Seven years and all I got was this awesome family

You and me, plus three cats and two children. We were married seven years ago, today. Last year we completely forgot about it, but this year the champagne is already chilling in the fridge. Almost every day I both take our family for granted and shake my head at the luck I must have to land this family of mine.

Happy anniversary, Matty. I love you to the moon and stars.

I dedicate this anniversary to the man who rubs my feet every single day

 Dear Matty,

This morning you woke me up. I was in our bed, wrapped up in the arms of our eldest daughter. She had spent the night with me because you needed to spend the night with our youngest daughter. I stepped out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and immediately we began an intricate dance trying to team-tackle the five piles of cat vomit that Hille had so lovingly thrown up seconds before (around the time I was untangling my arms from our daughter's). Minutes later you cornered the small one with a bottle of sunscreen while I convinced the taller one get dressed before breakfast. As one was bouncing around begging to watch one of the DVDs she brought home from the library, the other was declaring (loudly) that she really needed to play with one of her sister's toys. Somewhere in between the madness I prepared some breakfast for our first born while you ushered our second born out the door. There were hugs, squishy kisses, giggles, yelps, bounces, whispers, cries, and together we all started our day. With you on your way to daycare/work and me on my way to school drop-off/work, our Monday had begun.

And then a couple of hours later I realized that today is our sixth wedding anniversary.

Ten years ago we met on the first day of school. Eight years ago you finally found the nerve tell me you were sweet on me (though only after I asked you out on repeated dates). And six years we stood under the chuppah, surrounded by the people we love, and became a family.

Then there were children, jobs, moves, adventures, more moves, more adventures, laughter, sighs, gasps, sobs, and kisses. Lots of kisses. We have leaped through life together these six years and while we find ourselves distracted by the world zooming around us, I can only leap because you leap with me. Thank you for holding on so tightly. The madness that surrounds us means nothing.

Also, thank you for the children. We did good.


Happy Anniversary, Matty. xox

How Gchat saved my marriage: Some advice on Valentine's Day

Do you have an issue that you and your partner argue you about on a regular basis? That topic where one or both of you argue terribly because you're so emotionally involved you lose the ability to speak with any sort of compassion or kindness? Do you have one of these?

Matt and I have have about a million of these issues.

Alright, not a million, but many. I think they are probably the same as yours: finances, jobs, sex, religion. The big ones. These issues are wrought with emotions and hopes and anxiety and passion, and despite some well-meaning discussions, they can get us into trouble. We are both endlessly stubborn (mostly me). We are also endlessly tired, and this can sometimes make us cranky arguers. Not the best combination.


My marriage and my iPhone

But here is the thing: we often connect through the day online over chats on our Gmail accounts or through texts on our phone (and we're not the only ones). Most of the time we send ridiculous messages that will make each other laugh, about the children or the cats ("Please send help: Lucy the cat just set up a union and is out of control with demands. Also, the cats are late in paying rent.") Other times we send notes of a more practical nature, reminding each other to pick up something from the store or run an errand, or, sometimes, to gently nudge the other person to stop leaving dirty clothes all over the bathroom floor. (For the record, there is a laundry hamper directly outside the bathroom, not two feet away from said bathroom floor.)

Matt and I have what feels like a strange work/family set-up, though the way so many parents cobble together resources and working hours I'm sure it's more common than I realize. There have been periods in our lives where we've spent a lot of time together because we both worked from home, but for the past few years we have found ourselves constantly trading off home/kids for working time. Although Alyce is in school during the week, Shira has always stayed at home because it made the most financial sense for me to continue working from home and not pay for daycare (in addition to me wanting to keep her at home with me as long as humanly possible because she is my baby). But because Matt's job is very flexible he and I take turns staying home with the kids, which translates to me escaping the house two days during the week.

Here is our typical day: Shira wakes at 5:15 am (that's sleeping in) and one of us gets up with her. (Our rule is whoever is staying home with the kids that day gets to sleep in. Deal? Deal.) Once it's time for that parent to leave for work, the other parent takes over and begins the day at home, usually trying to squeeze some work in between school drop-off, meal preparations, and Shira's requests to paint/draw/have a snack/watch a show/have a snack/paint again/and then paint again. Some nights when the other parent comes home around dinner, the other parent heads out for a few hours of work (and that is when I meet most of my doula clients). Other nights we sit on the couch and watch NCAA tournaments and eat popcorn.

