Arwen/Elizabeth

In Three Years He'll Be Thirty

Last year Bryan's birthday was kind of a dud for him, I think.  We had a very new newborn and I was recovering from giving birth, and I wasn't allowed to drive so I didn't even manage to pick up a card for him, and it was a good thing my mom was here to make dinner because otherwise he would have been eating soup from a can on his birthday.

I'm really trying hard to make this birthday better for him.  He deserves it.  Man, does he ever deserve it.

Six years ago, Bryan and I came dangerously close to breaking up rather than deciding to get married.  Sometimes in bed at night I break into a cold sweat remembering, and then I say a prayer of thanks for the outpouring of grace that managed to get us through that, and to make us both realize that we were meant to spend the rest of our lives together.  Preferably sooner rather than later. 

Bryan and I often joke about how sorry we are for all the other parents in the world, because we got the best baby ever and they're missing out.  What I don't say to him - at least not often enough - is that I feel that way about him, too.  All those other poor women, missing out with their substandard husbands, while I have the cream of the crop.

This point of view is, of course, merely a feature of the fact that the ones we love are most precious to us.  Still, even objectively, I think I got a pretty good one.

I stay home with the Billa and he gets up an hour or two before we do, every day, and goes to work to provide for our family, and then he comes home and matches me diaper for diaper, and puts the baby to bed at night, and takes out the trash and does laundry and never ever complains if he gets home and I haven't gotten around to starting dinner or even coming up with a dinner to make.

And all the things that make him really special are less tangible, harder to describe, but even more important.  Like the way he has never, even once that I can remember, made a comment that made me feel the tiniest bit unattractive - and the way I know he's committed to helping our daughter respect and love herself as well.  The way he's the only one who gets some (okay, a lot) of my jokes, and the way he's sympathetic when I make a joke so bad HE can't even laugh at it, like he really wishes he could make it funny for me even though it's not.  The way he's never rude to people, and even if he's quiet they feel comfortable around him, and the way he loves to give gifts and surprises and make other people happy.

I could go on all night, but he's here, and it's his birthday, and even more than I want to write about him, I want to spend time with him.

Happy birthday, Babe!

Four Years Ago

For someone who is the oldest of six children and spent hardly any of her first two decades alone, I think I am remarkably good at handling solitude now. Or perhaps it’s because of those first two decades that I can handle solitude. When I was younger it was very hard for me to get a quiet moment alone, so now I’m making up for that. Often, I relish my time alone.

Which is good, because I’m alone tonight.

I can hear you gasping. Alone on Valentine’s Day? Her husband always sounds so sweet when she talks about him! How could he do this to her?

Rest assured, Bryan is still wonderful and I am still loved by him. He’s in DC tonight because he had to do mandatory training for work, and he could either do it today or the 28^th, and on the 28^th we’re going to be on a trip that he’s planning as a surprise for me. So you see he’s still eligible for his World’s Greatest Husband title.

(A surprise trip! Isn’t that great? Bryan has been trying to plan surprises for me for as long as we’ve been together, and it rarely works because I am such a good guesser. I mean, I don’t try to guess surprises, but if he drops a hint my mind just starts whirring, and before I know it I’ve figured it out. So he’s taken a tip from my dad, who knows that if he wants to keep something secret from my mom he can’t give her a single clue about it, and the only thing I know about this trip is its length. Eight days, for those who wonder.)

I’m thinking tonight about Valentine’s Day four years ago. In case you’re really bad at the math, that was early 2002. We were both at the same college; I was a sophomore and Bryan was a junior. We had a date to go out that night (just for dessert, not dinner, as it was a Thursday and he had a meeting that lasted until nine). And I knew he was going to propose.

If you’re thinking that proposals should be surprises in order to be romantic, let me assure you that this proposal was meant to be a surprise. (Not an out-of-the-blue oh-my-gosh-he-wants-to-marry-me-I-never-suspected kind of surprise, just an oh-goodness-I-wasn’t-expecting-this-tonight kind of surprise. We’d talked about it, obviously; it’s a big decision to get married as young as we did, and we were both active participants in that decision well before any diamonds were involved. Although of course it goes without saying that getting married was his idea.)

Where were we? Oh, yes, it was meant to be a surprise but wasn’t, because I don’t happen to be an idiot. Bryan’s hands were sweaty and he was jittery and he kept patting the pocket of his jacket. It took me about .2 seconds to figure out what was going on, or would have taken me .2 seconds if I hadn’t already known what was going on, as a result of the fact that Bryan’s father (incidentally, a jeweler) had driven into town (a three-hour round-trip) the following evening just to meet his son for dinner. Clearly it was a ring drop-off, and I knew Bryan wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for long.

