Wanting and knowing

Had a dream last night that I've had before and which highlights an odd thing about being married.  I am somewhere, and there's some vague guy, and I just know he's into me.  I can feel it in the air.  He wants me, and I know it, and he knows I know it.  It's those moments before anything at all even happens when it just hangs in the air like when you know it's going to rain.  And that's the whole dream. 

I wake up knowing that I am happily married and remembering that that is a feeling I've had in my past.  I don't get that feeling any more, ring firmly on increasingly-chubby finger.  I'm thrilled to not be dating.  But it's kind of nice to visit that feeling in a dream.  Few things are like that feeling.  Love is stronger and more important, but it doesn't feel like standing on that precipice.

The last time I had that feeling in real life was on my first date with my husband.  If this were a fairy tale, we would be having these dreams about each other, but I guess that's not the way it works.

Shaming?

Postscript on my recent "Invisible" post:

I go home, act like a freaky jerk to my husband, he thinks I'm mad at him and he can't figure out what he did wrong (since he did nothing wrong), we're weird until finally I cry, explain that I don't know why I'm upset, and then he's really, really nice to me.  The end.

In the midst of me finally crying - which I had been needing to do all day - it was revealed to me why I was so upset.  *snot-gasp-sob* "I feel like I'm shaming him..." *wah-boo-hoo-snot*.  It's amazing how sometimes you need to let yourself break open to discover what the truth is.  I've been feeling that, even though of course I have the right to quit my job, it seems like my leaving has exposed to others what really goes on here.  I feel like I'm revealing a secret about my boss to the world and that it is shameful.  He may be dysfunctional, but he's also been very kind to me, and I guess I feel bad about this.  My subconscious is volunteering to torture itself on his behalf to compensate.  Healthy!

Also.

This morning I discovered that I have a two hour conference call related to volunteer work that I need to participate in when I am supposed to be on vacation.  boo.  This is the worst-planned vacation ever.  We still have no idea where we're going or what we want to do.

What we're worth

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I just had to email someone my "salary requirements."  I am so nervous.  How do you say how much you think you should be worth?  I changed my numbers like three times, couched them in polite sentences, and finally pressed "send".

Google sources pretty much told me to blow off the question with a B.S. politician's change-the-subject sort of answer, but I think that is disrespectful.

Nothing is happening at my job.  It makes me feel not worth very much.  But looking at new opportunities, refining my resume, and creating a portfolio of professional writing samples kind of made me feel like my services could be worth a lot, and that I deserved more.

I'm scared that she will see the numbers I wrote and think, "Who does this girl think she is?  I could get a hundred people to do this for cheaper than that.  She doesn't deserve that, and she's BAD for thinking that she does."  I know, I sound like a 5-year-old.

But then I think of how happy I would be to work very hard for an amount that felt fair, and that pushed me to be worth it, to add value and make a contribution.  I want to be challenged.  I want to feel good about myself.

You always hear that women don't get paid much because we are too scared to ask for raises or to negotiate salaries.  What if I internalized that and now I just asked for too much?  Like to compensate for all the women who don't ask for what they're worth?  eeek.     

What if I am influenced by my husband's promotion to think that such jumps in rank and salary are the natural way of things, when really they are rare and only happen when you have connections that I don't have? 

What if I missed my opportunity for a happy, healthy work environment by emailing the wrong numbers?  What if she asks what I'm making now and is appalled that I asked for such a jump in numbers?

What I really want to say is that if I had a crystal ball that told me your organization and job were the right fit for me, and that I would make work-friends who I could talk to, and I would feel useful and competent and healthy, and I don't have to be afraid if I get pregnant or need to deal with endo at work, then I don't care much about the money, just please please be the right fit!  But now I'm in the game and I've got to play the game until it's over.

In my workday, I feel like I'm incubating secrets like a fat hen sitting on breakable eggs.  I'm terrified of having three jobs in a row that are a bad fit.  Currently stewing in number two.

I'm also scared of what a hard job plus potential pregnancy/kids plus husband's hard job could mean.  We are not that great at managing our household as it is...  Is this all too much?

Did a walk-a-thon this weekend and my hamstrings and hips were so tight.  Because all I do all week is sit crunched up in this chair like a bored zombie zig zag, staring at a screen all day five days a week.  Sometimes I opt to use the bathroom on another floor and it's like - ooh!  an outing!  stairs!  Then I come back and sit down again in this never-ending silence.  Which makes me wonder if I should have said I would work for anything for my freedom.  Instead I wrote down bigger numbers than have ever applied to me before.  Shit.

Sorry for the freak-out post.  Hopefully will return to normal programming soon.
 

Ironing the rags

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Lately it seems like the past is near.  Like the things that haunted past generations are trying to get their hooks into my own generation, into me.  I act out old patterns without meaning to, think old thoughts as instinct, and what was the past is still right here inside of me.  I am inscribed.

