Is this me?

Sometimes I don't believe this is really me.

Is this me?
Is this me who has a husband?
Is this me who's been married for four months now?
Is this me who's writing a dissertation?
Is this me who's supposed to graduate in May?
Is this me who's applying for jobs?
Is this me who's thinking about having a baby in the near future?

Sometimes I feel like I'm not really me.  I'm just someone who is passively observing what someone else who I'm not is supposed to be doing.

Like, when I was riding in the car with my husband back to our apartment tonight, I was spacing out (as I often do) and it occurred to me that the man sitting beside me promised to be with me for the rest of his life and that I promised to be with him for the rest of my life.  Lifelong promises, just like that.  There was a time when my life was without him in it.  Now, I have no idea what it would look like without him in it.  Riding in a silver Camry.

All that my mind is wrapped around is writing my dissertation.  It doesn't even seem like something I (if I were really me) would ever do.  But I'm miraculously doing it.  And not fast enough.

Is this me who wants to be a professor?
Is this me who wants a career in academia?

It seems like that's stuff for other people.  Other people do well-researched, serious stuff.  Stuff where they know just what they're doing and exactly what they're talking about and precisely what their plans are.  I just chance upon things.  I make it up as I go along.  It seems like I've lucked out more than diligently worked.  It seems like what I'm doing now isn't substantive.  That can't be true.  But it just feels like it.

What is it going to take to convince me that I'm going to be okay and that I must be doing something right?

My First Academic Publication as a Graduate Student

Hopefully this little guy will help me get one of those things.  You know, one of those whatchamacallits.  You know...one of those things productive citizens of society are supposed to have?  A, um...yeah, that's it.  A job.

Check it out here.  Especially if you're into diasporas and Africa and transformation and migration and stuff.

So...Week 4.

This is how it's going to have to be.

Writing a dissertation is seriously one of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life.  Chapter 3 is due this coming Friday and I really need to pick up the pace.  For real.

On top of that, there's a little book review to revise and resubmit and there are already postdoc applications that are due soon.

I can't believe I've gotten this far with such reluctance to get things done.  Like, I'm the laziest "overachiever" there ever was.  I am so serious.  I've totally shut myself off of social media, I get up every morning at 5:45, I go work out, I get to the library between 8:00 and 8:15am, stay until 5pm, and I (try to) go to bed every night between 9:30 and 10:00pm.  I'm trying my best to regiment my life to allow writeyourdissertation to seep into my bones and consciousness, but still.  I still get super distracted (Pomodoro notwithstanding), I still stare at my cursor blinking for hours without any writing produced and I still question if I'm really cut out for this.

Whether I'm cut out for it or not, I'm going to finish.  I have to finish.  I have no choice.  I mean, I guess I do have a choice, but the consequences of not finishing are pretty darn undesirable.

This is just where I'm at.  In the thick of it.  This is all I'm going to be blogging about, probably, until it's done.  So...onward.

Week 3 of Hammering It Out

We interrupt this dissertation writing session for a quick update:

This weekend, I went to my hometown, primarily to attend this friend's baby shower.  I left hubs behind, because he preferred to stay home.  If we were going primarily to visit my parents, we would have left sooner.

My mom knew I was coming, but my dad didn't.  It was nice to surprise him. I went to church with my parents on Sunday and of course, the inevitable, "Where's your husband?  Whuut?  You're already leaving him behind?"  Ugh, please go sit down somewhere.  I jokingly told a few people we got into a fight, just to see their reaction.  Heh, heh.

But here's what I really wanted to tell: When I got back on Sunday night, I came home to a beautiful bouquet of sunflowers in a vase with a card from my husband telling me how much he missed me and how much he loves and appreciates me.  Super swoon.  There is nothing like the love of a sweet freckled-faced man with a dimpled smile.  I seriously believe my husband is the best husband in the entire world.

I just love spending time with him.  Riding the bus together in the mornings, coffee in my little to-go cup with our church's logo on it. Getting little visits from him while I'm working in my little writing hole for hugs and kisses and "I'm proud of you"s.  Taking lunch breaks with him on a bench outside the library, laughing at how a squirrel nearby darts around and nervously eats pieces of sandwich bread crust I throw his way.  Work a little longer and soon we'll be heading home on the campus bus, but today we're going to make a quick stop at the campus Creamery first.  Dessert before dinner.

Going to a baby shower has definitely brought about a resurgence of baby-on-the-brain-itis.  The fact that a colleague recently announced her pregnancy hasn't helped matters.  I even told hubs, "If all goes according to plan, next year around this time, that will be me!"  He smiled and said that it would be.  He is going to be the best dad, too.  I know it.  I have these visions of me with a cute little pregnant belly being cuddled and coddled by my husband.  Sigh.

Back to work.  This chapter is shaping up, but at this point, it needs to shape up a little faster.

And at the end of the first week of sequestration...

