I am trying to make this the mother of all Christmases.
It's our first Christmas as a married couple, and I am more than a little sentimental about, well, everything humanly possible. I want to give him the perfect gifts. I want gasps of joy bathed in twinkle lights. I want Christmas magic.
This, of course, is not possible. We will be struggling to see everyone we are supposed to spend time with on Christmas: his parents, my 2 sets of parents, my siblings, both of our grandparents, maybe even some aunts and uncles... And with each, I will want to sit and laugh, to make memories, because I am a girl and we love Hallmark movies. I will see my grandparents and be reminded that my time with them is fleeting, and I will struggle to make each moment count. I will insist on helping with dinner, meaningful exchanges, hugs and kisses. I will force a moment. I will laugh too loudly and linger too long. I will continue to do this throughout the week before Christmas, and I will exhaust myself and my loved ones. My Christmas mania will spread through our apartment, and my husband will look forward to the end of the holiday season.
I have seen myself do this before.
I guess my crazy love for Christmas comes from my childhood, when Christmas meant finally having unity in our house. My parents didn't always get along, but on Christmas morning, the camcorder was rolling and our holiday movies reflect a kinder, gentler household. My parents laughed, probably giddy from sleep deprivation and rum cake. The presents weren't just under the tree, but piled up against it. There never seemed to be an end to them. My brother and I played together, lions laid down with lambs, and all was right with the world for 24 hours. Everything in my turbulent life was harmonious.
So yeah, nostalgia gets the best of me, and I replace the reality of Christmas with my whitewashed tinseled version of it. I love my husband, so much that sometimes I am bleary-eyed with joy. I want to give him everything in this world that I can: my love, my time, and yes, presents. I have to sail back down to earth and remember that I am a waitress in a recession, and any gifts I can afford are tiny miracles.
Fortunately for me, tiny miracles are the currency of love.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Sunrise, Sunset
We are fortunate enough to live in a very cool apartment. It's in a building that was erected in 1925, and it has a wood-burning fireplace and 11' ceilings. It has hardwood floors and those tiny hexagonal tiles in the bathroom. The kitchen cabinets are glass-fronted and the backyard is lined with trees and has a birdbath. If I were to imagine my dream house, it would look a lot like this one.
We live in a very small town in Northeast Tennessee, where hubs has a pretty stellar job working for a factory. It's a factory town, and the recession is killing off the factories one by one. Just like a lot of America, there is a pretty big problem with prescription drug abuse here. More than most places. When we first got here, I soon learned that every person I met had a family member or close friend who was addicted to Oxycontin. While the town is full of parks and trees and is just a 20-minute drive from the Smoky Mountains, there are some drawbacks.
Hubs has switched from second shift (3-11pm) to first shift (7-3pm), which is no small task. As 20-somethings, we had always relished our sleep... sometimes sleeping till 2pm. He switched to first shift right before the wedding, so it was like he fast-tracked his adult life all at once. The transition came with a bit of grumpiness, but who can blame him? I'd be grumpy if I had to wake up at 6 every morning too.
He's gotten fairly adjusted to the schedule, and I'm very proud of him for it. The new hours mean that we can have time together during the day, when stores are open, and we can actually go to dinner and do things that normal people do. I feel pretty terrible admitting this, but I've had a more difficult time than he had adjusting to our new hours. I still stay up after he's asleep, and I wonder if this is a problem that most married people have. I feel like it's a great opportunity to have time to myself, to read and watch bad tv shows and things like that.
But I still feel guilty for some reason.
Being married comes with its own gigantic set of preconceived notions that I don't know how to navigate. Do we have to go to bed at the same time? Do I have to make dinner 7 nights a week? Do we have to go on double dates with other married people? Is it okay if I don't chase kids off my lawn with a broom? Is it weird that I don't care if my husband plays xBox 360 for 12 hours straight on a Saturday?
I guess the answers will come with time. Right now, the best thing I can do for this marriage is to try to stay calm and pleasant when he wakes me up early to have breakfast on the weekends. We don't really have any married friends to ask, which is okay with me. Married people are boring anyway.
