Welcome wickedly witty guest blogger, my sorority sister Kim Drew Wright. Today Kim shares a glimpse of the Real Wives of Richmond, Virginia.
He opens the door, takes off his jacket and gives me that look. The one that says, “Why is the house still a mess? Why isn’t dinner ready?”
Instead he says, “What have you done all day?”
I’ve: gotten the kids out of bed, scrambled eggs and poured milk, let the dogs out, made pb&j sandwiches to put in plastic, let the kids help even though it would have been quicker if I did it myself, reminded them to brush their teeth, cleared the breakfast dishes, been saddened by the morning news, braided hair, mediated an argument, picked out clothes, nagged that they are going to miss the bus, yelled to go brush their teeth, tied shoes, found jackets, walked to the bus stop, told them to have a good day, hauled dirty laundry downstairs, unloaded the dishwasher, wiped down the table, loaded the dishwasher, scrubbed stains from shirts, thought about calling my mother before it’s too late, let the dogs in, put laundry in the washer, sent an email about a PTA fundraiser, counseled a friend having marital issues, volunteered at the school library shelving books in order, put the clothes in the dryer before they mildewed, wiped pee off the bathroom floor, forgot to eat lunch, tripped over an abandoned babydoll, tried to remember a conversation from 1982, cleaned up dog puke, ran to the store for miscellaneous items you needed, joked with the cashier to make her day easier, ran into a friend who wanted to do lunch sometime—I think she’s having marital problems, put my tennis shoes on and ran around the neighborhood because according to you a woman my age has to exercise an hour a day just to stay the same weight, gave the dogs a treat, folded laundry and carried it upstairs, took a shower, shoved my skinny jeans aside, answered 11 emails about the fundraiser, considered getting a job with a paycheck, petted the dogs so they would know they are loved, walked to the bus stop, gave our children hugs, gave them a snack, reminded them to wash their hands first, shuffled through school papers, encouraged them to learn from their mistakes, signed up to bring in cookies for a class party as soon as I got the note so the teacher would know I appreciated her, sorted through the mail, swept under the table, screened calls from telemarketers, picked up socks, shoes, jackets and backpacks forgotten in the foyer, listened to our children, reminded them to do their homework, updated Facebook with something cute our children said so I would never forget, yelled for them to turn off the TV, was ignored, took the trash out and, just now, sat down with that book I’ve been wanting to read for 3 months.
“Nothing important,” I say and get up to start dinner.
She carefully watches everything in her household
and suffers nothing from laziness. Proverbs 31:27 NLT
Presenting Steven Tyler and his little band Aerosmith with Crazy… because that’s how we feel on days when we do nothing important.
Crazy Steven & Tyler
What did you do all day?
Kim Drew Wright is a freelance writer, devoted wife, and frazzled mother of three. Most notably, she has excellent taste in dogs.
Year of the Tiger loved Year of the Dog the first time he saw her.
lanterns
He pursued her until she loved him back. They were inseparable. They married and ran away from home.
Time passed slowly. Finally they were blessed with one child, Year of the Monkey, a Solitaire.
Monkey made the days and nights seem longer, while the months escaped into years.
Tiger and Dog ran away from home again, this time taking Monkey with them.
They are best, these three, when they pull together. Best when inseparable.
The work of living takes Tiger far away sometimes. It cannot be avoided.
Year of the Dog and Year of the Monkey become a pair. They eat Chinese food or pizza and wait for Year of the Tiger to fly back to them.
Today there will be no waiting. Today they are home, all three. Together they will eat cake. They will feast on the decades and dream of the future.
Happy Birthday, Year of the Tiger. The Lord has been good to us.
Satisfy us in the morning with Your unfailing love,
that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us,
for as many years as we have seen trouble.
May your deeds be shown to Your servants,
your splendor to their children.
May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us;
establish the work of our hands for us—
yes, establish the work of our hands. Psalm 90:14-17 NIV
A gift: Perfect Moment by Darden Smith. Love don’t travel in straight lines.
Birthdays are a natural time to take stock of our lives. What’s the state of things in your world today? What or who can you celebrate?
For our precious realtor and friend who handled the unexpected sale of our house and quickly secured another place for us to rent. I’m thankful for the blessing of a wise advisor.
running the yard in Kansas
June was only the beginning. It was then we first learned my husband’s employer was being acquired. I’m thankful for his job with the new company.
A new job in a new city. Where just last week, another savvy realtor helped us find another house in a mere 48 hours. One that wasn’t even on the market yet.
