This is what it is really like to be married with three children

Evening is not our family's finest hour (neither is the morning, leaving us with a slim window of mid day in which we can be expected to behave agreeably, but that's another story). By 8pm, tempers run high on all sides. Everyone is tired. Everyone is fed up. The grown-ups in the house have been parenting since the wee hours and they really want the kids in the house to go the fuck to sleep so they can catch try to refuel physically and emotionally because guess what -- they have to do it all over again tomorrow -- but the kids really don't want to go to sleep, for reasons that are unfathomable.

Plus, there's the mess. After dinner, our living room looks like a pack of wild animals descended upon it. Really. It looks like instead of feeding children, we fed hyenas or some other kind of animal which eats by lowering its mouth into a trough or a carcass, without the use of hand or paw. It doesn't help that the baby invariably throws her food all over the room like she's an avant guard artist or a bat-shit crazy inmate. She'll overturn a bowl of yogurt, shove a few handfuls (how does one manage a handful of yogurt, you may ask? About as well as you'd imagine) then throws whatever yogurt she's managed to collect in her palm onto the wall and floor and on her siblings. I keep taking yogurt away from her -- "You're suspended from semi-solids until further notice!"  - but then she'll undertake a food strike that will scare the crap out of me, forcing me to cave,  just to get a few swallows of something in her. Blueberries, beans, wagon wheel pasta  -- whatever she's got on her high chair tray, she tosses to the ground. She does it methodically, too, one berry at a time, but fast, like she's got a deadline -- which she does, because as soon as I see what she's doing, I confiscate all food items.

The point is: at 8pm, we are up to our ankles in filth and crankiness.

Still, one must go on living, is my guess. So the other night, I decided to take a break from chasing Terza around trying to change her nasty-ass diaper, and offer a kiss to my husband, my partner in crime, my partner in punishment, who was mopping up a milk spill. I walked over and said, "Come give me a kiss."

And he said: "Blegh."

"David!" I rebuked him.

"What?" he asked, realizing the milk was cascading onto the floor from the countertop.

"I just said, 'Give me a kiss,' and you said, 'Blegh!"

"It's just -- look at this shit," he gestured to the living room, which looked like a middle school cafeteria after a food fight.

"Blegh!" I repeated, "Blegh!"

"I didn't mean the kiss!" he protested, "I meant . . .  everything else."

"We are so married with children," I said.

"That's putting it mildly." he replied.

Then he gave me a kiss, and we lived to stay married another day.

Tenth Anniversary

Ten years ago today I was in Hawaii, on my honeymoon i. David and I used our frequent flyer miles to get there and wedding gift money to pay for the hotel - no youth hostel, to be sure, but nothing lavish. To earn free dinners, we attended a few of those "time-share informational sessions." It was an idyllic honeymoon and as we lounged in bed and hiked the volcanos and swam in the ocean, we vowed that when our ten year anniversary rolled around, we'd return to Kauaii to renew our vows. Only next time, we'd pay for our friends and family to come. And we'd stay at the fancy hotel by the ocean. And we'd skip the time-share sessions because next time, we could pay for our own mahi mahi.

Oh, youth.

Ten years later and we can't afford an overnight getaway to Long Island. Hell, we can't even spring for the Union Street Holiday Inn. Chances are good we may never see Hawaii again. Not unless I make banks by grooming one of these blondie kids to be the next Macauley Culkin, which I'd do frankly if they weren't so damn intractable. Sure, our ship may come in yet, and sure, I still have years to accumulate the frequent flyers miles necessary for such a voyage, but there's college to pay for now, three times over, and braces. There's day care and skateboards and summer camp. We'll never be so footloose and fancy free again, and nether, certainly, will our bank accounts.

So, no Hawaii anniversary vacation. And much as I would like to be soaking in the sun against a Bali Hai backdrop, thats fine by me.  If I cared about stuff like that, really at all, I wouldn't be where I am today, wouldn't have had three kids in a one-bedroom apartment, wouldn't have married a novelist in the tradition of William Faulkner and chosen a career as a writer myself.

What I got for my anniversary was to spend all day and sleep all night next to the love of my life, a man I love more than I did ten years ago when I was hot and he was young and all we did was talk about James Joyce and have sex and make indie movies together. I still thrill to hear his voice when he picks up the phone or walks through the door. And its not just love I have now, but feelings that take time to develop -- respect and admiration and gratitude.

The idea that we would be renewing our vows now, after ten years, re-commiting ourselves to each other like we did on our wedding day seems so, well, redundant. We renew our vows every day - some days louder and more readily than others. Its just like the priest said in his homily on our wedding day, after hearing the Shakespeare sonnet my best friend read aloud: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment/ Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds."

"Love alters all the time," Father Greg said, "It is is constantly changing, and it will be shaken. What does not alter - what can not alter -- is the commitment to love. That's what marriage is."

Ten years later and I'm beginning to understand. All I can do is hope that I'll be lucky enough to have another ten years -- and another ten, and another, and another -- to really get it. Today and every day, I'm re-upping, for better or worse, richer or poorer. Hawaii or no Hawaii.

