Life as Betsy

Chorus:
Whoa
We can’t forget, these are the days
Whoa, don’t be afraid
We can’t forget, these are the days

Guitar capo - Mike would have to tell you what it does . . .

A splash of color for a dreary February. Mini daffodils.

Each Valentine’s day with him gets better and better. I don’t need diamonds or gold or even words of kindness and fancy on pieces of card stock stuffed in a post box, virtual or real. I have the most amazing man in my life. And I get the spend the rest of it with him.

When you live like that, devoted to letters, emails and phone calls, you also live by the calendar. I would spend hours creating my own four or five month calendars on graph paper and tape them to my bathroom mirror, something that I saw on a daily and regular basis. Why make it? It took time. It ate time.  And on those calendars, I would count down the months, weeks, days until my guy and I were reunited. I started living as if I were just surviving until I was once again in his arms.

But once he arrived, or I got to him, I would quickly begin the agonizing countdown until we were parted again and I would return to my hand drawn calendars and empty heart. The moments we were together would be wonderful, but they were also tainted from the months I wasted waiting for those precious few. Looking back now, I know the cost I paid for failed relationships.

When Mike walked into my life, the calendars came down. The watches were taken off.  Time didn’t stand still, but it stopped mattering so much. I wasn’t counting down days until, but rather, started appreciating each one for all that it had to offer. Even the days when we kiss goodbye in the morning and only get an hour or two together at night are worth so much to me.

It’s an entirely new sense of freedom. True, we all have a limited amount of time on this earth. Whether it be five more years or fifty, it is all so much richer now with him.

Today we have been married for six months. In some ways, I cannot believe its already been that long and in others, I am shocked that we have only gotten this far. We’ve already made it through moving, letting go of a pet, both of us getting laid off and my attempt to lose weight (again). Oh yeah, and my hair cut. Which doesn’t seem like something trying,( and really, it wasn’t) but you try telling a man who loves long hair (don’t they all????) that you are going to cut it and see how comfortable the room stays. Currently, he is calling me Piper and telling me how late 80’s/early 90’s my hair is. Oy.

My friend Liz Harper asked how the first year was going, since she had heard from married friends that the first year is the hardest. I have heard that too but I am happy to report that so far, aside from all the stressful finanical shit and the tearful nights of wondering what we were going to do, its wonderful. Because all that stuff is external from ‘us’. "Us" is great. The fact that we curl up together on the sofa and watch movies, or make dinner together, or goof around, despite all the other stuff, is perfect.

I know it won’t always be. I know there are harder times coming, times that will test our bond and our love, but like my mom said, we are just one of those couples who are going to make it.

He grinned to himself and said "Yeah, but we’ll be coming home to each other and in the end, it will totally be worth it."

I know he’s right. Mike and I are about to embark on an extremely difficult and trying year for the both of us, but once we are done, we’ll have done so much for us, for our future, for our future children, it will all be worth it. Mike started back at his full time job with Oregon Heating on Monday and has decided to stay on at Vinnie’s Pizza as well. The Cocos are being so wonderful and letting him trim an hour off his schedule so he isn’t completely crunched for time between getting off one job and getting to the other. While he is doing that, I will be working full time during the day and taking night classes so I will hopefully have my license in a year.

Mike signed us up and paid for the first three months of the Blockbuster Movie pass. Its like Netflix, except you also have the option to return 5 movies a month directly to the store and exchange them for movies immediately, verus always having to mail them back and wait for your next four episodes of "Bosom Buddies". This all came from the fact that we are spending a lot less time together these days, what with our different work schedules and the constant realization on his part that my sheltered, sheltered childhood has kept me from viewing a lot of movies that apparently I need to see. More than once in the last few months, he has exclaimed "You’ve never seen (enter movie name here)?! How could I have married you??"

So tucked under the tree Christmas morning were two envelopes, one which contained a handwritten card from him, explaining that this was my gift and the other had a gift card for Blockbuster (don’t worry, there was also an excellent freshwater pearl bracelet for me. Which I love. And try to wear as much as I can.). I am not sure if I should spend the gift card on another month of the Movie Pass, or buy a movie outright. I guess we’ll see when April arrives.

I say that the gift is very much for him as well because of the movies we currently have on our queue, 25% are movies that are really for me to see and the other 75% are ones I wouldn’t mind seeing, but that he really, really wants to see. Personally, I think I could do without seeing "Bladerunner" but seeing as how that is one of the movies he questioned his marriage to me over, I get to see it. So it’s sitting on our coffee table, waiting for our new weekend ritual of watching movies Saturday morning before Mike heads to work and all day Sunday. And I love movies, so it is not some strange injustice that I am forced to watch movies I don’t want to see.

At one point in time, I had a pretty impressive collection of movies, but when I moved back to WA, I left those in CA. And when I take those Movie quizzes people occasionally put up on the Myspace bulletin board, I generally have seen a lot of them, but I need more ideas to add to the queue. What movies do you love that we have to see??

I do attempt to curb my reality show watching to a minimum, but in these recent days, any show that doesn’t make it long in the Fall line-up is quickly replaced by a reality show or a corny gameshow and its nearly impossible to watch anything that isn’t reality tv and isn’t a Law and Order or CSI rerun. He doesn’t seem to mind watching E’s "The Girls Next Door" (huh . . . wonder why?) but pretty much anything else makes him cringe and whine. Not pretty on a grown man.