Posts Tagged ‘Married Travel’

Dec 2012

Yesterday we shared a post from Zen about shifting priorities in marriage and finding comfort in the familiar after the upheaval of a wedding. Well, today we’ve got a post from Courtney that explores a slightly different take on starting anew after experiencing a major life change. After losing a dear friend, Courtney and her husband decided that the time was right to go after the things they’d been putting off until tomorrow. As someone who has spent a lot of time in this very same space, I’m comforted to remember that sometimes terrible loss is the one thing that can set us onto the path that we need and want the most.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The day after my husband and I returned home from celebrating our first anniversary, we received a phone call that effectively ended our status as carefree newlyweds. A good friend of ours had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the doctors predicted she had six weeks left to live. She was twenty-eight years old.

I won’t dwell on all the sadness the next five and a half weeks brought us, mostly because there was so much of it that I can’t really put it into words yet. Instead, I like to remember the immense love we witnessed every time we watched her husband carry her to bed and kiss her goodnight. I remember the nights I clung to my own husband, so incredibly thankful that he was there next to me instead of in a hospital bed. I remember the sense of adventure our friend always had, even in the days before she passed away, when she confessed that what she missed the most was cooking her favorite exotic foods.

Our lives have changed so much since that phone call. The small spats that worked their way into our first year of marriage now seem childish. We spent my husband’s twenty-seventh birthday in a hospice room, during the last hours of our friend’s life. Today, instead of arguing over who would do the dishes (my husband volunteered!), we outlined a plan for finalizing our wills. Last week, I finally submitted an application to a graduate school program that will begin in the fall. The biggest change, though, has been our plans for the future. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Living for Today

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff | 25 Comments »

Jun 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Adventure Living

Whenever a post from Manya pops into my inbox, I know it’s going to be a good day. Manya, a former magazine editor, somehow let reading APW turn into an explosion of writing (thank our lucky stars), and this talented woman has written about the wedding she should have called off, mortification and the pre-engaged state, and about her own wedding. Personally, I’m waiting for her novel. But today she’s here to write about adventure living. She’s talking about living in Kenya with her husband and family as a long-term ex-pat, but what she’s really talking about is the ways that marriage, and our every day lives, can and should be an adventure: one brave foot in front the other brave foot.

Long before we met each other, my husband, Brian, and I were each discovering adventure on our own. I did some study abroad and had an urban adventure in New York City in my early twenties. We were both Peace Corps volunteers—Brian in Mauritania (a place that he swears is halfway between the Old Testament and the moon) and me in rural Cote d’Ivoire (in a village where sacred masks still dance).

After Peace Corps, before we knew each other, we both spent fascinating and difficult years working in West Africa. I was evacuated from two countries because of widespread violence and war. Brian was once almost killed when a tiny donkey tried to throw him in a well he was digging with a village. We both know all too well what a gamble a fart can be after a certain kind of snack bought from a certain kind of vendor on the side of the road. We have both lost that gamble and are card-carrying members of the I Shat My Pants club (thankfully, not together…at least not yet, but we have yet to visit India). We both have stories we can’t even tell here because our mothers will read this post. And let’s not forget I’m that wedding graduate whose finger got bitten by an elephant two days before the wedding.

There was a time where I was pretty sure that my unconventional career choice in international health and development—and the eccentricities that I have developed because the aforementioned experiences—would prevent me from finding someone I was truly compatible with. I was pretty sure my adventurous life would leave me well travelled, world-weary, and alone.

Then, when I least expected it, I met Brian. When Brian and I started dating, the force that pulled us together was industrial-strength. Because we had so much shared context in our explorations, our relationship felt very easy. My work and my passion for Africa are consuming and defining and central to my identity. So, I almost died when I found out that in addition to being totally hot, Brian speaks the same West African tribal language as me (!?!). Some people think our off-the-beaten-path choices are cool, but I know that they have made both of us a little odd—luckily in all the same ways. We get ants in our pants and a hankering to move every few years. We have similar beliefs about wealth and what constitutes a true problem. We know firsthand how hard life is for most people on the planet, and therefore cultivate a deep sense of gratitude—every. single. day. We are strict with our children: we expect them to respect both authority and their elders. When we come to The States we feel a little bit like strangers in a strange land, yet we are both deeply patriotic.