So we sat there, eating carrot cake, and he knew what was coming and I knew what was coming, and the minutes feel long and dry and shaky. In principle I like romance to be dramatic but in practice I’ve found that I don’t really enjoy the drama, that the most romantic moments are the simple ones that I don’t anticipate at all. I wanted the proposal to be over so that we could enjoy being engaged.

Fortunately, before I knew it we were walking again, and despite the cold, an evening walk on campus is not an unpleasant thing. Then we were under this tree, beside this bench (it’s Michigan in February, what do you expect, waterfalls?) and he gave my Valentine’s Day card. Actually, he gave me another Valentine’s Day card; if I recall correctly he had already given me at least two that day.

So this is the cute part: the first Christmas we were dating, back in 1998, I had no idea what to get him (the story of every Christmas, actually; he is very hard to buy for and I am easy so he always completely outshines me in the gift-giving arena; fortunately neither of us minds) and so I got him a variety of small things, one of which was a collection of coupons, for batches of brownies and other things like that. I left one of the coupons blank, to be filled out by him for whatever he wanted. And he… kept it. For three-and-a-half years, and he filled it out and taped it into my Valentine’s Day card, and that was how I first, officially, knew he was proposing. (I tried to find the coupon because I can’t remember exactly what it said, but it must be in a box somewhere. I remember it was something like “for a lifetime together” but it was better than that.)

Then he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him, with real, out-loud words. I’d dreamed about that moment for as long as I could remember, and I was a little surprised at how silly it felt. I mean, of course I was thrilled that the love of my life was asking me to marry him. But I think what I didn’t understand at eight, or even at sixteen, was that a proposal is not a goal in itself. It’s a way of getting to a goal, of getting to marriage, which is vital and permanent.

(I soon found out that engagement, which I’d always imagined to be a very romantic time, is actually pretty uncomfortable – I talked about that a bit when I told our love story. Illusions were shattering all over the place for me, that year. But of course it was the year we got married, so it was still wonderful. If engagement was less than I expected it to be, marriage is ever so much more.)

Bryan had thought I would cry when he proposed, as I cry very easily, carrying on the proud tradition of my mother and her mother before her. (I plan, in this tradition, to embarrass my children by tearing up at only the slightest provocation, such as at stories in magazines. It’s only fair that they should have to endure it, since I endured my mother’s crying when I was a child.) I anticipated crying, myself. But instead, I laughed. Happiness fairly bubbled out of me. He spoke those words, his knee on the freezing pavement, and almost before he had finished them I pulled him to his feet and started jumping up and down. If the actual proposal had felt odd, that moment felt exactly as it should. Standing there, holding each other, jumping and laughing for joy, was perfect. (That moment got its fulfillment six months later, when we stood in the vestibule after our wedding ceremony and laughed for the sheer joy of finally being married to one another.)

A few minutes later he remembered to give me my ring, and that was a beautiful moment too. I’ve seen plenty of engagement rings but I have never, before or since, seen one that dazzled me the way mine dazzled me then. It looks like this (or like this , if you prefer a more focused picture) although those pictures include the wedding band, which he obviously didn’t give me that night. (I can’t take a picture of the engagement ring alone because the two are soldered together, at the insistence of my father-in-law the jeweler. I am nothing if not an obedient jewelry owner. And actually they look much better soldered anyway.)

(Digression: this past Christmas I was thrilled to receive this.   I may have hinted a little bit. (Sorry for the horrid photo; it is abysmally hard to take good pictures of your own hand.) I know, some of you probably think a plain wedding band is a boring gift, but the truth is that I really wanted it. A wedding set like mine is not conducive to those everyday activities which I love so much, like laundry. And sleeping. (At first when we were engaged I slept with the ring on, until the morning that I woke up with a long, prong-induced scrape on my thigh. Since then the ring and the sleeping have not gone together.) Generally when I come home I just pop my ring on my handy ring-holder, which means that before I got the plain wedding band, I was spending most of my time with a bare left hand. Now I have the beautiful band, and I feel married all the time, which is great.)

Wow. If there is anything we have learned from this entry, it is that apparently my husband’s absence makes me inclined to blather even more than usual. I absolutely must go to bed. In conclusion: we got engaged! It was fun and had good results, and I would absolutely recommend it. Happy Valentine’s Day!