What are you thankful for today?
I’d be so thankful if you would share.
July 4, 2011, Cabool, MO
Happy Veterans Day!
Today I’m also thankful for the brave men and women who’ve served in the United States military. Thank you Dad, Uncle Jon, Uncle Bill, Michael B., Joe G., Jeremy N., Cordel H., Eric B., Jeff W., Uncle O., John M., Jeff S., and the many more too numerous to name here. Freedom is not free.
this is not my rooster. we met this rooster in Historic Jamestown, VA.
It’s 6:00 a.m., Sunday morning. The little rooster has awakened with the sun. Blame it on his grandfather’s dominant dairy farmer genes summoning him to get up and milk the cows.
There are no milking cows at our house, but this Sunday we are due at the early 8:30 a.m. service for my husband to sing. Two and a half hours is plenty of time for three people to get ready for church.
My son wakes us, crawls into our bed, squirms, crawls out then disappears to play. His father is immovable, somehow skipped by the early-to-rise dairyman genetics. The time is now 6:30 a.m. I get up and begin the routine.
Shower. Try to wake my husband. Prepare breakfast for my child who is starving. Feed the dog. Try to wake my husband. Read a book to my child who is lonely and bored. Try to wake my husband.
The time is now 7:30 a.m. My husband gets out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom. My child is on his second breakfast. We giggle at the table as we hear his dad warming up his voice in the shower.
“Ah, ah, ahhhhh!” he sings. We giggle some more.
I let the dog out. Try to convince my child to get dressed. Check to see if the dog has done her business. Check to see if my child is anywhere near his clothes. Clean up from second breakfast. Let the dog in. Praise the dog. Hunt for my child who has disappeared again to play.
Get third breakfast out as my husband still needs to eat. Ask said husband to please help our child get dressed and ready. Clean up from third breakfast.
The time is now 8:00 a.m. The final stretch. Departure in 15 minutes. I run upstairs to get dressed and put on some makeup.
“But, Daaad!” says child. “I’m trying to read this book!”
“You have to get dressed NOW,” says husband. “We’re going to be late!”
I’m tempted to leave my mirror with a half painted face to intervene. But the wise words of the trusty flight attendant ring in my ears: Put your own mask on first, then assist those traveling with you to put on theirs.
slow children at play
If I don’t get ready, none of us is going to make it. I reach for the hair dryer to complete the blowout.
“Daaad!” says child. “I want my book! You are so mean, Dad!”
That’s it. Exit bathroom. Break up squabble. Comfort and dress child.
The time is now 8:15 a.m. My child and my husband are clean, polished, dressed and sitting in the truck waiting for me. I’m standing in the bathroom with unstyled hair and no shoes, wildly slapping on mascara.
Next week, come hell or high water, before anyone else eats, bathes, dresses, reads, or requires me in any other way imaginable, I’m getting ready first. One must get into the lifeboat before one has any hope of helping the others.
My man is a bit of a messy. Not filthy, rather blissfully cluttered and unaware.
I asked his parents prenuptually, as we searched for an empty spot to sit in his living room, if he’d always been like this.
“Yeah, pretty much,” said my future father-in-law. Then he looked at me, a glint in his eye, and said, “You know he’s not going to change.”
Without hesitation I said, “Neither am I.”
Smug in my neatness, I relayed this story to my husband all these years later.
“Oh, really?” he said. “That’s funny, because around that same time your brother pulled me aside and told me you’re a perfectionist.”
What? My brother knows I’m a perfectionist?
“Yeah, he said, ‘You know she’s going to want everything to be perfect.’ I think he wanted to prepare me and protect you,” said my husband.
A perfectionist? My brother told my fiancé I’m a perfectionist? How did he know? Who told him?
Perfectionism is akin to chicken pox. And messiness. Can’t be hidden really. That’s its main imperfection.
I like to think my perfectionistic tendancies have mellowed with the years. Same way my husband likes to think his messiness has. I like to imagine my Myers-Briggs Super Feeler personality has no qualms with my Super Thinker husband. My J and his P can live together peacefully.
Seems truer though, our greatest strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.
The optimism that so attracts me to him drives me to the brink when it runs up against my realism. My emotion that so touches his heart often leaves him flailing alone in his logic.
How do we survive? Somehow we work it out. Temper one another. Genuinely like one another. Struggle and fight to love. Pick up day after day and maintain a disciplined loop, a quiet repeat of what works, a layering of commitment and time as circumstances spiral up and down.