I mean, how could we NOT tumble into love? I guess you could say he had me at O ka kenen wa. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Adventure Living

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 33 Comments »

Jun 2012

Team Slow and Unsteady

This week, we wanted to talk about adventure: the adventures that can happen in wedding planning; the adventures that can happen in married life; the adventures that can lead us to (or away) from those places. But we wanted to explore the idea of adventure in multiple ways. Today we’re talking about both internal and external adventure, but over the course of the week we want to discuss the adventures that take you away from home, and the adventures that happen right where you are. So this week, here is to Team Slow and Unsteady. We’re starting with Stacia’s truly amazing story. (Maddie says this might be her favorite APW post of all time.)

About a year after Andrew and I moved in together, we moved out. We put almost all of our things in storage and loaded the rest into panniers on our bicycles. We locked the door, put the key in the mail slot for the landlord, and biked away to Colorado from our home in Portland, Oregon.

This was not the first big adventure we’d planned together. When we first started dating in the spring of 2008, Andrew was planning a five-month trip to India and Nepal that fall and winter. A couple of months in, when he asked if I’d like to join him, it was a Big Deal. I bought a plane ticket to join him for a part of the time he’d be there. But before we could go anywhere, I got hit by a car while on my bike. My collarbone was broken, my knee was injured, and I was totally miserable. Andrew was a superhero, feeding me painkillers and saltines in the middle of the night and helping me in and out of my figure-of-eight brace so I could shower.

Then exactly four weeks later, I boarded a city bus while Andrew kissed me see-ya-later and hopped on his bike—he’d meet me at my house. A few blocks later, the bus driver said, “I think that van just hit that biker” and my heart stopped. By the time I got to him, Andrew was standing up, miraculously uninjured save some road rash, but he’d been dragged for almost ninety feet underneath the van before a bystander forced the drunk driver to stop.

I remember sitting together the next evening on the old metal merry-go-round at the playground near my house feeling like the universe had tested us, and we had passed. We were united against everything awful and unfair in the world (mostly cars and their drivers, at that point) and nothing could separate us. But I was wrong. Andrew had been 100% available for me when I was injured and upset, but when he was hurt, I was still recovering from my own travails. Because his physical injuries were less than mine, I think I assumed that was okay, but psychologically those ninety feet haunted him. We started fighting and we didn’t stop. We said terrible things to each other. By the time Andrew was getting ready to leave for India, we’d broken up. I traded in my ticket for one to Hawaii (why not?).

But we kept talking—arguing—over Google chat 7,000 miles apart, me in my hut at a hippie eco-hostel in the jungle in Hawaii, him at internet cafes in Kathmandu. Until one day my friends on the island took me to a tiny secluded beach surrounded by volcanic cliffs, not far from where lava spilled into the ocean from Kilauea, sending up huge plumes of steam. We spent a day relaxing and exploring with the beach and the surrounding jungle all to ourselves, and when we got back to the hostel I wanted to tell Andrew about the beauty of the day. He was online; we talked. I told him about my day and he told me about his. And then we decided to do something drastic—we decided to forgive. Each night before we fell asleep, we agreed, instead of focusing on the ways we’d been wronged, we’d try consciously to send out rays of pure forgiveness to each other.

And it worked. Slowly, our arguments decreased in frequency, length, and fierceness. We wrote long emails back and forth in which we dissected our feelings and our communication, and we signed them “love.” We are so good at this! I thought. Thanks to our abundant compassion and maturity, we’ve gotten past all the horrible things that have happened to us and now nothing can separate us.

Hah! When Andrew got back to The States, the difficulty of readjusting to being physically present in one another’s lives after so long apart came close to separating us. Then, a particularly rough couple of weeks after we moved in together came even closer. But we struggled through it and came out on the other side and, finally, on June 30th, 2010, we biked away together towards the sunrise.