And yet I love him, I really do

Saturday night we drove home after a day in Stratford, where we saw As You Like It.  It's not a short trip, and by the time we were on the US leg of it, the hour was late and we were tired.  But we talked anyway.  We talked about infertility: where we were a year ago and where we are now, and how grateful we are for the peace we've received after these long hard months of praying and questioning.  Then we talked about our marriage, about how we trust each other so much more now, about how our love for each other has grown in these long, sometimes very hard, three years.  We held hands and smiled at each other in that deep, tremulous way that you smile when you know that the words tumbling out of you are not enough to say what you mean, but you're glad in the fact that both of you understand that.  We were glad for the goodness of our marriage and felt unbelievably blessed, in that moment.

Ironic, considering what the next day was like.

My husband sometimes accuses me of portraying him too favorably on my blog.  "You never write anything bad about me," he says.  I'd like to say that it's because he actually is perfect, and we never fight.  But no, we butt heads as much as the next couple.  It's just that I have no ability to hold grudges and thus no memory for arguments; generally I'm over it five minutes after it happens.

(Although, remind me sometime to tell you about the thing he did, years ago, that made me madder than tarnation (assuming tarnation is a real thing), so mad that I couldn't sleep that night because of the sheer rage that was pulsing through me.  I hardly ever get angry; I cannot remember another time in my whole life when I was this mad.  It still makes me a little mad when I think about it.)

When we're apart, I'm always remembering the good things about Michael, so that's what I write.  In order to portray him in a bad light, I'd have to do real-time blogging, sitting there at my computer transcribing madly while we yell at each other.

After Sunday, though, I can remember at least some of the bad stuff.  I'm not mad anymore, of course, but the sheer volume of the fighting we did that day requires that I remember at least some of it. 

Michael always wakes up before me on weekend mornings, so on Saturday night I asked him to wake me up so that I'd have time to get ready for 11:15 Mass.  He woke me up at 9:15 and I mumbled at him to give me another half hour.  So he woke me up at 10:10.  At which point he was still in his pajamas, having been immersed in the highly important Sunday-morning activity of cleaning his office.  I didn't have time to
1) eat,
2) choose/iron an outfit,
3) shower, and
4) blow-dry my hair (which I'd have had to do in order to avoid going to Mass dripping)
so I chose to skip the shower, but that made me cranky.  I was trying really hard not to show my annoyance with my husband, and I did okay until we were driving to Mass, and his driving was driving (ha!) me crazy.  So I made some comment about his having time to clean his office, but not to shave before Mass.  He responded testily, I even more testily.

Oh, it was great fun.  Fortunately we forgave each other before Mass.  Unfortunately, we were forced to forgive each other countless more times during the day.

One exchange went something like this:

Me: Babe, do you want some of this [I can't remember what it was, maybe bacon]?

Him: -complete silence-

Me: Why don't you listen to me?

Him: Whaaaaaa?

Me: You never listen to me!

Him: Why do you always say that?  I listen most of the time.  I was just distracted.

Me: Well, obviously in this case the other thing you were doing (cleaning the fridge) was more important than listening to me.

Him: That's not true.  I just have a hard time concentrating on more than one thing at once.

We sat down and talked it through, like adults, although we were probably both wishing that we could leave the room.  Eventually we agreed that:
1) he would try to pay more attention to me;
2) I would remember that he's easily distracted and not assume he's ignoring me;
3) he would be sensitive to the fact that for some reason I have this thing about being ignored, and not get mad at me for assuming if I do assume, even though I'm trying not to; and finally,
4) I will not get upset with him if he gets upset with me for getting upset with him for ignoring me (not that he is).

I think it was a pretty good deal.  We may be a little neurotic, but at least we can craft compromises that atone for it. 

(Although Michael's eyes were looking a little glazed over by the time we got to the third prong of the agreement.  I have a sneaking suspicion he mentally files this stuff under "Be Better Husband" and figures it's easier to get forgiveness than to remember it all.)  (I, on the other hand, remember it all, but in the heat of the moment forget to actually do it.  Which, if you think about it, is probably worse.)

Fortunately, yesterday was much better, with just one tiny pre-bedtime spat.  Today has been so far unmarred, thank heavens.  Days like Sunday should come only once a year.  Or never.  I'd take never.

