true love

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The Bit

It must have started a year or two ago.

My husband asked if I could get him a glass plastic cup of water, and I did. I handed it to him and he looked at it, and then up at me, and then back at the cup, and said, “Seriously?”

To him, I hadn’t filled it enough. At the time, I was exasperated. Seriously, him. I had gotten him water, and so what if I hadn’t filled it exactly to his specifications? 

But I do try to listen and improve, even if I think he is being ridiculous overly specific. So the next time I got him a cup of water I filled it more. I remember being conscious of filling it more, because I wanted to be a good listener. I swear on cheesy nachos that I only meant to please him, I wasn’t trying to be snarky or passive aggressive. And yet, when I handed him the cup, he said, “Seriously?” and the issue this time was that I had filled it too full!

Again: exasperation.

This is not about my apparent ineptitude when it comes to filling cups, nor is it about my husband’s apparently very narrow definition of a full cup. It is about the bit that has resulted from it. 

Now, if my husband gets ME water (in a glass), he fills it to the absolute tippety top. 

The other night right before I went to bed, he got out the Brita to fill his coffee maker. I had a glass on the counter that was maybe a quarter full and I asked if he could fill it (otherwise, I would have to wait until he filled his coffee maker, refilled the Brita, and the Brita did its slow water filtering job before I could fill my glass). He poured a little bit into the glass, making it – to my eyes – about three-quarters full. 

“Could you please put a little bit more in than that?” I asked him, and then turned away to finish filling the dishwasher. (This is why I was asking him to get me water; I was otherwise occupied.) 

When I was done with the dishes, I went over to the end of the counter to grab my glass and go up to bed. And I noticed that he had filled it all the way up to the top – so full that the glass looked empty. 

It just cracked me up. I could not stop laughing. I don’t know if I am properly conveying just how full the glass was, but I clearly could not move it without spilling it all over the counter or anything. It was the kind of full your middle school science teacher used to demonstrate the power of surface tension. I had to sip carefully from the edge like I was a dog or a nine-year-old proving that all your years of careful etiquette teaching have been for naught. The whole thing made me howl with laughter until tears were leaking out of my eyes. 

“I could have probably filled it even fuller,” he said. “Next time.”

I don’t know why it tickles me so much, this stupid little bit that he does now. It’s just one of those completely ordinary things that you do almost every day, usually without thinking, and now it will always be funny. The glass will either be too empty or too full and it completely cracks me up. 

Do you have any stupid bits with friends/family? 

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Weigh In Wednesday: Loves of Our Lives

I ran into a Person in My Circle TM The Queen of Mediocretia  the other day who told me how she’d gone to her twenty-five-year college reunion over the weekend. It had been so fun, she’d said, but – with a deep, dramatic sigh – she’d seen The Love of Her Life and that had been hard. 

This was a very interesting comment, for several reasons. The first of which is that she is married and has children. Whatever – no judgement; the only people who know what a marriage is like are the people inside that marriage. 

The other reason I found it interesting was that she said THE love of my life. As though this person was the one and only (and her husband was NOT the love of her life). 

Personally, I don’t believe that there is just ONE person in the universe for you. (Mini Tangent: Perhaps incongruously, I do believe in soul mates. However, I believe in multiple soul mates, and I don’t necessarily believe that a soul mate has to be your spouse, or that a spouse has to be your soul mate. I have a former coworker who I consider to be my soul mate, even though there was never anything romantic between us, and even though I haven’t talked to her in far too many months. One of my best friends is another soul mate. My husband is a soul mate, too. I guess my definition of soul mate would be someone who knows some aspect of your heart so deeply, it feels like you are two halves of a whole.) 

(I also have very strong feelings about how Hollywood/Disney/media-in-general portray love, and what it “should be” vs. what it IS. But that’s another topic for another day.)

Anyway, I think there are probably multiple people in the universe whom we could each call The Love of Our Lives.  

Before I met my husband, I was in love twice. This surprises me, when I look back on it, because I had more than two boyfriends before I met my husband. And I certainly thought I was in love with more than two of those boyfriends when I was with them. I guess from this perspective, now that I know what love really is (or what love is to me, I guess), it’s easy to see which relationships qualified and which didn’t. The two I’m thinking of qualify because, I suppose, I think I could have seen myself building a life with either of them. 

It’s interesting to think about how things might have turned out differently, had I pursued something more serious with either of those other loves. To be clear: I don’t pine for either of them, and honestly don’t even think of either of them very often, and I am quite pleased with how my life turned out, spouse-wise. (Also, I am quite pleased with how my life turned out, offspring-wise. If I’d married one of these other dudes, Carla wouldn’t exist and that is unthinkable.) But it is kind of a mind-pluck to think about what I would be doing, what life would be like, where I would be living, what my kids would be like had things gone a different way. 

