Coming up: Suck it Britney and several-ex-husbands. The (W)rights have made it through twelve months of ecstatic connubial ecstasy without a whinge or a major debilitating injury. 364 days without an incident... will they make it to a nice round ONE? The lessons transude from interior fourth walls, ink on crepe soaking into consciousness. As the present embraces the past, it finds the future. Will time's muddled maquillage finally slip? And yeah, yeeehaw, you betcha! The clop-clop-clop of wooden cowboy boots herald a spectacle of bovine bravado and cracked cowboys fleeing amidst the flames. Our couple tilts at windmills, but dare they tilt at professional bullriding?? And will the Old Country buffet sustain them. Promises of home life, tenuous with uncertainty, become clear. Can the (W)rights keep their happy home for one more year, or will forces far beyond their domestic docility cast them upon the street?
Break out the paper prezzies, grab a party hat, and delve into a special ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY EDITION of the DINKiest adventures of all.
Non-Rehearsal Dinneraversary And/or First Anniversary Eve
Because no day should go by without some form of -versary (lest we lapse into prosaic prosody), a year ago today we had dinner with roughly a bazillion friends and family members at a celebratory dinner that was more of an event than the actual wedding. We had the leftover paella for months as a remembrance. Unlike the tradition with saving the wedding cake and having some on your first anniversary, we didn't actually save any paella for this evening. But that's ok. We'll be in the northern lands of Lynden for some dutch-cowboy bull riding. They will strive to last 8 seconds to celebrate our lasting one year.
It's kind of the dual schtick of Lynden that it is heavily populated by those of Dutch Heritage (and tony Dutchy tourismo) and that it is full of cowboy type folks. The groups don't always consciously interact, but I still harbor images in my head of little old ladies in dutch hats riding bucking broncos and screaming a heavily accented "yeeeeeehaw" with rattle spurs buried into their wooden clog-boots.
Anyways, at a year in, so far so good. I noticed when my friends got married before me that things do seem to shift after marriage, even when long-term relationships preceded them. With my first maritally pioneering friends, this was really hard. I felt a little left behind, like they'd "grown up" without me, and had been initiated into a world whose mysteries were not for my lumpen singleton eyes. Later, I realized that the shift was not eschatological, but it was still a shift, and determined that I would play a more active supportive role. Since I deal in family law, I also see a lot of the innards of marriages from that vantage. But until one takes the plunge, you are never quite sure what will and won't change. Probably even after.
Still a neophyte in a land where most of my friends have already now leap-frogged onto the even grander mysteries of parenthood, I can say this much about marriage:
1. It was an easier transition than I expected. Andrew and I had never lived together, except for weekends and breaks. We're both private people with idiosyncratic preferences for the order of things, schedules, etc. I thought there'd be some turbulence getting accustomed to sharing a home. There are of course the little times where the towels are folded "weirdly" or we both want to use the same room at cross-purposes; sure Andrew leaves mud clumps on the way to the shower and I leave my gum wrappers everywhere, but all in all it's been far easier than having a roommate in the past. Sharing a bed with a creaky-sinused squirmer has not been the death knell of my romance with REM cycles. I've apparently adjusted. And I'd discounted some of the benefits of sharing a home with a partner who is also a responsible adult. When things go wrong in the house, it's not all on me. We can figure out where the dump is, and what new microwave we want together. Not every household chore is something I need to handle.
2. I swear, I don't know why, but this last year I catch myself using eponymous endearments far more than before we were married. "Dear" "my love, my pet" "Mr. Sexy Pants" come up a lot more in vocative instances than before. Not sure why, but there we go.
3. I don't feel married. I still giggle a little when referring to "my husband", although I've gotten used to the convenience of describing him as such. I definitely don't feel more grown up. If anything, we may have devolved into a plethora of play-dates, may keep more ridiculously cute things around the house, and may engage in a higher proportion of frivolity and frolic than before.
4. Who the heck is Mrs. Andrew Wright? I'm perfectly happy with the last name of (W)right. I was born to be Ms. Wright. But I had no idea that some people might actually address me by this whole new level of culture-shocking sobriquet. If I titter when I find myself referring to "my husband," I scrunch up my face, ponder heavily, and then start guffawing when I see this. It does make so much sense. I've worn Andrew's clothes with his name on them for so long, I must have become him!