Here's what I'm learning that finishing a herculean task consists of:

Framing the task within parameters of structure and consistency.  The reason I'm waking up every morning at 5:45 am and leaving out at 6 am to then go work out for 30 minutes every morning and then arriving at my library carrel by 8 am Monday through Friday is so that I can burn "schedule" and "consistency" into my brain and consciousness.  It's not that I love waking up early or that I'm trying to lose weight.  It's just a thing I need to do.  I'm consistently getting up.  I'm consistently working out.  I'm consistently going to the library.  I'm hoping these things will translate into "I'm consistently working on my dissertation."  It's hard.  It's hard to stay focused.  It's hard to make the kind of progress I would be happy with.  But I'm making some progress every day.  That's what needs to be consistent.

A colleague introduced me to a productivity app that I'm going to try stick to called Pomodoro.  Each "pomodoro" is a 25-minute interval, which ends in a 5-minute break.  After 4 pomodoro/5-minute break intervals, then you get a longer 15-minute break.  It's a way to make yourself consistently work without feeling overwhelmed.  It's good for a person like me who finds it hard to consistently work for long periods of time.  But 25-minutes of consistent work at a time is doable.  And it gives you the option to skip a break if you're on a roll and then at the end of the 4 intervals, you get a longer break. Operation Pomodoro starts tomorrow.

I have the chance to personally interview and communicate with the author of one of the books I'm analyzing.  I wrote her and let her know that I'm excited about the chance to talk to her, but that I would like to have time to prepare first, and asked for her availability to perhaps conduct the interview via Skype.  I'm pretty pumped about it.  My adviser and I are discussing the possibility of bringing her to the university for a talk.  That would be pretty awesome.  We shall see.

Sequestration: Day 1

My new semester routine:

1. Get up and out the door by 6 am to make your way over to the Ramsey Center.
2. Jump on the elliptical for 30 minutes while you listen to audio of the Bible.
3. Get back and take a short, energizing shower.
4. Down a cup of coffee with a fruit/a bagel/oatmeal and take a multivitamin (if we're planning on getting preggo in about a year from now, gotta start getting vitamins and good stuff in me now.)
5. Get yourself together, grab your lunch (that you made the night before) and make it to the library by 8 am.
6. Sit your little self down in your library carrel and read/write/take notes/highlight/write down ideas/organize, do whatever you need to do to work towards one goal: Writing. Your. Dissertation.
7. Take a lunch break with hubby.
8. Sit your little self back down in your library carrel and repeat the actions in step 6 until 5 pm.
9. Give your mind a break, and make sure you get to bed by 10:30pm.

That's how it's gotta be, folks.  Ain't nothin to it but to do it.

Everything You Wanted

Another husbandless night.

I'm eating and watching trash when I should be dissertation reading.  There's something about my husband being gone that turns me into a sad bum.

But I watched this video of this girl who makes a list of all of the qualities she wants in a man, the producers or whoever finds a man who meets all of these qualifications, and she goes out on a date with him:

 Even after having every single qualification that she wrote down met, they still didn't click.

I don't know, there's just something equally hilarious and sad about that.  Like, he had literally everything she professed to want, but when it was presented to her, there were still reasons why she didn't feel they were compatible.

I found a list that I wrote when I was 16 and realized that my husband does line up with pretty much all of them:

1. "He has to be tall."  He is, I guess, around 5'10, which isn't basketball-player tall, but a good 4 inches taller than me.  And I can wear heels and still not be taller than him, which is all good.

2. "For some reason, I don't know why, but he absolutely must have long eyelashes.  It would also be nice if he wore glasses."  He has very long lashes and he does wear glasses.

3. "He would have this absolutely charming smile that would make you melt every time he flashed his pearly whites.  Dimples would be nice, too."  He does have a nice smile, and he does have dimples.

4. "He has to like to read."  Check.

5. "He has to have a passion for music, and an appreciation for all types. It would be cool if he could play the guitar (I love guitar!)--then he could make up guitar ballads about his undying love for me (just kidding)."  I really wasn't kidding, though.  He definitely has a passion for music, he definitely plays the guitar and he has definitely written ballads about his love for me.  He proposed to me with one.  When I wrote this 17 years ago, little did I know that I would one day also play the guitar and that playing the guitar would be what initially brought my husband and me together.

6. "He has to be understanding--he has to be sensitive to my feelings and realize that sometimes I say or do things that I really don't mean, and sometimes I myself may not understand why I feel a certain way, but he'll understand that, too."  This is so true.  I am emotional and sensitive and cry all the time and he is the sweetest, most understanding man ever about this side of me.

But here's what's crazy: If there were some other person out there who had all the same qualities that I claimed to want and maybe even need, there's absolutely no guarantee that he would have "clicked" with me.  I mean, my little teenage list aside, even if my "mature," 30+, single self had written a list like the girl in the video did and that man materialized right in front of my face, there would be no guarantee.  Everything you wanted is really not everything you wanted until you actually have a chance to want it in a flesh-and-blood person who also has a chance to want everything they wanted in you.  I know that's a little convoluted, but it's true.

There are things you think you want/need, but then there are things you never knew you wanted/needed that only come alive within a living, breathing bond between two living, breathing people.

