Birth of a hermit.

Have I mentioned that I rarely wear pants lately? Or, rather, I rarely wear “real” pants, preferring to lounge around the house in alternate pairs of yoga pants, usually matched with a (not at all) stylish hoodie. As I’ve intimated, I’ve been working from home lately, and maaaaaaaaaaan, have I gotten cozy. I’ve got a couch, a giant coffee table on which to spread out my crap, a fabulous red kettle that is the constant provider of tea, and a million kittens to purr in my lap as I stare at my computer screen, willing intelligent words to appear out of thin air.

This is my office.

It turns out I kind of like being a hermit. It’s hard, and I get cabin fever, which I combat by taking my walks and running errands and going to the gym and talking on the phone with my favourite colleagues like a teenage girl. But I kind of love it. Yesterday, I went in to the university I’m affiliated with to hear a talk by a colleague who is kind of a mentor to me, and saw all my old buds and co-workers and colleagues and everyone that I haven’t seen since the summer. I got there a little bit late, and tried to sneak into the room, unnoticed (I haaaaaaate being that girl), when a dozen hands started waving hello at me, including the speaker in question. I sheepishly waved back, secretly flattered that I had been missed. The talk was interesting, I threw my hat into the discussion ring a few times, kibbitzed with folks for a while afterwards, had tea with two friends, and then wandered home. And nice as it was to see everyone, MAN was I happy to be back home in my quiet house with the couch and the kittens. And I will admit, I was exhausted. I’m out of practice. I am this close to moving to the mountains of Montana, I think.

This is my secretary (chillin' on my leg).

Today is the start of a big conference at which I’m playing several roles, so I am going to be couch/cat-less until Sunday night. And surrounded by people. Talking about big brain smart things. This fills me with a little bit of terror. Which is likely a problem, considering that my academic work is very social by nature. So wish me luck in my terrifying encounters with the outside world, friends, and I’ll see you on the other side, when I am gloriously back on my coveted spot on the couch.

(Tell me that some of you are reading this in yoga pants, too. Please.)

I don’t like sleeping alone.

It’s a bummer when your husband does shift work. Lately he’s been on evening shifts, which is good for his sanity, but not great for having dinner together. We’ve been surviving, though, on our two evenings a week together. I was looking forward to next week, though, when he had been told he’d be switched to days. His day shifts are early and thus kind of harsh, but at least we get proper time together. Yesterday, he called me from work with some unfortunate news; due to various factors, he was getting switched to night shifts instead. We’re talking 11pm-7am night shifts. Bum. Mer.

It’s funny how relationships can show us that we are sometimes very different people than we think we are. I used to think I was very independent within my relationships, all about being together, but doing my own thing, savouring my own time. I generally have an independent streak, so I figured this is how my personality would fit into our marriage. It turns out, not so much. While both the mister and I value our own alone time, we like to spend much, much more time together than either of us ever thought we would. I find that being in his company is not that different from being alone, and I just like…having him there. Even if I’m sitting here, blogging, while he is playing video games. We get antsy if we don’t get quality time together on a near-daily basis. I want him around a lot more than I had ever anticipated, and sometimes I secretly feel like I am faking being a card-carrying independent woman.

One of the harshest ways that I have learned this lesson is through his night shifts. I am no longer capable of sleeping alone. When the mister works nights, I get to bed at weird hours, and then I lay there, eyes open, exhausted but awake, unable to fall asleep because something is off. We’re not huge sleep cuddlers, so it’s not about sleep positions or anything, it’s just about not being able to sense his presence. I am shocked by this  reality that not having him there could disrupt my sleep so badly, but it does. It feels crazy because we spent the first two years of our relationship in a seriously long-distance situation, wherein we saw each other every two months or so. How did we get from there to this current situation of being unable to spend a night alone? I feel like a brat.

Anyway. Well will survive this spat of night shifts like we have in the past, with both of us a little underslept and whiney. Being on opposite schedules is hard, but we try to find some common ground where we can. It’s not really so bad, but I just wanted to reflect a little bit on how the pattern of our relationship is not what I ever would have expected of myself. I know that this is obviously ok (with the exception of the sleep deprivation), but it is never the less something that I am constantly learning about myself, and adjusting to.