The Valentine's Day I Never Thought I'd Want

This Valentine's Day, there will be no candlelit dinner, no tiny wrapped boxes extended in the palm of a hand, probably no bouquet of roses. Hell, there won't even be the traditional heart-shaped box of chocolates I usually get (and love) from the Rite-Aid on the corner.  I mean, David may bring them, but there's be no slim possibility of me ingesting them since I've been in the throes of a nasty stomach virus for the past three days.

Which is totally fine by me. I like the candlelit dinners and presents and nights in a hotel - in fact, I love them. But what I got for Valentine's Day this year was so much better than a soak in a fancy jacuzzi and a pair of earrings. I got trash cans to collect vomit rushed over to me whenever necessary. I got Tylenol slipped into my hand and glasses of water to swallow it, full of ice just the way I like it. I got someone to take care of the kids, all three of those wild, raving lunatics - to feed them dinner and put them to bed, and stay up with them when they wouldn't go to sleep, and wake up with them when they had nightmares and take the baby into the bathroom to steam-treat her cold when she couldn't fall back asleep at 2am. I got someone to take the kids to school in the morning and tell my Mommy friends I was sick and I could use a phone call. And then last night, I had it all over again, and better yet, a warm body to curl up with when I was achy. Despite the fact that I'm about as alluring as Typhoid Mary, the man did not pull away.

That is fucking love.

Put that on a Hallmark card.

"Because while I was puking my guts out over the toilet, naked, and I called for a trash can, you brought me one, and when you asked, "What do you need a trash can for?" and I said "PLEASE! JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!" you did, without any further investigation. Because of this and more, you are my Valentine."

It may not be what you dream of when you're young, but when you're young you're also mostly an idiot and don't know anything but what you see in movies. Its what I dream of now.

Happy Valentine's Day. May yours be vomit-free but still full of tender devotion.

Hurricane Babies and Hurricane Divorces

I wonder how many hurricane babies were created over the past week?

And how many hurricane divorces? Because when you already have one, or two, or wait for it -- three babies running around your apartment with an intense case of cabin fever and record amounts of energy, there is no slim possibility of banishing boredom with some carnal embraces. And without the carnal embraces, all you're left with is bickering. Especially when you've just moved into a new apartment and there's about five thousand little, totally-non-essential things to be done to make Mama of the House happy and Daddy of the House beleaguered.

I've been trying to trap David at home to hang up pictures and change lighting fixtures and seal the countertop forever, and now I have but after five days at home with Franken-children, he's too grumpy to comply. We are both nearing fatal levels of grumpiness. Kids not faring much better. Seconda and Primo are locked into mortal kombat sibling rivalry from where there may be no return. Getting back to school yesterday was a tiny reprieve but then with the day off today, it was back to warfare. Those two will end up getting a divorce if we lose any more days of school.

Of course, its pretty damn innocuous stuff compared with losing your home and everything you have. So I feel duly guilty about complaining. In atonement, I think I'll volunteer my husband to donate blood or manually scoop water out of a flooded tunnel.

Is nagging the marriage killer?

Not if my parents are any indication. They've been married thirty six years and not a day has passed without my mother nagging like she's making a commission every time she employs the phrase, "How many times do I have to tell you?"

I'm not recommending it as a course of action, only offering my own research to reflect upon as you read the Wall Street Journal's article on how nagging destroys marriages.

Babble's Stroller Derby blogger was up in arms about the piece, considering it a piece of shoddily-researched anti-woman drivel. I wouldn't go that far though I agree its not the most insightful piece of investigative journalism I've ever read, or even particularly useful. Of course, I'm coming at the subject after having recently interviewed a bunch of parenting experts about the perils of nagging your kids. Yep, nagging is now a big no-no in parenting, on par with (gasp) yelling, which in my neighborhood at least, is on par with smacking your kid upside the head.

My perspective on the issue is basically: what genius doesn't know that nagging is ineffective and annoying? No one - with the possible exception of my mother -- thinks that nagging is a positive activity to engage in. In other words, of course its a marriage killer and a one-way track to getting your kids to tune out. That's breaking news? It doesn't keep us from doing it anyway - and yes, by us I mean, for the most part mothers and wives, because I've never in my life met a man that nagged me. It boils down to we want to get shit done and the people we need to help do shit need a lot of freaking reminders.

So, nagging, like biting your fingernails, is bad. Try not to. And when you figure out how, drop me and the Wall Street Journal, a line.

Royal Wedding

I want to personally thank Prince William and Princess Catherine for tying the knot last week because it gave me the chance to dress Primo in his Easter suit again, and to finally wear the tuxedo shirt and bow tie I bought in December from H and M for $9. Behold the cuteness:

Continuing the tradition of buying my kids stuff they don't need just because it is on super sale, last year my mother bought Primo a Calvin Klein suit, and its been hanging in the closest screaming "FIND AN OPPORTUNITY TO WEAR ME!" for months. On Easter, I put him in it, even though he was way overdressed and looked like a butler among the rest of the devoted attendees of the one Catholic church in David's Tennessee hometown. And I figured that would be the only time he wore the suit unless I found a way to score him ringbearer duties on somebody's wedding (anyone need one? he's got experience, and the suit). And then, miraculously, we got invited to a royal wedding viewing party.