The guy the girl in the video described up on the whiteboard was not a real person.  He was a conglomeration of ideas and characteristics.  Even if all of those ideas and characteristics could somehow become concrete (imperfectly, because the abstract can never be made perfectly concrete), there is, as the video showed, no guarantee that this concrete abstraction would or even could meet our needs, or as we like to call it, "click" with us.

This is another idea that makes me see a marriage as a sacred metaphor.  Great is the mystery of godliness.  Great is the mystery of what it is that makes what we think we want and need somehow secondary to something as ungraspable as another human being's bond with us.

Done! (For now.)

The first thing I've finally cleared off my plate are thank you cards for the wedding!  Woo hoo!  Excuse me while I get my praise on right quick.  Y'all don't even know.  Like, I feel like I just took my burdens to the Lord and left them at the altar and got delivered for the first time in my world-weary, downtrodden, Jesus-needing life.  I feel like I just got brought out of the miry clay and got my feet set on a rock to stay and got a song put in my soul today, tho.

My sweet, sweet husband helped so much.  He refused to let me do it all by myself, even though I kind of tried to, but he was insistent.  I really appreciate that about him.  I have this big-sister, I'll-handle-it mentality a lot of times that I'm learning doesn't really fly in a marriage.  Not for the long haul.  

We sent off the ones that could be sent off.  It felt so good dumping those 90 some-odd cards into the mailbox.  You will be thanked.  You hear me?  You sent us waffle makers and can openers and picnic baskets and planned bridal showers and lingerie showers and sent CHC (cold hard cash) in wedding cards to us and you think you gonna get away without being thanked?  Nawl.  Like I said, you will be thanked.  And you are going to read every handwritten word in those handwritten cards and you will smile and get a warm fuzzy feeling inside and you will go to bed and sleep in peace, knowing that finally, at long last, you have been officially thanked.

Now for local church folks, it'll probably take me a month to actually hand out the cards, but, hey, the hard part is done.

The second thing I've cleared off my plate is this blasted online class.  It is ovah.  It is finished and it has given up the ghost.  Got those finals graded and and those grades posted and those reports printed out and put in the big boss's box.  The last class I'll ever teach pre-PhD.  Yup.  But of course no college-level course worth its salt is without a last minute email from a desperate student.  Is there aaannnnyyyythinng I can do?  It's like, girl, you got a freaking A minus.  Go saddown with all that.  No, you cannot do any last-minute extra assignments.  Especially not after I've busted it trying to get your finals graded and get final grades posted on time.  The grades are in and they're staying in.  Like, I feel like it's kind of disrespectful and presumptuous to even ask that.  It's like, my friend, you have earned the grade that you've earned and that's that.  Why should I give you special consideration?

So now that those two biggies have been checked off, the road has been cleared for plunging head first right back into dissertation writing.  I'm planning to finish re-reading the novel of my next chapter this week, I'll take a little beach break with my husband and his family next week, and then, get ready.  I'm about to wear my library carrel out.  It's all nice and reserved, I got my books all nice and set up in the bookshelves and I even bought a little chair cushion from Bed Bath and Beyond to put on the library's ugly little hard wooden chair so as not to wear down my natural padding.  It is bout to go DOWN.

The Day of Things Broken

Yesterday was the last day of the lease on my husband's old apartment.  His former roommate had since moved out, moving on to bigger and better things as a new lawyer in a brighter tomorrow.  Unable to sublease, we'd just used it as a temporary storage for our wedding gifts and as a transitional place while my husband was getting settled in our new (well, new to him) (tiny) abode.

So, we rented a truck and started hauling our stuff out to then be deposited in a storage unit place in a podunk town about 15 minutes away.  When you live in a college town, storage unit places around town this time of year get snapped up.  Of course everyone and their grandmother was also moving out that day.  Although I had expressed it earlier, I was still nursing a bit of irritation at the fact that his roommate had deuced out without necessarily getting rid of all his stuff and sort of left it up to my husband to sort out.  I get that some of the stuff was mutually shared and bought (i.e. plates and kitchen utensils and their couch) but his bed?  His bookcase?  (We took the bookcase, tho.  He didn't want it.)

Anyway, you know how moving goes.  Well-laid plans with the best intentions that start melting in the sun and Georgia humidity.  I started out as a trooper but ended up sweaty, tired and irritable.  The turning point came when we were finally unloading our stuff into the storage unit.  A box which had a delicate item in it slipped and the item inside, an elegant white serving dish, was smashed to heart-wrenching pieces.  Tears sprang to my eyes and my husband apologized about 50 million times and I ended up making him feel bad and it was just a bad moment.  But in the end we just took the box with the broken pieces (and gift receipt!), put it in the car and hoped that maybe we could get a new one.  That was the first thing broken.

I got the new bookcase all nice and set up and was sorting through junk to throw away or things with sentimental value enough to keep.  In the process of moving things around, I dropped a little ceramic creation we made with the Young Married's group from church (before we were actually married, but we were included anyway). That was the second thing broken.