(And if you find me posting things at random late hours over the next few weeks, you’ll know why.)

Why are we all so insecure?

So I love that so many of the women whose blogs I follow got married at around the same time as me; it has been wonderful watching us all negotiate the early days of marriage together. Thanks to this syncronicity, it seems that lots of ladies have been talking, lately, about how it feels to get married (see: the transcendence debate), and how it feels to be married (see the “wife: does it or does it not need to be reclaimed?” debate). All of this is awesome, since I am a big fan of thinking through stuff that we might otherwise take for granted.

Here’s what I do not think is awesome, though: the shitty ways in which we assume that the differences in our experiences indicate some sort of hierarchy of authenticity in marriage or strength of partnership. I have to say that I was looking forward to moving out of the wedding world in part to escape the passive aggressive judgementalism that pervades it (see this rant here for my feelings on the matter). I am shocked and appalled to see that life on the married side of things still has a healthy dose of ladies judging each other in really quite useless ways.

What am I talking about? Let’s see. Those of us who experienced transcendent or huge moments at our weddings are: a) naive religious fools; b) space cadets who clearly hadn’t paid attention to what we were committing to until we walked down the aisle; c) brainwashed romantics who were not partners before we married.

Those of us who did not experience transcendent moments at our weddings are: a) superficial bridezillas who didn’t take the meaning of our weddings seriously enough; b) bimbos who don’t actually understand what we’re getting into; c) women getting married for the wrong reasons.

Those of us who think that being married has felt distinctly different, and in need of unpacking, are: a) wishy washy ladies who were not truly invested in their relationships until they got married; b) backwards women who buy into gendered stereotypes about marriage when we all know that we live in a post-feminist world; c) morons who didn’t understand what we were getting into.

Those of us who think that being married feels the same as dating/cohabitating are: a) vapid women who don’t take their decisions very seriously or think very deeply about their lives; b) dodgy ladies who don’t understand what marriage means; c) crappy wives.

Listen, I know that it’s a weird thing to blog about our personal lives. We put ourselves out there in very intimate ways in an attempt to connect with like-minded people. And sometimes this whole process can make us deeply insecure about our decisions; if someone that seems smart out there in the blogosphere says they had the exact opposite experience that we did, we feel insecure, like they are attacking our choices or our feelings. I don’t know why we do this: we’re all smart and thoughtful and capable of understanding that we live different lives and that there are a million reasons as to why every single one of our marriages is a little bit different. Rather than appreciating how incredible it is that we manage to find really profound commonalities among our diverse lives, we focus on our differences and lick our imaginary wounds as though another woman’s experience is meant to be a personal insult.

And let’s be honest, some of us are writing as though our particular experiences are reflective of our being better women and better wives than everyone else. We may not realise we’re doing it, but it comes across in the tone of our posts. If I read one more thing that says that “we didn’t feel any difference with marriage, because, you know, we were already PARTNERS for YEARS” I may scream–yes, indeed, those of us who felt something change with marriage were clearly all shotgun weddings. That’s as bad as those of us on the other side who make comments that we did feel a marked difference because we took our ceremony and our commitment soooo seriously, as though anyone who feels differently just got drunk and stuttered through their vows. Come on, man. Let’s be serious here.

I don’t want to argue against critical thinking; personally, my blog has been a useful place for me to unpack some of the stuff about weddings and marriage that grates on my last nerve, and as such I am a big fan of us all having our opinions, and us having them strongly. I think we need to own our own experiences unequivocally, but to still take a step back and think about how we write what we write. We also need to listen to each other sympathetically. We need to find ways to connect with each other through our reflections that don’t involve passing judgement, or trying to figure out who has it right and who has it wrong. A good example of this was the recent post I wrote about name changing; I wrote it mostly to be silly, but I was inspired by the discussion that broke out in the comments. Women on both sides of the debate engaged with each other in intelligent, critical ways, but without making broad, hurtful generalizations on one side or taking things needlessly personally on the other. So I have faith that we can do this.