What I'm getting at is that we don't have a lot of time during the day to connect, to sift through all the details of an issue, including those that are time-sensitive in nature. But what we've found is that because we are both very comfortable on computers and phones and can type almost as fast as we speak, we can connect very well online. Matt and I can work through a lot of necessary conversations in stolen moments throughout the day rather than during the witching hour of dinner and bath time with two young children.


Not just for shopping lists

But there's more. Some fancy (and probably very knowledgeable people might tell you that it's important to have the BIG conversations face-to-face, so you can look into each other's eyes and really listen to your partner's needs. I say phooey. Sometimes you need to have a conversation with your partner where you they don't see you roll your eyes or can't hear you raise your voice. Sometimes you need to talk about something really pressing and important in your relationship but you need space not to storm out of the room. Chatting online has saved us so many times, and I don't mean enabling us to just work out schedules. I mean with the big things.

We've talked about clashing expectations about our sex lives and moving our family to a new country over gchat. We've texted each other through emotionally charged panic attacks and moving disasters. We are so invested in these kinds of  issues that sometimes when we talk face to face we let our emotions stand in the way of a solution. We get defensive, shut down, or begin to raise our voices. But over gchat we are patient and take the time to (sometimes) clearly explain our positions and concerns, we ask each other for feedback, and generally give the other person space to disagree. Of course there are times when we do all this in person, but sometimes we can discuss an issue online or as texts first and then come together still in one piece with greater patience and understanding.

I kid you not, in the last hour Matt and I have begun to work through a very challenging idea over Gchat, an issue that presses buttons well-established after almost six years of marriage. I promise you that we will speak kindly to each other when we finally see each other face to face than if we waited until I got home to discuss it. Also, just because we hashed it out online doesn't mean we no longer speak its name when we get together human to human. We'll continue to talk about it sometimes, often, but the anger that often comes with that initial passionate argument is usually gone. And then we can be nicer to each other. And then we dance together on a rainbow.

Please, take this piece of advice as my Valentine's Day gift to you!

P.S. Happy Valentine's Day, Matty!

Today I changed my name

These two. I have a feeling that I'll be spending a lot of time trying to get a photo of both of my girls looking at near the camera at the same time. Is this the way of multiple children? Most of our day resembles herding cats (and sometimes we are actually herding cats) so I shouldn't expect this to be any different. On this day, yesterday that is, we were about to enter the Royal Ontario Museum (one of my new favourite places in Toronto) and they were far too excited to see dinosaur bones to sit for a photo. I should also mention that I was only trying to get a shot of the two them because the grandparents were inquiring about when they might receive such a photo. We all have dreams.

Today I changed my name (but only once). I married my husband more than five years ago but didn't assume his last name until today. When I wrote about why I regretted changing my name last month I never imagined that I would actually change it now. But the response to my post was a wake-up call, helping me to realize that it wasn't too late to make changes no matter what decision I made at the time of getting married. As I wrote in the original post, I was feeling a little left out of the party not sharing a name with the rest of my family. Something I never dreamed would matter now does matter, and so it was time for a change.  This isn't the best choice for a lot of people, but it is the best choice for me. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to find the best colour for our matching family jerseys.

Farewell, silent letter b. It was a good thirty-four years.

Why I regret not changing my name

I didn't for a minute consider changing my last name when I married Matt. I made a lot of changes when we married, like my religion, or my dreams of marrying someone who loved the outdoors and would teach me how to kayak among the dolphins or how to get over my fear of bears, but my name seemed too much.

My reasons for keeping my name after marriage are many. First, I have earned my name. It is difficult to spell, has too many consonants, and no one can ever say it outside of Quebec. By the time I reached adulthood I felt as though I'd put my time in, taken one for the team, and I was unwilling to just change it, give it up to the past. It was my name and I would stand behind it no matter what. And on the practical side I had already published articles in my research field under my original name and I didn't want my previous work to go unnoticed if I started publishing under a new married name.

I am also a feminist and that means I have spent a long time thinking about what happens to women when they marry and struggle with a new identity, including a new name. Marriage hasn't always been the kindest to women, and while I am confident that Matt and I married as equals, as two people who loved each other and wanted to grow a family together, I was unwilling to ignore the way marriage has historically defined women as property, rendering them invisible under various institutions, like the law. Marrying my husband was the first step in our family, but I didn't want to get lost along the path. Keeping my name was a way of marking this part of me, the part that never wants to forget the efforts involved in creating and supporting a culture that values men, women, and children together.

Plus, did I mention how many years I endured under the wrath of the silent "b" in my name?

