While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

How to surprise your husband on his birthday

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Most of the people in my life go out of their way to not celebrate their birthdays.

For example …

For her 50th birthday dinner, my mother, the diva, requested that my father to take her to Long John Silver’s for chicken planks and french fries. For her 77th birthday, my Oma took one look at the balloons I had hung up for her and said, “Vell, dees is the first time I’ve had balloons on my birthday.”

“The FIRST time?” I asked.

“Ve didn’t have balloons in Germany after the var.”

This was delivered with such a mix of melancholy and hardness that I felt at once glad and guilty for having hung them.

My Nana has bemoaned her birthday for years. Earlier this year, when I mailed her a container of homemade brownies, she told me to save myself the effort because she’s “an old crow” and the brownies were “all mush” by the time they arrived.

My sister PK has such severe birthday anxiety that as a child she refused to acknowledge the date. However, like any young ingrate she still liked receiving presents, so to ensure she’d still be gifted but not celebrated she invented a new birthday; an unbirthday for those of you who are into Alice in Wonderland. The date? May 11, the same day as my parent’s wedding anniversary. This was obviously a strategic move so my mother would be less apt to forget it. It worked. At 28 she still gets presents on this day.

Having said this, I do not come from a family of party poopers. Under different circumstances these people are SUPER fun and celebratory. It’s birthdays that bring out the Eeyore in them. Unlike me, this apathy stems less from a fear of mortality and more from a fear of ATTENTION.

My husband on the other hand is exactly the opposite. He’s a birthday whore.

He lives for December 8. Truthfully, he lives for the WEEK of December 8. For Joe it isn’t so much a birth DAY as a birth WEEK. He counts down to it like a child counts down to Christmas. (For the record, he counts down to Christmas too because I think he views Christmas as an extension of his birthday.)

December is Joe’s birth MONTH and he’d lay claim to all 31 days if Jesus’ big day didn’t get in the way.

Sometimes I enjoy his birthday whoriness. When you come from a family of limelight dodgers, it’s refreshing to see a grown-ass man get bitchy when you break tradition and unknowingly cut the first slice of his birthday cake. (“What’s wrong with you? It’s my birthday. I’m supposed to make the first cut.”)

Joe doesn’t open a bag of LJS chicken planks and call it a day. In the fall he types out a long list of things he’d like for his birthday and emails it to me in a Word doc.

This year he failed to send the September wish list. Probably because he’s been so busy supporting our family, being a superb dad to Hank and a patient, understanding and bighearted husband to his sometimes high-strung, sometimes neurotic, sometimes surly wife.

HE EARNED A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY. (And a ticket to see Trey Anastasio play the House of Blues in February.)

So on a weekend that kicked off Dec. 6 with my dear friend Gabriel’s wedding in Safety Harbor, Fla., I planned a two-day celebration that involved a surprise hotel stay at the Safety Harbor Resort & Spa, a surprise boat ride from the hotel to Hula Bay Club and a surprise dinner attended by a rotating cast of family and friends.

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Funny things happened on the way to November

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Holy sad sack! Have I been a downer lately, or what?

On the Lance yes, I suppose I have been. This is where I go to sort out my feelings because I feel it’s socially unacceptable to weep publicly. Online I can mope in my slippers and caftan, listen to Bon Iver and wear my homely glasses while surfing YouTube for videos of pugs being adorable.

In person however, I’m quick to laugh at jokes, RSVP yes to parties, dress semi-attractively (hello trendy black glasses!) and carry on intelligent conversations with a fair amount of sophistication and crude humor.

What I’m getting at is this: blogging is my Haagen-Dazs and Sleepless in Seattle. It’s where I go when I’m feeling vulnerable, PMS-y and tolerant of Meg Ryan’s dopey acting.

Pug woes aside, I’ve had a lot of good laughs over the last couple months. You wouldn’t know it if you only read my blog. So in the spirit of reminding you that I’m still a good time, I’ve decided to share with you some of the things that went right in September and October – in photos of course.

Joe was in charge of getting our son ready for preschool one morning. This was the note he wrote for himself the night before so he’d remember what to pack in Hank’s bag. Let me translate for you: water, cheese, applesauce, sandwich and George (as in Curious) backpack. I found this to be almost as amusing as pug videos on YouTube.

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See Henry. See Henry run away.

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Some days I feel like I’ve got it all together.