In which I am really not trying to make you jealous

I am a fundamentally selfish, lazy, mean, and prideful person. I have to fight every single day against these tendencies. Some days I am more successful than other days, but there is always that struggle going on within me, and I know it will be there for the rest of my life. I’m aware that everyone has faults, that everyone has struggles, but it’s easy to forget that sometimes, especially when I’m around those people who seem to have a natural goodness of heart. Especially since my husband is one of those people.

I knew when I married him that he’d be good to me. You’d know it too if you met him and saw the gentleness in his eyes, the way his face softens when he looks at me. You’d know it if, like me, you’d been with him for six years and seen that at his worst he is frustrated or irritable, and never treacherous or mean. 

In James there is a verse that goes, “Show me your faith without works, and I will show you the faith that underlies my works.” This can be applied to Michael’s love for me, I think. He doesn’t try to convince me that he loves me without showing it. He doesn’t have to convince me because he shows it so well.

This past weekend, when I was exhausted from nightly performances, we couldn’t go to our regular Mass at our parish because it lasts until 12:45pm and I had to be on campus at that time to get ready for a matinee performance. I had suggested that we go, rather, to my school’s 10:00am Mass, but I agreed to attend the 8:45am at our parish because Michael wanted to so much. However, when Michael woke me up on Sunday morning at 7:30 so I could start getting ready for Mass, I was whiny enough that he said, “You know what? Let’s just go to 10:00 Mass at school.” I went back to sleep, and he woke me an hour later for breakfast, complete with hot cinnamon rolls and a steaming cup of tea. 

Did you get that? He had already gotten out of bed and showered so that we could go to Mass he really wanted to go to, and then when I showed a little bit of resistance gave up on what he wanted to do, did not complain about having gotten up much earlier than he would have needed to, and even made breakfast for me. 

The crazy thing about this is that it’s not out of the ordinary for him. He treats me like this every day. I need more time to get ready than he does, but he will routinely get out of bed and shower first so that I can be woken by a kiss from him rather than by a shrieking alarm. He brings me a glass of water every night before bed. He makes tea for me, and knows exactly how long to let it brew (five minutes for a cup of decaf, three minutes for a cup of regular). He fills the humidifier and runs the dishwasher. Since we got married, I have never taken out a bag of trash. 

Am I a little bit of a princess? Possibly. Is motherhood, once I finally get there, going to be hard because I’ll have to start doing things myself? Almost certainly. Do I deserve all the goodness that Michael heaps on me daily? Almost certainly not. But please don’t accuse me of being ungrateful. I am grateful, so much so that my heart swells when I think of my husband’s tender love for me. I tell him that I am thankful, and I kiss him and cling to him and try to show him in a thousand little ways how much I appreciate him. I’m probably not doing it enough, but with a guy this wonderful, who could?

Love Story (not that cheesy one from the 70s)

So I have this infertility problem. And then I get philosophical about the infertility, and I start trying to be deep and make meaning out of it on my blog. I’m jumping up and down over here, going “Ooh, ooh, look at me! I am infertile and yet I don’t let it get me down! Admire me for my poised and spiritual approach to this totally crappy situation.”

Haha. You probably already know it, but sometimes this is a false front. There are good days and bad days, but the truth about infertility is that it makes me want to crawl under the covers and not come out. Duh. A lot of the time I keep going only because I have to, not because I am inspired and eternally optimistic like I try to make myself sound.

You know what? This post was not supposed to be about infertility, so I guess I better interrupt myself before I end up with a not-about-infertility post that has a four-paragraph introduction about infertility. Huh.

Ideas for posts have been few and far between these past weeks; thus, the song lyrics in the last post, for which I apologize. But I’ve finally come up with an idea! I’ve downloaded Google’s Picasa photo organizer and am very much enjoying it, and it has inspired me.

I give you the history of my relationship with Bryan, documented for your enjoyment with pictures.

Bryan and I had our first date in the fall of 1998. I was barely sixteen; he was a week away from eighteen. He called me one Tuesday night to ask me out. (Of course I had been expecting him to call me. This was high school, people! It would have been weird if the grapevine hadn’t informed me ahead of time.) He said he wanted to compare answers on the calculus homework. (We were the two best students in the class. We did not need to compare answers.) So we went over the calculus for, like, twenty minutes. Booooring. Then, just as I was thinking he was about to get serious, he proceeded to discuss other topics, including marching band and his dad’s love of Star Trek, until my head was ready to explode. Forty-five minutes later, I had to resort to desperate measures. I told him that my sister needed the phone, and he finally asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner with him. (Did you think I was going to say no? I thought he was really cute.)

