Playing House

Gaye Haugen asked me this morning at church if I’ve been learning a lot of new things since I’ve been married. She smiled knowingly. I promptly answered in the sense that it still feels as though we are playing house. I contemplated the fresh and obvious plots I have to effectively take care of this home - the trivial little things that I’ve accomplished with small huffs of pride, somewhat-successful dinner experiments, and humble morning tasks like bed-making and the assembly of hasty breakfasts for two before work. These are miniature triumphs compared to the greater call to a new bride. Let me broaden my reply more thoroughly.

The new things I’ve been learning, Mrs. Haugen, are surely some of the most fascinating, electrifying, and profoundly mysterious lessons there are to be learned. I’m learning about the care and keeping of a husband. Oh, how little we knew as young girls playing “house”! How easy it was to dismiss our “husbands” to work all day while we “cooked” and “cleaned” and rocked our “babies” to sleep. When we played as such, our husbands never really came home. They didn’t have rough days or emotional needs or empty stomaches. Our invisible mates were simply too many characters to play at once, so we never explored their companionship. (I shall taunt the memories no further, lest I dissolve the beauty of being young ;).

Gone are my days of drinking imaginary tea from pink plastic cups, and shopping for cutouts of tomatoes, and swaddling sleeping dolls. I now long for the hour I know my husband is on his way home from work. My greatest pining is to invest time in him, and the result is a surplus of lessons learned far more valuable than home economics! Whether he is coming through the door or on his way out, there is required encouragement and love from his wife. Yes, I’m learning lots of new things. Proper housekeeping is the core of a functional and organized dwelling, but a vibrant, thriving marriage is the rich and fertile topsoil out of which grows an abundance of living. Without that, what good is it for me to know how to cook a chicken or clean a toilet?

I look to you and your marriage, Mrs. Haugen, as the result of one flourishing from a well-cultivated topsoil. And I admire it way it ripples and blesses the people in your community. That, I know without doubt, is one of the most spectacular calls on every marriage.

Underway

I learned three things today: that I hate starting things (blogs especially), that taking care of a husband is not rocket science, and that oatmeal crusted to a wooden spoon for three days will not just magically “come off” in the dishwasher.

But I do hate starting things. Drafts, essays, research, prose, journal entries, introductions, cover letters, critiques, epilogues. I hate the blank page and the way it lights up the screen, and the dull blinking of the impatient cursor, and the way the first sentence takes up an awkward amount of space. I’m not going to enjoy starting this blog, nor be proud of this first post suspended on the page by itself, not even big enough to illuminate the blue scroll bar. But I’m going to start it for people like Nancy Carlson, and Heidi Marineau, my writing professors, and my husband. Mark and I started something very suddenly a month ago today. There’s no easing into marriage, or testing the water a little, or trial memberships. It’s a headfirst dive into something that wasn’t, then all the sudden was. It’s wonderful. It’s rich. I loved starting that, and I can’t wait to write about it.

I will be entirely honest and declare I’m not positive what the purpose of this blog is going to be, but I imagine it will eventually have one. I imagine that it’ll be a place for lots of words - lots of adjectives, phrases, broken sentences. I plan on using clauses and fragments to my heart's content because after all, every writer knows the rules are meant to be broken. As I blot ink on the page I imagine that lessons might be shared here, because lessons I am learning daily. There are lessons in being married, and taking care of a home, and making decisions (like should we get out of bed this morning?), and no longer belonging to myself. The evening of September 12th I was swept up into this lovely whirlwind of starts. In one day I became a bride, a wife, a daughter-in-law, a sister-in-law, an auntie. I went from one bank account to two, from no bills to electric bills, from gallon milk to half gallon milk, from my bedroom to our bedroom, from alone to together. Everything had a distinct starting point from which I began to shape my new life with my husband. This is something we just started, and I think I’d like to have a place to write about it. Please do not anticipate frantic entries of experimental French cooking, or overly sentimental outpours of emotion in my hand-clasped wonder at the world of marriage, or embarrassing moments of sheer terror as I begin to discover all the unsightly things about myself that only someone as close as my husband could reveal in me. I’d like to think this place a narrative for lessons - an account of a very new marriage, a very new life, and very young people. It smells like a glorious concoction. :)