Tag Archives: schmoop

Rob sez:

“How well are you capitalizing on this year’s unique opportunities, Virgo? Now that we’re halfway through 2008, let’s take an inventory. I’m hoping that six months from now, you’ll look back and make the following declaration: “I’ve learned more about love in the past 12 months than maybe I ever have. I’ve also become far more skilled in the art of making myself happy. And I’ve finally figured out how to purge some of the martyr-like aspects from my generosity, which means I’m better able to give without strings attached and I’m more attractive to interesting people who are inclined to give me things I really want.'”

You mean unique opportunities like having my first child? (Can’t ever do that again.) Having Noah home for six weeks to help me adjust to having the munchkin? (We’ll never get this time back. We need to enjoy it now.) Figuring out how to parent? (Ok, so other people have done it… but it’s still different from the rest of *my* life.) I’ve certainly learned more about love. I feel overwhelmed by the depth of my feelings for Shanna. I am dealing with a lot of exhaustion and fuss and noise that would normally drive me bonkers. Instead I just feel kind of giddy. Yay the baby. And Noah… he continues to surprise and amaze me. I win.

Interesting people who can give me things I really want? You mean like 7 1/2 hours of consecutive sleep? Oooooh baby I hope she can give me that soon. 😉 In the meantime I will not feel upset about the lack of sleep and I will enjoy all the extra hours of the day when I get to gaze at her gorgeous face. 🙂

Oh yeah… bring on the schmoop.

The kind of thing I sit and think about

I think that relationships are complicated. When you think about what makes someone “right” for someone else you are looking at a whole elaborate string of interrelated points and it’s hard to figure out what is the clincher or deal breaker. Yeah, Noah is awesome in general and attentive and a good communicator (very unusual) and hot and good at sex and… He’s just a really bitchin package.

But I think I know what the clincher is. See–I have a really clear picture of what I want in my life. Of what the most important non-negotiable thing was in a life partner. I believe with all my heart and soul that Noah will be a good father. He balances me in all the most ideal ways. We’ve already spent a lot of time talking about how we think parenting should look. Yeah, there are going to be surprises and course corrections and there will be things that Don’t Go As Planned–but our overall attitudes and how they work towards dealing with kids is unlikely to drastically change.

I am not the most stable person on the planet. I work really hard at being consistent, but I can only do the best I can do. Noah is incredibly stable and cheerful and good natured. I’m really happy that I can give that to my kids even if I can’t be that. Noah also believes in letting kids do things for themselves and letting them learn how to accomplish things; they can ask for help if they need it, but I think “doing it for them” is a good way to stifle kids learning. My opinion is backed up by a lot of studies. 🙂 There are areas where I am probably inclined to be far more strict than necessary and Noah is good at telling me that I’m being lame and over reacting. (It’s a delicate line let me tell you.) He likes to play and is physically comfortable with touching far more than me which is going to be awesome for our kids. He can make up the best stories. I really suck at making up stories. He’s so willing to try things even if he might suck at them–I spend too much time worrying about looking stupid. Noah will be awesome at reminding me that just because he doesn’t need privacy and it’s ok for me to snoop in his stuff it’s not ok to do that with our kids. 🙂

Noah is everything I wish my father had been and wasn’t. I’m so glad I get to bring kids into the world and have them grow up with him.

Just noticing

I met Noah just shy of four years ago. (It’ll be four years in another week or so.) He asked me to marry him ~ 23 months ago, so close enough to two years. Besides, even that time period where I wasn’t dating him I was still obsessed with him and writing g-blog entries about how in love with him I was.

I’m still giddy when I see him. I pine for him if he works too long on a given day. We still talk for hours and hours and hours about nothing at all. Pregnancy complications aside, I’m still madly in lust with him.

Is this still NRE? Or is this just our relationship? I don’t take him for granted. I’m soooooooo grateful that I have him.

I win.

It’s been a year already?

One year ago today Noah and I snuck off from the lovely B&B in Lake Tahoe and went and got married. It was with little fanfare as such things go, but strangely it is the most appropriate way I can imagine for us to get married. There have been a few moments when I am somewhat wistful thinking, “I wish I had the sort of family where having a big wedding would have been fun and a positive experience,” but considering the families we have I am glad we made the decision we did. Honestly, as much as I love my friends, I don’t feel like anyone is that big of a part of my direct day-to-day life other than Noah. I like that our wedding reflected the way our life actually works.

I love Noah so much that sometimes I feel like I am drowning in it. I enjoy his silliness, his seriousness, his playfulness, his focus, his lustfullness… The list is long. He is my best friend. He is the person I most want to talk to about any silly or important thing that happens. I’m happy that I never feel like I want to keep things from him. (Ok, sometimes I do for about half a day when I’m upset at him for some reason, but it never lasts.) I’m happy that we work through intense issues and come out the other side appreciating one another more. I’m grateful that even in the middle of a fierce fight we can stop and do something to affirm to the other that it is just a fight and not something that hurts our general feelings for the other. I am amazed that he is able to see so many parts of me and never judge me harshly for them. I am grateful that I don’t feel the need to withhold levels of trust.

