… is unparalleled.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

*****

(And for my dad, best of men, always loved, always missed, this.)

My husband made this commercial. It’s kind of what he does, but this is a little different, because it’s something that he did on his own, with a partner, instead of with a massive creative team and production company and crew of whomevers doing everything from pointing giant cameras to making sandwiches, and it’s for a kind of competition, the result of which exactly will be I’m not sure what, but still. It’s important to him, and it’s a sweet and funny video, and so I’m going to make you watch it, and you will be grateful:

Please enjoy. And pass it on. The husband doesn’t ask much of my Internets, so it’d be nice to indulge him.

(We’re road-tripping right now – this post comes to you courtesy the free Wi-Fi at the Hampton Inn in Louisville, Kentucky – and to say that my attention span is crunched almost flat is to understate things dramatically. So.)

(We’re road-tripping because I’m going to run the Princess Half-Marathon, aka the Tiarathon, at Disney World this weekend. I’m doing it for Tanner. You can read more about here.)

(Also, puppies.)

My husband and I have been together for over seventeen years. That’s pretty much the entirety of my adult life, and almost half of my whole life so far. Hopefully, it’s only the beginning. Hopefully, we’ll both live long lives and will celebrate the births of grandchildren and maybe even great-grandchildren and those years of our lives that were spent without each other will seem distant and momentary and we will tell people, we have been together forever.

It seems such a rare thing these days, couple staying together forever.  My husband sometimes remarks, when we hear that yet another relationship – a relationship of someone close to us, or someone not close to us, or someone that we only know through People magazine – has foundered on the rocks of infidelity or irreconcilable differences, that it seems that everything, everything these days is stacked against lasting love. What that everything is, he’s not sure, but it worries him, sometimes. What if it comes after us, he asks? What if it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking and consumes us before we even know what’s happened?

It won’t, I say. Because we’re always looking. Because we value what we have too highly to let down our defenses. Because our love is our defense. And so on and mushy so forth. But I understand his concern. We live in an age wherein the opportunities for undermining one’s relationships are more numerous and more varied than ever before. There is more to be distracted by, more to be tempted by, more to cause one to forget – for a moment, for many moments, for far too long – about what really matters.

I’ve seen, in the last few years, too many marriages crash on the rocks of the Internet, too many relationships suffer because there is so much else to do and so many others with whom to do it. I’ve listened to peers complain that their partners don’t want them to write about this or that private matter; I’ve read the e-mails attached to countless submissions to the Basement, cursing the fact that a husband or wife or significant other doesn’t understand their need to share. I’ve seen far too many friends and acquaintances take their sharing elsewhere, away from the person with whom they share their offline life, to someone else, someone online, someone who better gets them and their deepest, innermost thoughts, the ones that they publish online. I’ve watched, and lent a sympathetic ear, and understood – this world, this virtual world in which we finally, finally get to tell our stories, uncensored, often seems so much more vibrant and more real than the world in which we change bedsheets and diapers and argue over who will drop the kids at school and who will make the doctor’s appointment and who will pick up the milk. In this world, we are writers. Artists. Activists. In this world, we are noble, we are fascinating, we are awesome. We get to project our best selves onto a virtual screen and see ourselves – and see others see us – as our best selves, as the selves that don’t change diapers or bedsheets, or that make the changing of diapers and bedsheets funny and interesting and – maybe, if we’re really on our game – poetic.

It is so easy to be seduced by those selves, by the idea of those selves, by the idea of being received and understood primarily on the virtues of those selves. It’s the dream of anyone who is a geek or has ever been a geek, anyone who feels or has ever felt misunderstood; it is the high school dream of having your secret poetry-and-sketch-filled notebooks discovered and seeing everyone realize that you are, underneath your Sex Pistols t-shirt and ironic barrettes and black fingernail polish, really a genius! And so funny! And then they all want to be your friend, or fall in love with you! Or both! The difference, however, in the age of the Internet, is that we put the contents of those notebooks up on Blogger or Twitter or Facebook and wait to be adored and when – if – the adoration comes, whether from one person or one hundred or one thousand or more, we sit back and tell ourselves that we always knew that this could happen, that we always expected this to happen, if we only had the opportunity to show ourselves as we really are. And we forget, some of us, in the thrall of this lived dream, that there are people who have always adored us for who we really are, only they don’t say so on Twitter.

