White (Diamond)

Five years ago today, there was a great culmination in the works.

I had been faithfully dating my future husband for several weeks. I'd been completely into him for about a month, after we clicked so definitely on our fourth date by Bouldin Creek in early April. A week after Bouldin Creek we had another wonderful date. We got dressed up (I even surprised him with contact lenses and a new hairstyle), we ate Greek food downtown, and we walked to the Capitol for an after-dark tour. I'd never even been inside, but my husband practically had the official tour memorized from so many childhood trips. He held my hand and showed me around, sneaking in kisses here and there, and then I drove him to his house and sneaked in a few more. We had a marvelous time, and we were fabulously into one another. But this is not the culmination I'm talking about.

A couple weeks after our date to the Capitol my future husband got on a plane bound for London, for a pleasure trip he'd spent months planning. I was in for about ten days of the old fondness-growing-through-absence treatment. Just when things were getting really good, he left the country. For the next week and a half or so, I heard from him through the occasional phone call. I heard about the museums he was visiting, the restaurants he was trying, the pictures he was taking, and the famous landmark he defaced with my name + his. He carried a picture of me in his pocket the whole time, so there are even a few pictures of "me" visiting famous London sights. But the best night was when he called me after a long evening of pub-crawling and drunkenly professed his love for me. It wasn't his intention to tell me he loved me for the first time over a trans-Atlantic phone call, but there it was. All I could do was return the favor, hope he remembered it the next morning, and wait patiently for his return, still a few days away . . .

Blue (Aquamarine)

I met my husband on March 12, 2005. I know this because I kept a written record. I kept a record for two reasons. One: Dating in the traditional sense was something I had never tried, and I wanted to take notes. I had always considered my relationships to be more like fluid, more organic, just happening, and ending disastrously. I wanted to try this one with terms of my own making, and one of those terms involved how many dates I would go on before I called this man mine. I had to take notes to remember them. Two: Despite my rationale, I knew this man would be my husband as soon as I saw him. I didn't believe it at first, but I knew it. Why wouldn't I keep a record?

So the record shows today, March 13, 2010, to be the fifth anniversary of my first date with my husband. On this night five years ago (I believe it was a Sunday) I went to meet this big, strong, bold man who'd asked me out for coffee, even though he didn't drink it. We actually ended up having tea at the Little City coffee bar on Congress Avenue downtown. We talked for maybe two hours. He found out that I was a college student. I found out that he was a self-proclaimed uber-geek. We learned that we shared a love of Led Zeppelin. I thought he was sweet and respectful. He thought I was sweet and cute. He walked me to my car and didn't even try to kiss me. We parted with a hug, and I went home thinking nothing would become of it, probably because he didn't even try to kiss me. But he had my number, and I had his, and when he called to ask me on a second date, I happily accepted.

Sugar's Note: Two weeks later, on date number three, he finally kissed me.

Cliff Jumper

Today was a stressful day.

Not that things went particularly badly. Things are actually going pretty well these days. We managed last month to scrape up enough monetary loot to secure an apartment. We are now the proud renters of a two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat on the south side of town, barely two blocks from the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment we moved out of just thirteen months ago. I look at it more as a new beginning than a step back, considering what we learned over the course of the last year and what we now know about rent houses. And it comes in a nick of time too. The four of us adults in the house were trying very hard not to drive each other crazy, after a couple failed attempts between me and my sister. To ice the cake, we also received our W-2s and filed our tax return quickly enough to have the refund in the bank on moving day, with the unprecedented benefits of joint filing and earned income credit. The move went smoothly, thanks in part to the aforementioned refund, and the new place is coming together nicely, despite the boxes we haven't yet gotten around to unpacking. We are quite comfortable for the time being, and worlds more comfortable than we were a month ago. My sister complimented me the other night on how cute the new place was looking. I agreed and told her we owed ourselves a cute place. And it is cute and cozy and very us.

But of course, we still have issues with which to contend, some old, some new, some welcome, some pains in the ass albeit expected ones. My husband is as of yet unemployed. I am still barely self-employed. He still wants more help with the finances. I still want more help with the house and childcare. On a week-long getaway to my parents' house over the holidays we actually managed to establish that we do want the same things in life, for the most part. Our problems remain in the strategic department; my husband does not concern himself much with how to go about getting them. This is a constant source of frustration for me, because I feel like we'd be unstoppable if he did. I have big dreams and lack the will to achieve them. My husband has a will of steel and no dreams.

Today my husband executed his plans of ridding our storage unit of some more of our stuff. He was gone for hours, running these and other errands. I had plans of my own for today, but of course I spent the day taking care of Lucy and getting little else done. This has been the routine for the last week or so. Now that we are in our new home with most if not all of the things we need to live, now that running back and forth between old house and new house and storage unit is not so much a priority, finishing the move has been a question of whoever can get out of the house while the other keeps a watchful eye on our budding toddler. And whoever gets to leave usually gets more of their own stuff brought into the house and more of their own projects accomplished. Although I did not choose to turn today into one, there have been conflicts over who gets to leave. My husband's argument is that we're both working toward the same goal, so what does it matter when and how things get done? I should do my thing, and he should do his, and together we'll get the work finished. What he forgets is that while he does his thing day after day after day, I have my hands too full to do mine.

I try, but constant interruptions get in my way. As I follow a crawling Lucy from room to room, I try to do whatever needs doing where I am, but the work stops as soon as she embarks on her next adventure. If she's awake it's just as impossible to get anything done as it was when she was two months old and eating every two hours around the clock. If she's asleep I crave rest, and sometimes I can't bring myself to try to power-clean or power-write or power-job-hunt for the whole hour or half-hour or two hours she may or may not sleep. And if she falls and bumps her head, or if I upset her by whisking her away from the electrical cord she wants to play with, or if she makes a beeline for the litter box, all bets are off. Whatever I'm doing must be dropped without a thought. For a person like me who always worries about doing better, seeing things left undone can be quite discouraging, but today I tried to shake it off. If I could just get one thing done, the day wouldn't be a total loss of productivity.

I started decorating one wall of my daughter's new bedroom. No, it did not get done. I started the job while keeping one eye on Lucy. Interruptions. Then my husband came home, decided I had everything under control, and went to his computer. More interruptions. Finally I got him to take over Lucy. Then I couldn't get the stepladder to work and got frustrated enough to quit it. Then I messed up with the automatic screwdriver and lost one of the screws I needed, only to find our screws apparently haven't made it out of their box yet, wherever that is. By this time I just wanted a cup of tea and maybe ten minutes alone in front of the TV or something before I had to start cooking dinner. I didn't exactly get that either. So my plans were thwarted for another day.

While I was stressing out over folding up the stupid stepladder a vision of my life flashed through my head. I saw myself standing at the edge of a cliff, with my dreams sitting on another cliff across a great canyon. Since I'm not very good at building bridges or flying (whether it's because I'm not confident enough to try it or because I'm really not very good at it), I often try to get across the hard way or the most obvious way, or maybe both. Sometimes I climb to the bottom and try to cross the canyon and climb up the other side. Sometimes I take a leap of faith and just hope to hit the other side, crazy as the journey may be. However I do it, I usually end up on the bottom of the canyon, and sometimes when I'm down there, I lose sight of where I was trying to get in the first place. My college education, for example, was a climb from the bottom. Having my daughter and leaving my day job was a leap of faith.

