While My Boyfriend Was Sleeping

What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

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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If this ring could talk

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If my wedding ring could talk, it would sound like Jean Arthur, the throaty-voiced spitfire in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It would be full of piss, vinegar and the kind of wisdom you earn the hard way. Picture 84-year-old Katharine Hepburn: blunt, memorable, sarcastic and dressed in baggy trousers. She would be full of good gossip and zingers. My ring would be the life of the party, if rings were dames.

Of course I have no basis for these flights of fancy – just an overactive imagination and an antique wedding ring that once belonged to Joe’s great-grandmother Millie.

Here’s what I know about Millie: she was a small Italian woman who lived with my mother-in-law in a three-story walk-up in Brooklyn, where she cooked big dinners and sewed fabulous clothes. She was married twice and couldn’t keep a secret, especially if it was a pleasant one. Other than that I don’t know much else about the woman, which feels kind of wrong since I wear her wedding ring 24 hours a day.

Some girls spend their girlhood picturing their ring finger bedecked in a diamond, emerald-cut and mounted in platinum, fastened to a band that was dipped in gold at the end of a rainbow somewhere in Africa. Me? I had other fantasies. On more than one occasion I said I’d be perfectly verklempt if my husband-to-be proposed with a hot tub.

When I did, however, finally warm to the idea of a ring I latched onto one word: antique. I wanted a ring with a past. But since Joe and I rarely spoke of marriage, much less marriage BLING, my fondness for antique rocks never came up. I figured if my hand ever needed a swift Liz Taylor-ing I’d browse Zales in my jammies and order one of those eternity rings middle-aged husbands buy for their middle-aged wives to let them know they’re still the cat’s meow.

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Marital non sequitur: finger foods

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We’re standing in the kitchen, heating up leftovers. I make a plate of steamed veggies, then hand Joe a plate of cold pasta.

Me: “Stick this in the microwave for 30 seconds.”

[Joe abides. Timer beeps. He pulls out plate.]

Me: “Is it hot enough?”

Joe: “I don’t know. Come here and tell me.”

Me: “You just tell me.”

Joe: “I’m not touching your food.”

Me: “What? Why? I don’t give a shit.”

Joe: “Because it’s wrong. And gross.”

Me: “But we’re married. What’s mine is yours.”

Joe: “Not in this case.”

Me: “I’m sure most people would agree with me.”

Joe: “I think you’re wrong. I think most people would say marriage does not mean you’re granted permission to touch your spouse’s food.”

Me: “What if your spouse grants you permission?”

Mon ami needs your vote!

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You’ve met Ricci and Mbaye before.

Ricci is one of my nearest and dearest girlfriends. We met six years ago at the newspaper I still write for.

In 2008, she left Florida to work as a freelance multimedia journalist in West Africa, where she met and fell in love with a handsome Senegalese soccer player named Mbaye. Two years ago, I grilled them about their relationship and then last year I introduced you to their baby.

Now I’m asking you to vote for Mbaye in Redbook Magazine’s 2012 Hot Husbands contest.

If you got your hands on the July issue, you may have seen him striking a GQ pose on page 10. He’s now one of 25 finalists in the Hottie Hubby face-off, so please, please cast a vote for him by visiting this link or this link.

Never mind that she’s worked for The New York Times, Ricci desperately wants to claim that she’s married to Redbook’s Hottest Husband of 2012.

Seriously. Is there no greater claim-to-fame? 🙂

—

PS. Photo snapped at the Saturday Morning Market in downtown St. Pete – one of my favorite places to take visiting friends and family. If that knit hat with ears doesn’t scream sex appeal, I don’t know what does.

Party of four on a Friday night

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Today my kid turns one month old.

I still can’t wrap my brain around it.

We have a one-month old.

He easily weighs over 10 pounds, eats like a champ, rocks three-month-old onesies and as of yesterday, drinks from BOTTLES.

A ONE-MONTH OLD.

And guess what?

We’re still cheerful people, enjoying adequate amounts of sleep and comfortable periods of normalcy.