We live in a very small town in Northeast Tennessee, where hubs has a pretty stellar job working for a factory. It's a factory town, and the recession is killing off the factories one by one. Just like a lot of America, there is a pretty big problem with prescription drug abuse here. More than most places. When we first got here, I soon learned that every person I met had a family member or close friend who was addicted to Oxycontin. While the town is full of parks and trees and is just a 20-minute drive from the Smoky Mountains, there are some drawbacks.
Hubs has switched from second shift (3-11pm) to first shift (7-3pm), which is no small task. As 20-somethings, we had always relished our sleep... sometimes sleeping till 2pm. He switched to first shift right before the wedding, so it was like he fast-tracked his adult life all at once. The transition came with a bit of grumpiness, but who can blame him? I'd be grumpy if I had to wake up at 6 every morning too.
He's gotten fairly adjusted to the schedule, and I'm very proud of him for it. The new hours mean that we can have time together during the day, when stores are open, and we can actually go to dinner and do things that normal people do. I feel pretty terrible admitting this, but I've had a more difficult time than he had adjusting to our new hours. I still stay up after he's asleep, and I wonder if this is a problem that most married people have. I feel like it's a great opportunity to have time to myself, to read and watch bad tv shows and things like that.
But I still feel guilty for some reason.
Being married comes with its own gigantic set of preconceived notions that I don't know how to navigate. Do we have to go to bed at the same time? Do I have to make dinner 7 nights a week? Do we have to go on double dates with other married people? Is it okay if I don't chase kids off my lawn with a broom? Is it weird that I don't care if my husband plays xBox 360 for 12 hours straight on a Saturday?
I guess the answers will come with time. Right now, the best thing I can do for this marriage is to try to stay calm and pleasant when he wakes me up early to have breakfast on the weekends. We don't really have any married friends to ask, which is okay with me. Married people are boring anyway.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Well, I did it. I got married.
Cue the violins....
NOPE. Cut them. It isn't that kind of wedding, or that kind of marriage. I got to my father's house, the site of the wedding, the day before. It felt exactly the same as it always had. Not like it was a sacred site, or that my life was going to morph into another life the next day. It felt exactly the same.
I woke up on the morning of my wedding with no voice whatsoever... a leftover present from my nephew, who had a cold. I laughed at myself. My family members started to show up at the house to help with the setup, and my friend Mary came soon after to help. Still no voice. I called Scott. He was en route.
I put on my makeup and did my hair. Scott was finally there, but with limited availability. He couldn't see me in my dress, it's bad luck. But after seeing his face, and holding his hand, I felt like the whole thing was already over and we were married. Honestly, I had felt married to him for months. This day was just another day on my agenda, getting me closer to making a Thanksgiving turkey or buying a really awesome Christmas present. I was already in the life I had chosen for myself. There was no transformation to be had.
This is the one thing I can say to brides-to-be: there is no new life together. There is no starting point. You continue on from the place you are. If that place is a happy place, then you are doing the right thing. For me, it was the place I had wanted to be my whole life, and I could have gotten there without a wedding. Eloping was just fine. I love him, by golly. He's mine, and I'm his. That's the gist of the vows.
So then we were married and everything was just fine and beautiful. I still didn't have a voice, but who cares! We were on the east coast and I could only whisper the things I was thinking, which is pretty romantic at times. It took me a good 2 weeks to reclaim my voice and now here I am, back in action. Waiting to tell you all how being married really is. Wait breathlessly.
Cue the violins....
NOPE. Cut them. It isn't that kind of wedding, or that kind of marriage. I got to my father's house, the site of the wedding, the day before. It felt exactly the same as it always had. Not like it was a sacred site, or that my life was going to morph into another life the next day. It felt exactly the same.
I woke up on the morning of my wedding with no voice whatsoever... a leftover present from my nephew, who had a cold. I laughed at myself. My family members started to show up at the house to help with the setup, and my friend Mary came soon after to help. Still no voice. I called Scott. He was en route.
