This weekend is my first weekend at home not knee deep in the book tour since, well, basically New Year's. I know! I know! Thus far I've taken walks, gone to the movies, read the paper, worked out (that's my thing, long story), gone ice skating, and had proper San Francisco tacos and tequila. I'm off to do more of that, with my husband... who is here! With me! I'll see you back here tomorrow. Mwah!
Photo: Amber Marlow Photography
Meg Keene: You're Welcome, Internet. from Rory Gordon on Vimeo.
Party In A Book Store from Rory Gordon on Vimeo.
Dear Team Practical,
I've been writing you letters for years, but this time I just want to say thank you. Thank you for supporting the APW Book and helping it to do so tremendously well that, in month two of the book being out, we're in the third printing (howcrazyisthat). Thank you for coming out on the book tour. Thank you for being smart, articulate, and hilarious, and making a month on the road a total joy.
And what better way to end this whole tour than with some video? The first video is an interview with me, mixed with some fun stuff. The second interview is bits of me speaking. Both of them are me with my most casual, least professional, least NPR voice. Fun, no? Hopefully it will make all of you feel a bit like you came on the tour, or like we had a drink together. It was all shot by Rory Gordon Photo in LA, who's a total wonder-ball, and shoots photo and video for weddings and small businesses. If you've been pondering a bit of video, you should totally call her right this second. She's so easy to work with that the whole thing seems effortless.
And finally, finally. The book tour is over, sort of, for now. Next week, once I've gotten enough sleep that I'm coherent enough to write, I have a bunch of entrepreneurship posts (and some marriage posts) up my sleeve about the broad scope of things I've learned in the past month. Plus, we have a ton of APW projects that we'll finally start getting to show you next week, and then even more projects a few weeks after. So! There is so much more happening. But for now, we'll bring the book tour to a close with this. Perfect.
And, for the record? I've decided I want to do more public speaking. So if you want me to speak at an event in the Bay Area (or can get me to LA), let's chat. I'm quite the talker, and I make good jokes, too.
Thank you thank you thank you,
Meg
This Thanksgiving, in the middle of our epic surprise roadtrip, I realized that partway into our third holiday season as a married couple, we had started to figure out the holidays. I don't mean figure out like it's easy now (it's probably never going to be easy for us, on a million levels), or even figure out like we now have a fixed set of traditions (that also might never happen). But we started to figure out the holidays this year in that they finally feel like they are ours.
Around this time of year, we tend to talk on APW a bit about the process of splitting holidays because it can be one of the first real trials you go through as a new family. For some of us, getting married means going through an emotionally transformative moment on our wedding day. For others of us, nothing much changes, at least at first. And then you hit your first set of holidays. Since a wedding is, on it's most fundamental level, about forming a new family in the eyes of your community, the holidays tend to hit like a ton of bricks. The fact that long standing holiday traditions have to shift to accommodate a new family can be painful and confusing. The fact that everything can't stay exactly the same can flat out suck. How can we honor the traditions and family we grew up with, while supporting and caring for our new family? How do we develop new traditions as we form and shape our baby family? Why is it all so hard?
But (surprise reversal!) this particular post isn't about splitting holidays, it's about owning holidays. As a Jewish household with an interfaith family, we don't have holidays to split, really. Christian holidays are generally with my family, Jewish holidays are either with David's family or on our own. And over the course of three years, we've decided that non-religious holidays are up to us. Nothing about this setup is particularly easy, but within the last year, we've started to make a home in it.
First, let's be frank. There are endless downsides to being interfaith and not having holidays to split. Christmas was always my favorite time of the year (and a religious time of the year at that), and for obvious reasons, when I decided to convert my relationship with Christmas shifted. When I hear people talking about splitting Christmas, I tend to want to curl up into a little ball, pound my head with tiny balled up hands and whimper, "Two whole families that want to have Christmas with you, lucky, lucky, lucky." Which is of course, totally unfair, but really, who is in a fair and balanced mood around the holidays? Certainly not me.
