THAT'S MARRIAGE FOR YOU
It was my husband and I’s first wedding anniversary
yesterday. And like any good marker of a year gone by, the day (or wee hour of the morning) started off by
making quite a profound and indicative statement of marriage; if I do say so myself.
At around eleven p.m. we were laying in bed - calm down, this
is rated PG-13 - and I started feeling queasy. Trying to ignore it, knowing we
had a nice day planned the following day for our anniversary, I decided that I
would willfully make my stomach feel better and ignore the revolt that was clearly going on inside of me. Amusingly enough sometimes this Jedi mind trick works, but definitely not this time. Almost as the clock struck midnight (which
meant our anniversary was upon us) I stumbled out of bed in a cold sweat feeling
like that man from the film Aliens who had the creature burst through his stomach cavity. Next thing I knew I was hollering for my husband
(I’m like a little kid when I’m sick, and I hate throwing up alone to the sheer
delight of those I force to accompany me) lying prostrate on the bathroom floor
fearing the inevitable. A few moments later, just as our
anniversary had begun, I began throwing up on the floor and my husband sweetly
and dutifully sat there cleaning it up around me. He knows I’m a clean freak,
so the fact that he was soon enough bleaching the floor tickled me, while at
the same time made me want to wretch even more. Bleach, bad stomach. Not a good
mix.
Anyway, as I lay there I almost laughed to myself (at the time I didn't really have the energy) thinking,
this for certain is marriage. And what better way to welcome another year of
it. I of course don’t mean that marriage is vomit – although some days I suppose
it could feel like that (ha!); but the fact that in the middle of the night,
when you’re feeling utterly wretched with food poisoning, you have that person in the other room
that will come in, mop your brow, clean up after you and bleach the bathroom
floor while you lie there trying to figure out what the hell you ate. The other
beautiful part of marriage (or coupledom really) is that despite the fact that
I must have looked like Keith Richard’s after a bad festival weekend, and I’m
pretty sure some of my sick got in my hair, my husband still looked at me the
next morning with love (mixed with a bit of fear) in his eyes as he handed me an anniversary card. Of
course before he kissed me, he double-checked I brushed my teeth at least four
times and combed my hair free of any foreign objects. Again, that’s marriage
for you. There’s unconditional love, all encompassing acceptance and
friendship, with just the right dash of relentless piss-taking (I
suppose in American lingo you’d call that teasing, mild mockery etc.). We’re
big on that in this house.
Of course, being that I’ve been a mother for the last three
years with acute insomnia, shockingly after the night I had, I didn’t feel much worse than I usually do. So we decided to hit the nearby arboretum (I love
that word, brings me back to my Michigan days) with the King so he could feed
his latest obsession of stick gathering and forest wandering. After watching
him for forty minutes gather every stick within a mile radius with his best pal
and neatly pile them on top of one another, I quickly realized that this kid has
inherited my organizational (and cleaning) bent. God love him. [I'm also sure his father was thinking that perhaps he'll solicit him to clean up after me the me next time I get food poisoning].
And so, our anniversary went from vomit, to stick gathering,
to a BBQ on a damn find London night - a rarity in these parts. What more could a gal ask for really.
Happy
Monday all.