This, I think, is the dangerous thing, the monster, that can creep up on us: this forgetting, this unvaluing or undervaluing – when held against the sparkle and glitter and heat of the virtual world – of our real, ordinary worlds, and the relationships therein.

There are corollary dangers, of course – the dangers attendant to finding ex-lovers on Facebook, the dangers of e-mail flirtations, the dangers of cultivating any virtual relationships that might supplant the one that is the basis of your real-world home, the danger of placing greater value upon one’s life in the virtual world than upon one’s life in the real world, the danger of simply being distracted. Such dangers are not, of course, restricted to interaction in the virtual world, nor are they new: Helen’s desire to pursue a new and more interesting life with Paris launched the Trojan war; Emma Bovary’s attachment to romance novels prompted her to seek romance outside of her marriage; Anna Karenina, of course, followed her unfaithful heart and ended up – broken and broken-hearted – underneath the wheels of a train. And so on. It’s an old, old story. But it’s one that, I think, becomes more common the more that we embrace opportunities to speculate upon and indulge the fantasies of what if? What if my spouse were more dashing, more romantic? What if I had a partner who loved discussing philosophy in the middle of the night as much as some of my Twitter friends? What if I were married to someone who truly understood my obsession with Glee?

The Internet – taken in the larger context of a mass media that assaults us, constantly, with images and stories about how much better our lives could be, if – has, arguably, become the postmodern, poststructuralist, interactive equivalent of Emma Bovary’s romance novels: it tempts us with the possibility that there could be something or someone better out there, that we might be happier with that something or someone else, that everything that we have here, right in front of us, is so much less interesting, so much less sparkly and fascinating and fulfilling than that those other possibilities, and then it invites us and gives us the means to explore those possibilities from the safety and security of our kitchen tables or home offices.

We don’t all do this, of course. And not all relationships that founder these days do so because of social media, and not all relationships that do founder for any reason related to social media are relationships that would have otherwise survived. It just seems, though, that this – this phenomenon, this thing – is so much with us, and that it carries so much potential for harm where harm mightn’t otherwise have occurred and it just makes me so sad every time I hear about another relationship being shattered after battering against the hard, glittery edges of new media. I tell my husband, when he voices his concerns, that these relationships probably would have shattered, anyway – any relationship that is so fragile that it could be disrupted by the Internet, or by what its participants see in magazines or on television or in movies, could not have had long to live, I insist – but is this true? I read another Basement submission or talk to another friend or hear another rumor and my conviction wavers.

I’m secure in my marriage, but still – I’ve set some ground rules. I won’t publish a story against my husband’s express wishes (just as I would expect him to do, were our situations reversed), I don’t seek out exes online, I don’t cultivate intimate relationships with members of the opposite sex, I don’t bitch about him online, I don’t share with others – confessions, secrets, grievances – anything that I wouldn’t share with him. Not because I believe that our marriage would be in mortal danger if I did any of those things, but because I don’t want to take any chances. What I have is too valuable, too precious. It wouldn’t be worth the risk. It just wouldn’t. I want to hold hands with my husband when we are in our very old age and the Internet and blogging and Facebook are so much far-distant retro bullshit and say, we have been together forever…

And then we’ll turn to our hologrammatic communication avatars and have them Twitter that directly into the post-electronic hive-mind, and we’ll high-five each other with our wrinkled, iPhone-bent hands.

This post was prompted, in part, by last week’s Basement post about a Facebook-fueled affair. It was not the first such post of its kind, of course, but came in a week wherein it seemed that every magazine and news feed had stories about infidelity and after a weekend during which I sat on a conference panel about memoir-writing and fumbled over questions about how and why I share or don’t share certain stories online and what my husband and family think about all that sharing. Which, you know, prompted some reflection. But am I overthinking this? Am I overexaggerating the dangers? Do you keep your real-life relationships front of mind when you’re deciding what to reveal – or to whom to reveal it – online? When you’re cultivating relationships online? What would you do if your marriage and your Internet came into conflict? Are you certain that your marriage would come first? What do you do – do you do anything – to make sure that it does? Could I have come up with a better topic with which to harsh Valentine’s Day?

Text of e-mail: “What you can’t see is the epic turd. I spared you that. So the four year old sits on the John and reads Vanity Fair while dropping bombs.”