At first, when I got the evite that read "William and Catherine Are Gettingt Hitched!" I responded to my friend, "Honey, you sent this to me by mistake. I don't know your friends William and Catherine." But when she enlightened me, and I read the evite which encouraged guests to wear their most royal finery and promised tea sandwiches and fish n chips, I was over the moon.

There is nothing I like to ingest more than cucumber sandwiches. Just the thought makes me salivate. In the middle of my severe, unbearable morning sickness with Primo, I remember having a few days where I desperately WANTED to eat something, and the thing I wanted to eat was cucumber sandwiches. I tried to make them but they turned out all seedy and soggy and it depressed me. I probably could've perfected my recipe except that in three days, I was back to vomiting my internal organs up. That was the last time I had cucumber sandwiches.

The party was amazing -- really, the sort of themed fete which I aspire to throw, but fall short of achieving because I lack an innate sense of design and classiness. There was tea service and Pim's. there were bangers and mash and fish n'' chips served in brown bags with newspaper underneath: "Just like they do it in London" I told Primo, though I can only presume as I've never been to England.

There were crustless cucumber sandwiches on slighty stale white bread which was heaven on earth. AND tiny egg salad sandwiches, too.

And my Martha Stewart hostess friend even made a Union Jack out of cut berries.

"I don't even have words to describe what you've achieved here tonight." I told her, "You're an inspiration."

Oh and yeah, the wedding was nice. I would've died for a veil like that when I got hitched. Also, her waistline. But my favorite part, I think, was the fact that they used the term "thou" - it was so Shakespearean. "Wilst thou, William, take Catherine?" That's classy, man. Don't think this Brooklyn girl or her rube husband could've pulled that off.

Anniversary Cake

Last week, David and I celebrated our 8 year anniversary. The festivities culminated in the presentation, by Primo, of the above confection --a nutella sandwich topped with mini chocolate chip cookies. A fresh take on the anniversary cake, prepared by my son himself. He wanted to put sprinkles on but I deterred him, thinking that the biggest present he could give me was sparing me the headache of cleaning sprinklers out of every corner of the kitchen. Magnanimously, he agreed.

We'd pre-emptively celebrated our anniversary on our trip to Tennessee, where David's parents watched the kids while he took me to the fanciest joint in town, overlooking the river. The big selling point of this place is that a meat peddler comes to your table with raw slabs of beef and lets you watch as he slices of a chunk for you to eat. Then they cook, of course. Still, it grossed me out a bit. Don't see how that's a perk. I'm not the sort of foodie who wants to slaughter my own pig. I don't want to know where my food comes from. I want to pretend it had no life previous to my ingesting it. I want to pretend it was born drenched in bernaise sauce.

David enjoyed the peddler, anyway. And I enjoyed the Asti Spumanti Sparkling Wine and we both enjoyed some time alone.

Every year, on our anniversary, David and I write letters to each other in the empty pages in the guest book from our wedding. The tradition began because I spent a ridiculous amount of money buying that silken guest book -- one of the few parts of my wedding that wasn't a bargain basement deal -- and it drove me insane to see all the empty, expensive pages. The moral to this story is: sometimes being a cheapskate can pay off because it gave birth to the best tradition that David and I share. Every year, regardless of how exhausted or busy or pissed at each other we happen to be at the moment, we stop and assess the State of The Marriage. And regardless of the State of the Marriage, we always find that we're happy to still be in it, glad we took the vows, and more committed than we were on our wedding day. Our letters always end with the surprising revelation on both our parts, that we not only still love the other person, but somehow love them more. That's not to say we don't also hate each other more, but I defy you to show me a couple married for nearly a decade with a bunch of rugrats underfoot who don't hate each other at least part of the time. I'm not the first to observe that its a thin line between love and hate. Frequently, I love hating David and just as frequently, I hate loving him. And the good news is, I know he feels precisely the same way.

And I bet William and Catherine do too, or will anyway, if they make it eight years.

And now please, raise your coffee cups: here's to holy matrimony and another eight years of it!

Don't cry over spilt M and Ms

When you’re hot and heavy at the start of a love affair, you might imagine you and your beau getting married, but you don’t imagine being married. You don’t imagine going to Costco, much less buying a freakishly huge bag of M and Ms there, much less fighting over the huge bag of Costco M and Ms. Because if you did, the love affair would end right there.