It's been five years since I made that decision, and now, I regret it. All of my reasons for keeping my name still stand, but now their are new ones. Their names are Alyce and Shira. When we talked about keeping my name, I remember telling Matt that they only thing that might push me to take his was the possibility of not sharing my name with my children. That was easy, he said, the girls can take your name. Well, that was easy. But then I was pregnant with Alyce and we found ourselves on the phone listening to Matt's father beg us to continue his family name, and I just didn't care enough (or have a strong enough backbone) to keep to my decision. Did it really matter, I wonder? Probably not. And always the people-pleaser, I suggested to Matt that we keep with tradition and name the girls after him.

It turns out that for me it does matter. Having a different name from Matt and the girls doesn't make me question my place in our family. I am just as much a part of this chaos as Matt or the girls. Of course. But on a regular basis I am made acutely aware that I stand alone with a different name. Alyce has started asking me questions, asking me to explain why we don't share a name. When I register her for school, or fill out the forms for Shira at the emergency room, I need to emphasize that I am indeed their mother. I don't know why exactly, because it doesn't make intellectual sense to me, but I really don't like that question. Don't they look at me and see the hours of labour I undertook to give birth, or the months years I've spent breastfeeding or waking up at unnatural times because my girls are early risers, because that's what I see. They see our names side-by-side and they look up at me and ask, are you the mother? Ugh. Of course I am. And I also want to order those silly reply labels for our mail and I want one name.

I don't quite recognize these preferences in myself, but they're mine nonetheless.

How do I reconcile this with my feminism? Is this just the beginning of my conflating my identity with that of my husband, or another one of those times where motherhood makes a woman turn away from feminism? Am I turning away from a deeply-treasured value simply because it's hard to feel left out sometimes? No, I don't think so. The feminist call for women to keep their names was timely and necessary. It was a call for women to redefine their marriage and the marriages of future generations. And while we can't turn our backs on the efforts of feminist movements past (because we must defend and protect the rights and opportunities afforded to women on account of this hard work), we can redefine some of the terms. My feminist commitment does not hinge on my last name. And while I probably won't change my name at this point, my unexpected reaction to my decision has reminded me how important one's identity truly is. It's complex. Things change.

If you get any mail from us in the future, just be prepared for a lot of extra letters on the reply stamp, including that silent "b."

Five

Five years ago today I married my favourite person. It was a good day. It was also the hottest day in the history of the universe. Last night Matt took me out for a dinner unlike I've ever had before. Maybe it was the fact that our children were not at the restaurant. Maybe it was asparagus and poached egg salad or the cheese and fresh fig plate (finally! A fig!), or the champagne or the wine. Maybe it was the dirty haiku I gave him as an anniversary present. Whatever it was, it was a good night.

Happy five years. I think so far we've got this marriage thing down.

Two different shoes

It was one of those long days where nothing goes terribly wrong but you just can't find the patience for the whining or the questions or the whining and all you want to do is hide under a rock for a few hours, until the other parent finally comes home from his thirteen hours away at work, and he gives everyone hugs, and then you look down and see how when he got up at five this morning he put on two different shoes.

All day long he wore two different shoes. Both brown, different shades, one with laces and one without. He himself only realized on the train, on his way home, about twelve hours after he put them on.

Raise your hand if you would have smiled watching this husband of mine saunter down the street in two different brown shoes? I, for one, cannot stop smiling.

Go Sooners

Guess who has a blog? Let me be more specific: guess who has a blog about the Oklahoma Sooners basketball team and various other college basketball gossip? My husband, that's who, and he is very excited to share his obsession passion with the internet. His new blog, Moving Without the Ball, is wonderful, especially if you happen to know anything about the Sooners (note: I'm not entirely sure I know what a sooner is). Here's just a sample of what you'll find over there:

What, then, can we learn about the stylistic preferences of OU’s new coach? There is no simple template for winning--except, perhaps, scoring inside the arc, limiting 2 pt. field goals on defense and corraling defensive boards--and consequently playing fast or slow on, high pressure or restrained on defense, tells us very little. It is how those stylistic choices are designed and implemented by the coaching staff and executed by young men in the their late teens or early twenties.

Can you believe it? Can you even understand it? I'm so proud of him. Matt is the sort to regularly fall asleep at night clutching some hot-off-the-presses book on basketball statistics, and it's about time he joined the larger conversation online. Now I happen to be an excellent basketball-watching spouse, and I'll happily knit watch a game almost any night of the week, but Matt needs more. He needs the internet.

