Ever since Chris started graduate school at Yale, I’ve had this sticker on the back of my car. It’s a simple sticker that says, “Yale University.” At first, it was a badge of honor because I thought it was so cool to actually know someone who went to Yale. After the novelty of the school wore off, I kept it on my car because I was so proud of Chris for what he had accomplished. When he graduated and started working in New York, we kept our connection to Yale through my job there, and that sticker was no longer a symbol of Chris, but of my own ties to Yale. When we moved to Florida, I debated about taking the sticker off, but decided to leave it on for nostalgic reasons. Every time I backed my car up, I’d see that sticker in my rearview mirror and I would remember that wonderfully happy time in our lives.
I took the sticker off this weekend.
Looking in that rearview mirror every day kept me in the past. Every time I looked at that sticker, it was because I was backing up. Sometimes it was backing up my car, and sometimes it was backing up emotionally. I’d look at that sticker and think about all the things I didn’t have in my life anymore. The people who we came to love at Yale, the house that became our first home, the jobs that started out our career paths, the seasons that gave us so much happiness…all of it. Every time I saw that sticker in my rearview mirror as I backed up, I’d mentally and emotionally back up a little bit, too.
This week, I was backing my car out of my parking spot at school after a particularly rewarding day of teaching that made me both proud and happy to be a teacher. I glanced at the sticker and thought to myself, “Oh! That’s still on there?” I couldn’t remember the last time I had noticed it. Probably not for months. “I should probably take that off,” I thought.
Just like that. I should just take it off.
In the past year, we have been establishing ourselves where we wanted to be in Orlando. We’ve built a life that not only satisfies me the way that our life in Connecticut had, but goes beyond that and makes me feel complete and whole. I can’t imagine my life being anywhere but here. I know where my kids are going to go to school in a couple years. I wake up every morning and drive to a job that fulfills me in ways I didn’t even know needed fulfilling. I come home to a family that is funny and happy and energetic and exhausting and constantly keeping me on my toes. I lay down at night beside the one person in the whole entire world that could give me this life. I can honestly say that I have never been this happy in my life.
You should see my house right now. It is a disaster zone. (I say that like that’s a change from the normal, every day state of my house…) But you know what I did today? I went on a glass bottom boat tour with my mom, my best friend, my grandma, and my two kids. We came home to the hustle of bath times and bedtimes and Sunday evening chores to get ready for the week. And as I sit here now, my house is finally quiet and the rush of the day is calm and if I had to give one word to my day after all that chaos it would be “happiness.” Just pure happiness. Happiness that I got to spend the day with three generations of women, all who have inspired me in ways I don’t even think they know. Happiness even though the kids were tired and grumpy when we got home and fought bedtime hard core. Happiness even though I got absolutely nothing done that I needed to for this upcoming week. Happiness even when I’m exhausted and feel like I need another weekend to recover from this weekend. It is all just happiness to me.
Running has been an unexpected joy in my life, but I think it is really the sign of something much deeper happening to me right now. With every step I run, with each early morning I rise, with each mile I clock, I am doing something that brings me happiness. For a long time, happiness was situational for me. I was happy when things were happy around me. But something in the past four or five months has shown me how to live in a state of happiness, even during times that may not necessarily be happy. On work days when I feel ineffective in the classroom, I still feel happy in my career. On days when dinner is late to the table and kids are crying and dogs are barking and Chris texts to say he hasn’t even left the office yet, I still feel happy. I feel other things that sometimes dull that happiness – frustration or exhaustion or anger – but at the end of each day, there is always happiness.
Deep, deep down in my soul there is happiness now.
Turns out, I don’t need to be constantly reminded about specific times in my life that have made me happy. I don’t need a sticker in my rearview mirror to remind me of happy days. That happiness is inside me. It goes with me. It’s there on good days and on bad days and every day in between. And when it is that prevalent in my life, when I don’t need reminders or moments that show me how happy I am, when it just comes that naturally from inside, then it’s time to take down that sticker.
08Mar
I get asked a lot about the trip to Costa Rica that Chris and I are taking at the end of March. We were recipients of the “Gift of Happiness,” which is an eight-day stay in Costa Rica at beautiful hotels, doing adventurous activities, in exotic locations. Sounds pretty darn happy to me.