The other night, when I couldn’t sleep, in between scanning through my mental calendar and remembering all the Evites I’d forgotten to reply to, feeling guilt-ridden about how I’ve never bothered to teach my daughter her ABCs while my son knew the whole freaking alphabet at this age, and worrying about how I’d locate different elements of the kids’ Halloween costumes, I also managed to squeeze in some recalling of fond memories from the start of David and my love story. I recalled specifically one beautiful night, right at the very start of it all, in college, when he was dating someone else and we’d been forbidden to talk, but he picked me up in his car anyway and took me to a Greek diner off-campus for a heart-to-heart. I remembered how I rolled the window down, and cried my silent, cinematic tears, and how I felt compelled to empty my pockets while we were driving home, and throw everything that was in them out the window of the moving car. We didn’t kiss, we didn’t have sex – we just pined for each other. Ours was a love that could never be! It was tragic! It was the stuff of novels.

Then, immediately after playing this scene in my mind, I played another scene, from earlier that night – the scene of the M and Ms. David, family man that he is, usually handles our monthly trip to Costco, with Seconda in tow. On one such trip, he came home with a mammoth sack of M and Ms, which must have held at least four million M and Ms.

“Why’d you buy four million M and MS?” I asked.

“Oh, I told Sec she could pick something out and this is what she wanted.”

Now, I try not to surrender to the harpie hag instinct in me, which is why I didn’t voice my extreme annoyance at having to find a place in our teeny, tiny kitchen for four million M and Ms, which would go uneaten for months since none of us really eat M and Ms. I mean, I COULD eat them, and I have been tempted to, just to get them from taking over an entire cabinet, but the last thing my ass needs is four million M and Ms, so instead, I’ve just been silently seething over them.

Finally, I found a way to get rid of some of the candy. We were having a few kids over for pre-Halloween festivities and I thought. “GREAT! I can unload some of these space-sucking M and Ms onto the kids. Perfect!”

I went to pull down the sack off the high shelf where David had stashed it. What I didn’t know was that the two-ton bag of candy-coated chocolate had not been sealed all the way. And when I yanked it down, the entire bag of M and Ms poured from the high shelf all over the kitchen.

If you haven’t heard the sound of four million M and Ms hitting the floor from a high altitude, I highly recommend it. It’s something quite extraordinary The sound was so thunderous, in fact, that it caused the kids to run out of their bedroom, to see what all the fuss was about.

There I was, standing in a sea of rainbow candy. There were M and Ms all over the floor and the counter, inside the pots and pans on the butcher block, behind the stove, under the stove, EVERYWHERE. I just stood there, stunned, exhausted. The kids headed back to their rooms, chuckling heartily.

David ran in, too, and gave me what appeared to be a, “Oh, come on, not another huge mess” look.

This triggered the fight.

“This isn’t MY fault you know.” I pointed out.

“I hope you’re not implying its MY FAULT!” he said, “since I was no where NEAR YOU.”

“But you put the M and Ms back without CLOSING THE BAG!! WHO DOES THAT?”

“THERE WAS A TEAR IN IT!”

“AND you bought the STUPID, insanely-big bag in the first place!”

I’ll spare you the rest, mainly because it just went on like this, with more and more four- letter words for another ten minutes Then I spent an hour cleaning up the mess, and David helped, too, and then I went to bed and stayed awake, juxtaposing this scene with the First Blush of Forbidden Love scene from years ago.

In the morning, I told David about how depressing it was to replay the scenes back to back. I tell him whatever cockamamie, hysterical thought pops into my mind, without editing, and to his credit, he’s very good about handling it. Later that day, I got an email from him, which was titled. “Don’t cry over split M and Ms” and the message went something like this:

Of course we fight over stupid shit like spilled candy, he said, because that’s the dumb, mundane crap that tired, frazzled people fight about. It doesn’t mean our love isn’t as true and deep than it was oh-so-many years ago when the only Coscto-sized item we needed was a super-sized box of Trojans. In fact, he said, check the nightstand, and you’ll find just that, purchased along with the M and Ms. Because while we may be older, and tired-er, and haggier and craggier, we’re still in it to win it, which is to say, lovebirds.

It was a hell of a love letter. And I slept like a baby that night.

Oh no he didn't!

The kids have had a rough week sleep-wise. There was the day Seconda decided to wake at 3am and start her day nice and early. And I don’t know what’s in the air but the nightmares have been turned on full-force, and one or the other child has woken up at least one a night screaming from bad dreams. Poison! Fire! Monsters!

Over the weekend, Primo woke at 4:45am, and I quickly ushered him into our bed, because if he’s awake alone, there’s a chance I can get him to go back to sleep, or at least watch TV while we sleep but if he wakes his sister, we are not only up shit’s creek without a paddle but without a boat. We will DROWN in shit’s creek if both he and his sister are awake. So I brought him into bed with us and he did doze off but slept so fitfully it was really hard to tell he was asleep.

“NO!” he yelled in his sleep, “DON”T LET SECONDA GET IT!!”

I find it hilarious that he spends his sleeping hours worrying about the same thing he does while awake. Must keep the prized possessions away from ratty kid sister. This is the stuff that (bad) dreams are made on . . .

So, what with all this, I woke this morning dog-tired. You know when you get so tired that nothing can wake you -- even the children jumping on you in bed and screaming as they kick and punch each other and reporting to you that their brother or sister is eating an entire box of cookies. That’s how tired I was.