However, it turns out that there are surprising upsides to not splitting the holidays. In short, when you're not splitting them, in theory all the holidays are yours. Because we never have had to ask, "Whose family is getting Christmas this year," we got a jumpstart on the idea that our family is always getting Christmas, and it's up to us what we do with it. And that jumpstart has lead us to some important lessons. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Owning The Holidays
Have you ever had a panic attack at 30,000 feet? I've had two in the last month, and one this weekend led to a fairly interesting adventure. But let's back up.
I've never loved flying, but ever since I moved to New York City from Southern California at 18-years-old, I've done a fair amount of it. This year, however, what with it being my first year of self-employment, I've done a ton. I said yes to personal and professional travel, perhaps a tad too often, just because I could. Then this fall, it reached a critical mass. Since August, I've been on 15 flights (including two trans-Atlantic flights, which I actually don't mind as much), one long ferry ride, and two long train trips. On Wednesday, in the middle of traveling to see my Grandmother for Thanksgiving, my body decided rather suddenly at 30,000 feet that it was overwhelmed by life and done with plane travel. Last time this happened, I was traveling alone, and the stewardesses (God bless them) pulled me out of my seat, blew air in my face, put cold compresses on my neck, and proceeded to get me drunk so they didn't have to call in a medical professional. This time, I was traveling with my husband (God bless him) and my hands started shaking so hard I couldn't hold the drink he'd pressed into my hands (and I was already on anti-anxiety medication). To say it was unpleasant would be a small understatement.
When we landed, I turned to David and said, "I can't get on the next plane. Also, I clearly need treatment for my flying phobia." And, "But seriously, I can't get on the next plane." And that's when the foundation of what my marriage is started to play out. There I was, sobbing in the Phoenix airport. David said, "Are you sure you can't get on the plane? Because it's a short flight and I think you can probably do it." And I collapsed into tears again, and said, "I can't." He asked if I wanted to get a plane home. I said, "No," and croaked out, "I think we need to rent a car."
And my amazing husband nodded and said, "Ok. We need to rent a car," grabbed his iPhone, started searching, and then told me to grab my things. Let me tell you, you get some funny looks when you roll up to a rental counter in Phoenix at 10pm, sans reservation, and ask to rent a car and return it in San Francisco four days later.
The whole thing made me think about what marriage is. Life is a series of things you plan and things you hope for, followed by things going awry. Life is thinking you're going to have a short and comfortable flight to New Mexico, and ending up in pine-scented Flagstaff, in a hotel you picked because you were too tired to drive your rental car any further, with a wife looking rather green around the gills after a terrible panic attack. And the thing about marriage is that it gives you a partner to sob on, to plan with, and to drive the rental car, when you're shaking too hard to do it.
We got our wedding album made this summer, finally. Heather of One Love Photo and I slaved over the album for, well, a year if I'm being honest (cobbler's children have no shoes, and all that), and then I surprised David with it for our second anniversary in August. The album is beautiful (Couture Book, flat printed on textured paper, one picture per page, unbelievably simple, looks like an art book) and looking it over with David on a foggy boozy evening this summer was wonderful. But it's been a busy few months, and I hadn't gotten a chance to show it to friends and loved ones until recently.
Then this weekend, one of my theatre-conservatory-friends from college was staying with us, and we ended up staying up late going through the album. As we flipped through, I got to answer questions about the day, and our loved ones, "Oh! You don't know we got ready together?" "Yes, that's Caron's son," and be jointly overwhelmed by the beauty of the photographs (again). But what I hadn't expected to realize, is the way our wedding created a shared experience. Our wedding was a communal foundation for our marriage, in a day and age where our lives and relationships tend to be very isolated and private. When my friend asked me, "Where is that picture you gave me of the two of us dancing together?" And I said, "Here it is! It's one of the most beautiful shots from the wedding, I think," I saw a look of happiness steal over him. And when he asked me if there were pictures of the communal blessing, "his favorite part," and I showed him the pictures of him tearing up during our last dance, I realized that we had done what we'd set out to do, all those years ago when we started planning. Our wedding had created a moment of celebration, and a communal foundation for the ongoing enterprise that is marriage.