I feel like this whole project of blogging about our weddings and our marriages is meant to inspire ourselves and each other to think a little bit more critically or to listen a little bit more deeply to our experiences and the experiences of women who we respect. The passive aggressive bullshit, born out of a sort of “oh my goodness, what if the internet tells me I’m not doing marriage right?” insecurity, doesn’t really help us get there at all. Let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt. Solidarity, sister.

Codependency and Pumpkins

The mister is the pumpkin carver in our fair household. He possesses magical skills with knives and squash, and every year, friends of ours throw a pumpkin carving party in which he wows a captive audience with his prowess.

Suffice it to say, when we found that this year’s party conflicted with his work schedule, I panicked. This was a crisis of pumpkin-like proportions. “I can’t carve a pumpkin without you!” I implored. “Maybe I’ll just show up with cupcakes and hang out.”

Well, last night I showed up, cupcakes in hand, and caught up with friends while the sweet, sweet pumpkins called my name. I could not resist. I drew a tentative face on one with a whiteboard marker, which kept getting wiped off. I then began to carve nervously, waiting to mess up the whole thing. First the horns, then the eyes, then the teeth, and the mess of fur at the very end. Finally, sweat on my brow, I was done. And…it wasn’t half bad! Lit up, it was actually pretty cool!

I was still at the party, reveling in my hidden talent, when the mister called, on his way home from work. “I totally don’t need you!” I exclaimed, “I can carve pumpkins without you!”. He was happy to hear that. I may or may not have questioned the purpose of marrying him, in light of this new information.

Happy weekend and happy halloween, internet buddies!

Our middle ground:

The mister sent me a link to this image this morning (a poster for a metal festival he’s all over):

source

We joked that it is the closest that we can come to an aesthetic middle ground. Accordions for me; skulls for him. The give and take of our relationship summed up in one image. Ha! I love it.

Friendship and Toxicity

Recently I have been thinking a lot about friendship. I pride myself on being a good friend; it is a part of my character which is very important to me. I aspire to being fair, loving and generous. And I’ve generally been lucky to enjoy deep friendships with people I loved, pretty much completely free of pathos. I met my closest group of girlfriends eleven years ago and we have been like sisters ever since; so all this talk of how female friendships are toxic and competitive has always felt very alien to me.

An unfortunate part of my good friendship luck, though, is that I am kind of blindsided when shitty friends do come along. I am naive and take a while to clue into people manipulating me or evaluating me or whatever. And so I’m not always the greatest at dealing with it.

Recently, I’ve realised that two of my “friendships” were toxic. I put that in quotes because the first I would hardly even qualify as a friendship: an old co-worker from a job in Europe with whom I’d been quite friendly landed a job in Montreal, and I helped him out a bunch in terms of giving him advice about the city, where to live, etc. We had trouble meeting up due to busy schedules and eventually when I suggested we get together he sent me a terse, mean email, because he didn’t like what I had suggested. Rather than a, “you know what, I’m not into that, how about something else?” I got rudely scolded, and felt shitty about it for days. Until I realised that I didn’t actually owe the guy anything. So fuck it. In the end, I never responded.

Unfortunately my second example comes from a friend that I have known for over two years and who I used to hold quite near and dear. There has always been stuff that made me uncomfortable about our friendship (she has some weird, quasi-self-hating-misogynistic views on women not to mention offensive views on religion), but we also connected on a lot of levels (we love history! And baking!) so I thought we were cool. No friendships are perfect, you know? Increasingly, she has become very negative and self-obsessed, to the point where being her friend is hard. I am constantly being evaluated; if I don’t call her often enough, I must not like her anymore. If we don’t hang out regularly enough, I must hate her. Because a mutual friend and I are collaborating on some work, we are excluding her and she behaves with petty jealousy. The list goes on. It feels like dealing with my mother; where every word and every action comes under scrutiny, and where I am never enough.

I find all of this overwhelming. My closest friendships feel effortless. Sometimes things get away from us and I will go a month without seeing even my very favourite people. That’s life. But we don’t fret about it, we just get together when we can, make an effort to catch up, and when we do, it’s like no time has passed at all. We are patient with each other, forgiving and things always feel easy. I never feel judged. I have not had a really high maintenance friendship since high school (when, let’s face it, life was high maintenance.) And what I hate is that this friend’s neuroses have turned everything into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Before, if I turned down a coffee invitation because I was busy or tired, it was a sign that I didn’t value our friendship and a major catastrophe. Now, I’ve actually started turning them down for that reason. I hate being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This negative crap has been going on for a little while, but this week I realised how much it was getting to me. I started dreaming about it and I was thinking about it constantly. My pride about the strength of my good friendships also seems to lead to extreme sensitivity regarding my difficult ones. At the same time, I have trouble cutting out toxic friendships because, well, I feel like a jerk. How have you dealt with these sorts of situations?