This is what happens when I leave the house for the day. Everybody gets all up in the body art and then someone takes a massive crap – while, apparently, reading Vanity Fair, which, thank god she’s picking up the important life skills early – and then someone e-mails me the evidence.

And I am left to puzzle over the following questions:

1) Why is my four year old reading an article entitled ‘The Bank Job’ while moving her bowels? Is she trying to understand the market? Is she planning a heist? Did she learn anything? If so, how can I turn this to my advantage?

2) Why are the two children in the bath without water? Was my husband actually planning on bathing them, or was this just some sort of bizarre time-out?

3) Why does my husband think that he is sparing me anything by not sending a picture of the alleged ‘epic turd’? I have witnessed those turds first-hand. I have shared a bath with them. I am hardened. BRING IT.

4) Why did my husband capitalize the word ‘John’?

5) Why did I spend more than 30 seconds scrutinizing this picture when it is clear that the allegedly ‘epic turd’ cannot be seen from any angle?

6) Why am I forcing you all to look at it, turd or not?

Mysteries, all.

*****

Oh hey! I’m a finalist in the Bloggies – Best Canadian blog. Which is really kind of exciting, because I never win anything, except a bowling tournament once, but that was when I was six and the winners were picked at random. You should totally vote for me, because. (It’s kind of weird and complicated at the Bloggies page, because you have to scroll sideways through the categories, but really, it’s worth it. To me. Just don’t mistake me for one of the vegetable or sandwich blogs that’s nominated with me. It’d be understandable, I know. But don’t.)

This is what passes for humor in our house. You’ll be forgiven if you get confused and think you’ve stumbled onto rehearsals for a kindergarten performance of scenes from the works of Ionesco.

Yeah. I didn’t get it either.

Because, when I’m not looking, he makes our daughter a Christmas suit out of foil wrapping paper and dresses her in it.

And then, suitably attired, they sit down for cocoa with marshmallows and smashed candy canes, and when I say to myself, this is golden, it is true both literally and figuratively. And my heart shimmers like her Christmas Suit, and life is good.

He gives me this. This is better than the bounty of a thousand Santas.

I don’t say much about him, here. I wrote something about that, once:

I don’t say much about my husband here, on the blog. He appears, now and again, a peripheral character in the stories that I tell. Sometimes, rarely, he comes to centre stage, as an antagonist or foil, in some adventure or misadventure that I’m recounting, but even then the story is usually not about him but about our home or our neighborhood or – most often – our child, and his prominence in the story is merely a function of his indispensability to the scene.

I don’t say much about my husband here, nor about our marriage. I don’t, I feel, have enough propriety over those stories to assert myself as narrator of those stories. They are not mine to share. They are his stories – or, in the case of our marriage, our stories. So it is that you rarely read anything substantive about my husband.

Which is a shame, because you would like him, you really would. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man: one of those souls who is just genuinely good, genuinely concerned about the world around him and everyone in it, who is just naturally, effortlessly generous and kind and not in the cloying manner of someone who wants recognition or a place in the kingdom of God for their efforts but in the straightforward and authentic manner of someone who knows that we all just have to be good to one another if we’re going to get along. And he loves animals and children, all of them, except maybe the really unpleasant ones and the older ones with the silly pants dropped below their skinny asses (the kids, not the animals), and always has, even before we had our own. I’ve seen him moved, really moved, at the sight of young children at play. All of which might make him sound kind of wussy, but he’s not, he’s really not, and that’s the thing, probably the biggest thing, that I love about him: he is at once the kindest and gentlest human being that I know, and the strongest.

And then I said:

He’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination… But I’m not perfect either; contrary to all appearances, I am far from it. But I’m perfect for him and he’s perfect for me and that, my friends, my dear, dear friends, is probably all that you need to know.

It is all that you need to know. I struggled for a long time this morning, trying to figure out how to say more. He does, after all, sometimes ask why I don’t say more about him (Do you want me to say more? I reply. Would it be about me not putting my underwear away, or about my vasectomy? – Probably. – Then maybe not.) And I sometimes wish that I did say more about him, so that you could know him, because as I said above, you would love him, you really would. But as I said above: for that, I think, you need only know that I love him, more than I can ever put into words.

