The toast

I’m back home in Michigan this week.  My sister is getting married, and asked me to be her matron of honor, which made me feel simultaneously honored and old.  Mostly honored.  Since I’m quite a bit older than her (almost 11 years to be exact), for many years I have been perceived as desperately un-hip.  I’m probably still just as uncool as I ever was, but now she is past the age where she feels compelled to remind of that… at least most of the time.    She does however, tell me when I write boring posts (always useful advice).  

She is having the antithesis of the wedding I had, if you can even call it that (I eloped).  And it occurs to me, here just days before the big day, that I have yet to write my toast.  I have been enjoying the time just hanging out with her and helping take care of some of those irritating little things that inevitably take twice as long to do as you thought they would.  I’m feeling like I have something to prove, seeing as I felt like such a tool when she got engaged.  And since I am very old and married, I should have some good advice to give.  I don’t want to just give the “We love you guys!” version of the toast.

I don’t know.  I’m not sure how I can condense all of the things that are running around in my head.  How proud I am of her, the amazing woman she has become… confident, talented, smart and beautiful.   How bright her future is, and how happy I am that she has found someone to share her life with, someone who will love her as she deserves to be loved.  That while I know that marriage is far from the idealized picture of love, champagne and roses, I also know that no matter what life throws at her, she will go through it with strength and grace.  Even though sometimes I look at her and wonder when it was that she stopped needing a babysitter. 

Mostly I’m going to try not to cry.

Ten years

I have been married for ten years today.

I’d like to think that as I stood on that mountainside in Korea that I knew exactly what I was getting into, but the craziness that is our life has been unexpected. The life of an Army family is far different from anything I had envisioned.

When we got married, one of my dear uncles wrote me a lovely letter of advice. I would quote from it directly but I’m not that far unpacked. I remember clearly how he wrote that my aunt asked him once which year of their marriage had been the best. He stated that it was the current year (which had not been one of smooth sailing), which surprised her. He qualified that by writing how that was not because their first years were so rough, but because each year their relationship grew stronger. Oh how true that is. I would not trade places with my ten-year-younger self for all the tea in China. Even if I was thinner and prettier back then.

We have spent our day with relatively little fanfare. I guess we are officially “old and married” because the only thing we could think of to give each other was the microwave and deep freeze we need for the house. He gave me a box of chocolates this morning, and helped me clear out a flowerbed that had been overgrown with grass. We’re continuing to unpack at a snail’s pace. Maybe we’ll go out for dinner. Ten years sounds like such a milestone, I wonder if instead we should have had some hoopla about it. But that just wouldn’t be us.

I know you don’t ordinarily read my blog, my love, but just in case I wanted you to know that THIS year has been the best…

Hmmm. This is becoming a trend.

I did it. I emailed her.

I’m so glad I did. It turns out she recently became engaged (!) I can’t describe exactly how it felt to read that email. A strange mixture of shock and relief… of the guilt I’ve been carrying around for the past few years but also of happiness for her. It felt like the chapter of her life (the one that included me, and the Army) completely came to a close. I remember having so many conversations about life, and our futures when we lived next door to each other. We had thought we would be traveling down the same path.

How very different life has turned out.

So now that’s 2 people (the other being my very own mom) who I never would’ve expected getting engaged. They say it comes in threes, anybody else?

Lost in translation

My dh just came home at the beginning of August. This was not our first experience with deployment, but it was our first with a child. I was so worried that she was going to break her daddy’s heart by taking a long time to warm up to him. She was only 7 months when he left. Ironically, the dutchkid handled the adjustment of having daddy back home very well! It was me that had the trouble.

It has been a lot rougher going than I had anticipated. I think every military spouse has a little bit of a control freak thing going on, I most definitely do. That tendency is what gets you through being alone, what makes you independent enough to survive. It’s just hard to turn it off sometimes. I get ultra sensitive about any comment about the way I run things. You add to that my very opinionated dh, the new dimension of parenting, and you have a recipe for disaster.

We have a running joke between us about “the translator”. Words come out of my unsuspecting dh’s mouth and somehow midair they become the most hurtful barb known to womankind. I speak in some sort of foreign language — it sounds just like English, except for the words have different meanings. My dh has been known to stop, mid-argument to say, “Hold on, let me turn on my translator!”

It turns out translators get a little rusty after a year or so of not being used. I was a little worried mine was broken, but I am happy to report that they are both back online. Now if I could just learn the language…