Daydreams of home.

An addendum to yesterday’s post about my autumnal walks around my neighbourhood.

Lately, on my walks, I have been seeing this house. Actually I saw it once, and then on subsequent excursions I would randomly find my way onto that particular block again and again, to stare at it and daydream. It is not for sale, and even if it was we could never afford it, because we live on the border of a very bougie neighbourhood, and we’re broke and not in the position to buy anything for a long, long time. But that’s not the point. I just like to look at it, and dream about it full of cats, and kids, and baked goods, and home. It’s the kind of space that seems to beg for such daydreaming.

Have a good weekend, friends.

The Crowns of Montreal

I have been working from home since early September, something which is sometimes a blessing (lounging in yoga pants; typing away with a kitten sleeping next to me; no more boss), and sometimes a curse (lack of division between work day and the rest of the day; maaaaaaaaajor cabin fever). Lately, I have been trying to make sure that I do leave the house every day for at least a bit, so as to keep myself at least nominally sane. When I don’t have any errands to run or anything, I just take short walks around my neighbourhood, which is particularly pretty this time of year; the autumn colours at least partially make up for the crispness in the air and the greyness of the sky.

The trees on my street!

In trying to clear my mile-a-minute head, I try to look around, properly look around, this space that is so familiar to me. I am a big fan of finding beauty in every day objects and experiences. Yesterday I brought my camera with me, and found myself documenting one of the mister’s and my favourite things about Montreal architecture: the strange, whimsical rooftops that adorn the peaks of many of the city’s oldest apartment buildings.

When G. and I first moved back to Montreal, and saw the city with fresh eyes, we could not stop admiring their crazy shapes and colours. We both felt like these rooftops were designed by someone whose only knowledge of Victorian aesthetics came from a children’s book. I even bought the mister a book about them (and how psyched was I when I walked by a bookshop in our neighbourhood one day to find such a thing on display? Looking at the publisher’s website, there is also a book on the staircases of Montreal!).

Here are some of the rooftops that I captured during my quick walk:

I love where we live. Here’s to looking up, every once in a while.

Wah wah wah, living in a feminist bubble is HARD.

This post was inspired by the lovely Petite Chablis’s post on changing her name, and by the embarrassingly mammoth comment that I left in reply to it.

I have often mentioned in passing on this blog that changing one’s name with marriage is not only out of fashion in Quebec, but hasn’t been legal since 1981 (the year I was born!). Since I was a child, before I even knew about my home province’s laws, I could not imagine changing my name, because it just seemed like a random thing to do, and I was attached to my rather rare and distinctly ethnic surname. When the mister and I got engaged, we barely even had a discussion about it. I think that I only know one person in real life who changed their name when they got married. I live in a franco-feminist bubble where the whole name thing was a total non-issue to me and my partner.

Of course, just because it has been illegal to change your name in marriage in Quebec since 1981, does not mean that everyone is hip to that fact, and I actually feel like my taking the non-decision for granted ended up offending a lot of people who, apparently, do not live in a feminist bubble. Whoops. The first name changing conversation only came up two weeks before the wedding, while I was trapped in a car with my mother for several hours. I had just been telling my mom that we’d received a cheque made out to Myfirst Hislast, and that we’d had a bit of trouble cashing it. My mom replied, “Of course, because you haven’t changed your name yet.”

Yet? I related that it was not changing at all, and she retorted, “Of course it is.” I was stunned that she had been assuming all of this (and had the gall to “correct me”). I, naively, had never brought it up, as I seriously didn’t know people assumed these things.