But whenever people would ask me about it, I sort of avoided the topic. There were two reasons. First, there was this tiiiiiiiny little problem with my passport. Like, the fact that I didn’t have one. Years ago, when I was in my teens, I had a passport, but who the heck knows where it is now. When I needed one for my honeymoon, it was during the time when you could still use a certified birth certificate to fly with, so that’s how I got out of the country then. But now, I needed a real passport and mine was no where to be found. I decided not to tell our lovely travel agent this minor detail in the planning (sorry, if you’re reading right now!!!). I figured I’d apply for a new passport, on the hunch that since I now needed an adult passport, it technically WAS the first time I was applying. But as the plans were formed for our trip and as plane tickets and hotel reservations arrived, I kept this horrible pit in my stomach. What if they sent the passport application back to me and said it would be a more complicated process since I had lost my first? I wouldn’t have time for that before our trip! I was up all night long some nights, worrying about my passport.
But then… IT CAME!!!!!!
I was so excited I could hardly speak! Now I was legal and ready to roll! But even with that huge weight off my chest, I still found it hard to get really excited. And, actually, I feel that way about a lot of things these days.
In the past few years, I’ve become a lot more hesitant about celebrating things too far into the future. We made a lot of plans for the past two years – a move across country, a new life for our family, great jobs, and an easy transition. And a lot of stuff disappointed me and, at time, downright hurt me, when I expected one thing and another thing happened instead. I guess that happens to you as you get older. In fact, it probably happens to people a lot younger than me, but I just hadn’t experienced it yet. For the most part, whatever I wanted to happen in my life, had happened. I’d worked really hard to accomplish goals and follow my plans, and so I just got used to things always working out for me. So, when I went through those few years where everything sucked, it was a really big wake up call for me that sometimes in life, things just don’t go like you want them to. I’m glad I learned that lesson, but learning it did cause me to shy away a bit from celebrating things a bit too early.
The downside to that hard life lesson is that you can sometimes lose your optimism. I remember when we finally found our house and were under contract to buy, everyone around me was so excited and wanted me to be excited, too. But I had just come off the heels of a two year period where everything seemed to fall apart at the last minute, and I wasn’t too eager to get all excited. I basically waited for the other shoe to drop through the whole buying process. And that’s pretty normal, I guess. Buying a house is tense and stressful. But even after we got into the house, I never really had a big celebration moment. It was always just a “I’m going to get by until something bad happens,” kind of feeling. I think that’s why I’ve been so slow on the renovations to our house. I haven’t really sat around dreaming of paint samples and fabric swatches or anything. And I think that’s all because I’ve lost a bit of my excitement about major events in life because I got burned so bad during that two year period of time.
I worried for a while that it was depression that kept me from being excited about things. Whenever something major would happen and I wouldn’t be as excited as I used to get, I’d secretly stop and wonder if life was always going to be this way. Would I always expect bad things to happen now? Would I ever be completely, totally happy again? And if I wasn’t, would it be because I’d grown wiser with age, or would it be because I had pieces of depression still in my mind, planted like tiny emotional landmines that always went off whenever happy things happened to me? But I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, and I don’t think it is remnants of depression. I think that as we get older, we learn the hard lesson that life sometimes doesn’t go as planned. The upside to all of that is that I’m also learning that it’s often in the unplanned situations that you find real happiness. Deeper happiness.
And so, I think it’s strangely (and divinely, I must say) ironic that Chris and I are getting ready for our “Gift of Happiness” trip. Because if I’ve learned anything about happiness, it’s that it really is a gift that is given out of experiences and moments created by us, for us, and with us by the people we really love in our lives.
We leave in three weeks, and for the first time since we heard we were going, I got excited this morning. Really, truly excited. Giddy even. I was riding in my car on the way to work and a song came on the radio. It was about a couple packing their bags and getting away from it all for a while. And I thought about sitting on the beach with Chris, laughing with him, spending entire days with him without having to share our attention between kids or dogs or jobs or family. An entire week of having plans, but also of having the luxury of knowing that the absolute worst that could happen is our plans would fall through and we’d end up sitting on a beach all day. And I thought to myself, “You know, who couldn’t use a little gift of happiness every now and then?”