It started with my mother-in-law casually asking me if I packed my husband lunches every day.  That seemed odd and old-fashioned.  Two days ago, I felt my husband was not doing his share of the cleaning in preparation for a visit from out-of-town relatives.  I resented how it seemed to be my role, as the female, to prepare the house and be the hostess. 

Then there was yesterday's dinner with the relatives, an event so filled with heavy statements, lingering ghosts, and clues to the mysteries of my family that today on Good Friday I am still digesting what it all means.


Before people arrived, I cleaned the last things, straightened a pillow, put on the tablecloth.  I spun the patterned plates I inherited from my grandmother as I positioned them before each chair so that the blue carriage scene faced the correct direction.  I cut hyacinths and a daffodil from the front yard and placed them in a vase in the middle of the table.  My aunt and uncle had driven across the country for an Easter visit, so I wanted their first impression of my house to be a good one.

Before my mother and aunt arrived, it was me and the guys - my husband, brother, father, and 84-year-old uncle who hadn't seen me since my wedding.  The first thing my uncle said as I greet him is, "You've gained some weight!  It looks good on you."  It seemed like he expected me to thank him for the assessment of my body shape in front of three other men.  I said, "Okaaaaay . . ." and someone changed the subject as I fumed in silence. Suddenly, my breasts and stomach felt huge and prominent.  I wish I weren't so affected, so upset.  I wish I didn't know I would remember this for a long time.  I wish I didn't monitor my eating so he wouldn't think I eat too much - so he didn't think I deserved this larger body I now have.

I spent the night sucking my stomach in for this asshole who I only see once every few years.  As if that would disguise it - the obvious fact that I have gained a lot of weight, and it's visible and everyone can tell, everyone has known for some time now.  It's not my private secret just because no one else is rude enough to bring it up except my inappropriate 84-year-old uncle.

This rude comment coincided with a rather adult moment - the kind of old-fashioned, classic adult moment that centuries of women have been groomed to orchestrate: I am greeting relatives who have known me since infancy as a grown woman and as a wife, in my own home, as hostess for a meal.  I am proud of my husband and my house, and proud of the woman I have grown up to be.  Look at this happy life I have made for myself.  Look at the flowers from my own yard on the table. 

I stare across the kitchen at my elderly uncle, clutching his glass with two hands so he doesn't drop it, confessing that my aunt no longer trusts him to drive, asking for everything to be repeated because he can't hear.  I've gained weight, but he has new hearing aids.  Time marches on.  It's not worth it to make a scene by expressing my rage.  I am actually the one with power here - youthfulness and health.  I need to let this go.  

When my aunt and mother arrive, my aunt has my dad go re-park my mother's car so it is not so far from the curb.  As her husband follows her sister's orders, my humiliated mother tries to joke that she's being put in her place by her big sister just like the old days.

During the meal, my aunt reveals that in childhood my grandmother made her iron everything, even her father's undershirts, even the rags.  She didn't have to iron her father's underwear, but there was a particular way to fold each one.  After ironing, the rags could be folded and stacked - they wouldn't stack nicely if they had been wrinkled.  When my aunt grew up and got her own house, my grandmother offered to give her some of her rags and was mad when my aunt said that she didn't want my grandmother's rags. Imagine how much my grandma thought of her rags!  My grandmother who survived the Great Depression, who in her rural childhood wore dresses sewn from the fabric of flour sacks and grew up to live in urban Cleveland having these rags, this superfluous fabric, that she made her daughter care for and fold and stack.

My mother and aunt discuss how their childhood church - where they were baptized, went to school, gave confession, got married, and buried their parents - was recently going to be closed but the Vatican is making them re-open it.  They are much relieved that the Vatican has taken this step, despite the Catholic money problems stemming from all of the sexual abuse lawsuits.

I sit next to my mother, our similar soft bellies pressing against the dinner table.  She reminds me to bring an extra hardboiled egg with the deviled eggs I am assigned to bring for Easter dinner in three days.  It's an Eastern European family tradition to cut the egg into pieces and each person eats from the same egg "to keep the family together."  How pagan, I think.  She mentions ham, kielbasa, sweet potatoes for Easter dinner.  Garden of the Gods salad.  Usually there would be fried homemade pierogies, but this year my mother is making a renewed attempt to control her weight.  My brother asks if he's supposed to bring anything and my mother says no.

My aunt explains that when, long ago, my grandmother asked her doctor if she should quit smoking, he told her that it would be bad for her health because it would make her too nervous.  So she kept smoking.  My uncle says that quitting smoking was the hardest thing he ever did and every day he still thinks about smoking.  He talks about the navy.  On the boats, he worked in the laundry.  I don't say this but I think, the navy, that's where you got your tattoo, the tattoo that my grandmother always assumed you were a bad person for having, because people get tattoos in jail.  He asks my husband, "Did you ever smoke?"  In front of my mother, the only right answer to this is no, because in her eyes, only bad people smoke.