Our first date was that Saturday, October 10^th. We went to Applebee’s, not because either of us had any great love for it, but because we were driving past it when I happened to notice that his ex-girlfriend (of two years, the reason he had been previously unavailable to date me, even though I am his soul mate) was driving right behind us. She was actually a very nice girl, and I’m sure she was not following us on purpose, but as soon as I mentioned her presence, Bryan said, “How about Applebee’s?” and shrieked into the parking lot on two wheels to get away from her. He might have been a little paranoid, because she was pretty clingy when they were dating. It wasn’t a very auspicious start, but we didn’t need one because, as I said, we were meant for each other.

More than six years later, I’m amazed at how much I still remember about that night. I remember exactly what we both wore, exactly what we both ate. I remember sitting nervously on my hands during breaks in the conversation; I remember him pulling out money to pay for dinner and carefully showing me all the features of the new twenty-dollar bill. I remember walking by the river after dinner, our matching school jackets wrapped tightly around us to ward off the cold. I remember when he dropped me off at home, a little embarrassed that he had a 12:30 curfew and I had none. I reached my hand back into the car after I got out, and he held it in his for a moment.

I little knew then how quickly my life would become linked to this near-stranger’s. Thinking back, I can’t describe the linking concretely now any more than I could then. On our first date, I barely knew him, but since then there has not been a day that I haven’t thought about him.

We spent the first months of our relationship tentatively getting to know one another. We would spend hours sitting in his car by the boardwalk, talking. One evening we bought a package of glow-in-the-dark star stickers and pasted them all over the ceiling in his car. (This is now my car, and a couple of them are still up there.) When spring came we started walking by the river, enjoying the warm breezes almost as much as we enjoyed each other’s presence. I marveled at how our dates apparently defied physics – the hours before curfew sped by more quickly than I thought possible. Still, I knew that Bryan was leaving for college in the fall, and so I guarded against heartbreak. His school was only an hour-and-a-half away, but I knew that we might decide a long-distance relationship wasn’t worth the hassle, and I wanted to be okay with that.

It’s a good thing that breaking up wasn’t what he wanted, because it would have hurt me more than I expected. Being away from Bryan changed the way I felt about him. It made everything more real, more painful and more joyful at the same time. He would drive back on weekends to see me and I counted the hours until he came home. We could spend whole evenings together just talking. As we sat together, I would trace the curve of his jaw with my fingers, and think that the lines of his face were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

We first started talking about marriage that winter, in early 2000. It sounds crazy to me now, because we were only seventeen and nineteen, but we were in love. We wanted to get married; we were ready. Retrospectively, I can see that things would have been much easier if Bryan and I had started dating a few years later, or if we’d realized that things were getting too serious and backed it off for a while. You can’t get married at seventeen! It’s not even legal.

But there we were, totally into each other and ready for the commitment (or so we thought).  We figured out that we could probably get married as soon as he graduated from college, even though I’d have one year left. Three-and-a-half years sounded like a lot, but we didn’t really have a choice.

It’s a fun experiment. You should try it sometime. Get two hormonally-charged kids in their late teens who are madly in love (and trying to live chastely, no less) and say to them, “Sure, you can get married… In three years! Bwahahahaha!”

As crazy as we were about each other, the pressure was too much. We tried to stay together, but we broke up three times between the spring of 2000 and the fall of 2001. I definitely cried more in that time than in any other year of my life.

The weird thing was, I was the one who broke it off, every time. Actually, it’s not all that weird, considering that Bryan has a thousand times more patience than I do. He could wait, but I could not. I was miserable, waiting. Three years felt like a lifetime to me. So I tried finding happiness in other places. I tried being single; I tried dating other guys, but nothing was right. And every time I started being quiet and listening to God again, He sent me right back to Bryan.

We had a huge fight in September of 2001, and we spent the next month apart. It was the hardest month of my life. I was avoiding the truth that I was simply too scared and too weak to commit to waiting for the man I loved. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that I had no real control over my happiness. I wasn’t ready to trust God on the timing.

One afternoon in late September, I went to confession. I hadn’t been in a long time, but I suddenly felt called to go. The peace I received in that absolution was unlike any I had felt before or have felt since.  On my walk back to my dormitory in the late-afternoon sunshine, I passed Bryan’s dorm. Propelled by a force I hardly knew and yet trusted completely, I suddenly turned and walked up the stairs. In that moment I knew that he was for me, and that I could not skirt around it anymore. I walked into that dormitory prepared to commit the rest of my life to him.