And marrying my husband? Sometimes I feel he'd rather just stand on the cliff and enjoy the view than climb or jump with me. But I guess I'll always have him up there to give me perspective and direction when I'm down at the bottom, and maybe throw me a rope, and if I'm lucky, he'll pull me up. At least I hope so.

6 Things I Have to Take Back Now That I Have a Baby

Since I had my daughter nine months ago I've been haunted by ghosts from the past. These are the spirits of previous Sugars who thought they knew everything. And I guess these Sugars knew all they needed to know at the tender ages of sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-five . . . but Sugar at thirty must put their spirits to rest. So I'm taking this opportunity to take back a few things I might have said or ideas I might have harbored when I was younger and less, um, matronly.

1. "Why can't stay-at-home moms take showers? Can't you just take one when your husband gets home? For real."

This was my first big post-delivery revelation. My first "Ohhhhhhh." Do you want to know why stay-at-home moms don't always get to shower, especially new ones? First of all, to understate, babies keep you busy. And I don't mean they make you busy, I mean they keep you busy. Everyone is told this before they have babies, and some people listen, but nobody really knows how true it is until they have one. They start you out with a fairly simple routine of eat-sleep-poop-eat-sleep-poop, and from there it evolves into more interesting cycles of repetition, constantly changing and rewarding all of your parenting accomplishments with new challenges. But for newborns most pediatricians will tell you they basically do five things: eat, sleep, pee, poop, and cry. If they stop doing one of those things, they need to see a doctor. That's sound advice and very reassuring, because they're always doing at least one of those five things. While they're doing those four things other than sleeping, you're taking care of them in a very hands-on fashion. When they finally do go to sleep, you're either trying to get some sleep yourself, eating just enough to stay alive, or trying to clean up things around the house that are on the verge of becoming dire emergencies, like dish avalanches waiting to happen. Why are these emergencies everywhere you look? Because you've been too busy! And even if you're doing stuff around the house while the baby sleeps, you'll quickly realize you should've slept, when the baby wakes up. And repeat! The cycle takes two to four hours and repeats around the clock. It's easy to forget to eat, much less shower. So what do you do when hubby comes home? You let him take care of the baby while you do all those things you never got a moment to do while he was gone. And showering only makes the top of that list every two days if you're lucky. Usually it's beat out by sleeping, eating, or washing the dishes so you have something to eat off of. This is why the luckiest new moms are the ones with vast support networks of friends and family members who will come over and clean house just to get a look at the new baby. I myself had my mom at my side for two weeks after Lucy was born. But she eventually had to go home. And when she did, I cried a little, and then I started to smell. Note: If your child was delivered by C-section, lucky you. You must shower daily until that incision is initially healed. After that, good luck.

2. "You don't have to have a child to understand what it's like to be a parent."

PAHAHAHAHA! (I might not have actually uttered these words, but I know I thought it a few times.) Yes, you do. If you've never had one, you don't understand. Period. It's not a character flaw; it's just a fact. You're not childless; you're child-free. Enjoy it. Because, well, see the next two points.

3. "Your life doesn't end when you have a baby."

Yes, it does. It's not entirely a bad thing. I think Wanda Sykes said it best when she pointed out that children ruin your life, but they give you a new one. And it's arguably a better one. It's like when your house burns down and you take the insurance money and build an even better house. Yes, that fire is shocking and traumatic and leaves you with an empty feeling of irreversible loss. And it's true you'll lose some valuable possessions and never get them back. It's painfully and undeniably hard. But then you look at that insurance check and imagine the possibilities. And then you get to work on making those possibilities reality, and you realize that fire actually lifted some weight off your shoulders. And then that initial shock wears off and you have a new house. And it will surely have its problems just like your old house did, but it's worth the effort of keeping it up. That's what kids do. They burn down your sense of personal freedom, but with it goes your arrogance. They burn down your solitude, but with it goes your loneliness. They take away so many things about you that you've worked so hard to make from yourself, and in return they give you a love like you've never known before. And one day very soon you won't be able to imagine what your life would have been like without that house you're living in now.

4. My adolescence. And everything that followed until I became a parent. Which I can't exactly "take back". But I sure wish I could, for my parents. I now know how and why people "turn into" their parents. It's not that you turn into your parents specifically. It's just that by having a child you have joined a very large club, and left another one behind for the most part. Parents see the world as basically made up of two kinds of people, parents and children. Parents have parents of their own, so they understand what it's like to be someone's child, as well as what it's like to be responsible for one. Children are people who do not have children of their own, so they do not understand what it's like to be someone's parent. This is why children do not understand their parents, or anyone else's parents for that matter. That's not to say that people without children are emotionally immature or somehow incapable in life. And it's certainly not to say that parents are the wisest and most enlightened beings on the earth. There's just a perspective children don't have and will never have until they take responsibility for a child themselves. It's not something to be taken lightly, so no one should be blamed or ridiculed for not being a parent. But once that perspective is gained, years and years of answers about one's parents are gained with it. Other questions are sure to spring up, but understanding is there. I tremble to think about the day, some thirteen odd years from now, when my daughter starts to question my love for her, but I find warmth in the hope that one day she'll have a child of her own.

5. "People who can't have children should just learn to be happy without them."

Okay, I never said it just like that. But when I was still unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty-five I began to examine the idea of never becoming a wife or a mother. What if it didn't happen for me, I was thinking. Did I want to spend my life pining for a husband and children that would never come? Or did I want to be happy with my life as it turned out? What if I fell in love with a woman and experienced the obvious reproductive conundrum? What if I never met the right partner at all and was condemned to a life of limitless personal freedom? I decided I'd look for happiness in any possibility and not build a house around an empty picture frame on a squeaky clean table, to use the example of Jenna Currier Nadeau, who wrote of her experiences with infertility. I still think that was a healthy decision for me. But what of the others around me, especially the ones building those houses? My idea was based on the most widely accepted one that children should be with both their parents, and those who couldn't should be adopted. I couldn't understand why so many infertile couples would put themselves through the rigors of fertility drugs and in vitro fertilizations when there were already children living who needed parents. I couldn't understand why gay couples would go outside their unions to get somebody pregnant so they could have a baby the "natural" way, although this was easier for me to understand given that discrimination against homosexuals is still pretty much perfectly legal in this country, which gets in the way of adoptions on that front. Actually there are a lot of things about these issues I still don't understand. I still think we as a society should turn our attention to the children who are already here, not worry ourselves sick over children who haven't been born or even conceived yet. But to anyone who really and truly wants to have a child, I have to say: do it any way you can. It is worth it. On that note . . .