Yet somehow, that incident did not teach me my lesson. The worst faux-pas came the day after our wedding, when we went to dinner with the mister’s family, and they casually brought up the name issue. Without thinking about it, I laughed them off with an “Of course I’m not changing it!” as though they were being cute. And then I got home to open up some of our cards and see that they’d written us a cheque to Myfirst and Hisfirst Hislast. And while I think it’s obnoxious that they would have made such an assumption without asking anyone about it (especially considering that they tend to be pretty progressive on similar matters), I also wish that I hadn’t laughed off derisively something they had clearly thought was normal, and possible even meaningful (note: they are from the west coast, where most people do still change their names). I still feel like a jerk about this.

I am generally caught between thinking that I erred in never having explicitly addressed the issue with our families, and feeling annoyed that people’s default assumption in these cases is that one would be changing one’s name. I think a little bit of both is true; both I, and the families in question, assumed. And did that whole “making an ass out of u and me” business.

At least the last name changing incident was funny. About a month after the wedding, I wrote my dad a cheque for some money that I owed him, and he called me up a few days later and said, “I noticed that on the cheque you’re listed as Myfirst Mylast and Hisfirst Hislast. Did you not change your name?” (Again, this was over a month after the wedding. He is sometimes a little slow on the uptake.)

Me: No, of course not, IT’S NOT EVEN LEGAL HERE.
Him: It’s not?
Me: No. Not since 1981. Why doesn’t anyone seem to know that?
Him: You’re proud to be a Mylast, aren’t you? (Our last name is a very rare Jewish name.)
Me: No dad, that’s not it.
Him: Say it. SAY IT. You’re proud to be a mylast! SAY IT!

(The “say it!” repetition went on for a couple of minutes, until both my dad and I were laughing like total dorks. Who knew that in the end, he would be the one to have the easiest time with all of this? Pleasant surprise.)

An addendum to yesterday’s post: how marriage makes me a better person.

Yesterday I talked about how the mister and I chose each other, for all of our good and bad qualities, and how wonderful it feels to know that your life/partnership/marriage is the result of such conscious decisions about what you are taking on. Y’all really expanded on what I had been trying to say in really muddled, roundabout language, so wonderfully and so much more clearly than me, and so I have been thinking about it lots more.

I have also been thinking about it because I have been the shitty partner lately. I have this habit of, when something is really stressing me out, just trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. This is clearly not a healthy way of reacting to stress. But back in the day, what did it matter? I was only hurting myself. If that was how I chose to deal, then that was how I chose to deal.

Lately, there’s a particular issue that I have been giving this silent treatment, only it affects us both. I kept putting off this thing I really, really had to get sorted out, because it gave me a lot of anxiety to think about it. I am finally on top of it. But while I was avoiding it, the mister, amazingly, did not harrass me, or criticize me, or call me out; he was patient with me, tried to help out however he could, and only mentioned it in the least confrontational ways possible. Now that I am reflecting on this, I am pretty amazed, because I have been majorly on his ass for much, much smaller things in the past. But I appreciated his patience so much, that I think I’ve learned my lesson about balancing the need for things to get done, and the need to respect where my partner is at, at any given moment.

More than that lesson, though, I realised how utterly selfish I had been for sticking my head in the sand. While I used to feel so adamant that it was my life to fuck up, so I could do so if I so pleased, that is no longer the case. In fact, that hasn’t been the case for a few years already, and that’s something that marriage hasn’t changed. But having affirmed our commitment so explicitly (and having, again, so explicitly chosen this partnership together), I feel more aware, lately, of how I behave as a partner. My recent behaviour was not very partner-like at all.

I feel like marriage is challenging me to be a better person, a) because I am learning lessons about how to treat people from my partner, just as he learns his own lessons from me, and b) because I am more aware of how my actions affect other people that I care about so dearly, and desperately do not want to hurt.

And there’s also a third reason. Today the mister and I went out for lunch to one of our favourite neighbourhood places, and I apologized to him, explaining everything that I have said above. I grew up in a very proud family where people never admitted their mistakes, and I can count on one hand how many apologies I’ve ever received from members of my family in my entire life. It has become a point of pride, to me, to be open about my foibles, and to apologize easily, without pathos. The mister accepted my apology, and then we talked through where we were at with the issue at hand. Even though this particular issue has been a huge source of stress for me lately, the lunch left me feeling like I was very much blessed.