I went to his room. He had the door propped open and I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched him typing, struck by my love for him. He saw me and stood up; I walked to him and put my arms around his neck. We hardly had to say anything; I think he knew that I had come back to him for good.

Only a few weeks later, we decided to throw caution to the wind and get married a year earlier than we had planned. We didn’t get officially engaged until February, but we were essentially engaged from that time forward.

This picture was taken a few days after our engagement, at his grandfather’s birthday party. It was during the six months between his proposal and our wedding in August that I learned the real truth about engagement. I always tell it to my friends when they get engaged: Getting married is not the fun part. Being married is the fun part.

That probably isn’t true for everyone, but it certainly was for us. We argued constantly during our engagement. One of my philosophy professors once said that engagement is the hardest time, because you’re committed, but there is still the possibility that things could fall apart. Marriage, for Catholic couples at least, is an assurance. Look, you’re stuck – things can no longer fall apart, because they’re not allowed to.

Bryan and I were married August 17, 2002. All the arguing we’d done during our engagement suddenly stopped, and we just enjoyed finally being married. Our honeymoon, which we spent at a resort on Hawaii’s Kona Coast, was in many ways the best seven days of my life.

And yet, in another way, every day since then has been even better. Of course our bliss-induced honeymoon tempers didn’t last, and we’ve had plenty of arguments since then, but they’ve been productive arguments. We’ve grown into each other in the last two-and-a-half years.  We’ve become one emotionally, in echo of our sacramental oneness.

I would be lying if I said I had never considered that it might have been easier another way. Getting married at nineteen is no picnic. You give up a lot of things about being young, being carefree, that are fun and valuable. And yet for me, there is no question that marrying Bryan when I did was exactly the right decision. My life right now makes more sense than I ever imagined it could. He and I have had challenges, and I know we will have many more as the years wind by, but he is for me, and nothing can change that. I am so grateful.

Don't you wish you had a dork like mine?

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but my husband is a computer dork. A software engineer. He majored in computer science in college, and now he works for a company that does research for the government. He’s the only person I know who uses vector calculus in his job. (Except, you know, math professors, but they don’t really count.) Michael is very smart. I’m proud of him.

My first year in college, I took an introductory computer programming class, in C++. I loved it. Aced it. The next year I decided to take the intermediate class, the introduction to object-oriented programming. (C++ is an object-oriented language.) (And no, I don’t know what that means.) I only passed the class by the graces of the curve. I got an email saying that I had failed, had actually gotten an “E,” and then I got another email saying that they’d recalculated the curve, and my grade was now “D.” I didn’t asked questions, just said a prayer of thanks and moved on with a vow to never, ever, do programming again.

But lately, since I’ve gotten into the blogging world, I’ve been thinking it would be nice to know a little more. Maybe I could even design a template for my site, instead of using Typepad’s standard-issue. So I asked Michael, “How hard is it to learn HTML?”

A few semesters after I almost failed object-oriented programming, Michael was a teaching assistant for the same class. He likes to tease me about my fear of programming, I guess because he really thinks I’m smart enough to do it if I wanted to. Now he looks at me, deadpan, and warns, “HTML is pretty hard.”

I answer seriously, “Really? Is it object-oriented?” (I’m pretty sure it’s not, but I’m trying to see if he’s lying.)

He nods, confirming that yup, it is. I let my face fall. He loses it. He falls over on the bed, shaking with laughter, shrieking, “HTML isn’t object-oriented! It doesn’t even compile!”

I raise my eyebrows and shake my head, but inside, I’m laughing with him, and thinking just how much I love my dork-man. I’m a little relieved, too, because I wasn’t absolutely sure he was lying. And I took that vow, after all – object-oriented programming is something I’ll never do again.

Sometimes a bicycle can help that fish a lot

I try hard not to be judgmental about other people’s relationships.  Sometimes I have to try very hard.  But if you’ve been dating only four months, and you decide to get married, I won’t ask you what the rush is, or if you’re really sure you want to do this.  And if you’ve been dating for years and years, and you still have no real commitment, I won’t stand there tapping my foot and looking at my watch.  I might want to, but I won’t let myself, because I know that people are different, and I can never know enough about your life and your feelings to justify my judging them.