06Nov
I don’t like to be told what to do. (Who does, really?) And if that something that I need to do involves making a change in myself? Well then, whoever is brave enough to tell me to my face had better be wearing a helmet and a sports cup.
Just about the only people in the world that I can take direct criticism from are Chris and my sister. Ginny keeps me in check when I’m being stupid or immature. She tells me to get over things, grow up, and let it go. And though I sometimes get mad at her in the conversation, almost always, I go away somewhere by myself to lick my ego’s wounds and then I think about what she said and usually I make some changes. Sisters are great for reality checks.
Chris hardly ever criticizes me. Ever. He’s a good man and patient beyond belief, so when he tells me I’m doing something wrong or need to make some changes, I usually listen up. You’d think having that much of an impact on a person would give him a power trip, but it never has. He is selective when it comes to asking things of me and because of that, I always take him seriously.
On our way to Atlanta, after the kids had fallen asleep for the night and while we sat in comfortable silence, Chris came right out with a request.
“I need you to make a little more effort, Kate,” he said.
He had said this to me the week before, but it had been in a tense voice over two cranky kids and dinner on the stove, so we had just fought about it for five minutes and then moved on. It wasn’t productive (or even kind) at all. But hearing him speak to me thoughtfully and lovingly helped me let my guard down a bit so that I was really able to hear what he was saying.
The immediate problem he needed more effort in was with our money. Since my meltdown last year, Chris has taken over our finances to take some of the load off of me and I cannot tell you how helpful that has been. He took it over completely and except for an occasional, “Go easy this week,” I really hear very little about our money. Which is why I am ashamed to admit that the few times Chris has come to me to help him make financial decisions, I have pushed him away or melted down and not been able to have the conversation.
“I know you’re still anxious about money,” he told me in the car. “But we’re doing okay now and I really need you to get back to the point where you can help me make some decisions. It’s not fair that I have to decide budgetary things about our money by myself. It’s too much pressure for one person. You should be able to help me. Not with the day-to-day, but with the long-term planning. I need you to get to a place where you can help me.”
I listened to what he said and I knew he was right. In fact, maybe some of my anxiety would go away if I was more involved and knew what was going on. Once I agreed to make more of an effort, Chris thanked me and then said, “Actually, I need you to make a little more effort around the house, too.”
That’s when I started to get defensive. I do a TON around our house – cooking, laundry, diapers, bath time, bedtime, blogging… Who was he to tell me I needed to do MORE?
But Chris, knowing me so well, reached over and held my hand before I could explode and told me to listen. “It’s not about chores. I need you to make a little more effort with responsibilities. Things like sorting the mail, instead of refusing to open it. Answering emails, instead of asking me if I’ve looked at them. Our household is just a little messy right now and I need you to get to the place where you can help make it better.”
Once again, I knew just what he was talking about.
The truth is that last year when I had my meltdown and crawled into my black hole for a while, it was all those little things that I lost track of. I stopped opening mail – even to the point of not paying our bills. I stopped checking my email because there was just so much of it and it overwhelmed me. I didn’t manage our family calendar. I’d make appointments and then not go, or I’d forget to make the appointment altogether (case and point, Gracie STILL hasn’t been baptized and I forgot to schedule her six month vaccinations). I stopped planning our meals and clipping coupons. If it required planning or patience, I basically gave up doing it. Partly because I was depressed and partly as a solution to the depression. I cut myself some slack. I asked for help and I learned how to take help when it was offered. And there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with that.
But now, things are better. I’m not overwhelmed (more than normal…). I’m happy and healthy and our family is back where we needed and wanted to be. And so, Chris was right. It was time for me to start taking some of that responsibility back for myself. I’ve had a whole year of excusing myself from details so that I could get better. And I did. But now, it’s time for me to start picking my load back up again.
I told my friend, Sarah, about the conversation I had with Chris and when I confessed that I was a bit of a mess at home, she was shocked.
