You are viewing stuff tagged with marriage.
We’ve been married for 15 years! This picture is from an overnight we took to the St. James Hotel in Red Wing. What a fun little trip: short and low stakes made it feel like the best parts of travel, the parts where you leave your routine and enjoy the company of the best person you’ve ever met.
“A single pond means it’s not married to a puddle or a lake or an ocean. Because single means not married and that’s the things a pond would be married to.”
— Esmé
It is our nine-year wedding anniversary. The dew points were near 80° today. I worked in Minneapolis, brought flowers home for Mykala. We had a summery dinner of vegan smoked apple sausage sage Field Roast sausages with potato salad and beans and then watched a little of Frozen and all of The Wrong Trousers and some of Chicken Run to stay out of the heat. Essie has awoken this morning and this afternoon with a head soaked in sweat — we assumed it was the heat, but tonight she told us she was scared of having dreams again. She’s becoming a master delayer, but this was clearly a very real fear. Mykala talked and talked with Ess, told her stories, helped her imagine us out together as a family on a beautiful day, riding bikes, having snacks, flying kites. Ess eventually picked out an octopus to take to bed in addition to her usual cadre.
Inexplicably, Essie fell asleep when I was driving her back from Nannie and Grandpa’s house today. It was bright out, only 7pm, but when I opened the back door of the car, she was totally asleep. I gently picked up her car seat and she kept sleeping in it; so I left her in the bathroom with the fan running. That was 90 minutes ago. There has been time to congratulate Kourtni on her wedding day (today, she and Arlene eloped!), feed the cat, try on my wedding celebration clothes (New Orleans, in a few days!), make dinner, eat dinner, do laundry, and browse the internet. What a strange feeling, sharing this twilight time between just the two of us, Mykala and I.
Instead of wildly speculating, thoughtfully considering, or analogically writing about life as a dentist, I’ve actually been doing it for the past few weeks. Such a disconnect between writing and experience is precisely the reason I’ve tried to make it so easy to post things in this space and exactly why I am troubled when I do not. That is to say: I don’t want to look back and forget what life was like, so I seek to write it out here. And yet, when I seem to be living the most life, I’m not writing… I’m out living. Like coming back with no pictures of your great tour of Europe, because it was too exciting to stop for photos. I guess I’m someone who isn’t confident that memories in one’s head are good enough souvenirs of a life well-lived.
For our third wedding anniversary, I surprised Mykala with something she always wanted to do: learn how to work with molten glass. The look on her face as we pulled in to the Foci Center for Glass Arts was priceless! A few hours flew by as we learned how to pick up glass and try to work with it. We made paperweights.
“A patient of yours just checked in, has no appointment for today, and axiUm says the chart is checked out to you.”
This was not the voicemail I wanted to hear this morning during breakfast. I sighed, closed my laptop, and hurriedly biked down the hill to school to see the patient.
I love this article from Tony Schwartz in Harvard Business Review, “The Only Way to Get Important Things Done”:
The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
Roger Ebert reviews the movie Blue Valentine:
All marriages have milestone moments, events of startling clarity that allow the new lovers to see themselves as a couple who have been defined.
I hopped on my bike to ride home on from school on this gorgeous evening. The sun illuminated everything in front of me, casting my shadow far in front of me along the bumpy pavement of Washington Avenue. I glided by Punch Pizza with its garage door up, looking at the people who were looking back at me, they dining halfway al fresco, me wishing I were dining on something. Snapping out of my reverie, I went through my compulsive check. See, ever since I began dental school, I walk out of the house the exact same way each day — wallet in my left pocket, keys in my right, phone in the change pocket on the right. I will do this check when walking, when idle, or when I’m leaving for anywhere. Turns out I unconsciously added a wedding ring check to the list.
Mykala and I finally managed to attend our first ethnic Wednesday event (that’s the Dan-Ryan-Emily trip to a local non-crappy non-american restaurant) yesterday, and it was a complete success. Halfway through dinner, as the subject turned to marriage, Mykala turned to look at me and asked “Am I nicer to you now than I was when we were dating?” I guess I was a little surprised at the question, but without hesitation answered “yes, definitely”. We had fun dating, but marriage seems a lot better. That reminds me of this quote from a recent “Room for Debate” discussion at the New York Times called For Women, Redefining Marriage Material:
Welcome to the first post of 2006. So many things have happened to me in this year, that I’ll toss them out in random order, maybe they’ll be funny, and maybe you’ll get bored. Who knows. First, Nils is in Norway - he’s overseas along with many people I know (for example: Emily, Emily, others). He called the experience “once in a lifetime” complete with backpacking Europe later in his 7 month stay, and total immersal in Norwegian culture and general Norwegianess. This type of horizon and world-view-expanding activity strikes me as extremely desirable for the complete college experience. While I am unable to partake at this point in my existence and for the forseeable future, I plan at some point to do some real traveling. It would break my routine-building tendencies, show me things I’ve never seen before, and make me a more interesting life-experiency type father. “Let me tell you what the Cathedrals of France look like at sunset” is generally more interesting than “let me tell you about the Saint Paul skyline at sunset” but not necessarily as practical as “if you use the correct attachment on the wrench, removing the oil filter doesn’t have to be that difficult.”
Pure and simple, same sex marriage should fall within the lawful parameters defining marriage. The Puritanical roots of the American society are sprouting up in order to attempt to strangle an inexorable worldwide march toward more liberal social policy.
Consider President Bush’s statement from February 24, 2004. In it, he outlines why White House policy will favor keeping the traditional form of marriage. He says, “If we are to prevent the meaning of marriage from being changed forever, our nation must enact a constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America.” The big question accompanying this statement, however, is not what the White House is looking to do, but why they are looking to do it. Considering it is an election year, I would say Bush’s hand has been forced and while the administration is partly responsible for this bone-headed decision, “Bush has been under pressure from social conservatives within his political base to come out in favor of such an amendment, several versions of which are floating around Capitol Hill.” (CNN.) There is, however, a point at which the cause for the decision does not matter. It is what it is, a stunningly foolish step backwards towards limiting personal liberty.