David came home from his workout to find me still in bed. He brought me a cup of coffee and I slowly began to join the land of the living.

“I am just SO TIRED.” I moaned, “I don’t know why.”

Which was just something to say, not true at all. Of course I do know why, precisely why and the reason for my fatigue is my kids wake me up all night with piercing screams of pain and agony.

But instead of assuring me that I had plenty of good reason to be tired, my husband, issued a highly ill-advised reply.

“Well’’, he said, “You’re not as young as you used to be/”

Gasp. Horror. Not even employing the courteous “we” as in “we’re not as young as we used to be.” Just a

balls-out announcement before 8am, before I’ve even gotten to the half-way point in my coffee, that I am OLD.

AND THAT”S NOT ALL.

He then continued on, in a perfect example of adding insult to injury: “And your metabolism is slowing down.”

“WHOA!” I cried,“Whoa now! Why do you need to bring my METABOLISM into this? I don’t see how that’s material whatsoever. There’s no call for that, no call for that at all.”

“I just mean –“

“Maybe you just shouldn’t say anything else, while I ponder on those nuggets for a while.”

Has this man never met me before? Is this our first time at the rodeo?

I think it was a teachable moment. For him, the lesson was, never throw around the word metabolism without serious forethought and certainly not in the same sentence as “you’re not as young as you used to be.” And for me, maybe a little less complaining, much as I do cherish it. I was born to kvetch. But, I guess, that’s what blogs are for.

The Three-Legged Race

On Saturday we went to an old-school kiddie birthday party in Prospect Park, full of field-day type games and races, including the three-legged race. The children were not familiar with the concept of the three-legged race and it took them a while to catch on, though they had a lark of a time in the process. Primo’s leg was tied to that of his best friend Leigh, the girl who got his first mix tape, and with whom I once heard him comparing the work of Roald Dahl and Walt Disney. They hadn’t figured out yet hoe to move their shared leg at the same time so one or the other was always on the ground while the other one dragged the fallen one around by their ankle.

As we stood there watching this spectacle, David observed: “This, right here, is a metaphor for marriage.”

“Yeah,” I said, “They’ve tied themselves together and as a result, one or the other is constantly falling down, while the other one forcibly drags them against their will forward.”

“Sometimes the falling down is fun and sometimes it painful,” said Leigh’s mother, “And there's no prize at the end except having made it through without serious injury."

Yep. Sounds about right.

Seven years ago today

Seven years ago, I wore a 10 foot-long veil and clutched my father’s arm as he walked me down the aisle. Waiting there was David in the first suit he’d ever bought for himself, shaking visibly. When you look at the video tape that my cousin shot you can see my chest rising up and down frantically, almost like I’m about to hyperventilate. I was so nervous that I could hardly work up the courage to say my vows. And when it was over and the priest pronounced us man and wife, we booked it down the aisle so fast, I remember the photographer was pissed because she couldn’t get a single shot of us that wasn’t blurry. We flew out of there to start the next stage of our lives.

Looking back, I’d say I was one hundred percent right to be as nervous as I was. Not about the wedding because in the grand scheme of things who cares if you trip over your veil or the florist delivers daisies instead of anemones. But about the marriage part. Taking a vow to honor and cherish someone under all circumstances all the days of your life. No loopholes, no exit strategy, no plan B. Together. Forever. Period.

That is a big-time promise. And it meant something to David and I that we did it in front of all our friends and family, in a church with a priest sealing thr deal.

In fact, I remember feeling a terrific sense of relief when the ceremony was over, and yes, it was mostly because I didn’t have to worry about my flower girl showing up on time or not me breaking a heel on the alter steps. But it was also a relief to have taken those vows, to be locked in, as it were, to a deal that was clearly stated, And not because David was some kind of slippery guy who I had to pin down – on the contrary, he’s always been extraordinary steadfast and loyal. But because in today’s world, it seems like there is nothing absolute, nothing that one can’t undo. You can get remove your facebooks posts and get tattoos removed and undo a vasectomy for God’s sake, Contrary to what you might expect, I found release in an irrevocable promise.

When I was in high school, I read Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and I remember being powerfully struck by one passage which I’m pretty sure I scribbled down in bubbly script and pasted in my diary next to a picture of Robert Sean Leonard. Unlike my crush on Mr. Leonard, I stand by the quote.

“But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

To me, marriage – and parenting, for that matter – is like the big down comforter I have on my bed. I need to sleep under it, even in the summertime, because if I don’t, I shiver. Sure, sometimes I feel a little suffocated by the thing but I then I just stick a foot out or peel them down a bit. I never toss the whole thing off because without the weight of it, I can’t find any peace.

Seven years ago, what I knew about marriage was this: I loved David and I wanted to be with him for the rest of my life. During the ceremony, I had a friend read Shakespeare’s sonnet “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,” because I really dug the idea of love as an ever fixed rock that looks on tempests but is never shaken.