Where I bring organization, he brings spontenaeity. Where I bring order, he brings fullness. Where I am prone to panic, he is even-keeled. Where he is tempted to inaction, I hold ground and press on.
Not sure how it works, messy and imperfect though it may be, but thank God by His grace it does.
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8 NIV
we three
You Take Me the Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson is one of the sweetest songs ever. Some people don’t like the video. Must be the clowns. Normally I don’t like clowns, but I do like this video. Reminds me of a certain married couple I know.
A smartphone catapults the navigational differences between men and women to a new level.
“Should we use our current location?” I ask my husband as we drive in a strange city on our way to visit friends at their new home for the first time. “Maybe I should use the city we just left as our starting location.”
“We’re on Ronald Reagan Highway,” he says. “Use that.
“That won’t work,” I say. “I’ll use the city we left. I-N-D-I-A-N-A-P-O-”
“Do I take this exit?” he says.
“Just a minute,” I say. “-L-I-S.”
“It’s exit 10 for 75 North,” he says.
“Wait a sec. It’s thinking,” I say.
“I’ll just take the next exit north,” he says. We zoom by exit 10 at 70 mph.
“Stay on this road until we get to the fork,” I say, “then veer left.”
“We’re taking the next exit.”
“At the fork?”
“No, the next exit north,” he says.
“It says, Continue on Ronald Reagan until the fork. Veer left.”
“Does it say north or south?”
“It says, Veer left.”
“North or south?”
“IS THE VEER LEFT AT THE FORK NORTH OR SOUTH?” I say to the iPhone.
My husband grew up on an 850 acre farm where every parcel of land, every watering hole, every homestead, every wayward blade of grass is due east, west, north or south as the crow flies. I grew up in the suburbs where every destination is triangulated in relation to the mall.
“Just pull up a map!” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
“Well?”
“Wait a sec. It’s thinking.” We zoom by exit 11 clocking 80 mph.
“The map’s not coming up,” I say. “Maybe we should stop and ask for directions.”
Exits 12 through 14 disappear in a blur.
“Give me the phone,” he says.
“Not while you’re driving!”
“We’re taking the next exit north,” he says.
Suddenly the speed limit slows to a 45 mph crawl. We enter a residential area.
“Hey, I think that’s the fork!” I say. We veer left-north at about 50 mph.
Soon, by the grace of God, we come to our friends’ subdivision. “What’s their address again?” he says.
“Um, I think it’s 7911 or something,” I say. “Wait a sec and I’ll pull it up. Oh, look, there’s a house for sale! Cheryl didn’t tell me they have a house waiting for us next door to theirs. It’s beautiful. It’s 7909, so I’m sure the one next door must be theirs. Pull in here.”
We pull in the driveway. We smile at each other. Love fills the cab where tension once stifled our patience. We’ve arrived. My husband unlocks the doors with a sweet click. A woman steps out from behind the house.
“That’s not Cheryl!”
My husband revs the engine and engages reverse thrusters. We escape by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins to our friends’ house across the street.
“How could 7911 be on this side of the street?” I say.
“Their address is 7912,” he says.
A minor detail. This time, we really have arrived. Next time, I’m driving.
What to say here? What else, but I Drove All Night by the unimitable Cyndi Lauper? While researching this song, I discovered this music video was the first to be closed captioned for the hearing impaired. Warning: it’s a little risqué and Lauper’s sporting Cruella de Vil hair, but oh, that voice…
I have known this for at least seven years. Now he believes it too. Why? After a sleep study during which he stopped breathing more than 100 times per hour, the doctor told him oh yes, he has a most severe case.
Repeat the rule after me. Listen to your spouse. Listen to your spouse.
My husband insisted for much of the past seven years he didn’t need to go to the doctor. His condition was genetic. He couldn’t help it. He was born this way. Comes from a long line of short, fat, snoring, German men.
All this despite the fact he stands six feet tall and his father is taller. So much for the short, fat, German man defense.
But my father-in-law snores too. I acquiesced to the genetic excuse for a while.
Then I got mad. A counselor friend tells me it’s easier to be angry than to be afraid. She’s on to something.
I was afraid. I am afraid my husband will drop dead of a condition that is absolutely treatable.
In the middle of the night, he will have a stroke or a heart attack and be gone. Or in a state of cataclysmic sleep deprivation, he will fall asleep at the wheel and die in a crash. It happens. Poof! Just like that. Gone.
