Sarah

Saturday morning, I had a talk with my father.  “Have I told you what my brother Tony once taught me about love?” he said to me.  We were talking on the phone, of course.  He had just finished painting the family bathroom in preparation for Thanksgiving.  Among our many lovely guests will be Manfriend.  The family wants to put its best bathroom forward.

I couldn’t remember what Dad’s brother Tony once taught Dad about love.

“He was engaged to this woman.  Karen Garff.  And one day she disappeared.  They had been spending every day together, but one day, he called her, and she didn’t answer.  She avoided him.  Later he found out she’d been seeing someone else.  He was heartbroken.  That’s why he went to Europe.

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Tom and I made a will when our boys were young and named a brother-in-law our executor and willed our children to them (Tom’s sister and her husband) should we fall out of the sky on a trip we were planning.  While my boys love Tom’s sister and her husband, they were always horrified that they might actually have to be raised by parents who were tough micro-managers while our parenting style was more a benevolent neglect. My youngest son, Sam, jokes that his second mother was Wendys, and Sharon Kamarath, (now his mother-in-law), Mary Ann Wright, and a host of other women who fed him, adored him, and took him on vacations to Bear Lake.  Sam always had a mother who owned a boat, a tennis court or a swimming pool.

Anyway, Ed, son number two, was here two nights this week and I was updating him on how we wanted to go out of this world and reminding him that he was executor now.

“Have you written this down?” he asks.  He has grown into a practical adult.

“ No, but we will.”  I think we’ve been saying this for a decade.

“You might want to write it down,” he says.

“And I want to be cremated,” I say.  “I don’t want morticians touching me.  “I want the family gathered around my body when I die, and then I want you to wrap me in a sheet and take me to the crematorium.”

“In my car?”  Ed cares a lot about his car.

“Well, yes.”

“I have a better idea.”  His look is smug.  “We should invite a lot of people over to see you when you die.  We’ll give them each a magic marker, and they can draw on your face and then have their photos taken with you.”

Unlike his aunt and uncle, whom I don’t think would have found this funny in the least, I break into five minutes of guffaws.  That’s the trouble.  I encourage this kind of irreverent behavior, and now my children don’t respect me.

I think about the time, a hundred years ago, when I was sitting at my parents’ table with my brothers and sisters in the kitchen, and my father was describing how hungry they were during the Second World War in Holland.  I probably had that same smug look on my face as Ed had, when I said, “Why didn’t you just go to the refrigerator and get yourself a HoHo?”

My father rolled his eyes and exchanged an exasperated look with my mother.

Sorry, Dad, wherever you are.  Hope you’re smiling at my overdue realization that what goes around comes around.

Levi and I—we’re tired. For the first time since we’ve been married, we’re having a hard time reaching consensus (at least about something important) and the stakes at hand make our diverging opinions feel like kind of a big deal.

I’ve always thought it unfair the number of big decisions people our age have to make. Isn’t there a place, say five years from now, where we just live the lives we’ve been deciding about for the past decade? Because it really is exhausting—all this choosing things right now that will ultimately determine whether we end up in Michigan or Mongolia; in passages of hounding regret or blissfully happy.

Who to marry. What to study. Where to live. Where to work. How to live. Because we have to decide all of that right this minute, don’t we?

The particular choice at hand feels like roads diverging, which is hard enough. But it’s complicated because we’re two travelers who decided to always walk together, and after a lot of personal and careful consideration on this matter, we didn’t chose the same path. Levi wants to go left, I want to go right.

Which means we’ve spent the past couple of weeks trying to convince each other to switch platforms. And trying to convince ourselves that we’re not being selfish by pushing our own agendas. And then deciding it is selfishness and meeting up at the end of day and saying to each other—at the same time—I’ll walk with you. Then trying to convince each other that we’d both be happier doing what the other person wants. Until we find ourselves back at that place where again, we each want two different things. Like I said, we’re tired.

There’s a story in the Book of Mormon that a lot of Mormons read when they have to make a choice. It’s about a man who goes to God with two specific problems. God solves the first one, but sends the man to come up with his own solution to the second, in effect promising to help and bless whatever solution the man comes up with.

Levi and I, we’ve tried both approaches. We went to God and asked for solutions for almost a year, and no definitive feedback to speak of, we assumed He would bless whatever we came up with.

So we’ve brainstormed. We’ve been to the temple. We’ve fasted. We’ve listed and ranked the options. Weighed the pros and cons. Stayed up late. Conceded. Held fast. Listened. Cried. Argued. Sank. Pumped our fists. And this week, we smashed head first into a deadline. We had to make a decision by Tuesday morning. (Or else.)

So on Saturday we spent three hours with a marriage counselor. (Okay fine, it was one of my best friends who doubles as a therapist. The things we ask our friends to do for us…)

On Sunday, anytime we found ourselves alone, we looked at each other and though we didn’t want to, asked the same question. “What are we going to do?” Sunday night, we fell asleep on the couch, on the verge of depression, at 9pm. We both slipped off at that point in the conversation where it didn’t make sense to say the same things for the sixtieth time. We still don’t know what will be best.