With that disclaimer, I make this statement: I believe that in most cases, people who are still in high school are too young to be dating seriously and exclusively.  This judgment is even more ironic than the previous paragraph makes it seem, because I married my high school sweetheart.  I know that marrying him was the right thing to do, but I think we could still be married now even if we hadn’t started dating so young.  If I could go back and meet my sixteen year-old self, I’d tell her, “Just be friends with him for a while.  It’ll save you a lot of heartache.”

There’s one way in which dating him saved me a lot of heartache, though.  I was a skinny kid, you see.  When Michael and I started dating, I was 5’9” and 130 pounds.  I could wear size eight.  I think my thighs then were like my arms now.  Now, six years later, I weigh 20 pounds more.  Size twelve.  My twig-thighs have been replaced by actual thighs.  I have breasts.  A tummy.  But despite the filling out I’ve done, I have a good relationship with my body, and this is largely due to having Michael around through my whole filling-out phase.  He is the number-one reason that my perfectionist self never turned into an eating-disorder self.  And I am so grateful for that.

My sister Rosie, who’s a year and a half younger than I, is one of those small-boned people.  She’s just thin, always has been and always will be.  She’s twenty now, and it’s become clear that breasts and thighs are not coming her way any time soon.  The family tummy has also completely passed her by.  She’ll be one of those women who is actually happy to get voluptuous while pregnant.  It was hard for me, especially in my late teens, to be Rosie’s older sister.  She’s so small, and I felt like a cow, even more so when I started filling out.  But I had Michael around, and he always seemed to think I was beautiful, so I dealt with it.  My little sister Maggie, on the other hand, didn’t do so well. 

Maggie is built like me, except with less thigh and more tummy.  The top half of her is shaped kind of like a box.  She’s not overweight at all, and she’s perfectly fit, but she looks in the mirror and sees this huge person.  And she can’t get past it.  She’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, and she’s only seventeen now – I can’t imagine what she’ll like be by the time she’s thirty.  Everyone who meets her can see how awesome she is.  She’s a straight-A student, president of her high school’s student council, a community volunteer, and an all-round overachiever.  She’ll be able to go to any college she wants, including these.  But even more than that, she has an inner sparkle, so much compassion and intelligence and wit, and she writes and speaks beautifully.  Everyone who meets her can see it, but she can’t. 

In August, at a wedding, I saw her talking to a childhood friend who moved away a few years ago.  The girl is barely going to graduate from high school, can’t get in to any college (according to her sister), and is inseparable from her boyfriend who is an “abusive bastard” (also according to her sister).  She’s the kind of teenager who clearly is not interested in going anywhere.  But she’s a size four, and when Maggie was talking to her I could see the longing in my little sister’s eyes.  The longing to be that.  And it broke my heart, that she’d be willing to give up everything that she is and does, everything she’s worked so hard for, just to drop a few dress sizes.

A year ago she was throwing up everything she ate.  Fortunately, she stopped doing that, but the eating disorder is still there.  Undeniably still there.  After that wedding, I talked to her about that longing I saw in her.  I told her how amazing she is, and how sad I think it is that all she sees when she looks at herself is someone who will never be a size four.  She cried when I told her that, so I know she doesn’t hear it enough.  We tell her all the time that she’s great, and that we love her, but she doesn’t hear it.  It’s blocked by her own underestimation of herself.

Fortunately, she finally decided that she’s ready to get counseling.  My parents have offered several times to pay for it, but she was never interested, never willing to put herself out there that much.  But I pointed out to her that if she doesn’t get this worked out now, it could affect her relationships for the rest of her life: her husband, her children.  Especially her daughters.  And she, being so smart, saw that, and made the decision to do it.  I’m really proud of her for that, ‘cause I know how hard it is for her.

It’s been a hard year for her, a hard adolescence for her.  Not because she isn’t surrounded by love, but because she just hasn’t been able to understand why it’s there.  She is getting better, though.  And one of the main reasons for this (I’m back to my point, see!) is her boyfriend.  Like I said before, I’m not in favor of serious relationships between high-schoolers.  From what I’ve seen they mostly lead to heartache and bad decisions.  Maggie knows how I feel about this, so when she called me last week to tell me that she and her boyfriend were dating again after a four-month break, she expected me to try to talk her into singleness.  She was surprised by how enthusiastic I was, and I was surprised by the tears of gratitude which stung my eyes. 