But I remember that our priest, who David and I adored, corrected Shakespeare in his homily. He said, “All this stuff Shakespeare says about love never changing is a bunch of baloney. Because love changes, it changes all the time. What doesn’t change, what can’t change, is the commitment to love. And that’s what you need to renew every morning when you wake – you need to decide every day that you are going to commit to loving this person.”

Today what I know about marriage is this: I love David and I want to be with him for the rest of my life. But I know, too, that it takes work, and contrary to what I thought when we were newlyweds, the fact that you have to put in the work doesn’t make your relationship any less good, or less strong, but in fact, better and stronger.

The other thing I know about marriage now is that when you’re in it for the long haul, sometimes you have to fake it til you make it. But – and here’s the beauty part, the magic of it all – you always make it sooner or later. If you have the patience and the faith and the commitment to love, you always find your way back together again, and the union then is like the house made of bricks, compared to the house of straw you had on your wedding day.

So there you have it folks, my wisdom on marriage boils down to a Three Little Pigs metaphor. For anyone planning a wedding, I give you permission to use that in your ceremony.

To David I say this: So far, I haven’t liked anything in this lifetime as much as I’ve liked growing old with you. Here’s to another 7(0) years . . .

No more romantic getaways, please

You couldn’t pay me to go on a romantic getaway with my husband. No way. Not happening. And I’ll tell you precisely why:

Every single time we try one of these weekend getaways, one of us falls terribly ill.

Not just a cold or a bad headache or some pre-menstrual cramps but a stomach flu or mysterious raging fevers. And this weekend it happened AGAIN. This makes the fourth of fifth time in the past year or two.

David and I drove up to the Hudson Valley to attend the wedding of my dear friend Amelia, whose letters from Port au Prince I posted after the earthquake. Amelia kindly invited the children to the wedding and I kindly declined to take them. The last wedding they went to, my cousin’s, was such an ordeal we’ll never forget it. Apparently, neither will my cousin. Last year she told me the clearest memory she has of her wedding ceremony was Primo yelling, “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE CAR!!!!!” as David dragged him kicking and screaming down the aisle, after he had a tantrum during the wedding vows. So we don’t take our kids to weddings, if at all possible. Plus, since our own anniversary is coming up we thought we’d make a romantic weekend of it, have some steamy loving in the Courtyard Marriot. Cue Marvin Gaye.

On the drive up, I had definite presentiments of illness. Scratchy throat, growing feeling of weakness. By the time we reached Poughkeepsie, I called Amelia to let her know we couldn’t make it over to her parents’ house forthe pre-wedding pizza party. I was feverish, shaking, seriously ailing.

And so it was that our first romantic night was spent with me shivering in the hotel bed watching The Real Housewives of New York City (OMG my new favorite show, I was loving it, though maybe it was the fever) while David drove up and down the highway looking for Tylenol, cough drops and a pair of pajamas, since I’d neglected to pack them and a sick person needs her pajamas.

Then we ate hamburgers from the diner next door in our bed while I moaned in misery.

In the middle of the night, the chills came. I despise the chills. There is little worse than the feeling that your blood is freezing in your veins. I hobbled around the hotel room in search of more blankets. There were none. I called the front desk and was sent to voice mail. SO helpful. Then I put on my sweater, David’s fleece jacket AND my own jacket, and laid all the towels from the bathroom on top of me, under the blanket.

Are you getting a picture of the hot loving? The R and R? The marital renewal??

Raw suckage, I tell you.

Next morning, I propped myself up, Weekend at Bernies style, and survived the wedding. It was a beautiful wedding and I cried like I was making French onion soup. By 5pm I was back in the hotel bed, shivering and moaning. Repeat Friday night feverish festivities.

Sunday morning, though, we received an EXTRA treat. David and I were roused by a mindblowing, earsplitting fire alarm going off. The alarm was going off in our room as well as in the halls and everyone else’s room in the hotel. I can not possibly describe how loud the fucking thing was except it reminded me of those devices hardware stores sell which emit sounds at a frequency that mice hate to keep the vermin from your house (don’t work, by the way, our mice just frolicked around them). So we stumbled around throwing our belonging in our bag, half-mad from the roar of the alarm, tripping over bottles of Tylenol.

I feel REJEUVENATED; let me tell you, after that weekend away.

Maybe on our next romantic getaway, we can both get root canals.

Commitment, 5 year-old style

Primo's BFF, Leigh, the chick he made the mix for, has been talking to him about commitment.

Yeah, that's right, going steady. Primo is pretty clueless about what it means to be boyfriend and girlfriend -- thankfully -- and Leigh probably is too, but she's a girl, and by the age of about 3, girls know they need to be married. I know this because of my recent daily proposals of marriage from my daughter. Stands to reason that by age 5 or 6, they know that having a boyfriend is a precursor to having a husband.

So, Leigh wants to marry Primo, pretty much as soon as possible, and though she is his best friend, he's not ready to be tied down.

"Maybe," he told her, "But I might have to marry Seconda."

Kid's got priorities, after all. Family first.

So today I pick Primo up from school and he told me that this month, he's excited because he's sitting at Leigh's table.