I put on my makeup and did my hair. Scott was finally there, but with limited availability. He couldn't see me in my dress, it's bad luck. But after seeing his face, and holding his hand, I felt like the whole thing was already over and we were married. Honestly, I had felt married to him for months. This day was just another day on my agenda, getting me closer to making a Thanksgiving turkey or buying a really awesome Christmas present. I was already in the life I had chosen for myself. There was no transformation to be had.
This is the one thing I can say to brides-to-be: there is no new life together. There is no starting point. You continue on from the place you are. If that place is a happy place, then you are doing the right thing. For me, it was the place I had wanted to be my whole life, and I could have gotten there without a wedding. Eloping was just fine. I love him, by golly. He's mine, and I'm his. That's the gist of the vows.
So then we were married and everything was just fine and beautiful. I still didn't have a voice, but who cares! We were on the east coast and I could only whisper the things I was thinking, which is pretty romantic at times. It took me a good 2 weeks to reclaim my voice and now here I am, back in action. Waiting to tell you all how being married really is. Wait breathlessly.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Extreme Couponing/ Extreme Lack of Tact
My sister is amazing, and that should preface any sentence I ever write about her. ex: My sister is amazing and she took out the trash today. My sister is amazing and she doesn't eat pork chops.
My sister is amazing, and one of the reasons for that is that she knows how to use coupons to her advantage. Combining her know-how with hubs' restraint/loathing of coupons has made me into some kind of a weird hybrid shopper. Hubs says I can only use coupons to buy things that we would have otherwise purchased, which makes sense to me. But on the other hand, sometimes I can get free things that we normally wouldn't purchase but could use, and this is a tough sell for hubs. If I want to get the free items, I have to wait until he is preoccupied and get them myself, under the cloak of darkness wearing a balaclava. When he finds said free objects in our house, I have to convince him that I have had the item for a long time. It's a delicate dance, marriage is.
And speaking of marriage, things have been weird lately. Not so much with hubs and I, we are pretty status quo. Other people- people on the outside- have been giving me their unbridled and unwanted opinions about my upcoming nuptials. I've heard things that range from "So, are you really going to go through with it?" to the more extreme "You are making a huge mistake." The people doing the nay-saying are friends, relatives, ex-boyfriends... but nobody who has ever seen our relationship in action, which makes me suspicious. I get the feeling that the world is down on marriage in general, not just specifically mine. Yes, it pisses me off to have to politely deflect these statements. In fact, I think something so bold and blunt should be met with equal force: "Yes, I am going through with it, but you're not invited anymore."
My sister is amazing, and one of the reasons for that is that she knows how to use coupons to her advantage. Combining her know-how with hubs' restraint/loathing of coupons has made me into some kind of a weird hybrid shopper. Hubs says I can only use coupons to buy things that we would have otherwise purchased, which makes sense to me. But on the other hand, sometimes I can get free things that we normally wouldn't purchase but could use, and this is a tough sell for hubs. If I want to get the free items, I have to wait until he is preoccupied and get them myself, under the cloak of darkness wearing a balaclava. When he finds said free objects in our house, I have to convince him that I have had the item for a long time. It's a delicate dance, marriage is.
And speaking of marriage, things have been weird lately. Not so much with hubs and I, we are pretty status quo. Other people- people on the outside- have been giving me their unbridled and unwanted opinions about my upcoming nuptials. I've heard things that range from "So, are you really going to go through with it?" to the more extreme "You are making a huge mistake." The people doing the nay-saying are friends, relatives, ex-boyfriends... but nobody who has ever seen our relationship in action, which makes me suspicious. I get the feeling that the world is down on marriage in general, not just specifically mine. Yes, it pisses me off to have to politely deflect these statements. In fact, I think something so bold and blunt should be met with equal force: "Yes, I am going through with it, but you're not invited anymore."
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Nobody Gets Rich Drawing Giraffes.
I work as a waitress and I'm 29 years old. In my head, this sentence comes out like something you would admit in AA. Something shameful that you hide from the world. I try to avoid talking about my livelihood if I can, since waiting tables is supposed to be something that you do to get yourself through college. I'm already through college. I have no excuses.
