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If By Yes

Tag Archives: anniversary

Eight Years

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, Me vs The Sad, Perfect Husband

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

anniversary, depression, family, life, love

Yesterday, we were sitting around watching Stephen Fry’s Q.I. on Youtube when Perfect Husband sat up straight.

“Oh, SHIT.” He covered his mouth. “I forgot!”

“What?” I was alarmed. I wracked my brain. Were we supposed to be doing something that night? Was there something vital that I had let slip through my calendar?

“I have to call a prostitute right away! It’s my last chance for the seven year itch!” he said.

I leaned back on the couch and stuck out my tongue.

Eight years ago, we were married. 0143

Eight years ago, he was my rock, my prince who made me feel like the luckiest person in the world. I couldn’t believe that I was getting to spend the rest of my life with this man who worked so hard to make my life better.

He was the kind of person who cooked dinner and then washed the dishes, while insisting that I sit and rest. He was the kind of person with whom I could talk for hours and never grow bored.

The best part of it all was the fact that he thought he was the lucky one – he actually felt lucky to be with this socially anxious awkward girl with weight problems who loved to take care of pets and babies but also desperately needed to be taken care of by someone else.
Ten years ago, I started dating my best friend. I avoided it for so long, because it sounds like such a terrible idea, but within days we knew that this was it.

Img_0074

We knew that we would move in together. We knew that we would get married. We knew how many kids we would have and what their names would be before he even formally proposed.

Sometimes you just know.

Eleven years ago, he emerged from years of crippling depression, and I discovered that the man who had always been my best friend because even better when he was free of his chains. The man who had always been willing to talk for hours about books or argue with me about hypothetical situations, who had always been willing to give the shirt off of his back to help a friend, stepped out from under the clouds so I could really see him in his entirety. He turned out to be a sunny optimist with a can-do attitude that I found deeply attractive.

Twelve years ago I stopped him from committing suicide. Even then, I knew that I couldn’t live without him in my life. Even then, he was part of the furniture of my mind. Even then, I was willing to sacrifice his happiness to keep him alive. Even then, his pain mattered less to me than the continued beating of his kind heart.

Thirteen years ago my parents met him for the first time, and they thought, “that’s the one.”

“That boy is in love with you,” my father told me later.

“Yeah… we don’t talk about it, though,” I replied, and my parents wisely kept their mouths shut. But they told me later that they knew from the first moment that they saw us together that this would happen. That he was meant to be their son in law.

His parents have said the exact same thing.

Let’s face it, Perfect Husband has said the same thing. “I knew it was just a matter of waiting,” he said.

Show offs.

Fourteen years ago, I sang a Lorne Elliott song with one of the actors in the production of Hamlet that I was stage managing. Almost no one knows Lorne Elliott and we were both delighted to find someone else who did. Almost no one else has read Gordon Korman, but he had, and we talked about it for an hour. He liked Who Is Bugs Potter. I preferred I Want To Go Home.

Fourteen years ago, I found a new friend.

So here we are, fourteen years in, thirteen years in, twelve years in, ten years in.

Eight years in.

I don’t have a photo of us, now. He doesn’t want his picture taken. He doesn’t want to remember this.

Life is different now.

The depression is back and has been raging for years. Most days, he isn’t the sunny prince that I married, but he is still the best friend that I couldn’t live without.  I have met this side of him before and I married him knowing I would probably see it again. So it doesn’t scare me. He is still kind. He is still my best friend. He is still the man that my parents knew I would someday marry.

We have two young children that demand almost all of my time. I feel a constant gripping anxiety based on the fact that I want to work more, because we need more money, but I also want to work less, because I feel overburdened as it is, and I can’t afford to shift too much of that burden onto my husband, and I really can’t afford to pay someone else to take on some of that burden.

I struggle constantly to hide my stress because he blames himself when it emerges. A stray tear, wiped away too late, and he will be pestering me, asking what he can do, beyond the impossible. He thinks that I will blame him, or should blame him, for this.

I don’t.

I was there, you see. I saw how he couldn’t make himself wake up and go to class. I saw how he sometimes backed out of plans because he couldn’t face a social scene. I knew him. I married him.

Yes, I miss the man who pampered me and spoiled me. Yes, I miss feeling like he was someone that I could lean on. Yes, I miss feeling that he was someone I could come to with my problems, instead of someone that I needed to shield from them. Yes, I sometimes feel envy when I meet people who can just get their husbands to take the kids at a moment’s notice, no problem, or who can go out with their friends or on date nights on a regular basis.

Then again I know people who have husbands that are perfectly well and are just giant dicks, and then I feel very grateful. He may be asleep a lot, but he’s not a dick.

Besides, I knew he was sick, and what that meant, and I said the words, “in sickness and in health”, and I knew what I was saying when I said them.

“You could still run away, you know,” he whispered before the vows started. “Now’s your chance. Look, there’s a door just there.”