It’s his birthday today. Wish him a good one. He’d love that. Because although he doesn’t want you hearing about his underwear or his vasectomy, he likes to know that you know that he’s there, and that he’s awesome. Which he is. So.

(Happy birthday, doofus. Love you.)

Here is the paradox about parenthood and marriage: having children with the person you love gives you a bajillion new reasons to adore each other, a kerpillion new horizons towards which your hearts, together, can shoot, an infinity of moments over which your hearts can, together, explode into a burst of white-hot stars, but, too, it gives you a septillion distractions, a gajillion reasons to pass each other by on the stairs, a googleplex of moments in which you are just too tired to do anything but murmur love you and blow feeble kisses at each other’s cheeks. If that.

Having children with the one that you love deepens and broadens and enriches, immeasurably, that love, but it also imposes such a strain. The strain is worth it – so far beyond worth that it almost seems ridiculous to say so – but still. It must be acknowledged, because the strain is what tests our strength as parents and as couples, as partners and as lovers, and that we withstand the strain – that we feel the strain, push back against the strain, work with the strain, and flourish – is testament to our tremendous, amazing strength.

To mine, and to my husband’s, and to ours together. But especially to his. Today, especially, the testament is to him.

You, Kyle: you love me, and you love our children, and both they and I thrill you and amaze you and challenge you – how forcefully we challenge you – and you love us all the more for this, and for this, I am so grateful that I could not find the words to say so even if I tried.

Okay, so I tried.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

Me: So? What do you think?

Husband: Does it say, belongs to Kyle?

Me: No. It means, love knows no order.

Husband: Not, belongs to Kyle?

Me: No.

Husband: I suppose I can live with it.

Babies are hard on a marriage.

It’s sort of ironic, really, seeing as babies are so often understood (rightly or wrongly) to represent core bonds of a life partnership, but still: for every measure of centripetal force that they exert upon a relationship and bind partners more closely, babies exert a half measure – maybe more – of centrifugal force, pulling those partners away from their center. It’s true. If I understood Newtonian physics well enough to explain it fully, I would, but I don’t, so just trust me on this: babies bring couples closer together and pull them apart in a million teeny tiny and not so teeny tiny ways, and the yank and tug of this phenomenon can exert an uncomfortable pressure upon a spousal partnership.

Pets do not have this effect, I’ve noticed, possibly because you can just put them out in the yard when they start to get difficult. You cannot do this with babies. When caring for babies gets difficult, you can only turn to your partner (if you have one – I cannot begin to address single parenthood here, other than to say that I have NO IDEA how people do that. Superheroes, seriously) and negotiate some means of coping and hope to hell that you can figure this shit out together. So when the moments come – and they do come – when you realize that you are not figuring this shit out together – that you’re either not figuring it out together, or you’re not figuring it out, period – it can be hard. You can put it down to lack of sleep, to lack of alone time, to sheer exhaustion, but it still feels the same: you’re struggling. And you’re not always struggling together. And in those moments when you’re struggling apart… those moments feel isolating. Lonely.

The first baby isn’t – I don’t think – as hard on the relationship as the second: with your first baby, the novelty of the situation can cause you to overlook or ignore the fact that you and your spouse are almost never together alone, that you almost never sleep, that your romantic dinners for two have become mac-and-cheese for three, that your bed has become the gathering place for a tangle of toddler and toys and cats. The first baby can be a great romantic quest, like backpacking together through Europe – full of all variety of trials and discomforts, but nonetheless an adventure, one that is full of new experiences that you are sharing! Together! So who cares if the hostels are crowded or you’re eating bad food or the pack on your back is crippling you with its weight? You’re having an adventure together, and it is awesome.

But when the second baby comes along, you’ve been there and done that and sent the postcards and you’re just not as open to feeling romantic about this whole journey as a quote-unquote adventure. The novelty has worn off. The hostel conditions – the noise, the squalor, the bathroom shared with too many other, messy people – no longer represent adventure, and their effect on you – sleeplessness, disorientation – is harder to bear. You’re still thrilled to be doing this again – you love so much about this journey – but you’re older now, and more tired, and the sleepless nights and bad food wear you down so much more quickly and so you look at each other and you both wonder why the other hasn’t booked you into a plush hotel already.