I can't lie, the flexibility in schedule is wonderful. Also, I get to sleep around 10 hours a night, which is a luxury that I am loathe to forfeit. It has very limited perks, one of the most important being that it matches my skill set in a way that my college degree can't: you can't excel at Organizational Management when you hate managing people.
As an adult, I am good at very little. It's hard for us to admit that we are not the blank canvasses that our parents told us that we were. At some point, you just have to realize that you are not going to be an astronaut, you have acid reflux and have grown soft in the middle. I keep telling myself that after the wedding and honeymoon, as soon as I get back home I am going to look for a respectable desk job, one that I won't be embarrassed to talk about. In reality, I dread this.
I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of things that I am good at, which have no practical value in the workforce.
*I'm very good at drawing wild animals in a slightly scary/childish way.
Sometimes my boss at the restaurant asks me to draw him a hippopotamus when he's having a bad day. I can also draw giraffes, elephants, platypuses, chickens and snails. I mostly do this for the amusement of children and coworkers who have nothing to do.
*I write small books for my friends about their adventures in the world.
Usually I accompany these tiny books with pictures to accompany the story. The books are usually about how I'm sorry for insulting/degrading the person unintentionally, but sometimes they're about happier things. I try to make them funny, because people generally can't stay mad at you for degrading/insulting them if they're laughing.
*I can sew very basic things.
Like buttons. I am very proud of how I can sew a button or mend a sock. I can also make really dumb things like pillows and pajama pants and skirts. Nothing fancy. You can't make a living of it, for sure.
*I tell stories to my 5-year-old nephew that he seems to enjoy.
Sometimes even the imagination of children needs to be jump-started. Most stories that kids hear are about dogs or sharing or other boring stuff, so it helps to hear something outside of the box. I'm sure that this skill has an expiration date; by the time he's 6 years old he'll be over it.I also sometimes have a hard time coming up with material that is age appropriate and not terrifying.
*I make really good spaghetti.
It's true.
So there you have it- my list of things that I do well, yet can't possibly make a living excelling at them. I'm also very good at being poor, which is fortunate.
I can't lie, the flexibility in schedule is wonderful. Also, I get to sleep around 10 hours a night, which is a luxury that I am loathe to forfeit. It has very limited perks, one of the most important being that it matches my skill set in a way that my college degree can't: you can't excel at Organizational Management when you hate managing people.
As an adult, I am good at very little. It's hard for us to admit that we are not the blank canvasses that our parents told us that we were. At some point, you just have to realize that you are not going to be an astronaut, you have acid reflux and have grown soft in the middle. I keep telling myself that after the wedding and honeymoon, as soon as I get back home I am going to look for a respectable desk job, one that I won't be embarrassed to talk about. In reality, I dread this.
I thought it might be helpful to compile a list of things that I am good at, which have no practical value in the workforce.
*I'm very good at drawing wild animals in a slightly scary/childish way.
Sometimes my boss at the restaurant asks me to draw him a hippopotamus when he's having a bad day. I can also draw giraffes, elephants, platypuses, chickens and snails. I mostly do this for the amusement of children and coworkers who have nothing to do.
*I write small books for my friends about their adventures in the world.
Usually I accompany these tiny books with pictures to accompany the story. The books are usually about how I'm sorry for insulting/degrading the person unintentionally, but sometimes they're about happier things. I try to make them funny, because people generally can't stay mad at you for degrading/insulting them if they're laughing.
*I can sew very basic things.
Like buttons. I am very proud of how I can sew a button or mend a sock. I can also make really dumb things like pillows and pajama pants and skirts. Nothing fancy. You can't make a living of it, for sure.
*I tell stories to my 5-year-old nephew that he seems to enjoy.
Sometimes even the imagination of children needs to be jump-started. Most stories that kids hear are about dogs or sharing or other boring stuff, so it helps to hear something outside of the box. I'm sure that this skill has an expiration date; by the time he's 6 years old he'll be over it.I also sometimes have a hard time coming up with material that is age appropriate and not terrifying.
*I make really good spaghetti.
It's true.