5. Taxes are weird, and do not take those damned exemptions. I know, I know, it's a Community Property state. Everything I earn is community, everything he earns is community. So my income, according to the IRS is the average of our incomes, and my debt credit is the average of our debt credits. I knew this in theory, but it was still kind of a confusing shock to my system when I tried to work through the married filing separately version of our eventually joint taxes. Even more discombobulating when I found the covertly tucked in "exemptions calculator" in Instruction Manual Directions Siberia, and suddenly realized neither of us should even be taking the one exemption we'd taken as single people.
6. Social pressure never ends. First there were the leading questions about "seeing somebody" with the implication that a negative would more or less be an admission of the deepest and vilest guilt/defect imaginable in American society. There were the singly-vaulted eyebrows and the "say no more say no more" about our "status" when we started seeing each other. There was the implicit reaction that (1) I was now better off for having somebody in my life, but (2) not as well off as I would be if that somebody and I would just get hitched and have a big old party.There was almost an explosion of relief mixed in with the joy from acquaintances that I had gone forth with this (W)right step.
Now of course, there's the kid-question. The thoughtful comments on how cute our children might be, the open ended implications about certain events "in the future". The thoroughly excited encouragements and offers of old baby things. Should we comply and have a child, I'm told I will then be encouraged to have another, preferably of a different gender for the sake of whichever parent didn't hit a gender-match in the last run, and then of course the cycle will continue with our parenting straight into all the things we hope our non-existent children will do and theoretical grandchildren.
Which is not to say that I resent the encouragement. I am happy that we're married, although I was also quite happy when we were single. I would like to have a child, although I recognize that might not be in the cards and that this would not be a horrible thing either (considering my full awareness of the requisite sacrifices of things I rather love about my life thus far). But it is always an extra-wrinkle in the what-now considerations. Do we buy a house because it makes sense to buy a house given our respective situations, or do we buy a house because that's "the next step" on our highly proper shufallo to upper middle-class retirement and stately death? Where would my disappointment at not popping parturient as soon as I stopped popping those birth control pills end, and where does my sense that I'm disappointing others who so hoped that "for us" begin? You know what I mean.
7. I married a nut-job, but he has a really cute toosh and I kind of prefer crazy anyways.
8. Routine is not a dirty word. Yes, there should be new discoveries and excitement to keep things going. But it is so exquisite to have a baseline, to have shared rituals, and to feel comfortable in a world that requires a lot of discomfort.
9. My husband is not "my best friend." We're life partners in the fullest sense of the word. He may hear more about my day to day life and deep thoughts than anyone else. He may be my sounding board. He's my playmate. And I am damned attracted to him. But I have an entire support network of people who relate to and strengthen different aspects of my psyche, who ground me in a past that predates his grand appearance in my life, who keep me connected with the work I do and the interests I pursue that are uniquely mine and make me who I am. And that involves a cadres of friends who defy singular superlatives. It takes a village to support an Adella and definitely a marriage.
10. One can live with a permanent bike installation in the living room.
Marriage Achievement Points Unlocked The Paper Badge of Minor Longevity
And of course it is now our Truncated-honeymoonish-longstay-at-theChrysalis-a-versary!!! Whooo. Okay, okay, really, I'm done with the -versaries for a spell. But the predicted milestone hath been passed. I have now been Ms. (W)right (to varying degrees of bureaucratic formality for a year now. And Andrew has been Mr. (W)right for about as long. Actually technically much longer if we're just going by names alone, but this current married incarnation began a year ago and continues pedalling fiercely.
While we inaugurated our connubial blissossitude with a big freakin' party and a night in the fanciest spa hotel in town, we went a little differently to commemorate the prior inauguration. PBR! Which does not, in this case, stand for Pabst Blue Ribbon, but instead Professional Bull Riding!! The Dutch cowboys to the north were hosting one of the the many qualifying rounds for PBR and hootenanie and how, was it a blast.