We went back to my husband's old apartment to do some final sweeping and vacuuming.  He produced a plate and serving dish one of our colleagues had let him borrow for his little CD release party a while ago.  I had planned to go but decided not to for whatever reason.  That was about a month before our initial coffee date.  So, in effect, my husband had borrowed and kept those things from before the time it took to meet me, date me, become engaged to me and marry me until now.  We had a good laugh about it.  We put them in the car. I drove the car and he drove the truck on the way to donate the beds.  Enter a weird driving person who kept putting on the brakes at weird times.  Just as I was about to get into a turning lane, homegirl suddenly stops in front of me for whatever reason, so I slam on the brakes.  Of course the dishes (on the back seat) fly off.  And one of them shatters on the floorboard.  That was the third thing broken.

Back at home.  Finally.  My husband is digging around for some boxes and/or bins to put his to-be-donated kitchen items into.  In the process, he drops a box of these little stone coasters with our initial on it.  I was planning to take those back to Bed Bath and Beyond because people got us like a million of them.  My husband apologetically emerges with pieces of one of the coasters...except...it's not his fault.  I actually broke that coaster a while ago when I was digging around in our little closet.  But I put it back in the box with the others and figured we'd take care of it later. And that was the fourth thing (still) broken.

Today, sore from our moving expedition, I thought about our reactions to things breaking and how it related to our marriage.  I was nearly crushed after the first broken thing.  It was a really nice dish someone had given us for our wedding.  And it was sort of my husband's "fault" since he was moving stuff around when it fell.  I got upset.  But what about the things that I broke?  Even something that didn't belong to us?  Even something that I broke a while ago and never said anything about?   He was calm.  Forgiving.

I realized that I could definitely stand to be a little calmer and a little more readily forgiving when things don't go the way I think they should.

And we took back the broken elegant white dish and got a brand new one.  I felt so badly for my unnecessary drama when the first one was broken.  I apologized over and over.  My husband smoothed down my hair, smiled, and assured me that it was okay.

Things I Did While My Husband Was Out of Town

1. Went to Target with all the Target gift cards we received.  I bought a little rolling cooler for the beach (in two weeks) and a sunflower-colored beach bag.  I can only find cute clothes/shoes when I don't have any money or gift cards to spend.

2. Ate leftover chicken poppyseed casserole and watched Buzzfeed videos.

3. Worked all night on a bibliography that I should have finished a while ago because I needed to finish it, I wasn't tired, and I needed to keep my mind occupied.

4. Ate a middle-of-the-night piece of banana bread.

5. Got in on his side of the bed not just because it's closer to the lamp.  Smelled his bottle of cologne and his stick of deodorant and looked at a little baby picture of himself he got from his mom's house when we went to visit over Christmas.

5. Tried to go to sleep, but, being unable to, read a couple of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie short stories.

6. Finished a short story that ended pretty depressingly, felt sad, felt cold, didn't feel like moving to turn up the temperature, cried into his pillow and still couldn't sleep.

7. Tried a breathing exercise I'd read about in one of those stupid "listicles" to help me fall asleep.  It didn't work.

8. Started thinking about babies again and how my father half-jokingly said we were "postponing" having one.  Mom I can understand, but not you, Dad.  Not you.

9. Woke up from a strange dream-filled sleep at 8 am.

10. Thought I'd lay back down just for a few more minutes and didn't wake up again until 10:45.  There's a morning wasted.

Two Months

So, Thursday was our two-monthiversary.  We celebrated with a breakfast of Chick-fil-a chicken biscuits.  Yup, totally went all out.  Some observations:

1. I sometimes struggle with an impulse to push him away when I don't feel like a great me.  It's like I want him to go away for a while until I'm back to being acceptable enough.  But I just can't do that.

2. The impending fall semester is staring me in the face.  It's going to mean sequestering myself in a library carrel while I eke out the rest of my dissertation.  It's going to mean beginning a job search that feels overwhelming.  It's going to mean not spending as much time with my husband because while I'm writing, he's going to be taking classes/teaching/researching/writing.  I know that once classes start, things aren't going to be the way they have been this summer.

3. Conversations with my mom have taken on a new layer that I'm trying to get accustomed to.  I can't explain what it is.  It's not awkwardness, necessarily.  It's a hesitation, an unsure dance that consists of trying to figure out the boundary between supportive and intrusive, between honesty and oversharing.  It's her trying to exercise restraint when her heart is spilling over with all the advice and experience that 34 years of marriage has to offer, wanting to say the right thing.  It's me wanting to talk to my mom like I always have, but trying to figure out how to do so with the awareness that someone else is intimately connected to me.

4. One of the things I'm trying not to allow to take residence in my brain is the fear that we will never gain the stability I'll need to feel comfortable enough to have a baby.  It's ridiculous, I know.  A perfect time or perfect amount of "stability" necessary to undergo any kind of life change simply doesn't exist.  And I have no idea what the future holds, so I'm trying to tell my brain to cut it out.  That kind of thinking doesn't do anyone any favors.