The trip was everything I had imagined it would be—challenging, breathtaking, long, interesting. We saw places we never would have seen any other way, and we met wonderful and generous people who helped us out along the way. At diners and county museums and on the street, we were often asked where we were headed to. We started to joke that we ought to say, “Here.” We biked from Portland, Oregon, to visit this small town or learn about the railroad that once came through here or eat this omelet or admire the way the sunlight fades over this grassy hill. Truly, we weren’t biking across the West in order to arrive in Boulder, Colorado. There are many more efficient ways of getting from place to place. We biked to see the spaces in between and all the things we didn’t know were there. Continue reading Team Slow and Unsteady

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, Wedding Undergraduates | 29 Comments »

Apr 2012

Marriage, Money, and the Long Haul

Today’s post might be the perfect follow up to yesterday’s fraught, yet ultimately rewarding conversation. When Elizabeth of Lowe House Creative offered up her mom, Karen, to write a post on marriage and money, I leapt for it. Her parents will celebrate their fortieth anniversary this summer, so they know a thing or two about being married. (Note: Let this be motivation for all of you to call your moms and ask them to write a post about marriage. We could all use their wise counsel.) But what I didn’t expect is to literally sob through the end of this post. Karen shares a ton of really useful advice about money, and she also talks about her hard-earned perspective on a career and outside interests, raising kids, and the balance of partnership. But what grabbed me is how much respect she clearly has for her husband after forty years, and just how much they like each other. So I’m warning you, get out a tissue now. You might need it. And paper and a pen, so you can take notes (because you’re guaranteed to learn something).

We were hopelessly young and poor as church mice when we got married. “For richer or poorer” and “in sickness and in health,” the words said to each other forty years ago resonate deeply in our marriage today. I was eighteen and my husband was twenty and we didn’t have a pot to pee in, as my Texas born grandma always liked to say. I had two years of college credits under my belt, and Stephen had three. I helped pay for the wedding with money I had saved working through high school. We were so poor we had to borrow one of his parents’ cars for our honeymoon because our old beater wouldn’t have made it as we camped our way up the Oregon and Washington Coasts

But the thing was, we had prospects. Though we were poor, the future loomed bright and shiny. We headed into marriage thinking we were going some place, but we weren’t deluded that it was going to be easy. I gave up college for a while because the plan was for me to work for a few years while Stephen finished his B.A. Then it would be my turn to finish my degree. During our first year of marriage I worked at three crummy jobs, but because better things were just around the corner, it was bearable.

The second year of our marriage, my adventurous husband proposed that he finish his degree in Japan at Sophia University. I was game, and so off we headed. Our apartment was the size of a shoebox, uninsulated with no furniture, except for a futon. What little furniture we did accumulate, we literally found on the side of the road. Sort of like a Monty Python Japanese version of “we were so poor…” We had a little two-burner cook top, no oven, and no hot water. We heated our bath water with a circulating heater, much like a hot tub system. Once we accidentally brought the water to a boil, which we discovered when we heard a strange booming emanating from the bathroom. It was the plastic bathtub undulating in and out in protest.

We both taught English for what seemed like amazing amounts of money to us then, and I worked as a fashion model, a bizarre job but a unique life experience. We were partners in an adventure rife with paradox. We were poor, but feeling rich. We made do but didn’t feel as if we were making do. Continue reading Marriage, Money, and the Long Haul

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 107 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wedding Graduates Return: Morgan and David

I’m not going to lie to you. Today’s post makes me cry every time I read it. Morgan has been around APW a long time. She was the first person brave enough to write about getting married right after a parent’s death, and her joke with me is that she basically OWNS the hard stuff chapter of the APW Book. So it was important for her to come back and write this piece about how after surviving the unimaginable, she and her husband David have somehow fought their way through to happiness. Morgan was the inspiration for all the posts about what happens on the other side of the really really hard parts this week, and I’m so honored to share her story with you.

The year before the wedding was so hard that it only makes sense that everything since has felt so easy. My dad was diagnosed with—then died of—cancer, David was unemployed for eight months, my mother was challenging, my cousin died two weeks after the wedding, and my already stressful yet boring job became almost comically awful. (I’d tell you about it, but for that HR gag order…) How could all that has followed not have been easier?

The hard stuff got better. The grief over my dad has leveled to a dull ache with moments of raw grief. David switched to a similar job in his industry with a stable company for a substantial raise. My mother turned sixty, calmed down, lost thirty pounds and found new happiness. She is so much less negative now and it’s proof, I guess, that sometimes people do change and that I was right to distance myself from her but not to close my heart. She’s still who she is and critical, but she’s not mean anymore, and that’s more than I could have hoped for two years ago.

I left my terrible job for a lateral-on-paper move within the company that’s been excellent for me, and I have just been promoted from admin assistant to engineering technician. I left my twenties behind with a surprise birthday party planned by my husband and best friend that involved party hats and goody bags and I couldn’t be happier to be thirty.

