October 21st
It is a dark, dismal day. Almost all the leaves have been torn off the aspen outside and the branches, bare against the sky, are an ominous indication that months of grey winter sky are on the threshold. All that gold that was on the branches is now on the lawn and consequently the lawn holds what little sunlight I will see today.
"What time is it?" I mumbled into my pillow, when Keith came home from PT.
"Eight," he said.
"Ha!" I replied. I was certain it would only be seven at the most.
"Did you say, "Ha?" Is my little kitten not a morning person?" he teased, indulgent; clearly thought about leaping on the bed to cuddle and then thought better of it.
He has only recently realized the thing about me not being a morning person, though he's been feeling the effects of it for quite some time. Knowing why I'm such a witch in the morning apparently makes it cute.
There is a "For Rent" sign on our front lawn and it leaves a slight hollow feeling in my stomach. Our house is now open to the general public. So far we have had no one come in, or call. Our realtor did say we had the rent a little on the high side, but she wanted to leave it that way for a few weeks anyway, just to see.
Keith has warned me that for years now there have been rumors of Ft. Knox closing and moving to GA. Yesterday he came home and said he thought the rumors might be more substantial than usual and it might be prudent to rent a house in Kentucky instead of buying, in case we might have to move again if the rumor proved true.
I think that I am getting my period, a blow yet again to my pregnancy hopes. It's silly. It takes people a while to get pregnant and Keith and I have been trying only for two months yet and still I am crushed each time my period comes.
Each time I have to fend off fears that I might be infertile, that I'll never get pregnant, never have a family. Then my period finishes and I start to look up again and then I start to wonder if I am and the wondering increases in intensity and it doesn't help that signs of pregnancy are so like signs of impending menstruation.
"Wow, my breasts are swollen and tender; I'm really, really tired and moody! I must be pregnant! It really must be true."
And yet not.
I find myself longing for a baby with a strange kind of clarity. I see the translucent nose and ears of my future newborn, the windswept like reddening on the cheeks and the way the tiny clenched fists move jerkily in the air. I smell baby powder and spit up. I see a pile of tiny onesies and bibs in the laundry, dishes in the sink I haven't had time to do and the bed unmade.
It doesn't help that a wide variety of people ask on a regular basis if we are pregnant or not. First of all, I don't think I'll be comfortable announcing it until we are well along, maybe two or three months. Secondly, it's just doesn't help with alleviating the pressure.
People keep telling me that it'll happen when we aren't thinking about it, but I just honestly don't know how not to think about it. I cook a meal and think about how it will be like to cook for a family, one baby squalling at my hip or under foot, two playing rambunctiously upstairs or hungry and whining about when dinner will be ready, their heads just above the counter.
I want this. I want to be continually smothered under a tide of dirty clothes that I never come ahead on. I want to induce small children to sit down and do their homework at the kitchen table when they would rather be outside, I want to see them off to school with backpacks larger than they are and I want the chance to outsmart my teenager in his or her attempts at rebellion.
Maybe in all the stress of moving I won't think about it and it'll just happen. And yet they say stress inhibits one's chances, so that probably won't happen. The only that does help is remembering that I really have very little control over the whole process anyway, so just to let go and enjoy the ride.
It's just hard to do that around this time of the month.
October 22nd.
Wow, what a couple of days. Yesterday Keith and I argued pretty much all evening and all night and into the morning.
There are some days when I have to admit, I just want to argue. I really don't care about what, really. I just want to get angry and state things loudly and as though they were as set in stone as the Ten Commandments. (Could that have anything to do with my PMS? Noooooooo. I totally think they are soooo unconnected.)
Firstly, we argued over having yet another guest come over to the house for dinner. We've had another soldier living here for the past week, as his barracks room was given away. He's a very good friend of Keith's, I mean, like a brother good friend, so there was absolutely no question of him paying for a hotel room.
And the guy is great, he washes up; he's done so twice now. He even wipes down the counters, he washes his own clothes, he makes the bed in the morning.
"Honey, you're in trouble now," I teased Keith, about this.
"You love me!" protested Keith.
I kissed him on the top of his head and went on up stairs.