So head on over and say hello! He's very friendly and soon to be my favourite blogger, I'm sure.

An handsome man

Trying to charm me on my birthday, and relieved to be free of The Children. That's not a small glass of wine, either.

This post is dedicated to Matt, hands down the world's greatest (and most handsome) stay-at-home Papa and house husband. He loves his girls more than anything, I know, but I also know that he'd like absolutely nothing more than to be working (far) away from the house. At a job where he gets paid actual money. Is this too much to ask? Hardly.

So please join me in reminding my husband that he is doing an incredible job staying home with Alyce and Shira. Things feel hard some days, but we are all thankful for the things you do. xxx

Four things about my weekend

1. Yesterday morning it was my turn to sleep in, so after nursing Shira at 5:40 I returned to bed and let Matt monitor the morning chaos. It was heaven. But even better was when Matt woke me up at 8:15 with my coffee, toast, and the computer in hand. Here, he said, I thought you might enjoy some breakfast and computer time without the children. That's right, he sneaked past The Children on his way upstairs, so not only did I get breakfast in bed, but I go breakfast in bed by myself. It was not Mother's Day or my birthday. I'm sorry, you can't have him. He's all mine.

2. After killing my body with a hot yoga class later in the day, Matt sent me upstairs for a nap. Enough said. No seriously, I slept in and had a nap.

3. This morning, with the help of my good friend Kaylie, I crossed yet another thing off my Life List. It's a small thing, but I've wanted to pick my own apples for years. I have such romantic notions of fall and the idea of picking my own apples sparked big dreams of making pies and applesauce. I have to tell you: picking our own apples was everything I dreamed it would be. Me and the girls met Kaylie at a local orchard between Cambridge and Toronto, grabbed a cart, and spent the next hour getting lost in the apple trees. The sun was brilliant and the apples numbered in the thousands, though we held ourselves back and picked only a bushel each (the internet tell me that a bushel equals around 42 pounds of apples!).

Now I have plans to make a few pies and a lot of applesauce. I will use the the recipe and canning instructions from Simple Bites (it never lets me down), and for the pie crust, I'll use Martha Stewart's recipe for pate brisee . It's been years since I made pie crust from scratch and I haven't tried Martha's recipe before, but some of of the people I trust most follow Martha's instructions on this, so I feel confident that it's the way to go--see here and here for some other pie crust inspiration. I'll return with some evidence of my apples later this week.

4. Alyce wore her princess gown while she picked apples. Of course she did.

How was your weekend? Did anyone attend an apple festival? The last time I attended one I was pregnant with Alyce. I can't even begin to comprehend how fast the time goes.

Ten things about Matt, on Father's Day

Lately it seems that it's all Matt, all the time, around here. It's pretty obvious that I miss my husband (I've never been good at subtle). Teaching in Poland for five weeks sounded lovely when he was offered the job, but now I just want him back. In honour of Father's Day, and in honour of me missing him, here is a Matt list.

1. On an almost daily basis Matt will sing any song in the voice of either Eddie Vedder or Sean Connery. Oh yes, I'm that lucky.

2. Matt does more laundry than anyone else I know, but couldn't fold a pair of pants properly if his life depended on it. Fortunately, his life will probably never hang in the balance over a pair of pants.

3. One of the times that I love Matt the most is when he sits back and allows Alyce to boss him around. He gets this look on his face, as though he were annoyed by the inconvenience of having his hair dressed with purple sparkly barrettes, but it's obvious that he wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

4. Except for maybe at a Final Four game. The man loses his mind over NCAA.

5. He also likes to snuggle up in bed with his beloved copy of baseball statistics. He likes to make notes in the margins, you know, for his fantasy baseball league(s).

6. Nothing makes Matt laugh harder than The Children.

7. When Matt was little he buried his father's tools in the backyard (or maybe it was his records) for no reason at all.

8. He loves public radio*.

9. One of my favourite things about him is that he lets people be who they are. I wish I could be more like him in this way, especially on those days when I become preoccupied with all those little details about the world that are driving me crazy.

10.  Last month Matt turned 35, and I forgot. There you go, Matty, I told the internet. Also, I'm sorry I forgot. I could try to make excuses, like that it was the day of the move from Delaware and that we had just finished giving away almost all of our possessions in a twenty-four period, but that doesn't really matter. Birthdays trump everything, and I'll make it up to you next year.

*I might have stretched the truth a little bit with #8.

P.S. Happy Father's Day.

