  more.

But I stay.

Why? Because at the center of all the drama, all the fights, we completely love each other.

And, God, do we fight. We once had a thirty minute screaming match about where the dog should sleep.
We don't have a dog. We're not planning on getting a dog, but we're damn passionate about where this dog is going to sleep, dammit.

More than once, I've wondered if it were a good idea to marry the other person who always wanted to be the last one to leave the party. Yeah, let's leave the club at eight in the morning and find the after club. Let's stay awake til ten in the morning then head to a pub. Let's....  who knows what we did that year we were dating. We were together for a year in London. Then, for the six months before the nuptials, he stayed in London, I went to St Paul, and we met at the alter.

I've said many times that I married him because he was the first person who made me want to wear sexy underwear, and if that's not a foundation for marital success, I don't know what is.

I got pregnant six weeks after wedding, and I'm not sure if being the last people to leave the party, any party is a skill that translates well to marriage and child rearing.

The year that he worked eighty hours a week and I stayed home with two kids under two and a couple day care kids, I said, "that was bad; if we made it through that, we'll stay together."

That year I had another baby, my dad died, we moved across the country, and he lost his job, I said,  "that was bad, if we made it through that, we'll stay together."

That next year when he still didn't have a job, I said, "that was bad, if we made it through that, we'll stay together."

And more than once, I've worried that we were staying together because we're both too stubborn to admit that we've made a mistake.

But I've thought about it a lot lately. Somebody advised me to write and process. So I wrote, I processed, and I found that many things led back to the man and how I felt about the man. And I feel like I like the man. Quite a lot, actually.

His partying skills mean that he can take any dull family evening with the five of us and turn it into a spectacular event. Music. Food. Dancing. He knows what to do to make us pull out the best most festive parts of ourselves.

I love a million and ten things about him.

I love how he apologizes by heading to the kitchen to make us both a snack. Who needs words? I've got a giant plate of food.

I love how after I've given the boys a hit on the shoulder and told them that they're okay after an injury, I find them cuddling up to him for real sympathy and first aid.

I love how when he's feeling confident, he can command a room full of people to listen to his tales and laugh at his wit.

I love how I can wave a little hand at him, sit back, and watch him win any political debate.

I love how when I hung up a piece of ripped sheet crookedly over the kitchen window, he said, completely un-ironically, "Oh, honey, how nice, we got new curtains."

And I love a lot how he gave me a little bit of quality cum that I was able to make into three of my favorite people.

He's not easy, I'm not easy, but I believe it's worth the fucking effort.

Desultory Tidbits

There I was in the kitchen getting in touch with my inner-geezer-bird by pouring myself a white wine spritzer and thinking to myself, Minger, it's been awhile since you've blogged. Then, out of the blue, my phone started beeping. It was a Facebook wall post from my ol' aunt Judy reminding me of my blog. Whoosh (that's the sound it makes when Minger's head explodes).Well, Kitty, I'm back and I'm ever so sorry to have neglected you.

Desultory Tidbit One:

My first date (it wasn't officially a date since I still had the tattooed Canadian in my bed) with my husband was in a bathroom. I asked him to meet me after his work shift. Then, wearing my best see-through white tank top, I cleaned the thick layer of gooey grossness off the shower wall while he watched. I feel, perhaps, that was a bit misleading. Sexy clothing and cleaning, what was I thinking? More on the man later as I have had him on my mind and am preparing a blog post regarding my great love for him.

Desultory Tidbit Two:

My almost eight year old still cannot read. I am not at all concerned about this fact and am utterly confident that when he is ready to read it will happen relatively quickly. However, we are going to meet my immediate family for a little get together next weekend. Between my siblings and their spouses and children, we number nineteen and we're going to spend a "fun" filled five days in Estes Park where hopefully no one will bring up the fact that Johnny can't read. More on that topic later.

Desultory Tidbit Three:

Here is more proof that the gods hate atheists. Instead of letting old age creep in with a nice gray pub (short for pubic hair not public house) or something innocuous, God has smote me with arthritis in the middle finger of my left hand. No more on that later. That's all I have on that particular topic.

Desultory Tidbit Four:

I've been wrapped up in pursuing my Ayn Rand/Nathaniel Brenden moments and the damage control regarding the execution of such moments, and all that sinning has distracted me from blogging. Oops.

Dear Laundry, You're an Asshole, I hate You. Regards, Minger.