But like I said, we had a deadline. So on Monday night, we flipped a coin and had a good night’s rest.

Evan, Little Brother, my mom and three of Evan and Cheryl’s children at the family cottage.

Lisa

Back in October 1997, my older sister Cheryl went on a blind date. That blind date ended with plans for a second date; the second date ended with a marriage proposal. Cheryl—who was a college sophomore at the time—called home, ecstatic.

“I’m getting married!” she said gleefully.

“That’s great,” I responded, “But… um… who are you marrying?”

Some guy named Evan Smith had won my sister’s heart within the space of four days. My parents were a little panicky. (Okay, a lot panicky.) Since work wouldn’t allow them to fly down to Utah to meet their future in-law that week, they let me skip school to go and check him out.

I showed up guarded, skeptical. I didn’t care how quickly my sister knew, I would not be so easily convinced that all was well. But as he came bounding up to me in the Salt Lake airport—wide smile and brown curls, beaming the way only the pure in heart can—I knew she was making a good choice. And when my parents were able to meet Evan, they, of course, came to the same conclusion.

We laugh and joke about our original skepticism. (As does anyone who meets Evan. How could you be worried about that guy marrying your daughter? He ranks higher than Mary Poppins on the practically perfect scale!) But, sadly enough, it seems to be a common reflex towards any would-be immigrant. You weren’t born here. You are different. Things were going along just fine. You could ruin all of this. I still feel that jingoistic flare of emotion when Little Brother calls me to tell me about his current crush. (Maybe even more so, actually. My mother always pointed out that the Bible says a man should leave his parents and cling to his wife, not the other way around.) Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah

A couple of weeks ago, Manfriend finally asked the question.  “Sarah,” he said, “what are your love languages?

Love languages, if you don’t know this already, is a shorthand way of referring to a set of theories by a guy who says, essentially, there are five different ways to show love: physical affection, words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, and gifts.  These are the five love languages.  We each preference a language or two, meaning we’re more likely to communicate our love for people in one or two particular languages (e.g., by saying the words “I love you,” by hugging, by doing the dishes, etc.) than we are to love people equally with all five.  In return, we’re each more likely to notice love that is shown to us in a love language we prefer.  In other words, we’re a little dense. 

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Louise

Tom and I were not experienced kissers when we began dating.  Our first kiss was slightly off the mark and one of us had tremors, although neither one of us knows who belonged to the tremors.  Lip seizures, I like to call them.  It takes about a minute and a half to learn how to kiss properly.  It takes even less time to learn the other moves, thanks to nature.

So it was a shock to learn years later that we were, in fact, not suitably matched for kissing.  We bought a small book called THE ART OF KISSING at the Frick Museum store when we were vacationing in NYC.  It was written by Hugh Morris and first printed in 1936.  He states boldly in the chapter entitled, “Kisses Are But a Prelude to Love,” that “ . . . it is necessary for the man to be taller than the woman.”

And I think he means more than a half-inch taller. Read the rest of this entry »

We spent the weekend in Florida. Coming home, Levi reminded me of one of our first “discussions.” It was right after we had started dating, and we were in different cities for Christmas. On one of those long-distance/just getting to know each other phone calls, he told me that at airport security, he showed some “attitude.” He was pulled aside, taken to some sort of an interrogation room, and “inspected.” He missed his flight.*

He told me the story and then said how much he despised airport security. “But it’s necessary,” I insisted. “A necessary hardship.” Even if airport security is JUST ONE MASSIVE PACIFIER—even if its sole purpose is to make Americans feel safer—then I’m for it.

He laughed at me. Told me I was ridiculous. Called me a Fascist. Still I maintained: it makes me feel better; more secure.

This weekend, the security guard wouldn’t let me through because all I had was my student ID. “It has to be government issued,” they said. This made sense to me, because if there’s any one group of people we can all trust, it’s the friendlies at the DMV. The airport security guard had me stand to the side so another—a more senior—security guard could assess the situation. Between my Costco card and my student ID, and a little conference between the two security guards discussing said IDs, I was good to go.

Levi got stopped too. There was more than three ounces in his bottle of aloe vera. Suspicions arose (naturally) and they went through his bag. Busted. A full tube of tooth paste. She ceremoniously set it aside. “You’re going to take both of those?” he asked, incredulously.

“Okay, fine.” She said. “Pick one.”

Ahhh. Pacified.

*Not to feel bad for him on this one. He missed his flight so they put him first class on a non-stop. It’s one of the reasons I married him: even the lame things turn out well.

Lisa

When I was in college, I bought a pet plant and named it Herbert.

“Give me a plant that I won’t be able to kill,” I said to the lady at Home Depot.

She pointed towards the pothos.

I returned to my apartment, delighted. I even made a little sign out of some crafty stuff and stuck it in the soil so everyone would know my plant’s name.

But before the semester was over, my roommates scratched H-E-R-B-E-R-T off the sign and wrote L-A-Z-A-R-U-S on top. You see, I only ever noticed that Herbert needed water when he was on death’s door. I’d run to him with the water can, like an EMT with a first aid kit. “Hold on!” I’d say, as I’d drench the parched soil. Read the rest of this entry »