“Your classroom is one of the most organized places I’ve ever seen,” she had said. “Maybe you just need to implement some of the same procedures that you use in your classroom in your home.”
I decided she was exactly right. What my home life needed was structure. We have a pretty clear routine, but we don’t have many structures or procedures in place. In my classroom, my students know where to turn in homework every day and where and how to check out books from my library. They know where the extra pencils are kept and they know where to keep their materials throughout class. I needed some of that same structure in my home and then maybe it wouldn’t be so overwhelming to me to take on some of that responsibility again.
I decided to start small. Our entry way in the new house is a little tricky because you have to come up a flight of stairs before you put your stuff down. And when I would finally get upstairs, hauling all my stuff and two kids in the afternoons, I’d usually just fling everything into a big arm chair and that’s where it’d stay until we left the house again. Papers piled up there, random mail, coats, keys, cell phones, shoes – it was just a big mess. So, last weekend as soon as we got home from Atlanta, I asked Chris to move one of our small cabinets into that entry way.
It has a key bowl to hold keys and sunglasses (because I am ALWAYS losing both of those). There’s a plug for my cell phone charger (because I am ALWAYS losing that, too).
And there is storage space down below to hold all of our daily bags that we use – lunch bags, diaper bags, my school bag, my purse, etc. Now it all has a place.
Now, I have a place to sort through the mail and put my things so that my house doesn’t look like a college apartment. Is that a solution to all our problems? Not by a long shot. But it is a beginning step for me. I know myself and I know that I have an urge to please people and so my first instinct is to just take on the world because Chris asked me to make a few minor changes. But if I do that, I’m going to sink again under the weight of everything. So, I’m starting with small steps. Like meal planning and doing a load of laundry every night.
And this weekend, I spent Saturday afternoon cleaning out the NEWBORN clothes from Gracie’s closet (see how bad it had gotten?!?!).
None of these are life changing, but they are changing my marriage day by day. Chris really appreciates me stepping up and helping more. He likes coming home to a house that isn’t going crazy and not having to search around for mail or step over piles of laundry. And, you know, so do I.
Chris and I have been together a long time and through all those years, I’ve come to see him in a lot of different roles. Sometimes he’s my husband and sometimes he’s like a brother. Sometimes his presence is commanding, like a father, and sometimes he is like having a third child. But the role he plays in my life that I am the most appreciative for is the role of my best friend. Having a kind, loving voice of reason who helps me become the best version of myself is a quality in our marriage for which I am very thankful.
28Aug
During one of the busiest points of grad school at Yale for Chris, he came home one night to find a hearty, home cooked meal: Chinese take out. We ate at our tiny kitchen table together while he told me about how stressful grad school was, about how he wasn’t sure he could make it through, and about how sometimes he just wanted to give up. I sat with him, listening, holding his hand, and trying to find the right words to help him through, but in the end, it was a fortune cookie that said what I didn’t know yet. Chris opened his cookie to find the words, “You are almost there,” printed in red ink. That night, he took that fortune cookie and put it on our bathroom mirror as a daily reminder to him that he was one day closer to his goal.
When Chris graduated from Yale almost a year later, he took a job in New York and I kept my job in Connecticut and we bought a house halfway in between. It was our first home and we were, as my Grandma says, tickled pink.
It wasn’t too long after that move that I started itching for a baby. And it wasn’t too long after that itch that I became pregnant with Bean Man. I think I have sufficiently proven throughout this blog that I am a terrible pregnant woman. I complain. I moan. I pick fights. I swell. I cry. I complain some more. Often during those long nine months, Chris would point to that fortune, now taped to the bathroom mirror in our new house, and say to me, “You’re almost there, Pookey!” And we would laugh and hug and kiss and think about how close my due date was coming.
Before we knew it, Bean Man was in our lives and we had never been happier. Couldn’t imagine being any happier, really. Everything was wonderful.
Except…
Except I started missing my family like crazy. Every minor milestone Bean experienced in his first nine months of life made me wince a bit on the inside because there was no family around to share in that excitement with us. And so, after a few months of talking it over, thinking it through, and turning it over in prayer, we made the decision to move back to Florida to be closer to both mine and Chris’s families. As we packed our house in Connecticut, I cried and Chris quickly wiped a tear from his own eye as he took down his tattered fortune slip from our bathroom mirror and placed it inside his wallet.