Recently, I admitted defeat on laundry experiment number 6. I was sad to see it go, but it seemed time to move on.

I AM the Sisyphus of laundry. Wear, wash, fold, repeat, wear, wash, fold, repeat, and somewhere in there my soul dies. To be honest, I am a bit of a petulent asshole, and I hate the fact that when I fold the laundry, everyone else has a towering stack of clothes and I have one teensy, tiny little pile of two or three items. Unlike the other assholes in this family, I am environmentally conscious, and I wear the same thing everyday (to save water). Sometimes, I will wear the same shirt for four or five days including to bed. It's not gross at all because I always smell great. Even when I don't smell great, I smell meaty and sexy. That is a fact.

I don't only hate laundry because I'm lazy. It also stresses me out. It's too self indulgent to run all that water down the drain for the sake of a clean shirt. Then, I feel guilty if I don't use the clothes line in the summer so I have to time the laundry with the daylight. It saves energy to not let the dryer cool between loads so I've lost sleep over that issue as well.

My sisters rock at laundry. I used to live with my sister when her kids were about the ages of my kids, and I never saw any laundry heaped on her dining room table. I never saw a pile of clean laundry grow to epic proportions and then breed with the dirty laundry like mine does. She just skips into a room and folds the laundry like a dainty little fairy. Then, she gives her husband a blow job and a beer. Meanwhile, the dinner is simmering. She really has all the skills I lack. I'm pretty sure my sisters and mother have secret laundry meetings that they don't invite me to. Topic One: Crisp sheets. Topic Two: Good smells. Topic Three: The Benefits of Softener.

I accidentally told my mother that her dirty laundry smells better than my clean laundry. Note to self: Do not say that shit aloud or you will lose your remaining parent to a stress induced heart attack. I thought she was going to hyperventilate.

In a vain attempt to control the huge piles and the mitigate some of the associated stresses, I have attempted a few laundry experiments. Feel free to try any of these for yourself.

Laundry Experiment # 1 in which I used a laundry/housekeeping schedule. That was successful while I had only one kid, the man had his chef whites laundered through work, and we had a diaper service for the cloth diapers. More kids, a different job, and canceling the diaper service relegated LE 1 to failure status.

LE #2  in which I decided to trade in whining for excellence. I spent an entire afternoon reading laundry labels and subdividing and alphabetizing the clothes accordingly. When I heard Sean Penn say that "entertainment is two hookers and an eight ball" I knew that he had clearly never spent a day reading laundry labels. Needless to say, LE2 didn't even make it through the first day. The toddlers ran through my alphabetized piles, and everything got scrunched, trampled, and ruined. Fail.

LE #3-#4 must have been horrible because I have no memory of them.

LE #5 in which I stopped folding all the clothes of everyone who weighs less than 200 pounds. The only reason that I had to fold the big man's clothing is that it was too large to fit in the drawers without folding it. Skipping folding was definitely a time saver.

LE #6 in which the clouds parted, a sunbeam shone down, and an angel handed me this brilliant idea. In LE #6, I restricted everybody to three outfits. I removed forty two bloody shirts from boy one and two's dresser. Trust me, I did not buy those shirts....  Since I usually wear three shirts at any one time, I allowed myself nine shirts/tank tops. Years of Catholic school mean that I can divide any number by three and feel confident that it is the same. (IE. If three gods are actually one god, then nine tank tops are actually only three shirts). The man said something along the lines of, "We didn't have central heating and I had to chop wood everyday when I was a kid. I'm not playing your hippie games." Thus, the man kept his extensive, pretty wardrobe.

LE #6 was, without a doubt, the best LE ever. Of all the LE's I have ever or will ever try, it was the BEST. After a year, I folded to the consumerist BS that wants me to have more than three outfits, and I dug all our old clothes out of storage.

I don't really have a plan now. I'm trying this crazy thing where I just fold the clothes as soon as the dryer stops, but don't tell that to the three loads on the floor next to my bed or the load that is sitting in the dryer.

Question: Gender Roles? Couldn't you just let the man do the laundry?
Once the man did the laundry, and he folded all the clothes into one pile without respect to their destination. It was a total (well folded) mess; his boxers were on top of baby shirts, kid shorts were sandwiched between my underpants. It was a nightmare, but I learned something. I learned that screaming and yelling and calling him a hopeless idiot moron d-bag was not the correct way to respond. Thus, in a lame attempt at apology, I have sentenced myself to a life of doing the laundry alone without his help.