5. Sometimes when I look at my husband unnoticed (while he's asleep, working, or doing something that allows me to observe without being observed), I ponder what it is that made him decide that I was it.  What made him so sure?  We're different.  We were raised differently.  Our families and backgrounds are different.  How did he decide that he definitively wanted me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me?  When I ask him things like this, he laughs and says something sweet and generic, like because I'm a beautiful person or something like that.  But the fact is that there's not some specific reason or specific moment he can recall that he can point to as the reason or the moment, and that's how life is a lot of times.  There are a series of little reasons and little moments that add up to a life-defining whole.

Oh, Baby

No, we are not having a baby any time soon.  I always feel like warding off questions about kids with a crucifix as if they were vampires trying to sink their fangs into my exposed neck.

Why, then, is my brain being lit up with baby fantasies?

I know I don't want one.  Not right now.  It would just be too hard and too weird and just too much.  Ugh, knocked up/writing a dissertation/trying to find a job/maybe moving/still being a newlywed.  Just a jumble of stuff that would just be ugh.  My brain knows I don't want that.  Not for real.

But then I keep having these visions of myself glowing with maternal radiance and wearing these flowing maternity clothes and my husband being the sweetest husband in the world and taking care of me.  I imagine carrying this beautiful, fat, brown baby.  Curly, coppery hair, dimples (in the cheek like him or in the chin like me), and devastatingly long, dark lashes.

I imagine baby foods: applesauce, bananas, those grainy cookies they gum down until they're soaked through with saliva. I want to decorate my baby's room with a Curious George theme.  My baby is definitely going to be bilingual, we've already decided that.  My husband and I are both fluent in Spanish and plan to consistently use the language with our child.

I imagine my parents being the most happy humans in the world.  Finally.  A grandchild.  I know my in-laws would of course be happy, too, but my husband has older siblings who have already married and produced grandchildren.  My future baby (unless one of my brothers beats me to it, which, at this point, I highly doubt) will be my parents' first.

Even after so many questions have been settled, new ones always arise.  Who knows where we're going to be, where we're going to be headed, what we're going to be doing this time next year?  I still feel unsettled.  And I feel like things have to be settled before we bring a baby into the equation.  But then I ask, are things ever "settled"?

Sacred Marriage or Is Marriage "Hard"? Part II

A friend suggested the book Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas, so I downloaded it to my Kindle and started reading.  I'm already four chapters in.  The premise is not unlike something I've expressed in one of my earlier posts and that is that God intended marriage, rather than as a means of self-fulfillment, as a means of understanding our relationship with Him.

It seems that part of what makes marriage "hard" is loving another flawed human being and making a conscious choice to love this flawed human being every day, which in turn requires you to exercise self-discipline and requires you to examine your own flaws.

Maybe it's a good thing I married a little later than many people because by this time, I'm confident in saying that I don't have my expectations too high.  What I'm saying is that people get disillusioned because they go into marriage expecting their partner to "make them happy" and fulfill them in ways only God can.  I realize that knowing this mentally is different than putting it into practice spiritually.  But in the end, it would be unfair for me to expect my husband to bring me to a place of self-actualization, just as it would be unfair for him to expect it of me.

But here's what I'm still having trouble accepting: That one day the feeling of being "in love" will fade away.  Maybe it's true.  It's something I've heard and read many times.  That the "excitement" fades and you're left with something more "stable" and "familiar."  But I honestly feel that excitement is not really what makes me feel in love, and I don't think that stable and familiar are buzzkills.  I'm okay with the ordinary.  With routine.  What makes me feel in love are very simple things that aren't "exciting."  What makes me feel in love is seeing how he lights up when he comes home to me after a long day.  What makes me feel in love is when we hold pinkies in church as we're praying a dismissal prayer/pre-altar call prayer (I don't know how or why we started doing it, we just do).  What makes me feel in love is seeing him enjoy a raspberry-blueberry-banana smoothie I made for him.  I know that as we learn more and more about each other, we will become more and more familiar to each other, but why does that lead to a loss of feeling "in love"?

I have this picture framed and placed on our coffee table:

I look at how on-top-of-the-world we both feel in this moment, and I want to always remember it.  Treasure it.  I know I will not always feel the excitement of this day, but I want to always believe that marrying him was one of my best decisions.  We wrote our own vows and we have them taped to the mirror in our room.  Every time I look at myself in the mirror, I'm faced with my promises to him and his promises to me.  They remind me of why I decided to marry him.  That's what makes me feel in love.  Please don't tell me the delight of sharing my life with someone will fade away.  Right now, that idea is hard for me to believe or accept.

Is Marriage "Hard"?

I've gotten so many grim-faced warnings that marriage is so "hard" before getting married, it annoyed me, but I also have to admit it slightly worried me.  One of my FB friends posted this article. I really appreciated it and it made a lot of sense to me, giving a relatable analogy to explain the so-called "difficulty" of marriage.

But here's another admission: I think we're special.

What I mean is, I have this feeling that we're different than the people who've supposedly been there and done that and know how "hard" marriage is.  Maybe it's silly and naive and perhaps even a little self-indulgent, but that's sort of how I feel.  I guess I don't think that facing life married will be any harder than facing life single.  I faced life single for a pretty long time and sometimes it was hard and sometimes it was exhilarating, but most of the time it was somewhere in-between. I imagine marriage to be more or less the same.