Like roller derby, PBR is something of which I've heard tale but hadn't seen in action until recently. The ambience is a tad different, being a sport (the original Xtreme sport according to their materials, and they do have some basis for such claims, even if their use of dude has all kinds of different connotations than the typical X-Games dudeage) essentially tied to the ranch and rural lands surrounding those. These are literally cowboys. Granted many of them have gone a touch WWE, but they're still patently cowboys and the audience is still a little bit rural NASCAR country. They won't just sing the National Anthem before one of these event; they'll start with a long and heartfelt prayer; the participants will eagerly bow their heads in reverence between both the orison and the aria. That said, there was nothing there to alienate us hippy-dippy Bellinghamster types (aside from the inherent violence to the riders and use of animals that might trigger some). It was a nice sense of connection with an audience with which I wouldn't necessarily find connection with in other contexts.
There is something unifying about sports that way. We may have drastically different views all the way down to our starting principles, but we're all feeling the same excitement when the bull breaks into the arena and we're all laughing with the same voice at the rodeo clown shenanigans.
The quick primer on bull-riding: (1) Riders must stay on a bull for 8 seconds to receive a score; (2) half of the score is based on the difficulty of the bull, which is always judged; (3) the other half of the score is based on stylistic elements of the ride itself; (4) a majority of riders don't last 8 seconds; (5) there is an impressively well trained support staff of cowboys and rodeo clowns whose sole jobs are to help a fallen rider get clear of the bull's hooves; (6) there's something back stage that the bulls really like. A few cavorted around the arena a bit (mugging for the audience, I swear), but must were happy to shrug their rider off and then mosey off without much ado; (7) riders do get hurt, and there's an EMT team on standby. Two actually had some contact with the bulls' hooves this go around. Both walked off but just barely and it was kind of scary.
Ok, so that's your primer. There are four or five heats and a championship round that takes the top scorers from the prior rounds for a final ride. Each bull only goes once, and they are drawn from all around the country. Nobody stayed on their bull long enough in the championship.
It was a well finessed program, emceed to perfection by two announcers. One was in the stands while the other was the rodeo clown himself. His athleticism was off the charts impressive, especially considering that he never sounded out of breath despite an ongoing couple of hours of full zumba intensity cavorting. During any lag between riders, they were seamlessly involved in revving up the audience, getting people to dance and cheer, and throwing out minor freebies. There was also a lassoer on a horse, just in case a bull needed some extra prodding to get off the stage. He stood up on the horse for a brief attempt at a dance-off with the host in the ring.
And yes, there were mild pyrotechnics at the beginning. Not during the bull-riding, thank goodness. And some of the bulls were really adorable.
Both for novelty value and because it was right next to the event arena, Andrew and I stayed at the Windmill Inn, a delightful little dive redolent of the road-tripping days of highways past. The bed didn't actually vibrate, but the nonsensical wiring, the ubiquitous religious placards and cards, and the pullulating recreational vehicles lining out the "RV Park" portion more than made up for that. I'm not sure it was the best sleep I've ever gotten, but ... well... Windmill!
I admit we didn't stay in Lynden for the full tourist experience. We hadn't gotten down there until just briefly before the event, and most things are closed on Sunday in Lynden (informal blue laws for a persistently religious community). Instead of sticking around, we continued our theme at Old Country Buffet for a very early brunch and returned to our old home home off the range.
Because we're romantics, we spent the rest of the morning packing up dross and dropping a carload at Goodwill. Then Andrew biked up a mountain. To proclaim his undying love for me from the hill tops, of course.
As a bonus anniversary gift, our landlady informed us that her daughter would be staying in Seattle for another year, so we can sign a new lease. Phew! Glad she waited until we could act on our terror of potential impending moves and get rid of our junk, but knowing we don't have to manage all those moving logistics again just yet is quite the relief.
And I'm back at work, where the cleaner-guerilla artiste has struck again. Apparently the bonhomie between Lucy, the glass octopus, and Ernestine, the ceramic turtle, has faded with the hangovers. They are again set apart at their own levels of personal space. It looks like the other desk animals may have had their own party, as some are laying limbs akimbo and bleary grins upon their faces. It must be Monday!
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