You see, her Andrew is like my Michael.  He’s smart, strong, kind, polite, and handsome.  More than any of that, though, he is captivated by my little sister.  When he’s around Maggie, you can see in his eyes how much he admires her.  Loves her, even.  And thinks she’s beautiful.  So I don’t care how dumb it may be to date seriously in high school.  I’m not worried about the heartache Maggie and Andrew may go through later.  Because right now, I just want my little sister to be surrounded people who know how beautiful she is, and who tell her and show her every day.  She needs Andrew just like I needed Michael at the same age.  I pray that he will help her as much as Michael helped me, so that by the time she’s twenty-two she’ll be as comfortable in her skin as I am in mine.  I want my little sister to be able to meet a size four and think to herself that she wouldn’t trade any of who she is for that size.  And I’m in favor of anything that helps her get there.

He's deep in other ways

My husband and I have an ongoing struggle about the fact that I am very emotional, while he is not. He once told me, in a fit of frustration because I was bugging him to share his feelings, "I have five feelings! You have thousands!"

This struggle has become so innate to our relationship that we are able to joke about it a lot of the time. I know it's true that some women have trouble sharing feelings, and some men do it very well, but Michael and I tend to generalize about the sexes based on our own experience.

So, tonight I'm hosting the women's group of which I am president, which meets for two hours every other Sunday to discuss femininity, spirituality, and our lives (this document is our inspiration). I'm a little depressed today because of the whole no-baby thing, so after I took my shower this afternoon (I usually take them in the morning, I promise) I crawled back into bed and cried. Michael came in to console me and I told him that I was not getting out of bed.

"Okay," he said, "I'll host your group tonight. I'll just have them write down all the feelings they've had in the last three hours. That should take up the whole meeting time."

Men: Hitting them with a rock is apparently not enough

Despite the attitudes of the widely-advertised diamond industry, I’ve never thought that a big engagement ring, or really any engagement ring at all, was necessary. (A girl working the checkout at Target once told me that her dream was to get an engagement dog. I doubt most women would share this sentiment, but whomever she marries will definitely save some cash.) My mom wears only a plain gold wedding band. I would have been happy with the same, but I married into a jewelry-store-owning family. So I got, as my smart-aleck friends called it at the time, the Rock. Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I wouldn’t trade my gorgeous ring for anything. This is because I love my husband so much, and it’s symbolic of my relationship with him. My wedding set is my constant sign of our commitment, so I love to wear it.

But anyway, my point is: it’s big. Not ostentatiously, but obviously. So it never fails to amaze me when men don’t notice it. Case in point:

Yesterday Michael was going to be out for the evening, so I planned to settle down with a good movie and a cup of Twining's English Breakfast Decaf. I stopped at Blockbuster after class and as I was getting out of the car, another car pulled up next to me. The driver got out and quickly followed me into the store. It went like this:

He (as I glance at Envy, a movie I’d watch only under extreme duress): That one was real good. It was so funny. Me, I don’t like many movies (thumps chest for emphasis) but I liked that one.

(He was a big guy, friendly, with messy blond hair. I would guess that his curriculum while still in high school had a lot more emphasis on PE than AP Biology. And he probably hasn’t had any schooling since then. Not my type even when I was single, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to him.)

I: Huh? Really? Maybe I’ll try it out sometime.

(I place the case firmly back on the shelf and move on down the aisle, looking for something more my speed. He follows.)

He: Got any suggestions for good movies to watch?

I: (make a non-committal negative noise)

(He then asks a couple standing nearby the same question. I had assumed he was trying to pick me up, but now it seems he’s really just interested in finding a good movie, so I point to Love Actually, which, sap that I am, I loved. I figure if he, who most likely never reads anything but Sports Illustrated, can suggest that I watch movies starring Jack Black, then I, who have read everything Jane Austen wrote, can suggest that he watch romantic comedies starring actors with British accents.)

I: I thought that movie was wonderful.

(He nods, but I notice he doesn’t pick it up. He’s still focused on me.)

He: You got a boyfriend?

(Ah-ha! I should have gone with my first instinct about the come-ons.)

I: (somehow managing to smile sheepishly even though these situations always embarrass me horribly) Uh, actually, I’m married.

He: (good-naturedly) Damn!

He: You’re pretty as hell though, you know that?

(By this time I figure I must be bright red, so I mumble a thank you and move away. I grab my choice and manage to be out of the store by the time he’s ready to check out.)

Anyway, my point (and I had to scroll up to find it, so don’t feel badly if you’re lost) is that he could have saved me the embarrassment and himself the expletive just by glancing at my left hand. I’m not going to get a bigger ring, so those guys out there will just have to get bigger eyes.