Call me naive, but also I have this unfounded, fanciful belief that we possess above-average gratefulness for one another.  I cannot remember a day we haven't said "I love you" (several times a day) to each other since we started saying "I love you."  Even the times we've argued ended up in "I love you"s.  I guess we haven't had a super blow-up argument yet, but I wonder if we ever will.  I know, I know.  We're still in the honeymoon phase, right?

I guess I feel like we have above-average gratefulness for one another because we've both experienced really low points in our lives and we've both had past unhealthy relationships and we're just so glad to have found each other and are basking in the glow of a positive, healthy, caring, nurturing, loving, godly relationship.  I feel like we're both hyper-aware of not taking each other for granted.

I feel like I have the best husband in the entire world.  He's a delightful melange of handsome and sweet, sexy and mild-mannered, hard-working and creative, sensitive and resolute.  He loves to see me smile.  Going to Kroger with him.  Having a soul food picnic with him (barbecue chicken and pork loin, cornbread, collards, blackeyed peas, mac and cheese, baked beans).  Playing the guitar and tambourine and singing together near the fountain in front of our department.  Watching a movie on my laptop with ice cream sundaes.  Riding the campus bus together.  Reading our devotion together while we have our morning coffee.  Taking evening walks beside the train tracks.  I love sharing my life with him.

When I think of the "marriage is hard" warnings from time to time, it makes me wonder if one day the other shoe will drop.  If one day, I'll wake up, sniff the air, smell the end of our honeymoon phase, and then steel myself for the beginning of the hard days.  Part of me is waiting for the hard part to begin.  Part of me is wondering if we're living in a fantasy whose days are numbered.  Because, according to the experienced ones, marriage is supposed to be hard.  Right now, I feel like I'm falling more and more in love.

Inner Smile

I'm currently obsessed with this song.  The original comes from the soundtrack of one of my favorite movies, Bend It Like Beckham, and then I realized the band had done a soulful 60s remix of it.  I like it better than the original.

Everything about being in this particular moment in time, this Sunday evening, relaxing at home with a cup of tea, makes me smile.

Husband and I visited some friends for the 4th of July weekend, came back, silently but companionably unpacked our stuff and slipped into chill mode.  Except now I'm still in chill mode and he decided to skate for a while.  I have a skateboarding husband.  That makes me smile, too.

I've been kind of sedentary this summer.  Hunched over my laptop grading stuff for this online class, editing and doing other side projects...I can't gain even a smidgen of weight without it being noticeable.  I'm getting a little soft around the middle.  Better start doing some crunches and planks or people (those same "people" to whom I address passive-aggressive rants) are going to take it upon themselves to ask if I've got a bun in the oven.

I do fantasize about having a baby, though.  Even though in real life I am deathly afraid of having one right now.  But just the idea...what if I did?  The knowledge that I could realistically turn up preggo simultaneously thrills and terrifies me.

When we were in Pittsburgh last weekend, we went to church and during worship, hubs was holding his sweet little baby nephew.  Just the way that he was tenderly holding him made estrogen come running out of my pores.  I must have been looking at him with serious mother hunger in my eyes because a lady sitting in front of me who must have been observing us for a minute touched my arm, smiled and said, "I know that look."  For some reason, I felt like I had been caught red-handed.  Why is maternal longing something I want to hide?

I'm afraid to romanticize having a baby.  But I just can't help but imagine our baby possessing an otherworldly beauty, and I know that the baby will enter the world with SO MANY people loving the stew out of it.  Like, I don't think there will be a being more loved in the world than our baby.

But, back to earth.  There are dissertations to finish and jobs to procure.  For now, though, I smile.  I enjoy this little piece of peace.

Me, in my head, "In My Place"

In my place, in my place
Were lines that I couldn't change

Post-marriage family gatherings.  New nieces and nephews smiling, teeth coming in.  A preemie plumping up, he looks just like her brother.

What do you do on a rainy day?  We have Starbucks gift cards from my new sister-in-law.  I have online class quizzes to grade, discussion boards to check, oral exams to open back up in an effort to show professorial grace to students who have confessed and repented over email.

Last weekend was my family.  Well, it's our family, isn't it?  My dad's a big brother.  I get it, I'm a big sister.  Still bossy, wanting to be "responsible."  I have a little brother who's always a little brother in my head.  Even though the little brother is a year older than my husband.  Might as well get over it.  Uncle (dad's little brother), cousins, more cousins.  They were all at the wedding.  Back for a Father's Day family reunion.  This family weekend didn't end with bringing home leftovers for the road.  It ended in my dad opening up the church and baptizing his little brother.  My dad's a big brother.  He's the oldest, like me.

My dad must get over the fact that I am a married woman over thirty.  That's my daughter.  In the arms of another man.  Really?  As if my dad were my boyfriend and I left him for some other dude.  It's like, dude, you're my dad, and the "other man" is my husband.  Fact.  You married us. You signed the marriage license as the officiant.  Remember that?  It's like, do you want grandchildren or not?  How do you think they're going to get here?  It's not going to be because my husband gave me a long side hug.