"I wash the dishes!" I heard him call up, a moment later. "Honey! I've washed up for you!"
He has.
Anyway, Keith wanted another friend of his to come over for dinner, but my relationship with this guy is strained by the fact that he and his wife openly disapproved of me back last summer and told Keith so and were rude to me. Naturally, thing are not all sunshine and light now, when I am the bonafide wife and have not actually run off with the silverware and the bank account during the deployment.
He came over though and we all played friendly. Maybe it would help to clear the air if I just said out loud sometime, "Hey, I know you hated my guts last summer, but I can see that you feel differently now, so why don't we just start over?" Yeah, right.
Argument number two was about money. We had round one, which was a lightening round and I lost that one and retreated with grace.
Round two began upstairs gracefully while making up for round one. That slowly escalated into "Let's discuss the past problems which were not even admitted, let alone resolved." I always love opening up that Pandora's Box O'fun.
Once past issues (which I had thought were unrelated) resolved, we moved again to discuss the initial argument and it ended up with Keith stating right out that he was just going to do what he wanted to do, which was to spend money.
Instead of getting incensed over this, I actually admired his honesty. I then turned the tables on him. This didn't have the impact I thought it would. We simply have two entirely different world views when it comes to spending money, surprise!
I lock down tighter than "The Rock" and he plays it nice and easy. Sometimes I give into him, but right now the stress level and the current financial level being what it is, I just can't unclench my mindset. He sees the whole situation being not just about money but his manhood, so he is not budging either.
We decided to call it quits while we still could, the argument was postponed with remarkable amity, considering. But it quickly deteriorated, and under unexpected circumstances.
Keith and I are still working out our sleeping arrangements. I anticipate these negotiations might take us years. He wants to be close to and touching me. I want to be untouched and him to be facing away from me, so that the volume of his snores is muffled by the bulk of his body.
This last is of extreme importance to me. My husband's snores are so loud that even my elderly grandfather at the other end of the trailer in Minnesota could hear him. It is not fun to have the source of that unadulterated racket mere inches away from one's face, especially as the night grows longer and more desperate.
I wore the new earplugs; they were painful and inadequate. I tried stuffing two pillows between him and I, I tried literally hanging off the bed so that I could get as close to the fan as possible (the sound of the fan muffles the irregular, grinding sound of his snores). I do this until my right arm falls asleep and the pain in my head from the earplugs begins to shoot into my brain.
Then I give up and attempt to wake him up. This takes several tries. Once awake, he agrees to roll over, but doesn't do so. This goes on for a long time, each time I take a deep breath to prevent myself from screaming from sheer frustration. Finally he wakes up enough to say, irritably "No!"
I am now seething. Not only do I carry the bruises, unhealed, from our earlier unresolved arguments, but now this. I think a great many incoherent things and fortunately decided to act on none of them. I'm stuck with this great, unmoving, ungrateful lump of a noise maker two inches from my sore and throbbing ears.
Since the earplugs are clearly not working, I take them out and simply suffer the undiluted assault. I begin to get fuzzy headed from sheer exhaustion but cannot fall asleep. Finally, Keith moves away in his sleep and soon after, I fall asleep. Sometime later, he moves over toward me again. I wake him up and this time he acquiesces. This happens about three or four more times in the night.
In the morning, he is angry. Apparently he remembered being woken up; this is not always the case. He asserts that he is the one that has to work and he got no sleep. I counter with, "I told you to roll over the way we always do it, but you didn't." I want to expound on this, along the lines of, "I ask you to do it for our sake, we should just agree that your back to me is our start out position every night here after," but I don't get the chance because he's too angry to listen.
However, he still leans over to give me a goodbye kiss on the cheek and to mumble "I love you," which proves him to be a very, very good man and I feel tons of remorse for keeping him up. I also feel resentful of feeling remorseful. After a while this muddle clarifies into simply remorse.
Later in the morning, before I begin to write this and while I am still reading articles from Realclearpolitics.com and drinking my bitter coffee, he calls. He is clearly remorseful and loving and my apology rolls out unhindered and genuine and like that we have made up and all is well in the world.
But all bets are off tonight, naturally.