6. My sanity. Children do bring with them an incredible amount of pressure, and it's easy to get lost along the way. I'm writing this so I can stop yelling at my husband in those hot-headed moments when I temporarily forget it's wrong to do so, even when he does screw up. I'm lucky to have him, and he does try, and things really are hard on him too, even if I sometimes feel I have them just a little bit harder. After a long, long week and a short, short night of interrupted sleep, I stayed in the shower this morning until the water started to go cold, and only then did I surrender and climb out, thinking I'd already experienced the high point of my day--that two or three minutes after I finished bathing and before the water lost its warmth. The bathroom has become my only refuge, and a purely theoretical one at that. To keep out my husband, my child, any house guests, and my nosy cat, a barricade is required. Sure enough as soon as I toweled off my husband burst in on me, and indeed he heard my wrath. But he was coming to tell me he was leaving with the baby for a while. Before my shower I would've seen this as an opportunity to go back to bed. Now it's an opportunity to write. So I guess that moment of silence in waning hot water wasn't the high point of my day after all. And when I see my husband's and my daughter's faces coming through the door, I'll experience another high yet.

There. I feel the spirits resting already. If I think of anything else I need to take back, I'll let you know.

The Cat Came Back

January 3, 2009, was a Saturday. Not three weeks earlier my husband and I had ended a glorious year of marriage and pregnancy by moving into our first house as husband and wife. With just three months to go until B-Day we were just getting settled into our new neighborhood when we lost a member of our little family.

Muriel was my cat. I'd known her about three times as long as I'd known my husband, having adopted her when I was nineteen and new to the world outside my parents' house. Ironically I'd adopted her from a friend and new neighbor who couldn't keep her any longer because she (my friend) was pregnant. Actually I adopted one of Muriel's own kittens and meant to find a new home for Muriel so she wouldn't have to go to the pound. But I never really looked for one, and soon Muriel had thwarted my plans by getting pregnant again. After Muriel had her second litter and the older kitten kept hunting and attacking the babies, I ended up getting rid of the would-be big sister. And when the babies got old enough I adopted them out, took Muriel to the spay clinic, and brought her home to stay.

After that she pretty much gave up on adventure and became a porch cat at best. As I spent the next ten years hopping from apartment to apartment, Muriel usually contented herself by taking the sunlight on various balconies and windowsills. One afternoon when I was twenty-one or so, I let her out for a minute without watching her as closely as I usually did and she ran off into the woods. When it came time for me to leave for work she was still gone, so I had to leave her outside. When I came home after dark I went to the edge of the woods and worriedly called her name. I heard crying in the distance, then leaves crunching, then Muriel tearing out of the woods toward my voice as if to say, "Oh my God, I've been worried sick!" After that, she never went further than my balcony without my close supervision, but I indulged her with little walks as frequently as I could.

Until January 3, 2009, when somehow inexplicably, she escaped. My husband and I fought that night. Then Muriel fought with my younger tom, Percy. My guess is she just got tired of all the fighting and longed to check out the new neighborhood. We're still not sure, but I think she must have slipped out the door unnoticed when my husband left the house to clear his head. I was hiding in the bedroom with a book, and when I came out to freshen the water bowls I realized we were one cat short. I must have searched the house top to bottom twenty times before I was forced to admit Muriel was gone. I headed outside with the flashlight and started searching the property. We had a wooden deck in front, but I couldn't see her underneath it. She didn't show up in the hedges. She wasn't under the car. I went up the street one way, calling her name, and then I went the other way. I went halfway around the block and back. Nothing. Finally I put my anger aside and called my husband distraught. When I had to say the words "I can't find Muriel", I broke into shoulder-rattling sobs.

And so began a seven-week ordeal no one in her third trimester should ever have to endure. My husband came home immediately and helped me search the block with no luck. We stayed up most of the night, watching from the living room window in case she should show up. She didn't. As soon as we got up that Sunday morning we went out to try our luck in the daylight. My husband spotted a cat he thought was Muriel, but she ran from him and lost him by jumping through a fence. We went to the house where he'd last seen her, and they let us search their backyard. But there was no Muriel to be found. That night was cold and rainy, and Monday morning Muriel was still gone and I was a wreck. I called in sick and spent my day posting Craigslist ads, filing reports with animal shelters, and walking the block over and over, six months pregnant and shaking a bag of Whisker Lick'n's in my hand. My husband brought home fliers, and with some help from friends we posted them all over the neighborhood and canvassed too.

A few reports came and went. People spotted cats in their yards that might have been Muriel, but by the time we got there the cats were gone or they were just the wrong cats. People pointed out other resources I might try. I visited the city animal shelter every other day after work and constantly kept track of their online mug book. But a week passed by and no Muriel. One week turned into two, two turned into three, and then we'd been without Muriel for a whole month. Gradually I stopped going to the animal shelter as much, stopped crying as much, tried not to imagine what my poor cat was going through, and finally stopped block-walking when it just got too cold.

Seven weeks after Muriel disappeared, I was cleaning up for an Oscar party when I came upon some old fliers, and I made the decision to throw them away. Not one hour later my husband pulled me out of the shower. A neighbor had come to the door with pictures on his cell phone of a cat he'd found starving in a storage closet off his garage. Just as we had no idea how Muriel had gotten out, he had no idea how this cat had gotten in. But he'd taken the cat to an emergency vet, paid the bill, and come home to ask around and maybe find the owner. Another neighbor had pointed him our way. Judging from the photos my husband was pretty sure it was Muriel. I couldn't believe it, but I quickly dressed and we got in the car and headed for the vet's office. I was sick with nerves. I almost didn't want it to be Muriel, because from what we'd heard the cat couldn't be in good shape.

When we got there we had to wait briefly. Then we were led through a room full of cages and vet techs to a pen where a tiny cat was hooked up to an IV. Her bony back was on me and I couldn't see her face, but she looked too small, and her coat actually looked shinier than my cat's. But I muttered, "Muriel?" When my cat turned around, saw my face, and cried that same cry of recognition I'd heard in the woods, I lost it like any pregnant woman missing her ten-year-old cat for seven weeks would. I cried from the gut, so hard I couldn't talk. My husband talked to the vets as I whimpered and stroked my cat's ears; Muriel most certainly wasn't out of the woods and had to stay overnight. She was starving and dehydrated, emaciated, with possible kidney failure. Every measurable fluid level in her body was off. If she made it through the night, we could pick her up in the morning and take her to her regular vet, where she'd probably need to stay for days.

We went home and called off the Oscar party, although a few cat-loving friends came by anyway to offer condolences. Our heroic neighbor came by to check on everything and even told us not to worry about paying him back, to worry about our baby and pay him back whenever we could. The next morning we'd heard no news from the vet (which was good news, as they said), and when we picked up Muriel at sunrise she'd made great progress. We took her to her vet's office, and there she stayed for a few more days before we brought her home with a weak, shaky walk, a bottle of antibiotics, and special food for her kidneys and weight gain. The cat insurance policy I'd taken out when Muriel turned ten paid off in a big way, as we were reimbursed for all the expenses after our deductible and were able to pay back our neighbor. As for Muriel, we celebrated her eleventh birthday just days after her return. It took a few months for her bald patches to fill in, for the meat to come back to her bones, and for her walk to steady itself out, but Muriel looks pretty much the same today as she did on January 3, 2009. Now she's almost twelve, and I don't anticipate any more adventures for her. I think she expended eight of those rumored nine lives.