I haven’t heard from the one since shortly after I joined Facebook in 2008 (I still have an account but do not use it) and I haven’t heard from the other since we ran into each other during a college reunion nearly twenty years ago. Each of them got married, to the women they dated right after me, and I think at least one of them has a couple of children. From what I remember, one was living out West, in Idaho or Utah or Colorado; the other lived in a big city. I’m not sure what their status is these days. I suppose I could try to Facebook one or both of them, to see where they are and what they’re doing, but I am too lazy.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in:

Have you ever been in love? How many times? What’s your position on soul mates, and the concept of “one true love”? Do you ever think about “what might have been,” or where you would be now if you had made a different choice? Do you keep in touch with any former loves or would-be soul mates? 

It seems as though I am doing NaBloPoMo this month, which is 30 blog posts in 30 days. (Will I make it??? Only time will tell.) Details at San’s blog here.

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Ten

I can hardly believe it’s been a whole decade since that magical day when I married my best friend. Here’s what I remember from that day: A whole host of things going wrong, running late, not going to plan, my nervous pulse hammering past disappointment and frustration to panic. The pure calm that settled over me in the empty chapel once I finally saw my husband to be. My father walking me down the aisle, the encouraging push he gave me at the end. Gentle laughter when the pastor read a bit of text too long for me to repeat in one go. The warmth of good friends crowded into a limousine. A tiny cup of velvet butternut squash soup and a buttery square of a brie grilled cheese sandwich that tasted like heaven. Poems on every table that tried but didn’t quite express the love that had subsumed me. Being carried on a tide of joy and love and laughter and, okay, too much tequila, the waves of happiness cresting and cresting and never breaking. Good music – are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright – and loud singing. Looking out the window to see snowflakes as delicate as butterflies form a kaleidoscope of white and the mountains, resplendent in their shimmering robes, presiding in the background. Magic.

But the wedding day was just a day. Just a party. A wonderful day I will never forget. But in the intervening years, there’s been a marriage. If we’re lucky, just the beginning.

We’ve been so very fortunate, these ten years. (And the seven years leading up to our marriage!) Our ups have been high, our downs have been pretty high as well. I have no doubt that we have sorrow in our future; that’s just the way life goes. But for now, I am so grateful for these wonderful, busy, happy ten years.

I tend to get gooey and overly sentimental about our anniversary (okay, about all things). My husband – logical, practical, scientific – is my counterweight. So in his honor, I am going to try to rein in the goo and aim for goofy instead.

Top Ten Great Things About My Husband

(Well, maybe not the top ten)

Okay, so he’s kind, thoughtful, brilliant, hard-working, funny, great father, supportive of my hopes and dreams, blah blah blah… But ALSO:

  1. Maybe he’s not a big fan of washing dishes, but he is almost always willing to do the laundry and he is SO GOOD AT FOLDING.
  2. He is a master at the art of choosing the perfect ridiculous gif to text me and make me laugh in the middle of the day.
  3. He and I may sometimes disagree – and disagree strongly – but he is always willing to listen to logical arguments, and often comes around to my side.
  4. He says, “Thank you for making dinner” every single night, even if what I’ve made is barely edible.
  5. He can hear an interesting snippet of music underneath the din of a thousand Target shoppers on a Saturday and know exactly how to find out which song it is and then play it in the car until it is our new favorite family song. He did that with Guster’s “Satellite” – which he identified in a noisy restaurant in Ithaca, and which has become one of my favorite songs. Bonus: I think of him and that trip together every time I hear it.
  6. He is super warm and snuggly which is very useful when I have just climbed into a freezing cold bed. But his feet are always icy, which comes in handy when I’ve gotten overheated by being pressed up against him, and he’s always willing to clamp his frosty toes against my calves.
  7. He may not be a flowers-and-jewelry-and-love-notes romantic, but he listens, and sometimes I will find myself marveling, “He is doing this solely because it is important to me.” Like addressing and stamping all of our holiday cards, when he thinks they are a waste of time and money. If that’s not romance, I don’t know what is.
  8. Speaking of romance, he loves to choose my next book for me to read. Almost always, it’s something I end up LOVING.
  9. He is happy to plan all of our travel together – airline, hotel, restaurant, museum, everything – which is great because just doing a single search on Kayak makes me break out in hives.
  10. He keeps getting hotter. I am serious. The older he gets, the more handsome he is.

Of course there are a billion other reasons why I love him, from the frivolous to the serious, the silly to the sentimental. You pile up quite a lot of love in a decade.  But above all, I am still so very glad we chose each other.