When I think back over the last year and half, I’m flooded with so many happy memories. Eating decadent Pierre Hermes treats in a park in Paris, going to a hockey game in Prague, curling up on our fancy leather couch in the basement to watch movies, and handing David a pregnancy test with good news. There have been so many happy things—days, trips, and special moments.

In my mind, the last twenty-three months have been a breeze. But the real world is more complicated, of course. I had bleeding blisters on my feet from all the walking in Paris—at the very beginning of a three and a half week wander around Europe, so I ended up limping across the Continent. We hated Prague so much that whenever we have to do something we don’t want to do, one of us turns to the other and says, “At least we’re not in fucking Prague” and then we fist bump. The basement flooded in May and insurance in Canada doesn’t cover “seepage,” so we had to do a five figure renovation without warning. Because it was all out of pocket, we couldn’t really afford to pay anyone and did 90% of the work ourselves. All while I was in the middle of first trimester exhaustion. Even the baby news wasn’t wholly uncomplicated. I had an early miscarriage a few months before this pregnancy and so we spent the first trimester waiting for something to go wrong. I don’t think I fully believed that it was happening until we had the first ultrasound at 13 weeks and saw little Skipper flailing away (nicknamed after the Madagascar commando penguin). I’m still having trouble processing the fact that we’ve like, created human life and that in March, we’ll bring home a person. Continue reading Wedding Graduates Return: Morgan and David

Posted in: Wedding Graduates Return | 58 Comments »

Feb 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Building a Life

This week, we decided to explore the concepts of “Getting through the hard stuff” and “What happens next.” We wanted to talk about the idea that when things are really hard, and really shitty, they can get better. It’s something that everyone on the APW staff has deep personal experiences with. In the past few years, all of us on staff have been through the trenches with things like miserable jobs, long term unemployment, family health issues, illness, family death, relationship struggle, and way more. So we have all done a lot of soul searching on how you get through the dark nights and make it through to something new. The form this takes is different for everyone, and we wanted to explore a whole bunch of stories of hope and struggle. So we’re starting with a post from Whitney about how she and her husband chose to leave their lives behind and travel (you can read more about their trip here). Like all dreams, it’s proving to be difficult and wonderful all at once.

A year ago, my husband and I sat in a pool in Phoenix and talked about our life together. We were on a short vacation with my grandparents—awesome retirees who have been together for over fifty years and now spend their winters in Arizona with all their high school friends—and we were having a really great time. The problem was that the thought of going home was crippling us with anxiety. The vacation had made us realize that the way we were living our lives was making us miserable.

I already knew that I was in a job that was causing panic attacks and depression, but what really set me off was being on vacation and thinking that the rest of our married lives together would be spent in small snippets of two week breaks (at best) until we were lucky enough to retire like my grandparents. I could see myself reaching my their age and wondering why we wasted our best years being miserable and using our awesome relationship just to help each other get by. Our marriage had thrown the rest of my life into sharp relief. I felt so good when we were together, so where did it say that I had to feel so bad the rest of the time?

So we talked about how we’d like our lives to look. Did we want to work? Yes. What did that look like? Well, we both wanted to be home for the kids as much as possible, including being able to take summers off when they were out of school. We wanted to have control over our time. Did we want to work from home all the time? No. Did we want to travel? Yes. Where did we want to go?

We had been married for six months, and the fact that we’d had a very brief honeymoon still stung a little. We had this long list of places we’d wanted to show each other and it was depressing to think that maybe we’d never see them. It’s easy for life to scoop you up and carry you along, and we didn’t want to assume that we’d ever be able to take kids to Spain. I’m not saying you can’t travel with kids, but we didn’t even have any yet and here we were again on another too-short vacation and it was starting to feel like our lives were over.

What a ridiculous thought, right? Of course our lives weren’t over. Our life, our family, had just begun. But when you’re in a dark mental place it’s really hard to see that you are only at the beginning of something else. We filed away our hypothetical life plan and went back to New York… but that plan had a really funny way of not staying filed. It sat there, hovering, taunting us. So we talked some more about it. What if we did a little traveling? So we let it sit there, and we talked about it some more. My husband devised some ways that he could work while we traveled, and suddenly it seemed a little more in reach. I had a lot of concerns, and we talked a lot more, until one day something clicked and we realized that we had talked ourselves into a huge change. There was nothing left to do but jump. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Building a Life

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 58 Comments »