As for my husband and me--well, it's a new year. Our rough times continued long after Muriel came home, as evidenced here in these very pages. But just as my cat was out there roaming the neighborhood and surviving the whole seven weeks I worried myself sick about her, love and commitment have been with us all along. Old fights and old problems have been put away, and now our marriage is left for new adventures.

The Definition of Insanity

Stop me if you heard this one. A recently laid off man is job-hunting on his computer. His wife asks him to watch the baby while she straightens up the kitchen, and almost immediately the baby starts to cry. The wife hollers a suggestion to stop the crying, and the husband shoots it down because he tried it before and it didn't work. She tells him to try it again; just because it didn't work last time doesn't mean it won't this time. The husband snaps back, "Honey, do you realize that's the very definition of insanity?" And his wife says, "Not with a baby!"

Okay, I know that wasn't funny. That wasn't even a joke; that was an actual exchange heard in our house just a few weeks ago. Except our house isn't our house anymore. We recently survived what will be remembered in our family as the Crash of '09. As of late we are sharing space with my sister and her fiancé, because times are hard, we needed help, and so did they. Of course, after we were forced to start a Code Enforcement investigation on our house, broke our lease, packed most of our things into a storage unit, and moved in, times got even harder when my husband lost his job, leaving the two of us unemployed spouses alone in a house to debate such issues. Now we don't know what is right and what is wrong. That is one definition of insanity.

For a little while there I was doing an okay job of standing by my man. It was actually working out well for the most part. I put my husband in charge of all the bills, and he started a record on Quicken of our expenses, our budget, our payments, etc. Where we came up short (thanks to our outrageous health insurance premiums and the outlandish utility bills we charged up living in a house with next to no insulation) he found a way to provide, and I didn't question. He kept track of where we were on the grocery budget and how much I could spend at the store each week. I took care of the planning of meals, the grocery list, the cooking, the dishes, the occasional deep cleaning, and other household worries. I watched the baby while he worked, and he watched her in the evenings while I worked. I asked for help when I needed it, sometimes he offered it, and vice versa. Having to move out of our house was not an ideal situation, but at least it moved us into a safer, cleaner environment for Lucy and took some major economic pressure off of us and my sister. It also put us closer to my husband's job, which didn't hurt. We cut our time and effort losses (the Code Enforcement case is ongoing), and we looked forward to getting caught up and back on our feet, and back into our own place as soon as we could, without the constraints of a lease. Then things really began to look up when I landed a contract writing job that offered me part-time hours and a pay scale similar to the day job I left in June. With my sister's occasional baby-sitting help, I started squeezing work time where I could into my busy schedule, and Lucy's.

Then, it seemed, the bottom dropped out when my husband came home one Friday evening and informed me he no longer worked for the law firm where he'd been employed for the last two and a half years. Due to budget cuts and re-assignments of duties, his position in the debt consultation division was no longer needed. Got to love the irony in that. At the beginning of October we were informed that we had my husband's remaining pay and vacation, a reasonable severance, and less than a month left on our health insurance coverage. And that was about it until my paychecks started rolling in. So my husband's new job became looking for a new job, and the following Monday he started working from home, with me.

How is this ever going to work, I thought, from the very first day. Remember how I was saying I wouldn't question how my husband fulfilled his role as long as he did it? Well, I got used to that idea, and suddenly I was presented with the challenge of standing by my man right in my own proverbial kitchen, not because he was there to see me but because he didn't have anywhere else to go. The bills were still getting paid (somewhat), food was still on the table (from his mom), and we still had a roof over our heads (my sister's), but I couldn't help wondering how long all that would last when my husband was spending so much time at our house. I tried to carry on as if he was just away at the office for another day. But while he was job-hunting I found it extremely difficult to just pretend he wasn't there, especially when I had my hands full of dirty dishes and the baby started screaming, or when I had my hands full of dirty diaper and the cats started fighting, or when I had my hands full of . . . you get the picture.

In the meantime, out of necessity, I also worked. Through my sister who was also laid off and had recently found work, I'd been referred to a self-named business guru who was publishing a sort of directory of industry professionals and donating proceeds for cancer research through a celebrity charity. My sister had taken over the position of Tour Coordinator from a friend of ours who was resigning, and she would be planning the book's publicity tour remotely from Austin. But the publishers in Vegas also needed some writing help with their website, their blog, some of their press releases, some of the copy in the book itself, and in the future possibly even a ghostwritten book about the upcoming publicity tour. She pointed them in my direction, and after a series of short phone interviews it was determined that I would be the book's newest editor and copy writer.

Just a few short weeks before my husband lost his job, I signed a contract and began work on my first professional writing job. And I was excited! I was working ten to twenty hours a week on my own, reporting to my employers by phone or by e-mail between feedings and diaper changes. I was rounding up all the materials I'd been sent from the previous editor, who'd resigned to spend more time with family, and I was about to embark on a mission to contact over a hundred artists and professionals so I could write or edit biographical paragraphs and feature articles about them, for their individual spreads in the book.

But it seemed as soon as I signed the contract red flags started popping up. When I sent in my first invoice (for my first four days of work), the accounting department tried to negotiate my pay amount, citing the contract they'd sent me to sign as "unclear". Because of this lack of clarity, not twenty days after I signed my ninety-day trial contract, my employers asked me to sign a revision that said I had to work more hours for the same rate of pay. I refused, and they backed off, assuring me they just wanted me to understand the job would require closer to twenty hours a week than ten, that they didn't want to be "taken advantage of". Then I began experiencing a flood of problems when reaching out to contact their clients.

The contact list I'd been sent turned out to be inaccurate and unorganized, e-mail addresses weren't working, and an e-mail signature I'd been asked to use, which was full of links advertising the project, kept tripping up my spam filter and those of my would-be recipients. Few people were returning my calls or my e-mails, which I was making from my personal cell phone and a Gmail address I set up just for the job, because I wasn't furnished with any of it. I was given a toll free callback number to give out, as well as an inbox e-mail address, but I was not given access to my messages either way. I had to depend on the project office in Vegas to send me my messages. By the time I decided to drop the spammy signature, stop trying to reach clients by phone, and give them my Gmail address to reply to, communications from my bosses had all but ceased.