“We’re going home,” he said to me. “We’re almost there.”
When we pulled into the tiny rental house that we had rented sight unseen from Connecticut, my heart broke. It was the first time I thought that we had made a huge mistake. I remember as our friends and family helped us unload our moving truck, I ducked behind a small shed in the backyard and cried my eyes out for about two minutes. What had we done? What had we given up? What were we thinking? But, I pulled myself together and reminded myself that this was a six month rental and that, very soon, we would be in a house all our own. When Chris taped that fortune to our bathroom mirror that night, I smiled and felt my spirits lift a bit. This was just a pit stop. We were almost there.
After several months of an unsuccessful job search, I found myself unemployed, uninsured, and, as luck would have it, pregnant again. I thought life couldn’t possibly get any worse. And then that horrid little rental house was broken into and I learned that things can ALWAYS get worse. As we packed up our house the morning after the home invasion, Chris and I picked up pictures out of broken frames thrown around our house, wedding China scattered throughout the dining room, and baby toys covered in the clam chowder the burglars had poured all over everything. We hastily threw everything into moving boxes and hauled all that we owned almost two hours away to my parents house where we would recoup and look for a better place to live. Just as we pulled out of the driveway of that terrible place, Chris stopped the car and ran back inside. He came out carrying his fortune, torn from the third bathroom mirror it had known in three years.
“Things will get better,” Chris told me. “We’re almost there.”
At my parent’s house, all of our things were kept in boxes and stored in the house wherever there was room, which meant every room was full of boxes and things and junk. It was a mess and I felt like we were camping. I was pregnant and nauseous, but we were safe and healthy and Bean didn’t seem to know anything was amiss, and that was what mattered to me. But at night, after we were in bed, Chris and I would lay close to each other and whisper all our worries and all our disappointments into the night until we were too tired to think anymore. And then we would hold hands and drift off to unrestful sleep, where I would dream over and over again that someone had broken into our house and taken my son. The only light during that time for us was that I finally found a job. I became a middle school teacher and with my salary, we were able to move into a beautiful rental home in a better part of town.
As we unpacked our things and pinched ourselves at all the space we now had, Chris once again taped his fortune to the bathroom mirror. This house was wonderful and the answer to so many of our prayers, but it wasn’t home yet. We were certainly closer though.
We were almost there.
In March, Gracie was born and our family was complete. She brought sleepless nights, colic, and so much darn sunshine with her that I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to be happy. Why I couldn’t let go of the fear of someone taking my children from me. Why I couldn’t get out of bed in the afternoons. Why I couldn’t do stupid tasks like paying our bills without bursting into tears. Depression was a slow, smooth, all-consuming abductor to me and before I knew what was happening, it tainted everything around me. In those lowest moments, Chris would hold me and whisper into my ear that this was almost over. I was almost done. And if I could just push through for a little bit longer, we would get there. And we would get there together.
Today, as I cleaned out our bathroom in that beautiful rental house, I was just about to turn out the light and leave when something caught my eye. There in the corner of the bathroom mirror was Chris’s fortune.
At different points in our marriage, there has been a variety of places. We’ve graduated from graduate school, bought a home, had a baby, moved back across the country, face unemployment, cleaned up a home invasion, found new career paths, had another baby, moved again, and bought another house. We’ve arrived places only to find that the finish line has been pushed back further and we were once again on journey together.
I guess that’s part of marriage. Part of life, really. Always looking ahead, always planning for the future, always working to get there.
But as we pulled out of the driveway of that beautiful rental home who protected us from any more hardship, giving us time to lick our wounds from the past year and get back on our feet once again, I pulled that fortune out of my wallet where I had placed it for safe keeping. I showed it to Chris and we laughed for a nostalgic moment about all the places and milestones that fortune had wisely foreseen in our lives.
“Well, we made it,” Chris said. “We’re there.”
I squeezed his hand and smiled. Yes, we were.
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