Marriage

Dec 2011

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

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 161 Comments »

Nov 2011

Reclaiming Wife: The Unexpected Adventure

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.

Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: The Unexpected Adventure

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 153 Comments »

Oct 2011

Wedding Graduates Return: Meg, Herself

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

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife, Wedding Graduates Return | 108 Comments »

Sep 2011

Name Changing: Don’t Be Quiet About It

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:

APW staffer Lauren was going to change her name, but then decided that felt wrong to her. She and her husband decided to hyphenate at the last minute. A new name for a new family.
Cate changed her name, but was adamant about using Ms., not Mrs., because, "Because you shouldn’t be able to tell a woman’s marital status from her title any more than you can a man’s."
APW staffer Kate has a dream husband (hi Kevin!) who offered to take her name. But after a lot of discussion she decided that she didn't want to keep her often-mispronounced-as-a-bad-word last name, so she changed her last name, and took her maiden name as her middle name. Well, socially. She hasn't done the paperwork yet, and it's been more than a year. She goes by Ms. as well, in case you were wondering.
Brenna changed her name, and then it didn't feel right, so she changed it back.
APW Staffer Alyssa changed her name, and then cried about it, mourning the loss (which in no way made it the wrong decision for her).
Marie-Ève lives in Montreal, where it's actually illegal for a woman to change her last name upon marriage. We had a long conversation about this, where I said, "People here think that to be a family, you need the same last name." And Marie-Ève said, "That's crazy. To be a family, you just need to be a family."
And then there is me. I didn't change my name, and I didn't have any heartache about it. If you ask us what we'll name our kids, however, you'll get some flustered arm waving. Don't think I'm going down without a fight.

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

Posted in: Ask Meg, Gender & Feminism, Manifestos, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts | 631 Comments »

Sep 2011

Reclaiming Wife: Married Travel

First off, I'd like to thank everyone for letting me take what felt like a two week sabbatical. I know. Other then the lack of my wry prattle on Twitter, you probably didn't notice much, did you? That is because of the amazing APW Team: Lauren D., Kate, and Alyssa handling the content side, Emily handling the business side, and Liz and Lauren W. moderating. Those ladies are amazing, so a huge thanks to them.

But I'm back. I've taken a lot of naps, written a lot in my on-paper journal, stared into space quite a bit, read some books, spent time with my husband, done some serious exploring, and taken eight flights. It's been epic. Specifically, I've visited three countries, two continents, and three islands in ten days. I know. So let's back up and talk about travel.

I didn't leave the state of California till I was 14 years old. It's a big state, and we didn't have a ton of money. I lived in a poor area in Southern California where the fact that I'd been to Northern California several times was considered relatively fancy. My parents had both grown up in the military, so they'd already traveled and lived all over the world, and no one else I knew went much of anywhere. Poverty is isolating enough that I knew someone in his early twenties who had never left the city limits of our hometown.

When I was 21, I went to South Africa, thanks to a highly subsidized honors trip I got into at Tisch, the arts school I attended (PS. The cover image on the Tisch website is from a class I was physically in. Odd, yes?). By the time David and I got together, that was the sum total of all the travel I had done. And more to the point, I felt like travel wasn't accessible to me. It seemed like there was some magical skill set that the kids I went to college with—who'd cut their eye teeth on trips to Europe—had that I didn't have. I thought I didn't have enough money; I didn't have the skills. I wanted to see the world, but I wasn't sure it was possible.

David disagreed.

At that point, we were pretty broke (artist class, as we used to call it). I made about $27,000 a year, living in New York City, which, suffice to say, is a little tricky. So when David announced his plan to take me to Europe for the first time, I thought he had lost his ever-loving-mind. I told him there was no possible way I could afford it, so he did what he always does when he has to convince me: he researched. He built spreadsheets proving how much it would cost, and how much I had to save to go. He arranged for us to stay with my family in England. He talked his parents into donating some frequent flyer miles to the cause. He figured out the most affordable time of year to go (hint: American Thanksgiving). And he would not give up until I came around.

Needless to say, it was amazing. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Married Travel

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 267 Comments »

Aug 2011

Reclaiming Wife: Solitude & Partnership

{Taken from my workspace in New York City, on my iPhone}

The week before Yay New York, I was in New York City on my own. I decided to take advantage of the fact that I can work from anywhere and went a few days early. David couldn't get time off work, so I was on my own in a city that I'm used to being on my own in.

It was wonderful. I saw friends on my own schedule; I journaled by the lake in Prospect Park; I walked from Canal to 14th on a lovely summer night because I wanted to check up on everything. When you've lived a huge chunk of your life in New York City, it feels like a part of you. When you leave, it can feel like you amputated a limb. So I walked the streets, at each block remembering something different from a different period in my life. "Remember when you interviewed as a nanny there when you were in college?" "Remember shopping for office supplies there when you ran an office?" "Remember staying out late drinking there in your mid-20s?" And frankly, it was nice to do the remembering alone, at my own pace. It was nice to be away from my husband for a few days (even if I missed him after seeing a play with no one to discuss it with).

During my trip, I had a long chat with Kimi of Printable Press about the nature of solitude and family. Kimi, who had a baby earlier this year, told me that partnership had been a harder adjustment than motherhood when it came to giving up solitude. And I got to thinking about how difficult I've personally found that trade off to be.

David and I moved in together pretty late. We moved in together when we moved across country, and only because David told me, "It is beyond stupid and expensive to move to San Francisco and then get separate apartments near each other." Because the truth is, I would have kept separate apartments til the last possible second. I viewed moving in together more as giving up my own place than building a home together (though in the end, it was both). Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Solitude & Partnership

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Personal Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 127 Comments »

Marriage

Friends