I hadn't heard from Lisa, the woman who'd hired me, in weeks. Her husband and partner, Todd, and the sales manager, Brad, were e-mailing me and on rare occasions calling me, but it became apparent that many e-mails supposedly from Brad were actually written by Todd. Soon it became obvious so were the communications from the "accounting department", a separate company employed by my bosses, or so they'd implied. By then I'd already realized their local business address was a UPS box (conveniently explained by their recent change in headquarters to Vegas), and I figured out their accounting department was Todd. And I still hadn't received the standardized time sheet they'd promised me, or any paychecks for that matter (according to my contract they had thirty days from my invoices, and that time was not quite up). Whenever I made inquiries on these and other issues I was given short, vague, dismissive answers alluding to the pre-launch publicity gala scheduled to occur in Vegas that month. They were running around like crazy trying to get ready for it, and things would be back on track after that, they said, thanking me for my patience and good work. I was getting frustrated at this point, especially when I learned that the friend who'd referred my sister was still waiting for her last two months of pay. I also wondered why the previous editor had really quit; it certainly seemed like she hadn't gotten much work done. My load was starting to feel too large for someone coming in less than two months before press time. And I still hadn't been given a concrete date on when that was supposed to be. The book was supposed to be selling in January.

After about six weeks of this mess (by then my first paycheck was officially overdue) I learned that the huge, star-studded, charity-benefitting gala event they'd been using to sell their product all along was canceled less than a week in advance, causing the charity beneficiaries and some of the clients to drop out of the project. And I learned this not from my bosses but from my sister, who'd been experiencing her own problems on the job. At this point we were reading clients' testimonies on ripoffreport.com, and it became undeniably obvious we were not going to be paid. So I was forced to admit to myself that I'd been scammed and decide what my legal options were. At the end of October when yet another invoice became contractually overdue, I wrote my letter of notice. My bosses responded by pleading with me to reconsider, promising to pay me by the end of the week and on time thereafter. I told them I'd reconsider pending payment, and if they paid me everything I'd billed them for, I'd finish my contract. They thanked me and told me to stay tuned for a conference call later that week, and that was the last I heard from them. I still haven't seen a dime. The only light in any of it is the clause in my contract that gave me ownership of my written materials if they were just late enough with my pay. Of course, they were, so I wasn't required to turn in anything I'd written for their use. Unfortunately I can't really do anything else with it. No future employers will want to read the materials I wrote for a book that was never published because it was a scam.

In the midst of all this I was sharing with my husband the space I'd convinced myself was mine to rule, trying to figure out how one stands by a man who's barely standing himself. We'd agreed to a half-on, half-off system. He'd spend the mornings in the office, looking for a job while I watched Lucy. Then I'd have the office for the afternoons and on Saturdays, while he watched Lucy. But it didn't work out that way. After a couple disheartening weeks of full-time job-hunting, my husband started getting out of bed later, starting the hunt later, showering and getting dressed later, going out on errands later, getting home later, and therefore handing over the office later. These delays in combination with Lucy's nursing needs and our need to eat dinner each night cut my work hours into smaller and more erratic pieces. And when Saturdays rolled around my attempts to catch up became little wars over the better computer, my husband's. I'd found myself in a situation not unlike the old one. There I was again, working on making money, working on the house, taking care of the child, asking for help, going through power struggles, and feeling completely overwhelmed. Only this time my husband wasn't reporting to work every day. This time we weren't in our own house, not even our own bedroom. This time was worse than before. So in an effort to keep from going insane, ironically enough, I drove myself in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. I gave my husband one more plea, like I had so many times before, just in a more blunt form of language.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked him, many times over the course of several days.

If there is ever a time I ask my husband not to do something (and there is), I offer him an alternative. If he's not making me happy, I try to tell him how he can make me happy. I ask him to do the same for me. Because despite what he tells me in times of peace, I'm not always making him happy. But he won't do it, and I can't figure out why. Again I've been left to come up with my own conclusions.

So I guess I was just driving myself insane. I guess this is just another case of goose and gander politics, and I should just deal with it. Maybe when the kingdom beats up on a man, the castle beats up on a woman? In an effort to keep myself from going insane, I've made a decision. If my husband can decide what his job is, do it, and not worry about much else, I can too. If he can "come home" from a day of his worries and take the evening to relax, so can I. Now that I'm free of my first so-called writing job, I've decided to relieve myself of the responsibilities of work and finance, just like my husband, in action, has relieved himself of the responsibilities of the house. I'll take care of the house and the baby all day, I'll cook, I'll clean, and I’ll do the shopping. But I'm not going to worry about much else. I've tried, and my repeated actions always yield the same results. It wasn't my dream to give my husband so much responsibility, nor was it my dream to take on so much for myself. I didn't ask for this role, but I'll play it.

My father, a minister, cherishes an essay Wendell Berry wrote on poetry and marriage; in lieu of premarital counseling it's required reading for any couple he marries, including my husband and me. To paraphrase Berry's thoughts, what you alone think marriage is going to be, it won't be. I was warned of this, and it appears to be true. Because I thought we'd live in our own house, take care of it, work hard for it, and enjoy it. I at least thought we'd eat dinner together. But I'm typing this as I eat mine alone.

Stand By Your Man

I think Tammy Wynette had my husband in mind. Relating to old school country tunes has never been my bag, but Tammy and I might have a thing or two in common. In fact Tammy might have something in common with every woman who's ever been married; maybe I just don't know it.

My primary wedded role model, my mom, seems to think it's so. Whenever I get on the phone with her to chew about whatever my husband's doing wrong today, I hear a little Tammy in her. Common pearls from my mother include "Try to catch him doing something right" and "It's hard on him too", and my favorite "Things will never be 100% equal". From someone I used to consider a raging feminist, this advice strikes me as strange. I don't know. Maybe she just really loves my husband and wants him to win.

There are a few things about my husband that must be understood. First of all, family in the traditional sense is a second language for him. My husband went home from the hospital in Austin in 1973 with his grandparents. His parents were young and inexperienced when it came to children: his father the eldest of three street kids adopted by a postal worker and his wife, a teacher, his mother the youngest of six born to a military man and his wife. They'd married after finding they were expecting, probably because that's just what people did, but when my husband came along, I guess they just decided they couldn't handle it. My daughter and I take our name from the postal worker and the teacher who opened their home to three children from the street, and then did it again for a grandson, my husband. He stayed with them until he was old enough to go to school, which he started just before his fifth birthday. Then he finally lived with his parents, who were a little bit older and wiser in their mid-twenties. Before he was ten years old however, they were divorced, but not before my husband witnessed some drug use and some domestic violence. He and his mother moved in with her parents, but the situation proved unstable when his aging maternal grandmother attempted to harm him in her increasing senility. So it was back to the paternal grandparents' house for him, and there he stayed until after his grandfather passed away. Then he was a freshman in high school and decided to have one more try with his mother, who was finally living on her own. The situation proved volatile, and he only stayed the length of a semester before a fight with his mother prompted him to move back in with his grandmother. He finished high school there and started his freshman year at UT. Barely a year later his grandmother went to live in a nursing home and soon passed away, leaving him eighteen and virtually all alone.

He was left a reasonable sum of money and his grandparents' house as an inheritance, or so he thought. After he blew through the money, as any eighteen-year-old might, he learned that his grandmother's will had been changed by her cousins, who'd been granted power of attorney while looking after her estate before her death. However legitimate or illegitimate it might have been, the house was apparently theirs, and my husband was forced out of it, coming home one day to find the locks had changed. By then he'd dropped out of school and he didn't have a decent job if any, he and his mother didn't get along, and his grandmother's funeral was the first time he'd seen his father in years, so he went to the only place he could.

