From the category archives:
On New Year’s Eve, John Bear’s little brother brought his girlfriend along from New York City.
The two are absolutely smitten with each other and I couldn’t help but take picture after picture of them.
Maybe because they’re so damn cute together
or maybe because I could picture them just like this walking down a busy street in New York City. [click to continue…]
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A few weeks ago I got an e-mail inviting me to speak to four AP Lit classes.
The teacher, one Mr. David Rickert, had been turned onto my blog by his wife and thought my philosophies on dating and love could serve as a great guide for his students in conjunction with the books they are reading this semester. They’re also all about to enter college, and naturally like any caring teacher, he is concerned for the fate of their little hearts.
I immediately responded with, “Absolutely.”
The chance of giving 18 year olds the advice I so sorely needed back then was too hard to pass up. So today I sat my butt down on that teeny tiny stool and started talking. And I didn’t stop until four hours and at least 60 kids later. Somewhere in the middle of hour three everything blurred together and I couldn’t remember if I was talking about man shopping, dating yourself or why you should never marry someone for their green card.
Right here I was probably telling them that true love was nothing like what they’d seen in those stupid vampire movies and that television has completely warped their sense of romantic reality. [click to continue…]
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When I first started dating John Bear his dog drove me crazy.
Every time I would come over Murphy would jump on me, scratching my bare legs with his thick doggy claws and if he wasn’t jumping he was panting and staring at me, all the while emitting a subtle doggy smell. When I put two and two together and realized that John let Murphy sleep up in his bed with him I freaked out, “Gross! That’s just so disgusting.”
“Why? He’s just a dog. He doesn’t even shed and he’s hypo allergenic.”
“Hypo allergenic? A dog can be hypo allergenic? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“He’s not that bad, you just have to get used to him. I promise. And you would never let a dog sleep in the bed with you?”
“No,” I snapped, “Never ever.”
That was five months ago. Now Murphy spends every single day at my place while John goes into his office. The little white fur ball follows me everywhere and we even cuddle – on couches, on beds, anywhere we can. Benjamin adores Murphy. The two wrestle, chase each other and even play hide and seek. I just can’t imagine our life without that damn dog and I am completely smitten.
One day we were sitting outside of the coffee shop and a few older ladies walked by (they always love Murphy).
“How long have you had him?” they asked. [click to continue…]
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“Are those poop bags in your pockets again?” I see the top of a bright blue plastic bag sticking out of his shorts.
“I always come prepared,” he says. Always is right. John Bear is seldom without a poop bag or two sticking out of his cargo short pockets. I’m always telling him to stick them back in while teasing him profusely for being such a dork. “Stop laughing,” he adds, “one day I’ll have our kid’s diapers stuffed in here.”
Gulp.
Visions of three more years of diapers are flashing through my mind and I give him one of my looks.
“What? No? Is that a bad thing?” He asks.
“No,” I relax my eyebrows and smile, “It’s fine. Really fine actually.”
My thoughts don’t even venture where they typically would with the typical men of my past. Instead they stay safely seated in the upright position, ready and willing to believe that happiness does not necessarily have an expiration date.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be a ton of shit to clean up along the way.
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We went to a Browns game this weekend for Fiesta Movement Mission #5. Pictures will be posted as soon as I get some sleep and just a little bit of time.
xoxo
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“If everything works out with John, Benjamin won’t know a time when he wasn’t around.”
As my therapist’s words sink in the last three years of my life flash through my mind; from the beginning when I packed everything up and moved into my mother’s, to the quiet nights at her house in the woods wondering and wishing myself away and back to some semblance of independence and then to the moment when Benjamin and I stepped into our own sweet, little apartment – ready to begin our new life.
What followed is all here, on this blog in my eBook, or safe in my mind.
I sit on her couch, staring off into a painting on the wall as I try to grasp this idea of him not remembering anything before John Bear. The memories wash over me – the adventures big and small – like the time we were yelled at by a hair salon owner or the countless grocery store trips that typically ended in knock down drag out tantrums. Then there were the big adventures like trips to find Joshua Trees
or deep forests and mountain coves in Vancouver.
And smaller adventures like hours of puddle jumping for no reason
or sweating it out on a hot summer day in August to hear our future president, a man also raised by a single mom, speak to us from about twenty feet away.
or chasing bunnies with Sydney.
Now, looking back, it is these moments – the moments when I forced myself out of the house with him, braving the book store, the library, the festivals, the camping trips and the road trips all by myself, trying to fill the time – that are the best memories I have of the two of us.
Memories of the moments when we both forgot where we were or when we just took our time
because we didn’t have anywhere else to be.
“So they’ll all be gone? He won’t remember a thing?” I ask my therapist or, as I fondly call her, Wonder Woman. She’s helping me to straighten out my trust issues and to figure out why, in the past, I had a pattern of choosing bad boys dysfunctional men. [click to continue…]
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