Ready for His New Wife and What Men Really Mean

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Holistic Wayfarer

Mrs: How did you get me to marry you again?
Mr: Deception.
Mrs: Ah

***

Mr: I’m getting a dog when Tennyson goes to college.
Mrs: NO. It’s me or the dog.
Mr: (No comment)

***

Took over 10 years, friends, but I finally did it. Decoded Malespeak:

You look pretty, honey. (I want to have sex with you.)
Mmm. You smell nice, honey. (I want to have sex with you.)
That’s a nice outfit, honey. (I want to have sex with you.)
What a great dish, honey. (I want to have sex with you.)

***

Mr: Here, let me take a picture of you.
Mrs: No. I’m chunk-a–munk.
Mr: Oh, no you’re not. I want a photo for when you die.
Mrs: ?????

***

Man’s own words

***

Mom: Remember it takes a year for the Earth to revolve around the Sun?
Boy: So that means the Earth’s revolved around it ten times since I was born?
Mom: Yes. As I have around you these ten years.

***

Mrs: It kills me that one day he will grow up and know heartache, that he’ll suffer at the hands of a girl. Pause. Women are powerful.
Mr: Yeah. It sucks. They take your HEART, they take your MONEY, your self-ESTEEM. They take EvErything.

***

[Speaking of postpartum depression]
Mrs: Actually, I haven’t been depressed since I met you. Pause. I’ve been pissed off like hell, but not depressed.
Mr: You’ve been too pissed to be depressed, ha ha ha.

***

On her last birthday:
*Taking wife’s hand, sentimental* Oh honey, when you were born, the angels…
the angels…laughed. Detour. They laughed…at me.

***

9 Years Old, bedtime:
Boy: Can you see me?
Mom: Yes.
Boy: Even in the dark?
Mom: Always. Even in the dark.

When Life Doesn’t Cooperate

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Holistic Wayfarer

JK,

I wish I had the words and muscle to help bear your load. You have borne your distresses with such amazing grace. Caring for the elderly becomes much like the labor over young children and you are pressed on all fronts with little margin to tend to your own needs.

Ariel Levy, staff writer at The New Yorker, recounts in her memoir her traumatic miscarriage out in Mongolia at five months. She speaks of grief, loss, growing up, thinking she had been getting somewhere with her career, love, playing house, motherhood, when it all came crashing on her head and she realized she’d just been driving around. She longs for her lost child in the crushed dream of motherhood, and confesses the fear of being without a companion. I thought of you but also of us all.

She quotes a famed writer, a woman in her ritzy apartment late in life who, when asked about her unfulfilled desire for children, answered simply that everybody cannot have everything. Ariel came to see – slowly – that we can have some things. I would add that every gift, every station in life, comes with a dark side we don’t think too much about in eyeing what we don’t have. This side of heaven, as you know, life is a burden, the burden of our humanity. T’s hobble from a judo injury has tapered to a limp. But I am reminded that we all limp. And joy can be found in all things.

Life here has been too full. I don’t have hands enough for all that needs doing, putting one fire out after another. Preoccupied as I had been with T, it took 36 hours for me to look down and understand that my thumb was (very) mad at me and was shouting up through my shoulder. I had forgotten the freak wrench off the joint after that first scream. In the resentment at being stretched like taffy, at being kept from the writing in life’s madness and the home school, it hit me last night that I have one shot at this. No matter how hard I try in the future, I will not be able to do this day over with T, resurrect his childhood and do motherhood more patiently and sweetly. I will not be able to care for him as I would want to. In a blink these years evaporated, leaving me with the freedom I gasp for some days and the house quiet. What lessons in character that he has learned from me (by watching) will he take into the world, into his own life and family? Faced, in the past, with the choice of alter egos for a life I could relive, I would’ve – so satisfied with my person – chosen my present self. Now, I would jump at the chance to be anyone else. Someone better at happiness, someone who knows worrying saves no one. In all that selflessness of yours, be selfish with the joy, JK. I don’t envy you your sorrows but no need to look this way through frosted windows.

Love always,
D.

Dear God, yes, I’ll take Combo #4. The family free of injuries (could we throw in my parents?), obedient child, antiaging powers, and that book deal we’ve talked about. But on the days that a smile is a workout, I’ll take it à la carte, the grace just to get through and to know You’ve got this.

What My Husband Looks Like

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Holistic Wayfarer

So here you go, folks. Presenting…Mr. Wayfarer.

War and Peace

Posted on October 13, 2017 by Holistic Wayfarer

I can barely open the door before it throws itself in my face, rattling against its frame. I rein in my voice like I’m working a pulley, and talk to the door.

“I said hurry and eat, brush, and go to bed. I’m leaving the house.” I can’t help flipping the pitch at the tail: “You happy?!” Sharon Olds can keep me company over fish tacos. I make a note to grab my beloved copy, as my head makes it into his room on the last try.

He releases his weight on the other side and flops on the bed. “You wanna leave? FINE!”

“I’ve done nothing wrong. I just pointed out that you need to be more responsible when I’m not here. You can’t not eat all evening and then stuff your head in the fridge just before bed. You don’t want indigestion again. But you need something to be able to sleep now.”

The words walk out of his mouth almost staccato, measured. The boy who still feeds and cuddles with his stuffed tiger cub suddenly sounds sixteen. “Mom, I didn’t have an appetite. I don’t need to eat now. It’s no big deal.”

“Do you know why I’m going?” The words are rocks, breaking apart. The tears burn. “I’m leaving because you hate me. I love you and you don’t want to be near me and I don’t want you to go to bed hungry.” Anger, love. They are one and the same passion. I storm down the stairs and he is above me, hands on the banister.

“I don’t hate you!” he yells.

“Of course you do. Your actions say you do. You said I make you sick.”

Somebody come collect the boy’s jaw off the floor. His brows furrow, furious with indignation. “I never said that!”

“Yes, you did. And you blame me for everything.” For the backpack that throws up its contents on the floor, for the headphones you can’t find. For being your mother. “I’m going,” I turn, desperate for tissue, and he calls out, “Wait…I have to give you something.” He disappears into his room and as I blow my nose in the kitchen, I feel something hard being closed into my free hand. A ruby out of his treasure box, plastic and pretty the way it gleams, his most prized keepsake. It looks like the rock candy I licked down to a mound at his age. Something to remember him by.

He thought I was leaving for the long haul.

He’s gone upstairs. And my stomach is arguing and turning. It won’t survive a wait for tacos, so I scout the fridge when I realize he’s back, pausing behind me a moment like a long comma. He drops a piece of paper to the floor and finally goes to bed.

My eyes are sore and tender as the tears swell. Isn’t this the home we seek of our journey? We roll the dice, kick it up on the boardwalk and go back three spaces – even go bankrupt. We hope we don’t perish in jail. We make our way along the edge of our wins and the losses, biding our autonomy. But at striving’s end, all we want is to lay it down, to say and hear I want you. I need you. Please stay.