My husband's best friend since high school is Bret. Bret's mother is Bianca, a widowed librarian with three children of her own and an entire family of full-grown adoptees. My husband is probably the oldest of those. When he was kicked out of his house at eighteen, he went to live with Bret and Bianca, and Bret's younger brother and sister. He spent a couple years there, working off and on and otherwise screwing around, until Bianca finally sat him down and told him he needed to do something with his life, and if he didn't go back to school or into the military he'd have to leave her house. So he enlisted in the army, with Bret, and after basic training both of them went to study at the Defense Languages Institute in Monterey, California. From there Bret decided to make the army his career. My husband came home. One day Bianca told him the story of her first child, a baby boy she'd had before Bret, who died shortly after birth. She told my husband she'd always known she was meant to have four children, and he was her other son. He met me some ten years later and still called Bianca's family his. Now Bianca is my mother-in-law, my daughter her granddaughter.

So my husband never knew anything close to a traditional, stable family until he was an adult. Before that he was raised by, well, grandparents. They were dead long before I came into the picture, and I know they were very special people, but if my parents' love for my daughter is any indication, I know these people spoiled the hell out of my husband. He wasn't made to do much that didn't please him. Vegetables weren't forced, housecleaning was optional, and self-entertainment was key to my husband's childhood. The television was probably on non-stop in their house. As for male role models, my husband had an old man, an actual old man, who left this world just when my husband was becoming a man himself. What resulted is a bona fide meat-and-potatoes bachelor with an extensive knowledge of television programming and old pop standards, who frequently entertains by talking to himself or making other sorts of music with his mouth. Well, that among other things.

Then here am I. The first born to young parents from large families, and a big sister before I was two, family is all I know. I grew up in a family of five, with grandparents, several aunts and uncles, and a host of cousins and family friends nearby, and pets too. I came to Austin from a small East Texas town, which for good or for ill champions a family atmosphere of its own. In my house space was shared. I didn't have my own room until I was seven or eight years old, and I can remember more than one fight with my mom about keeping it clean. As for the rest of the house chores were the rule, simply because when five people live in a space without cleaning it up, it ceases to be a functional space. That and the old adage "if Mama ain't happy, then nobody's happy" certainly applied in our house. I left home to live on my own when I was nineteen, leaving town to go back to school at twenty-two, and I definitely spent a few years doing my own thing. By the time I was twenty-five I'd made up my mind to be happy with whatever life handed me, whether it was a magical man, a magical woman, or the single life. I left behind my carefree, typical early-twenties attitude and focused on the future, my future. Then as soon as I stopped looking, he appeared. After I met my husband and he got down on his knee, my mind promptly switched back into family mode, if it ever really left.

And perhaps this is where I started screwing things up.

I didn't even want to think about marriage until I'd finished school, but my husband and I celebrated our first (pre-marital) anniversary just a few weeks before I was supposed to graduate, and he couldn't pass up the opportunity to propose. So I finished my last semester of college both exhausted and engaged. As soon as the summer began, my single life began falling apart directly. My much anticipated graduation, conditioned on the completion of one college algebra class, was postponed when I quite miserably and impressively flunked. Then my nine-year old car fell on its last legs, and I had to buy a new one, with my fiance's help, of course. We planned to marry on our second anniversary the next spring, and we wanted to go ahead and find a place to live. So my roommate beat me to the punch and found a new place to live himself. Unable to pay the rent on my own, I had to ask my fiance to take my roommate's place, although he had three months remaining on his own lease. After three months of awkward bouncing between "my" apartment and his, he finally, officially moved in. We ended up postponing the wedding plans for another year, due to the usual restrictions on time and money, but for the time being we were happy cohabitating. At least I think we were.

Anybody who's ever lived with, well, anyone, knows that's when you really get to know somebody. The two years I lived with my husband before he became my husband, I was getting a full dose of a man I didn't quite know before, his grandparents' grandson: the meat and potatoes, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of television that was in his head, his cooking and cleaning habits (or lack thereof), his disliking of animals, his disliking of my side of town, his command of obscure and useless trivia, and a love of role-playing games and miniature-painting that went to a level never before seen even by an English nerd like myself, although to be fair, he did warn me on our first date that he was, in fact, an uber-geek. We had two bathrooms in our first apartment and didn't share for the most part, so that at least was an experience I spared myself until we got our first house. I might not have been able to handle it. Some of the biggest problems my husband and I have today originated in those first couple of years. We weren't yet married, but it seemed the honeymoon was already over. A wonderful, blissful year of being in love but not being on the same lease was forever behind us.

At first I saw it as an opportunity to start anew. Yes, we were engaged to be married, but we simply saw ourselves as together, a year and a few months into a relationship that would last forever, no matter what we called it. I certainly didn't see our living situation as playing house; I saw it as making a home. I wanted to put into motion the systems and traditions I saw us incorporating as a family. My husband-to-be, of course, was part of that family, the figurehead, in fact. So I began asking him questions about things I thought were an important part of family life. How would he like the kitchen cleaned? How would he like the bills paid? What did he want to do about trips to the grocery store? When did he want to eat dinner? And I wasn't just asking about banal, rote household chores. What did we want to do to keep our bedroom warm and inviting? When did we want to go out on dates, now that we were no longer "dating"? These were just a few things I had opinions on, and I wanted to know his. I wanted to come up with some way of living that would be ours, and harmoniously so.

These questions made my husband look at me as if I were speaking Swahili. And I got my answer; over and over again it was usually the same. It was whatever. He had no opinion. He had no stance. In fact, these were things he'd never "really" thought about, he said. Sometimes I found this answer off-putting. Sometimes I saw it as an opportunity to teach him how I did these things, thinking I had some good pearls to offer. Sometimes I asked him to think about it and get back to me. Either way I began to develop the impression that he didn't care that much, especially when I re-addressed these "get back to me" issues and found he still hadn't really thought about it. So I figured if and when he didn't care to take a stance on an issue, we could just do things my way, right?

Not exactly. As it turned out, he did have strongly felt opinions when it came down to the time to do something, or to get out of doing it. I never expected him to just know intrinsically what I saw as the correct way to do things, although sometimes his lack of household knowledge did irritate me. I realized where he was coming from, and I tried to teach him by asking him to do things, like closing cabinet doors after himself, not leaving his boots in front of the door, wiping down the kitchen counter tops at the end of the night, or even eating at the table with me in the first place. I tried to get him to drink water and eat vegetables, and to prepare them as part of our daily meals. I tried to convince him that the bedroom floor in front of our closet was not the best place for him to keep his dirty laundry. And most importantly I tried to teach him that I would not be the only one responsible for making sure all these things happened. I thought we were running a household in the only way I'd ever seen one run: two grown adults, both bringing home the bacon and both taking care of the place, and taking care of each other. I even accepted his adamant denial of any duties pertaining to my cat, particularly her feces (he never went near it until I got pregnant; we, or rather I, had two cats by then). Still, my husband-to-be resisted my requests.

