I really really WANT to tell you that I was just the slightest bit cranky this morning.
I WANT to tell you that because it would sound a lot better than telling the truth.
But the doodle I drew while answering the phone for the 1,900th time indicates otherwise.
It indicates what my husband realized when he showed up to take me to lunch...
That I was very, very crabby.
Some weeks just suck you know? You're tired. You're stressed. And the work never ends.
Thankfully Mikael is learning to read my moods, and he knew exactly what to say.
"You want to eat meat don't you?" he said.
(We've been We had been trying out "vegeterianism" for about three weeks.)
At first I resisted. I told him the veggie soup at Panera is really good, which it is.
But he looked at my face, and said "Let's go get some chicken."
God bless that man!
We quickly settled on seafood instead, as our re-introduction to carniverous living. It is the chicken of the sea and all that.
Though we were about 25 years younger than the median age for lunch diners at Red Lobster, it felt awfully good to be there. Even better when round one of cheddar biscuits arrived. (And the butter, ohhhh the butter.)
When our combo plate got to us I looked over at my husband, struggling to crack open our fresh snow crab, and I thought to myself, "life doesn't get much better than this."
But then, somehow, it did.
Somehow I came home from work and got a hug and breathed again.
Somehow he made delicious "burgers" from a can of tuna, and the most delicious sweet potato fries I've ever had.
And then the little piggie timer dinged that dessert was ready.
And he and I snuggled up for a movie.
So maybe we fell off the diet for a day. (Update. We have fallen and we can't get back up.) Maybe we sat on our butts for 2 hours instead of hitting the gym.
But hey. They were organic brownies, and who wouldn't wanna watch Finding Nemo? Something about consuming all that fish we just had to watch the flick. You understand right? (I felt a tinge of guilt at the "Fish are friends, not food" line.)
I think the best part of today, though, was realizing that for better or worse, healthy or not-so-much, for fine dining or taking out the trash, I'm in it - this life - with a wonderful man.
A man who wants the best for me, but also acknowledges that sometimes the very best thing isn't bran.
Sometimes the best thing is a brownie. (With all natural ice cream on top!)
**For the sake of honesty I have to add that this was written yesterday. (And it's now been a week since this first addendum; I'm a very bad blogger.)
And that today was a veryyyy long day.
Today, in fact, I was even "crankier" than I was yesterday. It's not a good fact, but it is, fact!
I also want to say that marriage is stinking hard. Sharing life with someone isn't always roses and candlelight. It's not always Finding Nemo and homemade tuna burgers either.
Sometimes marriage is really really tough.
Tougher even than trying days at work. And tougher than high school track meets (and those were killer). And even tougher than attempting vegeterianism, which trust me, is no picnic. Literally!
Marriage is crazy tough!
That, I believe, is a fact.
There have been times in our three months of marriage that I've wished desperately someone would have warned me how hard it would be.
But then I think about how that would have scared the absolute crud out of me, and if that had been the case I would have missed out on a lot of wonderful times too.
Whatever their motivation, no one said much to me about the tough times we were in for. (Or maybe I plugged my ears. Either way, I was pretty clueless.)
Thankfully, for all the tough times there have been lots more great times. Times that have been so much fun I can't believe I was single so long. And times so perfectly peaceful that I don't know how I ever survived without him.
Why put all this out there, though? Why not just end with the happy Nemo watching?
I guess this is partly like a PSA to my single friends. Marriage is great, but really tough too.
Maybe people need to know that. Maybe.
But maybe I want to be honest with myself as much as anyone else.
When I look back on our life together, captured through this tiny little blog, dozens of scrapbooks, thousands of photographs, ridiculous stories... I don't want to be fooled into thinking it was something it wasn't.
Yea, I could metaphorically Photoshop our lives, trying to paint some perfect little reality, some easy and conflict-free existence.
But isn't it better to paint the real picture? Isn't it better to have some messy, challenging and wonderfully real life than a ficade?
Isn't it better to show something that is tough but worth the work, than something overly simplified?
Isn't it better to testify to grace at work, than to gloss over the rough parts and ONLY highlight the good?
I think so. But then again what do I know, other than brownies of course. :)
I know a boatload about brownies.
It may be weird that a newlywed like me is trying to offer any kind of thoughts/advice/anything about marriage at all, 3.5 months in.
But as someone who battles daily with accepting life's imperfections, and learning to trust that grace is bigger than all of them, it seems really important that I put this out there.
Most of all for me. A little reminder if you will, that even when I'm crabby, even when times are tough, there's still hope...
And usually brownies! ;)
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