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Fertility and the new frontier

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| Sept. 30, 2009 |

Three days after I returned from my honeymoon, at about 9 o’clock in the morning, I found myself in the passenger seat of Joe’s Honda Accord, lying on my side, curled up like a shrimp, crying softly into the car’s fabric upholstery on route to a St. Petersburg emergency room.

We thought my appendix was rupturing.

It happened in the kitchen when I was making Joe a tuna fish sandwich. It started out as a slight cramping in my lower abdomen. Nothing major, no more alarming than a dull wave of period cramps –– except that I didn’t have my period. I wasn’t even close to getting it.

I kept on with Joe’s sandwich, cringing as the cramps got stronger.

I squeezed a dollop of mayonnaise into the bowl. I mixed it with the tuna. And then a cramp hit me that was so fierce it brought me to my knees. It felt like I had a lead weight in my abdomen that with each breath grew larger, making it impossible to stand up.

The dull ache I experienced minutes earlier had been swallowed whole by a new, godawful kind of cramping; the kind that actually makes you whimper.

I crawled my way into the bedroom and climbed up onto the bed. I curled into the fetal position with a pillow between my legs and waited for Joe to get out of the shower.

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The jam session.

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Mothership drew this cartoon of me, Joe and the pug on the back of an envelope a couple years ago.

Let’s call it The Jam Session.

Those of you who know Joe, know he loves to jam. He’s awesome at it. He even has this little jam face. All good guitar players have one and Joe is no different.

The first night I met Joe, he played me a song on his guitar.

It was a song he made up earlier that day, prior to meeting me and a gaggle of friends at a downtown St. Pete restaurant.

It was a slow song, a dreamy song, the kind you drink coffee and cook pancakes to. We would do this a few months later, after the dating dance had begun. But at this moment Joe was a stranger with framed concert posters on his walls and an odd bar of Lava soap in his bathroom.

The song, so you can hear it in your head, was the kind of sweet little number girls get squishy over. Boys know guitars make girls swoon. It was a nice treat and the perfect cap on an otherwise perfect night.

He didn’t sing. Just strummed this song, a short song with a lullaby of a refrain that repeats and folds over itself like a quilt.

I was sitting in his apartment on his old futon, wedged between four good friends who no longer live here. We were all fairly drunk. I was slurring inappropriate stories that I would never have told in front of mixed company had my tongue not been coated in vodka.

I was being myself. My roots were exposed.

It was because I was comfortable.

This was because of Joe.

Eventually my roommate passed out on the futon, curled up in the fetal position. Two years and eight months later, after he had moved to Philadelphia, my roommate would get ordained to marry Joe and me on top of a hill in Ellicottville, N.Y.

But none of that had happened yet.

In that moment we were just a cluster of friends in an old apartment with dark hardwood floors, telling stories and taking turns trying to play Joe’s guitar.

It was cool out. I was wearing a purple scarf around my neck and a green scarf in my hair. Joe remembers this.

We had all lost track of time and the night had rolled on thick with throaty laughs; the way nights with friends tend to do.

My insides felt velvety. I didn’t think it was possible to feel so snug with someone I had just met.

I had gone out begrudgingly that night, but at 2 a.m. there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

That little song Joe played for me, did I mention it was an original?

It became my song.

On our wedding day, Joe stood under an arbor and played it as I walked down an aisle made of scattered mulch.

He looked dashing. He always looks dashing when he’s playing his guitar.

I wasn’t nervous.

I felt warm and sunny and light and comfortable.

Every time Joe plays me that song I think of our beginnings.

His futon. On top of a hill in Western New York.

My insides turn to velvet.

Recently, he played it for me when I was standing in the front yard, tugging weeds out of our vegetable garden. He walked out the door, guitar tucked under his arm, strumming for all the neighborhood to hear.

Curious, our neighbors moseyed over.

I didn’t even notice they were standing there until the song was over and they applauded.

—

PS. Happy anniversary, my darling rock star. I’m the luckiest gal in the universe to have snagged you. Have you ever thought about giving our song a title?