You can’t hide tired forever. Eventually chronic sleep deprivation shows.
My husband, once unable to stop talking, now was unable to carry on a conversation. The man who once relished reading with his little boy now was unable to stay awake past the first few pages.
We were losing him even though he was still living here with us.
my hopping mad little tent
At that point I was terrified, so I got hopping mad.
And that is where I camped out for a while. Seething in my anger. All by myself in my hopping mad little tent. Alone.
That is also where my lesson comes in.
No more seething alone. I need to say what I need to say before the quiet repression begins and the situation balloons into a major crisis. Cue John Mayer.
my skinny little foot in Kenneth Cole
When I finally put my skinny little foot down and called the sleep clinic and drove him to the appointment, my husband got the diagnosis I expected.
His doctor prescribed a sleep machine. It is helping. Immensely. Miraculously.
Of course the only model that works for my him is the most complicated and expensive one.
Funny thing. He didn’t use that as an excuse to bail.
This time I wasn’t going to let him. After all these years, every day and night, we’re still learning our lessons.
Be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each other’s faults because of your love. Ephesians 4:2 TLB
Dear Nora Ephron, thank you for Sleepless in Seattle. Who’d have guessed your film along with Pearl Jam and Nirvana would lure masses of Gen-Xers to Seattle in the early 90s. They stayed for Starbucks and ended up with Twilight vampire children who settled across the way in Forks. (Did I just write that? I think I need to get some sleep.)
During spring break we stayed a night with dear friends. Their eldest Eliza, nearly four, was thrilled to have our Theo, age six, as a play date.
mighty engine
Theo was thrilled to have Eliza’s massive wooden train set and open family room where he, my husband and Eliza’s dad could build the mother of all tracks.
Eliza played trains too, for about three minutes. Then the wooing began.
“Feo,” she said. Most preschoolers cannot yet pronounce the th sound, so they replace it with the f sound.
“Feo, let’s play veterinarian.”
Feo did not answer. He was busy fashioning a railroad crossing.
Eliza was undeterred. She stood near the stuffed animals calling. “Feo. Feo? Play veterinarian with me.”
Still no answer. She tried another approach.
Lodging herself in her younger sibling’s walker, she pretended to be stuck.
“Feo, help! Feo, help me get out! Feo! FEO!” Ah, the damsel in distress.
Feo, now engrossed in bridge building, could not be bothered.
Eliza’s mom chimed in. “Eliza,” she said. “You can get yourself out.”
“Feo, help me!” said Eliza.
“Theo, Eliza needs you,” I said. “Will you help her get out of the walker, please?”
My little prince obeyed his queen mum, dutifully leaving his venture to assist. Once Eliza was freed from peril, he marched back to resume construction.
Eliza did not give up. “Feo,” she said. “Feo, let’s play dolls now. Feo?”
Silence down the line, except for the muffled clinking of wooden tracks fitted together over carpet on the trek to the other side of the family room.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Eliza grabbed none other than Cinderella. She shoved the doll right between Theo’s eyes and said, “Feo! Cinderella needs to tell you something!”
Her mother and I shook our heads, both understanding all too clearly the plight of this little princess.
“She’s sooo relational,” said her mother. Aren’t we all, ladies?
In Genesis God lays out the consequences for Adam and Eve’s willful disobedience. The overarching consequence is death, but there is other fallout.
For example, right after God tells Eve she will have pain in childbirth, He says she will want for her husband and he will rule over her. The usual interpretation I’ve heard umpteen times in church is that women will want to dominate men, while God requires men to lead.
I get that. But I wonder. Maybe the woman’s want for the man is really a want for the man. Not to lord over him, but to relate to him.
It’s my gorgeous friend describing how she undressed and danced in front of the TV, unsuccessful in her attempt to tear her husband away from the football game.
It’s Scarlett realizing her love for Rhett in Gone With the Wind when he slams the door in her face. (Correction: Rhett walks out the open door and disappears into the foggy night. It’s a slam all the same.)
It’s Eliza’s unrelenting calls to Feo.
Men, pay attention. This one’s free. Throw your woman a bone of interaction and you’ll chip away at the curse in your house.
Give her your undivided attention as you would a dearly loved treasure, and watch the curse shatter like glass on the tracks of a mighty engine.
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. Genesis 3:16 NIV
Sanctus Real’s powerful song Lead Me is not to be missed. Click here to listen.
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