Four years

 St. Andrew's-by-the-Sea, NB. Honeymoon capital of Canada*

We were married four years ago today. I loved our wedding. I loved getting married to Matt.

I feel like all I've been doing lately is explaining how Matt and I started dating, fell in love, and jumped right into marriage and kids. I wish I could tell you that I've been crafting these experiences into a worthy memoir, but no, it's only because Canada wants to know all these details for Matt's immigration application Maybe I could just drop The Children off at their offices, you know, for "proof of relationship," but I like to think the Canadian government is filled with hopeless romantics who just want to hear a great love story (I might drop off The Children just in case). I remind myself of this daily as my fingers are cramping from the 587 forms weI need to fill out. And then re-fill out when the PDF typed fields disappear as I print them. 

Don't even get me started about the impact of a certain postal strike on our immigration efforts.

But back to romance. The story is a familiar one, but it's perfect just the same. We met on our first day of graduate school at the University of Toronto. Matt tells me that he fell in love with me that day, but I don't know. Do you think that really happens? I guess I do, because something did quietly simmer between us for a year and half before he finally accepted my offer that he should ask me out on a date. Let me be clear that he turned me down for a year. If you ask him, he'll tell you that I never really asked him out on an actual date (I would always invite him to join me and a few other people to do something, like go out for dinner or to spend the day at a festival) and so it never counted. I think that's awfully fine print of him to challenge my attempts at courtship. But eventually he got the idea and we finally got together. Finally. Here's just a sample of what was going back and forth between us during those weeks that we got our act in gear and finally told each other that we were smitten. This one is from Matt:

I remember that day so vividly in January: you were so wonderful, funny and kind and beautiful; it's when I started to learn about you, and I was so happy to learn later that one of the names your parents called you was Princess, just as I knew it would be. [Editor's note: I'm not a princess.] Although I had been interested in you long before (you know I think it really started when I saw you right before I left for the States last summer, you had just gotten over being very sick and you were working in Barb's office--I think you were stealing office supplies), it wasn't until that day I decided to tell you how I feel--and look, it only took six months!

I've been going through these old emails (again, for the benefit of those gushing government officials), and I just can't stop smiling. It was three or four weeks after we started dating that Matt told me he wanted to marry me. He didn't exactly propose that night--think of it, he said, as him just making his intentions clear. I wanted to say yes right away, but instead I asked him to ask again in six months. Six months seems like a responsible number of months, doesn't it?

So what does Matt do? He "practice" proposes every Friday night, every Shabbat, just to remind me of his intentions (I know, he's lovely). He was getting pretty good at it around month two. On November 4, a month or so shy of my six month cut-off, I decided to say yes. For real. Enough practicing already. We were in love and ready to celebrate.

Matt is still in Poland so we're celebrating over a long distance. It's hard being apart like this, but that shouldn't surprise me--marriage is hard all by itself, never mind when one of you has been abandoned for the thrills of Europe. Four years doesn't seem like a long time, but it feels as though we've packed those years with enough things (and Children) to warrant a proper celebration. As Matt reminded me this morning, "only 71 years to go until we can celebrate 75!"

71 years indeed.
Love you.

*Or maybe it was just us.

Day Eleven

I have no idea how couples kept in touch over long distances in the past (maybe a letter or two?), but Matt and I are keeping the magic alive with thanks to Twitter. Take, for example, the following love note from Matt earlier today:

I wouldn't have it any other way. Sure, a romantic letter, maybe even handwritten, might be nice and just a little bit sophisticated. He could send me a letter every day and I could keep them tied up with string, that is, when I wasn't re-reading them throughout the day. I would save them in a box and one day Alyce and Shira would discover them and treasure them always. They might even them pass them along to our grandchildren.

That sounds nice, but no. I'll keep my hour spent in the car this morning in the Starbucks parking lot, waiting for Shira to wake up from her unscheduled morning nap, laughing with my husband through Twitter, because that was the only way I was going to get this gem:

Or this one:

I have always relied on Matt to make my day better. While I reserve the right to direct some heavy eye-rolling his way some days, mostly I'm just relieved that he makes me laugh so much (let's just keep that between you and me). Even in Poland, Matt joined me while I sat stranded in The Kia while Shira slept. So yes, a collection of romantic letters is lovely, but they're not everything.

P.S. Speaking of letters between spouses, run, don't walk, over to Dinner: A Love Story, for the best report card I've seen. When a new post shows up in my reader, it's the first blog I turn to. I love when I find a marriage that our marriage can look up to. See also: school lunch contract.

P.P.S. Matt, come home soon.