So I welcomed him to plead his case. Why don't you want to do things this way, I asked. How would you like to do it? I refused to believe he just didn't care. The most common answers I heard were "Because I don't" or "Because I do it this way", or again, "I never really thought about it". And usually I'd retort with the reasons I did things the way I did, the reasons I thought my way was better. More often than not, these discussions turned into our earliest arguments, and my husband, gentleman that he was, usually ceded. But I quickly realized he was doing it to end uncomfortable discussions, when the chores continued to go undone or be done by me. This dodging strategy left issues to keep coming up, and I kept getting more irritated every time. After all, these were not the things I wanted to talk about. These were things I wanted out of the way so we could enjoy life, but not at the expense of just leaving them undone. I was persistent as hell. I tried to think of better approaches, such as not bringing things up in the heat of the moment. Instead of bringing things up when I was exasperated because the sink was full of dirty dishes again, I picked calm, detached times to bring them up, like when we were riding in the car. But nothing I tried worked. Usually this just made things heat up, and suddenly I was responsible for starting another argument.

Inevitably my husband began to accuse me of wanting everything done my way. He insisted that I was more worried about how it was done than if it was done. While I'd admit that my detail-oriented, female brain is prone to such desires, I didn't feel that was the case. I'd also agree that men's brains are not wired to deal with details as well as women's brains are. But I really didn't care how he went about cleaning the kitchen. Sometimes I snickered at his methods, because it was obvious he'd taught himself, hamfistedly, as a bachelor. He snickered at me the same way when I couldn't figure out how to do something on the computer. In reality, I really just wanted jobs to get done. And the way he most often chose to do something was to leave it undone. Even when we agreed it was his job, because I'd done it the night before, or I'd cooked, or just because he said he would, I'd usually wake up the next morning to pots and pans with dried food all over them and crumbs all over the stove top. It's not that he wasn't doing it the right way; he wasn't doing it at all. His suggestion was that I learn to work around messes like he did. The real problem, I eventually realized, was we had entirely different ideas about what needed to be done in the first place. Where were these ideas when I'd asked about them? I had no idea.

This began to turn into a vicious cycle. When I asked, he had no opinion, so I thought it wasn't important to him, and I got more used to doing things my way. When an issue came up, suddenly he had an opinion to discuss. But discussion of methods (his vs. hers) made him feel like I didn't value his opinions. So he refused to share them. His battle cry became the heroic anthem: "If you want something done a certain way, do it yourself!" And when it got too hot for me, I'd take his advice to heart. Okay, I will, I thought--until I realized that left me to do almost everything and got frustrated. It was ridiculous, but it just kept going and going. We tried a few successful interventions along the way. We made little agreements to try to keep each ourselves from driving each other crazy. I'd make an effort to keep the Brita pitcher full and cold if he'd make an effort to make the bed in the mornings. He even brought up the idea of joining a website that disguised household chores as a role-playing game, with XP and leveling up and all that, and much to his surprise I agreed. For a while it even worked. We got competitive about house-cleaning and the house got cleaned, and since we both agreed we couldn't claim any housework unless we claimed it on the website, arguments were settled before they began. But our little agreements weren't happening often enough, and we soon grew lazy about logging housecleaning XP. The game grew unrealistic, and household problems just re-surfaced. These arguments went on long after our wedding. I'm sure our daughter heard plenty of them from inside the womb. After all my being pregnant with our child didn't exactly light a fire under my husband to do a little extra housework (cat poop excluded).

About halfway through my pregnancy we went for the silver medal of the American dream. We moved out of our apartment and into a rent house. A duplex actually, the larger of two units built out of an older house in a charming neighborhood in north central Austin. We had agreed that our now cluttered two-bedroom apartment wouldn't be enough room for a baby, her parents, and two felines. We hadn't agreed on where in town to live. I had always lived on the south side and loved it. My husband had the same feelings about the north. So we decided whoever found the best house would win. He found the place on Craigslist. It was in a great neighborhood, (actually it was exactly where we wanted to be, should we move north of the river), and it had a pool. The pictures looked nice, it had three bedrooms, the rent was manageable for us and great for the area, so we decided to have a look. If it looked half as nice inside as its location was, we wanted it. We took a look, and we liked. It was much larger than we'd expected. It looked a little more run down on the outside than the pictures implied, but the interior was something we could work with. We weren't interested in buying it; although we'd originally hoped to find a rent-to-own situation, it needed quite a bit of work. But it would do just fine until we found something we did want to buy, hopefully in that neighborhood. So we applied and were approved for our first house.

Again I looked at the move as a new beginning. By then we'd spent more than two years under the same roof, and finding a new one was more than refreshing. We'd have an additional room to contain our lives and accommodate the new one coming in. The cats would have plenty of room to run around. And we were moving in six weeks before our lease ended on the apartment, so we could move in slowly and only bring what we needed, purging useless crap along the way. On top of all this we'd have all the comforts of a free-standing house, which outweigh the costs so heavily when you're used to living in an apartment. We were thrilled.

But the intensity of it was short-lived. The move took its toll on my husband, who handled most of the heavy lifting himself, except on the actual moving day when we hired movers and called on friends and family. There was some financial stress in the beginning because of our choice to pay double rent for six weeks. We also chose to move over the Christmas holidays. Our slow moving plan dissolved into a reality of ignoring all the stuff we'd left in our apartment until the last minute. Of course, my hormones were out of control. Just after the New Year, we had the worst fight I can remember, after I prepared a nice dinner in our new kitchen and my husband delayed coming to the table to do something I found less important, leaving me to eat alone. After we fought over the same old issues I left the house and went for a long drive, but when I came back I was still mad. So I said nothing to my husband. I broke up a cat fight on the way to our bedroom, and then I holed up with a book to distract myself, and shortly after that my husband left. He went over to Bianca's house and hung out with his brothers until I called him in tears, because when I finally came out of the bedroom I realized one of the cats was missing from the house. We'd been in the neighborhood little more than two weeks, and the cat I'd loved since the age of nineteen, when I'd first moved out on my own, was gone. I was a wreck. I felt like all the fighting had driven her from the house, and I was desperate to find her and get her home so I could make it up to her. But repeated searches of the neighborhood turned up nothing, and I was miserable for weeks. All the baggage we'd left in our old apartment ended up coming right back into our lives, much of it literally, as time ran out on the old lease and we had to move it somewhere. For a few more months, things didn't really change. We just had bigger things to fight about. Even painting our daughter's bedroom turned into an argument.

Then came Lucy.

We were good to each other the first couple weeks Lucy was in our new home. My husband was on family leave. My mother was there with us while I recovered from surgery and Lucy and I learned to breastfeed. And of course, family and friends visited frequently to get peeks at the new arrival. We were all tired, and the house was far from spotless, but we were all happy to be centered around Lucy, and not much else mattered. We got a little snippy with each other during a couple of Lucy's late-night crying jags, but as soon as we realized we were better served to work the nights in shifts, we got along fine. Then after a couple weeks my mother went back home and my husband went back to work, and I began my new life as a stay-at-home mom. I quickly realized just how much work a newborn requires, and everything in my life had to be adjusted yet a little bit more. It was stressful at times, but I loved it. I was right where I felt I should be.

