married life

You can’t change me (OK, maybe you can a little bit).

- Mel

Have you ever meditated or journaled or bitched over mimosas at Sunday Brunch on how much your life has changed?

I’ve been thinking probably too much about this (maybe because I’m slowly adopting my meditation practice again and also I’m probably doing it wrong because WHY am I so distracted about everything?!). Or maybe because this is what 40-year-olds do. But these thoughts were also induced by the passing of my 10-year anniversary of quitting smoking. TEN YEARS. Photo throwbacks almost always include a picture of me (very probably at a bar or club) drinking and smoking. My drinking habits have also changed, alongside the necessary stoppage of clubbing every night – given my 9pm bed time and ohhhh probably being no longer being single and 20-something has a lot to do with my retreating from The Scene.

Deep thoughts from the toilet.
I realized this week that I CHANGED MY TOILET PAPER BRAND for my husband.

When we had separate living spaces at the beginning of our relationship (though we basically lived together from Day One – yes, this man was just the right amount of cocky that he packed an overnight bag on our first date – we just rotated whose house we would stay until I finally moved into his apartment about 2 months into our courtship). ANYWAYS… I was firmly on Team Cottonelle when I was Managing Life on my own. He likes those bears that wipes their butts with “paper” from the woods.

It’s probably poison ivy.

Like most areas of our relationship, we never fought over whose toilet paper is superior. We, um… don’t really fight about anything unless we are doing house renovations. (Our backyard project is almost done, by the way.) Don’t you just HATE couples who don’t fight?! I am a total Kitchen Sinker type of fighter. My husband has probably raised his voice, like, twice. I let him assume the grocery shopping responsibilities because I shop like a teenager who only eats sugar – and here we are, 9+ years later, me realizing why we never had a discussion about what toilet paper we use. BUT HE DOES THE GROCERY SHOPPING, YOU GUYS, WHICH IS MY MOST HATED CHORE. Besides cooking – which he also does – but only because I find it overwhelming and he finds it to be a pleasurable and relaxing experience. HOW two people one person so complicated ever came together in a relationship is a question for the universe.

On my run last night, I had a conversation with my male running buddy about relationships and this notion of is it “better” to have met and married someone early on to figure out life shit together – or does the relationship have greater chance of survival if two people have independently lived and cooked for themselves – terribly or not. Which is the Charmin and which is the Cottonelle?

I dated my high school boyfriend for many years. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out (at least for us, together, but we are both now in long-term married partnerships. YAY, US!). I met my husband when I was in my 30s and shoved his presence away for ALMOST A YEAR because OH GOD, NO WAY am I dating someone in their 20s again. Hahahahahahahahahah.

What I’m getting to here, is that I am practically unrecognizable to myself from 20 years ago. I should also probably bring up that I had a nail piercing. I WORE DANGLING JEWELRY FROM MY PINKY (FAKE) NAIL.

I mean… Charmin toilet paper. WTF.

That said, we have DEFINITELY had the toothpaste conversation, and my husband’s preference is total shit while I am #Crest4Life, so we are firmly rooted in a two sink, two toothpaste household (TSTT — brand it!).

Maybe the secret to change is to let someone else do the grocery shopping.

So, what side are you on: Team Cottonelle or Team Charmin?

This is a post about cake.

- Mel

Be mindful of asking your husband to clean out the freezer.

Because he then may toss EVERYTHING from its depths (except for, apparently, an old cupcake in a ziplock bag which is somewhere between the ages of 2-years ago we moved to Des Moines and ehhhhh, maybe a month). That “everything” might include your vacuum-sealed pieces of wedding cake intentionally saved for your one-year anniversary.

…

Oh. Yeah. You felt it, right?

I wouldn’t necessarily call the emotion anger. Because I was definitely crying. But I was also so upset that I could barely breath and all the voice that was attempted from my mouth deepened nearly 3 octaves and echoed across our first level open floor plan when I spoke of The Disappointment.

WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!

Apparently, I missed this error by only one day.

During The Disappointment, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried in the shower for what felt like the length of my relationship. Why was this stupid tradition affecting me so terribly when I have a wonderful husband who cleans all his dead (also vacuum-sealed) meat from the freezer when asked by his beautiful wife to do so? Oh, I didn’t explicitly tell him ONLY the meat and, you know, men are not mind readers and WHATEVER YOU THREW OUT OUR WEDDING CAKE.

Tradition. That is not a word that I would use to define our wedding nor our relationship; however, the cake. It was made by a local gluten-free bakery who can make me a delicious sugar frosted almond flavored cake any time I’d like. We were together (my husband and I – not me and the baker) for 8 years before we decided to get married… well, I guess technically we decided a bit earlier than that but nonetheless, we married on the 8th anniversary of our first date. St. Patrick’s Day. We found a lovely lady who does mobile elopements and could marry us at home on our back deck in under 60 seconds with our two witnesses and a homemade dinner of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes and a passed bottle of Irish whiskey back when I cheated on potatoes and drank whiskey… a lot has changed in one year. Like that cake. The cake morphed to the dimensions of the air-sealed plastic but sat relatively undisturbed in the door of our massively-sized freezer. Like that chocolate peanut butter cupcake on the shelf in direct sightline every time you opened the freezer door. Until the husband threw it away. The wedding cake, of course, not the cupcake. I’m sure he had reasons for this selective behavior.

Did I mention that I have an amazing husband who not only cleans out the freezer when asked but while I was suffering the emotional breakdown of someone who lost the one-and-only photo of her and Spider-Man when she was one-years-old, that very husband dug through the trash bins in our garage and found the sealed pieces of wedding cake and placed them back into the freezer.

And do you remember the day when I rolled my eyes at his purchase of this dumb machine that sealed things in plastic when things like Zip-loc exist?

What’s great about vacuum-sealing is that it not only keeps moisture out of whatever you intend to food store, but it also keeps things like… oh, the other gross disgusting things that sit in your garbage cans, OUT of the sealed containment. It was also somewhat convenient that our garage is not insulated in the slightest and the temperatures hadn’t gone above freezing in the weeks prior. See, when the husband found the cake in the garbage, they were still completely frozen pieces of warped cake in plastic. And so, it was like they went from one freezer to the next – albeit a little grosser, more disgusting and probably definitely filled with used cat litter.

Well, damn it, I finally ate that cake last night while celebrating our one year of marriage. And if adventure is what you want in a marriage, well I certainly have that and then some. I have a man who is willing to go to the depths of the garbage to see me happy.

And I couldn’t be happier.

(And yes, I apologized to my husband. But I definitely made him use Purell for the following three days.)