As a mom that is.

Some days I really feel like I’ve got my head in the game.

I stuff my kid with a hearty breakfast – spinach and sausage in scrambled eggs, organic fruit slices arranged into a smiley face, almond milk sprinkled with fairy dust, a napkin made from Egyptian cotton.

Instead of letting him watch Woody Woodpecker on YouTube, I read him a library book that espouses the kind of morals I bend every day.

I remember to wash his face.

I insist he do his business on the toilet. And when he does, I give MYSELF a sticker because let’s be honest, potty training is a bigger pain in the ass for parents than it is for children.

I do not turn on the TV. I refrain from answering emails. I refrain from Facebooking. I earmark nap time for doing laundry, dirty dishes and sewing torn clothes, the way I imagine my foremothers did in the Time Before Internet.

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Why does everyone seem so perfect on the internet?

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Let’s call it the real reason my knees are bruised and torn up in this picture.

It’s something I’ve thought about for years, something I once got so passionate about I pitched it two years ago as a cultural think piece to a magazine that didn’t quite grasp the concept. It’s since been articulated by other writers in important magazines and newspapers all over the globe, which hurts my writer’s ego, but let’s not dwell. (Dear Editors of Publications I Pitch, I have good ideas.)

Here’s what I’ve been thinking: social media has created the maddening illusion that everyone’s lives are perfect.

Facebook is the virtual equivalent of your high school yearbook. Everyone is vying for space on the page and no one wants to look like a loser. So what do we do? We post pictures of our lives at their most exciting. Jet skiing in the Bahamas with my bestie! Front row at Jay-Z! Climbing Kilimanjaro. The view is auh-mazing!

Even the boring stuff seems exciting when photographed from the right angle. Shopping for bananas! The laundry is done! Look it’s my belly button lint!

We upload our best photos. We broadcast our most joyful news. Sometimes, despite our compulsion to put only our best face forward, we share our miseries. Why? Because misery loves company and eventually you need your virtual friends to provide virtual support.

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Why I love my husband in three examples

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ball gown prom dress

Today is my wedding anniversary, the celebration of which took place last week at a little-known resort on a little-known slice of local waterfront no one seems to visit. Stay tuned for an un-sponsored (ie: truthful) review of the resort. I started this post on the balcony of my hotel room. I failed to finish it because I was too busy eating and drinking heavily, losing midnight games of Rummy and lounging poolside for hours with highbrow (and lowbrow) literature.

Example 1: He dreams about our son.

Last week Joe woke up with a memory of a dream. This was especially noteworthy because Joe never remembers his dreams, which I find sort of sad since I remember every ridiculous plot line from every one of my ridiculous dreams.

Joe dreamed that two-year-old Henry ate a “pellet” that turned him into a full-sized adult male. In his dream, he watched our son swallow the pellet and like a character from out of a comic book, morph (disconcertingly fast) from a toddler into a hairy, lumbering man.

This really freaked him out – Joe not Henry. According to his recollection, Henry was calm, but “still slimy” from the transformation. Joe’s use of the word “slimy” caused me to CHORTLE.

“Slimy?” I asked. “SLIMY sounds disgusting.”

“It was disgusting,” Joe said. “You don’t change from a toddler to an adult in three seconds without some residual dew.”

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Finding Joy in the Dog Days (Or Not)

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Editors note: If you’re able to get through this entire post, you deserve a gold star and a Book It! pin.

To my husband, my mother, my sisters, my friends, my neighbors and anyone else I may have barked at, scowled at, sulked away from or cried to during the last … oh, let’s call it a month:

I’ve been a surly bitch.

Unappreciative and crabby.

No scratch that. I’ve been downright beastly. My outward appreciation for life’s little gifts has been snuffed out lately by sadness, strife, underarm sweat, sleeplessness and the care and keeping of a tantrum-prone Henry.

It’s 800 degrees every day in Florida. In the morning, it’s 600 degrees. At night, it’s 700 degrees. During the day? It’s 800 motherf**king degrees.