Eternal sunshine of the spotless unwind

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Matrimony didn’t physically change my life.

Joe and I had lived together for almost two years before we got married.

Before he’d even proposed, we had purchased a house together and vacationed alone together. From the day we first cohabited I began packing him a tuna fish sandwich every morning before work and in return he began making the bed. This arrangement has been going on for three years.

For an impulsive person with irrepressible wanderlust, I take to domesticity like a fish to water when I’m in love.

On our honeymoon, I met a couple in their 60s from Detroit, who told me they spent the first year of their marriage getting to know one another. He worked as a supervisor at a Ford plant and she was a housewife.

Every morning for a month she would wake up at 6 a.m. to cook him breakfast before his shift and every morning for a month he would force himself to eat it.

It was painful.

“I finally had to tell her I don’t eat breakfast,” he said.

“All he wanted was a thermos of coffee,” she balked.

Ironically, during this conversation we were eating breakfast outside, overlooking Seneca Lake at a bed and breakfast in Upstate New York.

“I eat breakfast more now that I’m retired,” he countered.

“But how was I supposed to know?” She exclaimed. “It’s not like we talked about breakfast before we got married.”

This blew my mind.

For those of us who shack up before marriage, the first year of matrimony takes on a different sort of feeling. I knew Joe didn’t eat breakfast three dates into our courtship. By the time he popped the question, I’d vacuumed up his toenail clippings no less than a dozen times.

The transition from live-in girlfriend to wife was subtle, but no less educational.

Here’s what happened to me:

In the months after our wedding everything Joe and I did as a couple suddenly seemed more official. More serious.

We were a married couple grocery shopping. A married couple watching Jeopardy. A married couple shopping for Christmas decorations. A married couple arguing over whether it was worth the extra buck for Hellmann’s Mayonnaise instead of the store brand.

As a result, I became more serious.

I felt like someone I had stamped the word adult across my forehead in bold, black ink. The weight of this perceived label caused me to spin into a toxic spiral of anxiety.

I worried about money. I worried about the future. I worried about fertility, drinking water, health insurance, car insurance, my savings account, his savings account, our credit card balances and the fragile state of the industry in which we both work — newspaper journalism.

I worried about APRs and PPOs, 401Ks and other acronyms I know nothing about. I worried so much the pug’s face turned gray.

I worried in my dreams and I worried in my pipe dreams. I worried I hadn’t achieved enough as a single person, all the accomplishments I had yet to cross off my list, all the countries I had yet to visit.

Joe had fallen in love with a free spirit and married an old crank. I held onto my last name because it was the last bastion of my former lighter self, but I had strangled my former, lighter self by fixating on things I couldn’t control.

One day, not long ago, it dawned on me that while it’s important that relationships mature, it’s equally important that they stay the same. And by that I mean, there are a million reasons why two people fall in love, none of which have anything to do with how well you look while carrying the weight of the world.

If marriage is about growing old together, then the best thing I can do for mine is drag it out by staying young.

Some women appear to have it all and I spent a year agonizing over whether I could too, until I came to the conclusion that having it all is not a literal feat, but a figurative one.

Having it all is making peace with it all. The first year of my marriage taught me that.

A maiden changes her name

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I didn’t know I was attached to my last name until it came time to change it.

It’s this way with most things, isn’t it?

I’ve been married for 318 days, 315 of which I’ve been Heidi Kurpiela, a name that I’ve pronounced two different ways my entire life: Ker-peel-ya and Ker-peel-a.

I always give people these two options when they ask me how to pronounce it. I’m not sure which is right and which is wrong and it doesn’t much matter as long as you spell it with a “pie” and say it with a “peel.”

Kurpiela is a German name with Polish origins, the result of blurring boundaries between two countries from which my people hail. Other than my Dad’s immediate family, I have no known relatives with this last name in the United States. Three years ago, Facebook introduced me to a whole new brood of Kurpielas in Canada, but after sending a series of messages back and forth with one of them, I’ve yet to find a common ancestor.

This is unfortunate considering how much I love Canada.

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