Chasing A Child: Who else would have us?

Who else would have us?

I'm really over this whole bleeding thing. Particularly since it's no longer bleeding -- it's more like, well ... sorry to be explicit, but ... chocolate syrup. Sometimes with chunks. I told this to the Mister last night and he put on one of those faces that says "I'm doing my damnedest to be a supportive husband, but is this much detail really absolutely positively necessary?"

These days, he's actually bearing a very close resemblance to Wonder Husband, for which I will always be deeply grateful. He's also been tossing around the word "soul mates" recently, and although that phrase has historically made me cringe, I'm beginning to see that he has a point. Frankly, I don't know anyone else who would make exceedingly dark jokes with me while I was miscarrying, plus put up with all of my day-to-day quirkiness. The amazing thing is, although he's also as quirky as they come (and believe me, I've seen quirky taken to fine art forms), his quirks fit quite well with mine. Which is lucky, since we're both pretty much homebodies and are perfectly happy spending entire days with each other or, like this afternoon, at opposite ends of a room engrossed in our own quirky projects (e.g., him: filing 100s of music CDs; me: blogging).

Perhaps we appreciate each other more because we met at a later stage in life? I certainly appreciate him, after having dated all of the Very Worst Men in NYC. The Mister, on the other hand, wouldn't even go on a date with someone if he couldn't imagine marrying them, so his stable of women was not exactly large. He dated so rarely that, when he lived in a 12th floor studio on the Upper West Side, his mother gave him an iron hook the size of his head for Christmas. It's purpose? To lower out his window and pull up a wife, what else?! You can imagine the looks on his parents' faces when the Mister introduced them to me at his family reunion. Unbridled relief begins to describe it.

We've had to describe ourselves and our relationship in the adoption paperwork, and it's been both a funny introspective process and a challenge to put on paper. Autobiographies were easy. But describing how we interact? Hm ...

Here is a perfect example of a typical Saturday morning at our place: The Mister is writing an email to his friends asking them to name the 5 most influential books in their lives and describe why. Of course this gets me thinking, what would be on my list? The first one that pops into my head is Barbara Ehrenreich's For Her Own Good, a book that traces the history of so-called experts trying to answer "the woman question." Among other things, it really brought home to me how much western medicine has stolen from women over the years. With chapter headings like "The Sexual Politics of Sickness" and "Motherhood as Pathology," it's a fascinating read.

The Mister had never heard of the author. What?! How is this possible??? (Update: I am informed that he had heard of her but didn't know anything about her. I stand corrected.) So we looked her up online, which of course brought up all of her other excellent books, including Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, which has a wonderfully fun cover. "Oh," says the Mister, "that reminds me of a painting that was in my friend's apartment of a bunch of dancing Hasids. Apparently, that joyful dancing thing is an important part of the Hasidic experience."

So of course, we then pop over to another website to see if we can find any videos of joyfully dancing Hasids. We had a great time watching the dancing rabbis, but we got really excited over Matisyahu. He's doing reggae in this clip, but in this one, he does a heck of a beatbox.

Which, of course, made me think of the amazing Butterscotch. Whatever happened to her? So we popped over to her MySpace page and discovered that she and I have a Six Degrees of Separation thing happening. We were both once upon a time piano majors and probably shared some teachers ...

"Hey," says the Mister, "we should put that in our 'Dear Birthmother' letter! That should set us apart from the other couples!"

You see what I mean by the Shared Quirkiness thing, right?

Posted at 06:59 PM in adoption, in between times | Permalink

Comments

going through those questions is interesting, isn't it? at least you're having some fun.

Posted by: luna | July 13, 2008 at 09:47 AM

Shared quirkiness is good, and I get it too. My DH and I are both oddities, but, usually fit together well (we fit together well enough that I can wait for him to come back to acting like the husband he was). Anyway, isn't it weird when you write this discription of yourself/your relationship to sell yourself(we are doing it now for the surrogacy).
It's hard!

Posted by: duck | July 14, 2008 at 09:41 AM