So there you have it- my list of things that I do well, yet can't possibly make a living excelling at them. I'm also very good at being poor, which is fortunate.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Two Weeks til Launch
So, I've got two weeks to be Sarabeth Dillon. I really should relish these moments. David Dillon is particularly fond of our last name and I suspect that on my wedding day, he will wax poetic about the end of an era or possibly something about a dynasty.
Just a few days ago, he asked me over the phone what he should wear to walk me down the aisle. I stopped for a moment, thinking that surely I had planned some kind of dress code for us... I had not. I told him to wear whatever he would be the most comfortable in, which could really be anything. On my 25th birthday, he showed up to lunch wearing my high school band uniform, so yeah. I'm leaving a lot up to chance here.
The truth is, I don't really care what he wears, or what anybody wears for that matter. I don't care if the cake is lopsided or if it rains. I'm honestly just glad Scott talked me out of eloping, because I'm really excited to be with my family as I'm transitioning into a new life. As a consumer and sometime-watcher of cable television, I'm a little confused by the general public's idea of what makes a perfect wedding. It seems like the world is fascinated (and frankly, kind of addicted) to proposal/wedding stories. The flashier, the better. As for me, I'd probably throw up on my shoes if Scott chose to propose at Disneyland or by putting my ring in a fortune cookie or at a Yankees game on the Jumbotron (I'd say no). The ring isn't the important part, the mark on my own personal timeline is. Starting on October 22, there's a slash through my life and Scott's, a distinct marker showing that our lives as two separate entities have halted. People don't put shows on Lifetime about that... unless one of us has inoperable cancer or something.
It won't be a wedding where people cry and look meaningfully into each other's eyes. It'll be better than that. There will be peacock feathers, or so I'm told.
Losing my Dillon won't actually matter much in the grand scheme of things. I'll have to wait longer when added to an alphabetical list. People will stop giving my sister-in-law my mail (maybe). I'll be a member of a new extended family that I've only begun to know. Better than that, though, I will be forging ahead into the unknown making my own family- a family of two! I'll be ruining holidays with botched cooking and fighting about what kind of paper towels to buy. But there will also be the good stuff, the stuff that acts as glue on the loose ends of our being. Oh, what a journey.
Just a few days ago, he asked me over the phone what he should wear to walk me down the aisle. I stopped for a moment, thinking that surely I had planned some kind of dress code for us... I had not. I told him to wear whatever he would be the most comfortable in, which could really be anything. On my 25th birthday, he showed up to lunch wearing my high school band uniform, so yeah. I'm leaving a lot up to chance here.
The truth is, I don't really care what he wears, or what anybody wears for that matter. I don't care if the cake is lopsided or if it rains. I'm honestly just glad Scott talked me out of eloping, because I'm really excited to be with my family as I'm transitioning into a new life. As a consumer and sometime-watcher of cable television, I'm a little confused by the general public's idea of what makes a perfect wedding. It seems like the world is fascinated (and frankly, kind of addicted) to proposal/wedding stories. The flashier, the better. As for me, I'd probably throw up on my shoes if Scott chose to propose at Disneyland or by putting my ring in a fortune cookie or at a Yankees game on the Jumbotron (I'd say no). The ring isn't the important part, the mark on my own personal timeline is. Starting on October 22, there's a slash through my life and Scott's, a distinct marker showing that our lives as two separate entities have halted. People don't put shows on Lifetime about that... unless one of us has inoperable cancer or something.
It won't be a wedding where people cry and look meaningfully into each other's eyes. It'll be better than that. There will be peacock feathers, or so I'm told.
Losing my Dillon won't actually matter much in the grand scheme of things. I'll have to wait longer when added to an alphabetical list. People will stop giving my sister-in-law my mail (maybe). I'll be a member of a new extended family that I've only begun to know. Better than that, though, I will be forging ahead into the unknown making my own family- a family of two! I'll be ruining holidays with botched cooking and fighting about what kind of paper towels to buy. But there will also be the good stuff, the stuff that acts as glue on the loose ends of our being. Oh, what a journey.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
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