"But Leigh's always talking and talking about how we are boyfriend and girlfriend and how we have to get married," he said, "and its really annoying."

Meditations on Monogamy

Major cyber-action going down on the old parkslopeparents listserv lately. You know things are heating up when you see a long string of anonymous posts. Nothing brings the crazy out in people like anonymity. There’s been a whole bunch of anonymous debates recently but the most fascinating by far had the subject heading, “Desire to Cheat.“

It started with this woman writing in about how she caught her husband browsing the craigslist personal ads and she’s worried that he wants to cheat and that if things continue the way they are, he’ll end up doing just that. And she wants to know what can she do to stop it?

As usual, the responses ran the gamut from really insightful to flat-out nutso. The most wackadoo advice was that the wife should encourage her husband to go to a few strip clubs in order to deflate his overblown fantasies about other women. Of course, the poster warns, she should not, under any circumstances, allow him to go to a “nice” club like Penthouse or Scores, where the other women would meet his expectations, if not exceed them. Instead, send that man to a “local” club, a seedy place with saggy, baggy women who will make his wife look like a centerfold. And, the poster cautions, don’t give him a credit card or he might get into more trouble than you bargained for. OK, so STD-ridden Brooklyn joint. Washed-up strippers. Cash only. And that’ll solve your problems.

Now I’m no Dear Abby but I do say that the above advice, besides managing somehow to insult everyone involved, is the the worst piece of cockamamie crazy talk I ever heard.

There were, however, some useful points made.

A husband wrote in, saying he’d been married for 7 years, never cheated, never thought about cheating but searched browed the craigslist personals all the time. Fodder for fantasy, he said. Someone else echoed this, offering these words of guidance: “It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home.” Some posters suggested hooking the husband up with plentiful porn, stocking up on sexy lingerie, scheduling plenty of date nights. And some people said infidelity had nothing to with sex but with feeling trapped, insecure, unhappy in other areas of life.

But there were also some posters who pointed out that maybe there was no need to stop the infidelity from happening. Maybe monogamy isn’t the best option, they suggested. It’s only cheating if it’s done deceptively: if both members of the marriage are on the same page, then having intimate relations with other people might be OK. One woman wrote about how she had two monogamous marriages but was now on her third marriage, and finding that being polyamorous was working out for her and her husband. Before she slept with anyone else, she talked it over with him, and made sure he was OK with it. The first time she did it, the fallout with her husband was tough, she said, lot of arguments. But when the opportunity arose a year or two later, he gave her his blessing again and afterwards, it was fine. In fact, the wife says, she feels more in love with her husband than ever, grateful to him for his generosity, and energized sexually by the excitement of being with someone else.

Yes, my local listserv has been better than a romance novel lately. Pretty titillating stuff.

All I really know is that every marriage is different and each couple needs to find their own way forward. If polyamorousness works for you, go for it. If having sex through ha hole in the sheet is what you’re into, who am I to stop you? Judge not lest ye be judged.

I don’t know if monogamy is the best way or the most successful strategy certainly but it’s the only way that could work for me and David, for better or worse. I don’t think I’m self-assured enough, magnanimous enough, or maybe even open-minded enough to let David be with anyone else. Plus, if I did ever give him my blessing, I’m so competitive that I would not rest until I got an equal amount of action, whether I wanted to or not. And then how would I know that person I’d entered into a dalliance with wouldn’t fall head over hells, madly in love with me? Initially, I’m shockingly lovable. And David, though he drives me batty sometimes, is a pretty great catch himself. Chances are his mistress would never nag him about how many beers he drinks or ride him about loading the dishwasher, and this lack of harassment might make him fall in love with her or at least think that his current situation was more of a nightmare than he’d suspected. The last thing I want my husband to have is a wake-up call.

But that’s me and I’m fettered by neuroses. What do you think? Is monogamy impractical? Or just hard? What advice would you give the PSP poster?

Happy Anniversary!

Yesterday was David and my six year wedding anniversary. Hooray for us! We like to joke that we’ve been together six years but it feels like sixty. If there was a “Which television couple are you?” quiz on Facebook, we would be the Honeymooners, for sure. But before my newlywed, non-parent friends get unduly alarmed about how kids crush the romance out of a marriage, let me hasten to say that feeling like you’ve been together sixty years isn’t a bad thing, necessarily.

Case in point: the terms by which David and I now address each other. When I’m not calling him “shithead” and he’s not calling me “nagshead” we usually refer to one another as “Mommy” and “Daddy” even when the kids are not present.

Now, I’m not proud of this. This is precisely the sort of thing I thought I would NEVER do before I had kids. I mean, its something people who have lost their selves in the process of becoming a parent do, something old, uninteresting people who never have sex do. It’s something my parents do.

But now I do it too, and there’s just no way around it.

David told me about one time when he was at the corner bodega, and the guy who works there and knows

David from his Friday night beer-runs, asked him why he was also buying Ben and Jerry’s this time.

“Just picking up something for Mom,” he replied.

“Is your mother visiting?’ the man asked.

But of course he was talking about me.

I’m not going to lie, That was a blow.