I looked out of the side door near the altar. It was open to let in cool breezes. The dandelions swayed in the old cemetery where couple after couple lay side by side. Then I looked back at him and shook my head, “no.”

“Now is YOUR chance,” I told him.

Sometimes I think he should have run. He isn’t equipped to handle the stress of caring for small children. I see how just our presence in the household raises his stress levels. I think about how much  of his time is spent on blaming himself for my own stress and misery.

Sometimes I feel like we are Albatrosses around his neck.

And I know he feels like an Albatross on mine.

We keep telling each other that we have no regrets. We keep telling each other that we prefer this to the alternative.

Maybe one day, we’ll finally believe one another.

Because let’s face it: If there is such a thing as fate, we are it.

So let it be. If we are lucky, we’ll have another thirty or forty years together. And I can’t speak for him, but I would still sign up for that in a heartbeat.

image  59 .JPG

Two

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, Perfect Husband

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

anniversary, Perfect Husband

We celebrated the end of our second year as husband and wife, and our last year as a twosome, by doing what everyone keeps assuring us we will never be able to do again – staying in bed.

We had to get dressed and leave the house for an OB appointment, but we hastily returned, closed all the curtains, and returned to bed. We lounged. We relaxed. We talked. We read old love letters to each other. We ate strawberries covered in chocolate, and french bread (sometimes also covered in chocolate). We watched a couple episodes of Glee on my little Netbook. We read. We cuddled.

It was perfect.

The Luckiest

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, Perfect Husband

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

anniversary, love, marriage, Perfect Husband

Two years. Is it really two years? Not two hundred years? Not two minutes? Because it feels like both.

We met nine years ago. We were best friends eight years ago. I finally gave you a chance four years ago.

We’ve only been married two?

You’re the man of my dreams. You have the chivalry of Fitzwilliam Darcy, without the stiff politeness. You have the passion of Edward Rochester, without the arrogance. You have the devotion of Noah Calhoun, and the perseverance of Orpheus. You are all the lovers in all the books, and none of them, because you are better than any of them.

I am, truly, the luckiest.

Thanks… I think.

23 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by IfByYes in Life's Little Moments, We Are Family

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

anniversary, father-in-law, life, parents, quotes

In an anniversary card from my Father-In-Law (which, by the way, was actually a birthday card that had been altered in the salient places with white-out and a ballpoint pen):

“…I don’t get excited about anniversaries until they hit the ten year mark…. but I am cautiously optimistic that you two will continue to work hard to be caring to each other, and kind to the world.”

Uh… Thanks?

My own parents, by contrast, sent us a touchingly sweet card and two hundred and fifty dollars in cheque form (“since the first anniversary is usually paper…”)

Perfect Husband, to me:

“…Want to trade parents?”

I always knew I was a pain in the ass.

22 Monday Jun 2009

Posted by IfByYes in Perfect Husband

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anniversary, horses, Perfect Husband

Yesterday was our first anniversary as husband and wife. It doesn’t feel like a whole year has gone by, so it sort of sneaked up me. Of course, being the useless spouse that I am, I utterly failed at finding any kind of meaningful gift… which resulted my not having any gift. So I wrote him a love letter, and opened up the page in my diary from the day of the wedding (Perfect Husband and I have an agreement that he can read my diary entries after they are at least one year old) and left both on his computer chair. I knew he’d go to his computer first thing when he got up. He always does. I also loaded up Open Office on his computer and wrote Happy Anniversary, and a promise that he would get lucky, on the screen in big  red letters.

He, on the other hand, took me on a two hour long horseback trail ride up in the mountains. He had never been on a horse before and has always steadfastly refused to try, citing a belief that he would somehow break the horse. I rode English a lot when I was a kid, but I haven’t been on a horse in years. I talk a lot about wanting to ride again, and planning to own a Clydesdale when I’m filthy rich. So this was his gift to me – by getting on the back of a large, strange animal, and clinging to it for two whole hours while I grinned like a loon, he demonstrated his love for me… and somehow did it all in good humour.

It probably didn’t help him that I kept kicking my own horse into a trot, which made his massive plodding steed follow suit. By the time the ride was over, he was moaning and massaging his legs. He took three muscle relaxants when we got home. I was sore too, but my horse hadn’t been as wide as his.

So basically, for his first anniversary, Perfect Husband ended up with no gifts, a long car ride, two long hours straddling a massive beast while it jostled him around, and pain in his lower extremities… all for the love of me.

When we got home we popped some champagne and toasted our first year as a married couple, then feasted on carbs together.It was a really nice anniversary. Well, for me, anyway.  Perfect Husband, on the other hand, is worried that he might have pulled his groin.

His birthday’s next month. I’ll definitely do better then. Besides, we have, like, 49 more of these things to go. Or, if you listen to him, 46 because apparently he doesn’t plan on living past age 80, lest he risk outliving me. Ha. We’ll see about that.

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