This weekend is his family.  Our family.  A long road trip broken up with stops, snacks, punk rock and NPR.  I realized they're starting to feel natural.  He looks just like his brother.  When I saw his brother in the swimming pool with the kids, I thought, that's how he's going to be with our kids. Seeing the same things in his brother and his dad that I see in him.  Mannerisms, forehead shape, bespectacled and bent over digging out chocolate icing-covered brownies.

Curly-haired niece (former flower girl) and nephew (former ring bearer) on either side of me bringing book after book.  I read with voices and outlandish expressions.  They sit in rapt attention.  Okay now, give Aunt Chantell (they say "ant" and I say "ahnt," just like they say "pop" and I say "soda") a break.  But I don't mind.

This is what I wanted to say during our visit to the young adults' bible study that I didn't say but finally felt compelled to say at the end: The reason for marriage is for us to understand what a relationship with God is.  That's another one of those things I've heard before, but that I know now.

I'm used to singly feeling my feelings.  Just staying in my own head and letting things rage on there.  Cry if I have to cry.  Worry if I have to worry (which I don't have to, but...you know).  Do my thing and maybe call a friend and bother her about it.  But I have a husband now and now my feelings can spill out and affect him.  If tears run down my face and he's there, he will wipe them away with his own hands.  Marriage forces you to be vulnerable.

There's still a part of me that is afraid to be vulnerable.  There is still a part of me that tries to take on this too-big responsibility.  There is still a part of me which feels like I have some fixing up to do and some sorting out to accomplish before I can allow myself to be loved and accepted.  But that's where the truth of it is like what God is: I'm already loved and accepted.  It's already a done deal.

Very soon, I must deactivate my Facebook account for a long while.  There are so many voices and distractions and I have so much to do.  I feel like I've been squandering my focus and attention.  I have to re-prioritize.  I have to get out of my head, get words on paper and stop being afraid to be honestly me.

One Month Milestone

I've been married for a month already.  Really?  That was fast.

Husband's been going out of town doing fieldwork for his dissertation project (yes, already) so since he wasn't sure whether he'd be back before dinnertime, we had a monthiversary breakfast at this ridiculously good breakfast place.  It's actually the same breakfast place we went to when I met his family for the first time and the same breakfast place we went to the weekend he met my pops for the first time.  Come to think of it, later on that same day he proposed to me.  I'd already met all of his folks, he had finished meeting all of mine...what else was there to wait for, I guess.  Here's one thing I know about my hubs: When there's something he's decided upon or that he's working towards, he don't play no games.  Old boy put me on lock quick.  I ain't mad at him. 

He'll text me in a little while to let me know whether he'll make it back for dinner.  If he does, I'll cook a special one-monthiversary surprise.  If he doesn't, I'll have leftover chicken stir fry.  Win-win.

So, I'm teaching an online class...going okay.  Some technical hiccups, but so far so good.  I've got to stay on top of it.  Doing editing for my prof (nice extra $$) and small translation projects on the side (more nice extra $$).  But the one thing I MUST do has been getting lost in the sauce.  It begins with a 'd.' And it is the bane of my existence.  I just can't emerge from this summer with nothing done towards my next chapter.  Ugh.  I just can't.  

Here's something I realize.  Like, I've been wanting to get married for the longest time, and now that I finally am, I'm super happy, but it honestly feels like regular life.  Because it is.  Like, I haven't transformed into some kind of ethereal being or anything.  I'm still the same me.  It's just that I'm continuing to be the same me alongside my husband.  I'm not saying that our marriage hasn't taken some adjusting to and that it won't continue to take adjusting to.  But I'm saying I don't feel like this brand new, ultra-spectacular me that I have to get accustomed to being.  Getting married felt exciting, but it also felt natural.  It's almost like, my now-husband came into my life, and soon he just became a normal part of my life and I couldn't see my life without him being a part of it, so, naturally, I married him.  That's really how it feels.

Here's something else I realize.  Something else I've wanted for the longest time is to become a mother.  But now that the possibility of becoming one is very scarily stark and tangible and real, I feel myself doing some backpedaling.  I know I had said dat...ummm.  Yeah, I had said...see, I need to think about it, den I letchu know.  I want to have kids.  We both do.  But it's like, darn.  Bringing a tiny, defenseless little human being into the world is no joke.  It's not like we don't have support. My mother, for example, is salivating with grandma hunger.  She is going to be a ride or die grandmother.  I don't even want to think about it.  Seriously though, I'm really thankful we have such supportive families and church family who would be there for us 100%.  But what I'm saying is that I feel like if I have a kid, I am going to be turned inside out and exposed for the inconsistent, contradictory, insecure person I am.  All my anxieties are going to come spilling out of me like marbles because 1. I have the capacity to reproduce and I do not want to reproduce the worst in me, 2. I don't want terrible truths about the world we live in to steal my baby's sunshine, and 3. Having a baby is going to change my relationship with my husband.  