Then some more weeks went by, and soon the time came to think about going back to work. I was allowed twelve weeks' leave from my day job, but only the first six were paid. I planned to go back to my home business after six weeks, but because of my surgery I couldn't. I waited until the doctor gave me the green light, and when Lucy was two months old I started trying to drum up business to get myself started again. By this time I'd decided I didn't want to go back to my day job and couldn't afford day care if I did. I was going to depend solely on my work at home to pull in my half of our income, and my husband was going to provide our health insurance. It would mean a pay cut, but we could handle it. I resigned from my day job.

But as it quickly turned out I'd highly overestimated myself. I was not under the delusion that I'd be able to care for an infant, work full-time with said infant by my side, and keep a sparkling clean house, but caring for Lucy was a priority that couldn't be questioned or compromised, our need for money was a reality, and some things did have to be done around the house. For example, for this new, old house we'd given up having a dishwasher, and there was always laundry and grocery shopping to be done. We'd splurged on an automatic, self-cleaning litter box for the cat poo, but it still had to be maintained, and it jammed occasionally, filling our house with the smell of shit soup. Also, in the six months we'd been there, the house had revealed many new characteristics with which we were less than pleased. Most notably it had shifted on its foundation as the seasons changed, creating some situations that were merely irksome, like doors that stuck, and some situations we realized could be dangerous to our daughter, like cracking floor tiles. I soon found myself completely overwhelmed, and my appeals to my husband to help me around the house were louder than ever.

My logic was simple. If I was going to stress myself out trying to pull in half the income while staying at home with the baby all day, how could I possibly be expected to take care of the house too? What had changed besides where I was working and what kind of work I was doing? I was still working. Obviously Lucy had added new dimensions of stress and worry to both our lives, but my husband still found time to watch TV at night when the dishes needed washing, and to go play role-playing games with his buddies on the weekends when the laundry was piled up, while I worried about every aspect of our household around the clock. He still left behind work for me to take care of: his breakfast remains in the sink, his clothes and painting supplies on the couch, his laundry in the dryer with no basket in sight. I knew he didn't do these things intentionally or spitefully, but he definitely did them thoughtlessly. By putting chores off for later, whenever he could, he essentially left them for me. With him gone eight to ten hours a day and me home alone, somehow I always got to his messes before he did. On Saturdays I begged him to help me get the house under control, and he reluctantly agreed, quite often with a heavy complaint first. I felt like everything I asked him to do was a huge and bothersome inconvenience, and I found myself weighing in my mind whether the task at hand was worth the trouble of asking for help. After much ado, I could usually get things going for a little while. But when I sat down to nurse the baby, which I did approximately eight times a day, sometimes for an hour at a time, he must have thought I was taking a break, because he usually excused himself for some computer time. If I protested, we were usually on our way into another argument. But since the baby it wasn't so much about methods anymore. It was about freedom.

It was an argument as old as time, I'm sure. My husband worked forty hours a week, and when he came home he wanted to relax. Who wouldn't? All along I'd been trying to get necessary evils like housework out of the way so we could enjoy as much time as possible together. Who knew? Maybe we could even enjoy the housework. I was all for the two of us being happy together. And I was all for personal freedom. I definitely wanted more of it for myself, especially after Lucy was born. I just didn't want for us to enjoy so much personal freedom that our household ceased to function. To me it seemed perfectly acceptable for us to devote a certain amount of time each day to personal fulfillment and relaxation, just as long as we spent the rest of the day focused on our family's needs. I would respect his time if he would respect mine, which I felt I deserved just as much as he did. And at the very least I'd be happy at the end of the day, knowing we both did as much as we could to keep our family on its feet, and then enjoyed ourselves. So I made it my mission to find out just how much freedom he wanted from me, so I could respect it. But I came upon the same roadblocks. He didn't think about things that way; he didn't have a time period in mind. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer, as if he knew where the road was going. As usual we could never come to an agreement, and soon I just came to the conclusion that he wanted to feel free to do as he pleased all the time, or it wasn't freedom at all. I was just some dominatrix trying to make a work horse out of him. All I wanted was work, work, work all the time, and never any fun. When would I understand?

Which brings me back to Tammy.

I understand the evolutionary theories about women and men. I know that women have traditionally taken care of the home and the family because their natural abilities are honed for the job. I know that men have traditionally brought home the meat for the same reason. I know that things have generally worked out well this way, and I'm fine with the man ruling the kingdom and the woman ruling the castle, as long as exceptions are allowed. I see great balance and fairness in that. If a woman wishes to stay home and take care of children and a house while her man goes off to work, that's what she should do. If she wishes to work, she should. I'm glad I was born after the feminist movement, with my own choices to make in life. I'm glad women are working all over this country, and men for the most part are on board with that. After all there are dual incomes for them to consider. We now live in a dual-income society and a dual-income economy, where it's been made difficult at best to live on one parent's salary. Men and women, for the most part, are sharing the responsibilities of food, clothing, shelter, cars, and big-screen TVs. Women have taken their new responsibilities and run with them. So when are men going to get the memo on dual parenting? When are they going to get on board with housework? If a woman is working to help her husband support their family, shouldn't her husband be helping her take care of the kids and the house? Shouldn't they be working a second shift too? Shouldn't a woman be able to enjoy some free time without leaving the house to fall down around her?

Apparently I've failed to make my husband understand this concept, and I'm just about ready to give up. The only thing holding me back, besides my conscience, is my suspicion that he's pretended to be clueless so I'd stop asking him to do things, like the Shel Silverstein poem about the kid who hates drying the dishes so he starts breaking them. Consequently I have also failed to bring in the income we so desperately needed, as the summer rolled on and our utility bills soared, and the hospital bills came, and my husband's paychecks choked on health insurance premiums. So I decided to try something new; my original plan wasn't working. I decided to stand by my man. I relinquished control of the family finances. My man makes the money, so he pays the bills. When I go to the grocery store, I go with an allowance he decides. My home business income, from what little business I manage to do, amounts to spending money for me, "the little woman". Obviously the responsibility for Lucy lies with both of her parents in the end (my husband's not a complete caveman), but the responsibility for household chores now lies with me. I'll not question my husband's methods of making money and paying bills, as long as he does it. And things around the house will get done my way or not at all, because I'll do them or blow them off myself. It's time to let a woman be a woman and a man be a man. If I need my husband's help, I ask him. And if he needs my help, he has to ask me.

Will this work? Or are Tammy and I both insane?

Sugar's Note:
Since writing this I've learned a little bit more about my husband's estranged father, who unfortunately passed away recently. My husband's father was actually the youngest of three siblings, who were not adopted from the street as my husband previously believed. My husband's biological paternal grandmother died when her youngest child was only three, and her children were sent to live with relatives, who raised the three children and later became my husband's grandparents. The grandmother who raised my husband is a relative of his biological grandmother.