And this is where everything – including the extended travel metaphor – breaks down, because there are no plush hotels in New Parentland. New Parentland is not a backpacker’s Europe; it’s not even the outer reaches of the former Soviet Union, where at least they have beds and a limitless supply of vodka. New Parentland is more like a deserted island. It’s survival conditions, no matter who you are, unless you have the means and the foresight to have brought an entourage that will attend to your basic needs and forage for your food. There’s no straightforward solution to your discomfort here; there are no resources beyond what you can gather and/or jerryrig together. Neither you nor your travelling companion has it within their power to make things easy. With the first child, if you’re lucky, this is like Blue Lagoon: you’re so enthralled with the romance of the situation that you don’t care that you are – figuratively – wearing loincloths and drinking out of coconuts. You might even find that kind of thing sexy. But by the time you’re on baby number two? The loincloths are starting to feel scratchy and you’re sunburnt and sleeping on the sand is making your back hurt and that other person is eating your coconut, dammit. You are on Survivor: Child Island and it’s only a matter of time before you turn on each other.

My husband and I haven’t turned on each other (*knocks wood*), and we wouldn’t reverse the steps that brought us here to our own, personal Child Island. We find pleasure in this place; we bask in the sunshine here. But still: we find it challenging, coping with the hardship. I find it challenging. Once the chores are done and the children are tended to and this place falls silent, I am so exhausted, so spent and worn, that I want only to crawl under the blankets and escape – with a book, with some Ativan – and rest and I know that he experiences this as a withdrawal. But then I – perversely – resent him for experiencing it as withdrawal. I’m so tired, I tell myself. This is so hard. He should get that. I tell him that this is so hard and that I am so tired and he tells me that he is tired too and instead of feeling sympathy, I feel frustration. It’s harder for me, I think, and the resentment starts to burble. And then I catch myself and tell myself that hard is hard is hard and just because I have spent whole days and nights on my own wrangling our two creatures and lived to tell about it doesn’t mean that he can manage the same thing and in any case he gets up at night and first thing in the morning with the baby, right? And then I think, maybe if we just had some time together, just the two of us – or better, what if I had some time for me, just me, alone, and THEN we had some together just the two of us ?- but then I immediately think, why doesn’t he make that happen? Why must it be ME?

And then I worry us about turning on each other. I worry about even considering the possibility that we might turn on each other, because once upon a time – in the carefree days before we embarked upon this strange and wonderful and impossibly challenging journey – I would not have imagined for a second that we could turn on each other, that we could be anything other than perfect allies. (This is the tragic innocence, to borrow another pop culture analogy, of couples on the Amazing Race; the bluster behind their bold claims, before running a single step, of being a brilliant team, of knowing that they’ll work together perfectly, masterfully, that they will, as a unit, dominate the race. This bluster invariably end in shouts and tears in the empty corridors of this airport or across the field of that Road Block challenge, and we the audience murmur, from the security of our armchairs, that we knew that they would fall apart and, also, that wouldn’t happen to us.) We are allies, my husband and I, we are, but that I doubt our alliance for even a second weighs upon me heavily, presses the air from my lungs.

It weighs upon me, because how could I feel any doubt? He is wonderful, my husband, really wonderful, and I love him so much and am so, so lucky to have him as my partner. But, still, also, there is this: I am tired, and I want to be carried, just for a little while, just until I get my strength back. And this is where the doubt resides: in my fear that he might be getting tired of carrying me, that although I know he will give me his last coconut, he might resent doing so. That I might resent his resenting doing so. That that resentment might build, and that we’ll end up yelling at each other across the crowded airport corridor that is family life or turning on each other in our own personal Tribal Council. That I want a day off, alone, just by myself, just taking care of myself, more than I want a day alone with my husband – and that I want him to want that – hurts my heart, in a way, because I do want time alone with him, just me and him, with no children attached to our bodies and no cries ringing in our ears, time to reinforce our alliance, our team, so that we can continue to endure the challenges of this island, this race, this reality, with grace and humor. I really, really do. I just need to be rested first. I just need to be carried for a while, or allowed to stop and rest.

We’ve come this far together. We know that our alliance, our partnership, is the key to everything. Our alliance, and maybe a few naps, some liquor and an all-expenses-paid holiday somewhere warm, with soft beds and babysitters and, yes, coconuts.

That’s all.