Just like getting married isn't all about a pretty white dress and new toasters, having a baby is not all about cute maternity clothes and getting one of those slings (although I'm super getting one because they look awesome, with the baby all wrapped up in it against the mom).  I'm totally okay with waiting.  I come from a line of fertile women and I'm still on the green side of 30, so it'll be quite all right.

Welcome to the latest edition of "Passive-Aggressive Answers to Annoying Questions"

So, how's married life going?

Really?  It's going horribly.  Oh, my God, it's misery.  It's SO hard.  I hate it.  It's the worst.  I mean, seriously.  Like, what do you expect me to say, other than, "um...good?"  Like, what other kind of answer is there?  It's going pretty much the way I thought it would.  There's a dude I love living with me who gets special privileges.  That pretty much sums it up.

Have you guys gotten into an argument yet?  Aww, you're still in the honeymoon phase, but you'll see...just wait!

Ugh!  Will you sit down and shut your unfunny mouth up?!  Ugh.  Number one, it's none of your big fat business whether we've gotten into an argument, first of all.  And secondly, like, do you really think we've never had a disagreement ever in the history of our relationship?  Please.  And it didn't stop us from getting married, did it?  Get outta here.  I cannot express how annoying it is for people to come around with this patronizing attitude as if we're just in some kind of blissful otherworld right now just obliviously floating around on a love cloud until the other shoe finally drops to jolt us into the grim, gray, harsh reality of "real life."  Get yourself outta my face with that.  Go saddown somewhere with your old wrinkled up boring spouse and your jaded marriage and let me enjoy my brand new, super hot hubs without your prophesies of the impending end of our honeymoon phase.

So, are you guys planning on having kids?

If someone asks me that one mo' gin, I swurr...like, get up out of my reproductive business!  Who died and made you my OB/GYN?  Seriously.  I mean, when and if we have them, are you going to feed and clothe them?  Are you going to buy their diapers?  Are you going to potty train them?  Are you going to set up their college funds?  Aight, den.  Plus, can we live?  Like, can we learn what being married means first before we start piling buns in the oven?  And on top of that, are you going to write my dissertation?  Are you going to give me and/or my husband a job?  Like, the aforementioned things are going to have to happen so that we can support these hypothetical desired children.  So, unless you're going to contribute any energy or money into facilitating my hypothetical children's arrival into the world, you 'ont een need to wurry bout it, tho.

-versary

This past Saturday was our two-weekiversary.  We spent it at another wedding, one of husband's professors.  So, we ended up seeing a bunch of other people in the department who also went to our wedding, still giving glowing reviews on how "wonderful" and "beautiful" everything was.

This coming Sunday is our engageiversary.  June 7 last year is when husband proposed to me.  Good Lord.  We were engaged for 11 months before we got married and dated 8 months before we got engaged.  Say what you will.  When it's right, it's right.

We've already celebrated our first -versary, which was our coffeedateiversary.  That's October 21, the first time we ever spent time together.  We went back to the same coffee shop, and it was probably the most beautiful, sweetest milestone I've ever celebrated.

The only -versary we haven't officially celebrated is our kissiversary.  Yes, I remember the exact date of the first time we ever smooched.  But some things must remain secret and sacred.  Plus, I don't want anyone to judge the time span between it and the initial coffeedateiversary.  Some people might think it's too long and some people might think it's too short and I'm just going to leave it to the imagination.

Name

I'm in that in-between stage where I am so ready to officially be Chantell Marriedname, but I can't move a muscle until that marriage certificate comes in the mail.  I changed my voicemail as soon as I thought about it.  "Hi, you've reached Chantell Marriedname, I'm sorry I'm not available right now..."

I'm in this amorphous state.  Like, if I write any checks from the bank account I've had since I've had a bank account, well over a decade, I have to sign them Chantell Maidename.  Anything "official" that I sign right now or anything that I own that has my maiden name on it will have to be that for now.  I'm only going to be a student here for another year, so do I have to go through the trouble (and expense) of getting a new student ID?  For the class I'm teaching this summer, I'm still Chantell Maidenname, because I was that when I was assigned the class, so that's the name the class is under.  I know my departmental mailbox is going to have my new name in the fall since I've made it public that I'm changing my name.  My FB name is that married girl's trifecta of Chantell Maidenname Marriedname.  That's probably going to be the name I publish under as well.  For little cards and things and whatever personal things I sign, I am totally Chantell Marriedname, marriage certificate in hand or not.

But when I graduate, when I get my diploma (in Jesus' name, by this time next year) will I have Chantell Middlename Marriedname, or Chantell Maidenname Marriedname printed on it?  I completed a good bit of this program before I even met my husband, so part of me wants to honor the me that did that work.  But my middle name is my middle name (and also my grandmother's name) and isn't that a part of the "me that did that work," too?

And what about my email address?  Will it still be partoffirstnamemiddleinitiallastname@gmail.com?  Or will I change it, too, to a married lady email address?  I've had the same email address for a super long time.  There's a part of me that just wants to keep it as is.  But if I'm planning to change my name legally, wouldn't it make sense to change my email address as well?  Sigh.