My mother expresses shock that my brother never told her he's been going to a physical therapist for weeks.  I mention that that very day, I had done as I was told and called her ten minutes after my doctor's appointment to let her know how it had gone.  My husband says, "Wait, what? You had a doctor's appointment today?" It is probably strange that I agreed to call my mother after my appointment.

I show my aunt and uncle the project I made in a Park and Rec. weaving class I took for eight weeks.  I describe how there were dozens of looms in the basement of an urban elementary school.  They ask if I still have the loom they gave me years ago, plucked out of their many looms and weaving projects and boxes of yarn that crowd their Cleveland living room.  I explain that I took this class so I could learn how to string it up.  "How to sley it," my uncle corrects.  He runs his fingers over the cloth, spreading it out and then re-folding it, examining how the ends are finished and the different patterns in the sampler.  "Houndstooth," we both say.  My aunt says she can't see one mistake in the cloth.  My uncle tells me it is very well-done, and I believe him.

Part of me wants to tell my mother what my uncle said to me about my weight, because I know she will understand precisely how it made me feel and we will gasp together in catharsis and validate each other's appalled reactions.  But I will not bring it up because I know it will actually hurt her to hear.  She will hate him.  And she has to serve him an eight-course Easter dinner in three days and share the hardboiled egg pieces with him and care for him as he sleeps in her house with his hidden tattoo. I look more like her every day, the shape of my body changing to match the round, comforting shapes of her body.

I hear her tell my husband as she's putting on her coat, "My mother would have loved you.  I so wish you could have met her."  Just before the group heads out the door, my aunt and mother are reminiscing about how their mother was so strict and about all of the Catholic school they went to, and my mom says, "People wonder why I never acted out or had a rebellious phase. I never had the slightest chance!"  But I know her too well.  I know she rebelled by eating what she wanted and savoring it.  By getting a doctorate and being more successful than anyone thought she would be.  By taking up space.

 

Schnoz Versus Baby

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I want to get started writing posts again but I'm not sure how to dive in.  There's been some medical shit going down, and not in the direction I've expected.  I need a surgery on my nose to correct a deviated septum and some other issues.  This could double the oxygen I take in each day! 

I am mostly feeling really hopeful that I could feel better, more energetic, more well-rested.  It is also alleviating my fears that if I got pregnant and were not able to medicate when allergy season hit, I would not be able to breathe or sleep and I'd pretty much just die. 

It is really hard to accept that impending surgery means that we are not currently trying to conceive.  We've done soooooo much work to get to this point of both being on the same page, ready to go in trying.  This month could have been it, who knows.  But now I will be trying NOT to get pregnant, so that mommy can breathe through both nostrils and alleviate the constant pressure and ache.

Will I be smarter?  Able to concentrate longer, or, like, at all?  Well-rested?  Cheerful?  Will I feel like exercising?  Will exercising energize me instead of making me feel like crap?  Will I feel like cooking healthy meals and organizing my household a bit? 

Will my husband be able to care for me in the way I need post-surgery?  We'll be breaking new ground here.  I know my mother is awesome at care in these sorts of situations, but now I am a wife, so I guess we'll try out hubby-care.  Let's see if he can handle disgusting nasal things.

I look on Facebook and see former classmates who are the same age as me with two kids already.  Smiling in front of a massive Christmas tree or something.  I know comparisons are not helpful, but I feel behind, and I feel worried.  As someone with endometriosis, I probably should have been first in line for trying to conceive.  Instead, I dated badly for years, got a graduate degree, and after finally getting married and ready to go for it, I am putting everything on hold to tend to my stupid nasal passageways!  It is weird to think about being an old mom, a mom so much older than my own that it is like a completely different species of family life. 

I am worried.  I'm also a little angry that my very passive allergy doc didn't refer me to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor a year ago when it was clear my allergy meds were not helping me very much.  I could have had this all taken care of before baby-trying time.  That is something that is pulling at my energy that I just need to let go.  I need to accept that things did not go down that way.

Have any imaginary readers had nasal surgery, or had fairly old parents?

Mended

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So we did the work of having big talks yesterday, and things are better.  We actually mentioned in the midst of it, "I guess this is the work of marriage."  The heavy lifting, the excavation, the surgery, the tune-up. 

In the midst of being furious yesterday, I stumbled onto a beautifully written blog by a 34-year old widow about her husband and grief and moving on.  A good reminder of how much I have, and how much I have to lose.  As you go post by post, you see how, in the daily web of a marriage, so many facets of your life get intertwined with another person. 