I’m glad that we have sufficiently disproved any doubts anyone may have had about us getting married because we had to. 🙂 And anyone who was in a betting pool that we wouldn’t make it a year… sorry about losing your money. No wait… nevermind. I’m not sorry. 🙂 I’m quite happy in fact.

*And* he’s perfectly content with just me? Boy did I never think that would happen. It’s just another day in Paradise.

Best.Husband.Ever.

I don’t feel great today, but I need to go into work for a bit anyway. I’ve been moping and fussing and generally being lost and cranky. Noah was procrastinating on his stated goal for the day of “getting a haircut” and seemed to be just hanging out. I finally fessed up that I really wish he would come with me. I did it in a whiny little-girl voice sitting in a corner on the floor. He leaned over and said (in that fabulous stage whisper of his), “I figured out that you want me to go with you, but I’m waiting for you to leave so I can go get your anniversary present.” Giggling followed.

Now he is out getting whatever it is he is getting and I’m waiting at home. I will close my eyes so he can hide it when he returns. Then we will go to my work. 🙂

I married the right boy.

Timeline of insanity.

 

Three years ago today my favorite dance partner, terpsichoros took me to my first DHP. I went because I heard it was wild and exciting. There was also this other boy going and I wanted to flirt with him a lot. Tom and I had very tentatively opened our relationship in December though sex wasn’t permitted with anyone until January. I was on a mad hunt for new people because the near celibacy of the previous year and some were just too much for me. At this DHP I ended up sandwiched between the boy I was crushing on and the strange host of the party. I never did figure out what made him go for me so hard that night.

I went out on first dates with the host of that party and the boy I was crushing on within a week. 🙂 The other boy was an intermittent part of my life for about a year in a very casual way. But uhm… the host, that would be Noah, didn’t end up being casual. At that time he had a primary and I had a primary and I had a lot of rules governing how much contact I got to have without outside people and there were time restrictions on how quickly anything could happen. Which means that on my first date (2/26) with Noah I told him that there would be no sex. Given what a pushy tramp he is he still was very pushy and forward sexually and that pushiness very nearly made it so that he didn’t get a second date. But I spent time with him, often going to the gym with him, and talking over the next few weeks. About a month later we finally had sex and it was ok. 🙂

We got closer and more emotionally intimate. He became the first and only person to ever ask me, “What happened to you?” He is still the only person to ever care that way for me. He wants to see me. We dated until late November. During this period I was the one insisting that I was still just a secondary. He was very enamored of the idea of my being a co-primary with the other girl he was involved with. I had the sneaky suspicion this wasn’t actually ok with her at all and later it was discovered that I was basically right. I broke up with him because I would not be “co-primary” and I didn’t want to come second behind her. I wanted to be the Most Important Person to someone and as long as I was so obsessed with Noah and enraptured with him I couldn’t look for that. It never entered into my head to ask him to change the nature of his relationship with the other girl. That would not have been ok in my head.

So I dumped him, hard. It wasn’t pretty for either of us. It didn’t take long (maybe a month or so) and even though I was pretty certain that a Relationship wouldn’t work I just couldn’t stay out of his bed. Ok, maybe the sex was better than ok. 🙂 But I tried to keep distance there. Then I made a nine month mistake commonly referred to by short hand as “Puppy.” During that period I managed to stay out of Noah’s bed through sheer force of will and desperation to find something that might work somewhere else. Noah was still very much my best friend. His relationship with the other girl went away with much drama. He dated other people, some for short periods some for longer. He started dating a very nice, gentle girl while I was early on in my mistake. I thought he was happy. I was trying so hard to be happy.

Then, by a year after breaking up with him, I was single again and stopping to look at my life and what I wanted. I was still spending time with my wonderful best friend. I was still pretty completely obsessed with him. I dreamed about him. I thought about him all the time. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to ruin his happy relationship with the new girl, I had broken up with him and I didn’t deserve him anymore. Though I did have active plans to ask him to knock me up when I was 26/27 because I couldn’t imagine a better co-parent.

But in March, two days before the second anniversary of the first time we had sex, he came over to have dinner and hang out. We did that often without it turning into anything other than friendship. This time he told me that he wanted me more than anything, that he wanted to marry me and spend forever with me, and even though he believed I would say no–he had to ask or he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself. I sat there in stunned shock for a couple minutes trying to find words. He believed this meant I was trying to figure out how to break it to him gently that I didn’t want him and started stammering out how he knows it won’t work and I don’t want him and… I told him to shut up and launched myself at him and told him yes. Yes, I would marry him. Yes, I want him. We did kiss, but very specifically on both our parts we kept all clothing on. He uhhh was still with the other girl. We talked about how much it was going to hurt her and I was very sad there was no way that I could see for all of us to be happy. I wasn’t going to give up on him again though, not for anything.