More than once I’ve exclaimed out loud to anyone within ear shot, that August can suck it. The bugs are at their biggest. (Thank god the 902-page September issue of Vogue arrived so I can annihilate cockroaches three at a time.) The ozone is at its thinnest. The grass is at its brownest. Homeless alcoholics are at their rankest and the general public is at its meanest. (Last week a woman at Target stormed out of my line because I had 11 items on the 10-items-or-less belt. “So much for the EXPRESS LANE!” she snarled. “Lady, you’re shopping at Target not diffusing bombs. Chill the eff out,” I snapped IN MY HEAD. In real life I glared at her while Henry reached for the candy display and tore open a package of peanut M&Ms. “HENRY WANT CANDY MAMA!”)

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Smash hit, or how to react when your toddler breaks your guitar

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This happened last week:

Joe walked into our bedroom after taking a shower. Henry, as usual, was waiting (impatiently) for him to exit the bathroom.

“Daddy out shower!” He exclaimed as Joe walked past him in a towel.

“Daddy PWAY Henry!”

Joe stopped to pat Henry on his soft blonde head as he made his way to the closet to get dressed. Henry, feeling slighted, walked over to Joe’s guitar, which was perched, as usual, on its stand, and without so much as a warning, pushed it over in one swift, deliberate move.

CRASH.

I was in the kitchen packing Joe’s lunch. (Editors note: before you assume I’m a domestic goddess who always packs her husband’s lunch, you should know that Joe takes the same two things to work every day: a tuna sandwich and a bag of Doritos. It takes me longer to wash the smell of fish off my hands than it does to prepare the lunch.)

I heard the guitar hit the floor. Like a bone breaking, I heard it shatter. I heard Joe scream and Henry cry.

“Nooooooooo!” Joe said. “Nooooooooo! Nooooooo!”

I’ve seen Joe lose his shit before. I’ve smelled his fear and tasted his dread. I’ve tried, usually with little success, to quell his panic at moments such as this.

Like for example …

Last month, I watched his face turn white when he realized he’d devoted the cover of his newspaper to the promotion of an event that had already happened. A year ago, I watched him projectile vomit out a window on the interstate while driving in rush hour traffic. Three years ago, I watched him weep when his brand new flat screen TV exploded in front of his eyes. (Who can forget that?) And early in our relationship, I watched him pitch his bicycle into a grassy median and demand I pedal home and get the car after I had pushed him too far on a ride.

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Upon waking

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Last week I had a dream.

I dreamed I was on a date with my husband. We were walking hand in hand through Ybor City in downtown Tampa. It was late. The sky was black. The streets were filled with people scattering like bugs, people spilling out of bars and clubs, women teetering atop stilettos, men pretending to have muscles in sweat-soaked shirts, electronic dance music pumping electricity onto the sidewalk, thunder clouds rolling in.

The streetlights were so bright they blotted out lightening.

Everything was obscured by darkness, trailed by neon and pulsing like a heart, a neon heart squeezing and releasing.

In my dream it began to rain. Water pooled like molten silver at my feet. People began to scatter faster. Cars began to accelerate. We crossed railroad tracks, Joe’s Adidas tennis shoes sloshing through the mud between the tracks. I picked up the hem of my dress, giggling at some joke he had made about running in the rain.

I suddenly couldn’t remember where I had parked.

Rather than lecture me about my forgetfulness, Joe teased me. We were on our first date. I was the free-spirited one, the non-planner, the girl in old flip-flops, cutoffs and short hair, which I had lazily trimmed the night before with my friend’s kitchen scissors.

We had yet to fall in love, my husband and I.

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Some men can’t tell a lie

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Two true conversations – one recent and one not-so-recent:

When I was about 19, insecure and dating my high school sweetheart, I asked him if he thought I was chubby.

He replied, “You’re not chubby. You’ve just got a thin layer of fat on your stomach.”

I couldn’t argue with this assessment. It was true. And though his remark didn’t send me into a downward spiral of body hate, it certainly didn’t boost my ego. It stuck with me of course, not because it was purposefully hurtful, but because it was idiotically truthful.

Fast-forward to my marriage …

About two weeks ago, after walking out of the shower and glancing in the mirror, I noticed that my shoulders looked especially broad and my arms looked especially muscle-y in that she’s-built-like-a-tank kind of way.

So I asked Joe, “Do you think all this swimming is making my shoulders too broad?”

He replied, “You’ve always had shoulders like a linebacker. It’s one of the first things I noticed about you.”

At first I sighed. I’m a Hungarian shot put thrower. Then I grunted and flashed my teeth like a grizzly bear.

“Fine,” I growled. “All the better to kick your ass.”