Side-topic: I continue coming to terms with the fact that I decided to change my last name to his (our) last name a few months after the wedding.  I did it with some bitterness and lots of discomfort, based on the faith that later on I would be glad I did.  Tons of people are glad they didn't, and that's fine, but I read a comment on a different blog the other day.  A woman said that no one in her highly educated urban group of friends changed their names, including her, and now that it's many years and two kids later - kids who took the dad's last name - she says she regrets not changing her name because she didn't realize how "profoundly" her whole life would be connected to her husband and children.  It is profound, name change or not.

(The reasons marriage is profound are the same reasons it is such a travesty that it is not legal for all same sex couples. no fair, no fair, no fair.)

headache

So Christmas was lovely, it really was.  And as that glitter fades, husband and I are in reality-land of having to have some Major Communication about some tense subjects. 

I worry over whether I have shared too much with my close friends - vented in too much detail.  Are married people supposed to keep personal things private?  But what do you do when there's communication breakdown and your head is about to explode - just keep it to yourself?  I'm no good at that.  I'm having trouble sleeping as it is.

There's a difference, however, between airing dirty laundry about some temporary boyfriend versus a permanent husband.  I want others to think we are perfect for each other and are doing well.  We are doing very well overall, but sometimes a wife needs some girl talk advice.

Yesterday's strategy of calming down through drinking has, predictably, resulted in a day-long headache and melancholy which does not leave me well-prepared to talk it all out later tonight and reach sensitive shared solutions.  sigh.  No one said marriage would be easy.  It's just that the ways it is hard are ways I did not expect. 

The Kardashians inflame my sinuses

Turns out, it is not good to watch Kim Kardashian's disintegrating marriage on TV right before going to sleep.  When I wasn't tossing and turning from the inability to breathe through my clogged sinuses, I was having the weirdest dreams of being in that crazy condo with those crazy false eyelash people.  I'm not a regular viewer, but it's oddly compelling to observe her misery and disappointment in her husband being filmed just a month into her marriage.  You can see her thoughts of "this is tooooooootally not working. Shit." as she continues to go along with the reality TV semi-scripted shenanigans.  She deserves some of her bad press of course, but it's kind of a sad situation for all involved.  And so annoying that she keeps referring to herself as old at age 30.  OK, enough commenting on other people's absurd marriages...

In other news - I have come to terms with sacrificing my breathing to the Allergy Gods in the spring and summer and early fall.  WTF is up with winter congestion?  No fair.  I just downed my first Sudafed since early fall and can't wait for it to kick in, my little red friends.  My sinuses are prickling with inflammation, heavy like two saddle bags that hang outside of my face.  Sorry if that's too gross.

I'm terrified of what will happen if a potential pregnancy/nursing overlaps with allergy times.  Fellow allergy moms, what did you do to breathe?  How do you handle the sleep deprivation of normal parenting plus the inability to nose-breathe? 

Hostess

So, Thanksgiving happened...  It was good.  A good tornado. 

It felt sort of like coming into our own as a household, or even as adults, to host this holiday in our house.  All the work to get a new tablecloth, and then a tablecloth pad, and then votive candles, and then make flower arrangements -- it was all worth it.  The table looked awesome.

My husband sat at the head of the table, expressed his thanks, and said a brief prayer.  I sat to his left and was proud of him, of both of us.  And since I can read my mother's thoughts, I can say that she was thrilled and surprised that he did a prayer. 

It's weird to be in these traditional roles, since I don't think of myself as a traditional woman.  I mean, why didn't I sit at the head of the table?  Why didn't he obsess over the table centerpiece?  I don't know, I just know it sort of fell into place this way and seemed to go okay.

Well it went okay except I walked in on a conversation in which a loved one was bragging about something being a good thing, while in fact I know it to be a very bad thing not worthy of bragging.  So that kept me up late into the night as my mind turned it over and over.  If I were a good blogger I'd tell you all the details, but for now, this is all I'll say.

My app verus Siri

Some random thoughts:

I have a knack for locating things my husband is looking for.  We've been calling this my Uterus GPS, but last night, holding his beloved iPhone, he said, "No!  It's like your app!  That's your app!"  I'm having trouble competing with this new "Siri" character, the personal assistant who lives in his phone.  He actually says "please" to her when making requests.  It's hilarious.  I've been reminding him of the many things I do that Siri could never ever do for him.  Heh.

I researched Hungarian Matyo embroidery today.  I think I should start a project.  By the way, I am half Hungarian, and I'm a little obsessed with embroidery.  I'll try uploading a Matyo pic.  I'm still learning etiquette on posting pics from other sites, so here is the full link where I got the pic from: http://thatbohemiangirl.tumblr.com/post/9607697644/my-bohemian-aesthetic-hungarian-matyo-embroidery.

I'd love some advice from other bloggers - where do you get your images from, and how do you provide the source for them when they are taken from elsewhere on the web?