He broke up with her. It was uncomfortable and hard. I really have nothing negative to say about how she responded at all–there would have been no better way for her to be. Noah and I started trying to figure out how we fit together without any one else being between us. It was actually a slow warm up. Even though we were sort of technically engaged already we tried to not be instantly together all the time or enmeshed. We only saw one another a couple times a week for a few months. We didn’t advertise how seriously we were taking the relationship for a while. I told him that it was important to me that he not just be exchanging one full time girl for another full time girl. We had to be seperate for a while before we could be together. That sort of worked. The warm up was slow-ish (I’m honest) and good. We started making plans for the future.

One thing we talked about a lot was selling this house and renting for a while so that we could build up a more significant deposit on a better house. Eventually this plan was vetoed for a variety of reasons, but not before his then housemate moved out. It was June by then (whoo hoo, three whole months later) and I was experiencing plagues and pestilence in my apartment. (The flooding from the upstairs toilet and the bug infestations were just Not Funny.) Given that he needed to have some help with his mortgage it looked like he might have to get a new housemate. But… my apartment was sucking… So given that I would be moving in sometime in the near future anyway I just moved in then. Then I ran off to the east coast on vacation and started proceedings for the gorgeous ring that is mine.

We spent the summer trying to figure out how/if poly was going to work for us. Yeah, most of what we figured out is that poly is a fucking headache. We were also talking about the ominous cloud of wedding planning hanging over our heads. Then I got sick. And people were sweet and wonderful and tried to be helpful in convincing me that going to a doctor would be a good idea. In this process they told me that some of my symptoms could potentially indicate a very serious illness that could kill me. While in the midst of freaking out at the idea that I could die I looked over at Noah one night before going to bed and said, “If it turns out I am dying, can we go get married this weekend so that at least I get to be married to you before that happens?” He agreed. So I went to the doctor–uhm yeah… not dying. I’ll be fine. Well don’t I feel silly. So I came home all sheepish and told Noah that I wasn’t dying. He was happy about this. I sat there and fussed and dawdled as I worked my way up to saying, “So uhm, would you be interested in getting married this weekend anyway?”

This was on Thursday before Labor Day weekend. We found a lovely B&B up in Tahoe, booked a room for the weekend and drove up on Friday. We bought a pretty dress and lovely gold rings on the way (my “real” ring still hadn’t arrived). We had a lovely night enjoying our last night of sin before we became all legally sanctioned. The wedding was small (us and the minister) and quick. We said our own vows and I had moments of terror–oh god, what if I am FUCKING UP?!!!! But I stomped that voice out ruthlessly. We went back to the B&B and had a lovely dinner and enjoyed our wedding pint of Haggen Das vanilla ice cream–it’s all about priorities. 🙂 We drank port and enjoyed one another very much.

By late September neither of us were dating anyone else. The poly headache just kind of… was shelved. We fell more and more deeply into enjoying one another and figuring out the rocky bits of how to deal with one another (I may be harder than average to handle, but Noah has his moments too). Meeting his family over Thanksgiving was an experience I will never forget, or need to repeat.

We had a lovely fun Christmas season with some really hot people, but have been really cheerfully monogamous for the past couple months. Given that breeding is in the pretty near future it looks like monogamy will continue to be the mode for the forseeable future. Yeah, we are crazy enough to want to breed and to do it soon.

Do I know this relationship will work out? No. I’m really hoping. I believe that a lot of what makes relationships work is wanting to make them work and I think we both have a very high level of investment in making this work. I love him. I like him. I think this has at least as much potential as any other relationship and more than a good many. So I’m hoping.

Thank you terpsichoros. I owe you more than I can ever repay. You gave me dancing, which I love, and you introduced me to my future. Did you have any idea what you were doing? 🙂

run run run flop run run run

My work week consists of running around like mad all week. Teaching, and prep work, and grading (which I’m not doing enough of), and meetings, and parent phone calls… it seems that the pace never lightens up. I’m exhausted like crazy by Friday.

Last Friday we were supposed to go see a play but as a result of not getting moving quickly enough and general crankiness, we stayed home instead. It turned out to be a good thing cause Noah is kind of sick and he needed the rest. We passed out by about 9:30. On Saturday I had another tattoo sitting but I only made it through about 30 minutes before I *lost* it. I just couldn’t be calm or rational. 🙁 We went home and spent the day in bed cause I was sick to my stomach all day. Of course we passed out by about 9:30. Sunday we soldiered our way through a gym trip despite being tired, borderline sick, and my back hurting. Sunday we ran a few errands and then flopped at home. We passed out by about 9:30.

Wow, we sound remarkably boring. Only it was awesome and wonderful. I loved the time I got to spend with my baby. We talked and talked and talked, often about hard/scary/painful things that we need to get through. We played and tried to map out a few more boundaries in our relationship. Resting and relaxing and cuddling together made not feeling so hot a pretty great thing cause it was an excuse to stay in bed. 🙂

I love my husband.