But it was also a year or two ago. And since that time, we’ve moved past the newness of this stage of our lives, and into the dense, deepening madness of it, And I have realized something.

Who gives a shit what we call each other? Who really has the energy to make sure that we’re addressing each other in quirky, romantic ways that keep our essential characters intact and shows respect for the people we are, apart from our roles as parents?

Its worrying about that crap that makes you old before your time and sucks the joie de vivre right out of you. Or at least that’s my position. What matters is that we are here, together, addressing each other at all, coming together even if in haphazard, clumsy ways, even if a trip to the dentist’s office, without kids, is considered a hot date, even if sex is accompanied by a Dora the Explorer soundtrack, even if the sentence “I love you” is too long to make it out without an interruption half the time. The joy of being together for six years going on sixty is that we don’t have to finish our sentences. David knows what I’m trying to say even if all I get through is, “Daddy, I love---” before an airborne Lego collides with my forehead.

When you’re married with young kids, the fastest way to ruin, I think, is to compare your marriage to any of its past incarnations. It’s a whole new paradigm. Less desirable in many ways, sure, but a hell of a lot better in others. At our anniversary brunch yesterday, I glanced over at this early twenty-something couple sitting at the table next to us, on a first or second date.

“That was great, thank you,” said the woman, who’d clearly blown out her hair that morning and had taken pains to pick out an appropriate not-too-skimpy-but-revealing-enough sundress for the occasion.

“No, thank you,” said her date, a man with no wrinkles in his button-down shirt.

Watching them, I felt exactly what they must feel when they pass me yelling at my screaming, snotty-face kids.

“I am SO glad not to be them,” I said to David.

“Me too,” said David, “I hated dating.”

“Well, I didn’t hate it. I liked it just fine. But been there, done that. I wouldn’t go back for anything,” I sipped my Bellini, “Honestly, I would rather sit here, arguing with you, than be on a first date again.”

And just like that, with the help of a little eggs benedict and a morning drink, we went from the Honeymooners to the other couple in When Harry Met Sally.

It’s the truth, too. We are, I'd dare to say, still crazy after all these years. David is my best friend and I’d rather be doing jack squat with him, I’d rather be wiping up vomit by his side than lounging in Rio with someone else. Sure, those singles at the restaurant get to look forward to hot, mystery sex, and breathtaking turns of romantic fate, the thrill of discovering someone and being discovered themselves but they also have to wade through all that awful not-knowing, the unbearable lightness of being uncommitted. And though the weight of my family sometimes feels like a ton of bricks dragging me down, its an anchor. And I know. I know that Big Daddy—I mean, David -- and I are tied together, old-school style, by which I mean irrevocably and forever. Maybe not the way I imagined it six years ago, but exactly the way I like it today.

Being married is . . .

Last night, after they’d been bathed and dressed in PJs, my two kids snuggled close for book-time. They were in the thrall of a veritable lovefest. This time of night, I’ve noticed, predisposes the kids to one of two moods -- unredeemable, snarling hatefulness or expansive, exquisite elation. You can guess which I prefer.

“Oh, my little petuti!” exclaimed Primo, kissing the top of his sister’s head. He made up this mysterious nickname for her a few weeks ago and both of them are tremendously pleased with it.

“Petuti, who is your favorite person?” he asked in cooing tones.

“Humpty Dumpty,” she replied without having to think about it.

Primo smiled, forgiving her ignorance. He rephrased the question.

“Who do you love the most?”

“PRIM-O!” she shouted, “You best my friend.”

Primo wrapped his arms around her.

“When I grow up, do you want to marry me?”

“Yes,” she replied, solemnly.

“When I grow up, I will marry you,” he decided. And then it occurred to him that she, being only two years old, might not know the meaning of matrimony, so he added: “Being married is when you spend all your time with somebody.”

At first I was a little disappointed that this was the takeaway my son has gleaned from the example set by David and I. No mention of love or sacrifice or loyalty or happiness. Just a commitment of hours – many, many hours. As if we were two roommates in a rent-controlled apartment on some cherry block in the West Village who can’t afford to move out. Or co-workers with adjoining cubicles.

But then I realized there were many worse conclusions Primo might have drawn from his four years with David and I. It could have been, “Being married is when you spend all your time yelling at somebody because they never wash the dishes or sort the recycling correctly or do their share or cherish you enough or show enough affection or make you feel beautiful.” It could have been, “Being married is when you willingly sentence yourself to life without parole in an emotional prison.”

After a moment of contemplation, I concluded it wasn’t a half-bad description if you take “time” to mean eternity, til death do us part and beyond. Neither was it a half-bad reflection on our marriage. Its not the stuff Shakespeare and Danielle Steele is made of, but who cares? I’ll take reality, with all its pockmarks, any day. The fact that my son loves his sister more than anyone else in the wide world and expresses that love by telling her he wants to marry her makes me think that David and I, the unit, aren’t the colossal mess I sometimes worry we are. And when I tell this story to David later on, he agrees. And that, my friends, is romance, married-with-children-style.