As we've started working on the Wedding Graduates Return posts at APW, and as I've looked at our album, I've done a lot of thinking about what I have to say about our wedding, and our marriage, two years later. Was it worth it? Yes. Did it somehow shape our marriage? Somehow, it did. And has our marriage been a different entity than our five years partnership before marriage? Perhaps most surprisingly, yes.
While I wrote a lot about what our wedding day felt like, shortly after the fact, revisiting it now it feels like this picture looks. Our wedding was this shining, raw, emotional moment, where we had the people we love most around us, and we made huge promises. It's strange how the little details really fade away over time, and what I'm left with is the feeling of the sweat dripping down my legs at the ceremony (a shocking rarity in Bay Area summers), how my dress felt, sharing food and floating on a bubble of joy in our Yichud, the rich chocolate cake covered with dahlias, and the sheer love of all those people in the same room having a marvelous time. What I'm still, more than two years later, trying to wrap my head around is how that day subtly shaped and altered our day to day reality, and our relationship.
When I got married, and launched the Reclaiming Wife section of APW, my very first post on the subject talked about what I hoped that our marriage could be. I said:
On our honeymoon I started realizing all the really great things about it—we're on a team now, a literal team. We support each others' endeavors, we encourage each other, we support each other financially. Ah ha! I realized. Now we are two! This is awesome. As two we should be able to be much braver, much more adventurous, right? We'll be able to hold each other accountable. Imagine all the stuff we'll be able to get done! Fabulous. So I started making a list in my head of "Now-We-Are-Two exciting projects to consider in the next three-ish years." I was excited.
And I was right. That, right there, was how our married life would be different than the previous five years of our relationship. We've always been an overly-ambitious duo, since way before we were a duo. Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Meg, Herself
It's been awhile since we discussed name changing on APW. And funny enough, in the time that we haven't talked about it, it hasn't gotten any easier, nor have the answers become any more obvious. So here is the first thing I want to point out: if you're in the middle of making this decision, you have lots and lots of options. Society tends to present a black and white world view: you change your name, or you don't. But thinking about it that way just disempowers you. As illustration, let's look at people we know in the APW community:
So you have options. You have way more options than I've listed here, but this is just to get you started. You don't even need to make a decision right now; you can wait til you feel ready. Or you can make a decision, and then change your mind. But don't let anyone make you feel like you don't have choices.
But here is where I have an issue: for most of us, this decision isn't an easy one. Even if we take the most traditional route and change our names and go by Mrs., the process is often emotionally difficult, leaving us in tears, feeling like we're mourning a loss. And if there is anything I've learned from the ongoing APW discussion about name changing, it's this: the men in our lives, by and large, don't know how hard it is for us.
Why? Well, I'd argue that we're being too quiet about it, and we're wasting far too much time judging each other for making choices different than our own. (Every second you spend judging a woman for making a different choice than you is a second you wasted.) For whatever reason, we're internalizing a lot of the painful bits. Maybe we're talking about it with our partner, but we're not talking about it with the world at large. We feel like, "This is the way it's always been," and "I just need to figure out what I want to do," and "There just are not any great solutions," instead of saying, "I'm just not willing to put up with this anymore!" or "You need to know that this is painful for me," or "I want more options, damn it, and better options, too," and then politely lighting something on fire. Continue reading Name Changing: Don’t Be Quiet About It
Hi, I'm Meg Keene and I live in San Francisco. I started this blog to talk about planning our 2009 wedding, but it grew to include a lot of grounded smart-alecky women talking intelligently about their weddings and marriages. My first book, A Practical Wedding, was released in January 2012.
*photograph by Emily Takes Photos
