One year plus

August 17, 2008

I started this post a week or so after our One year anniversary, but couldn't figure out where I was going with it. So I set it aside and I'm only now getting around to finishing it. Funny how a few months of ignoring something can all of a sudden bring it into focus.

So the post started out with me exclaiming about how quickly the first year of marriage went. It was a pretty blase beginning for a post, and now in the re-write I've completely deleted that part. The important part was not the speed with which our first year has flown by, but rather my perspective now that it is behind me

Right after the wedding I think we were in shock. All that hype and foofaraw, and then . . . nothing really changed. That's why everyone says not to move in together before marriage, I guess. We came home from the wedding and SURPRISE! We were already married. Already sharing our bedroom and bathrooms, doing laundry together, paying bills, splitting chores.

We broke the rules again by immediately "having kids" . . . we adopted the dogs before the end of the month of our return. The next few months were a giant learning curve of how to cope with our pets, Dan traveling off and on, the burden of owning a house, and the looming dread of no vacation time left for the rest of the year our lives. Well, at least that's how I felt.

We spent Thanksgiving at Dan's brother's house, and I hosted Christmas dinner for the first time. It was sometime around the holidays that Dan's OCD first started becoming an issue in our relationship. Well, not necessarily an issue, but it factored in.

His OCD is very mild (pray it stays that way!) -- mostly I don't even notice. He washes his hands several times throughout the day, sometimes several times in quick succession, and if he still doesn't feel like his hands are clean after using one sink, then he might try washing them from another sink to see if that will do the trick. A little quirky, but no skin off my nose, so what do I care?

Once (once!) he asked me if I'd washed my hands. Let's just say it didn't go over well, and he's never done it again.

I honestly do not care about the hand-washing quirkiness. Actually, it's really nice that he never has the typical guy hand with dirt around the nailbed and red skin that looks white in the creases and flakes and falls off. Yuck!

But at some point around the holidays, I noticed his OCD behaviors were starting to overflow into the kitchen. Being a new Woman of the House, this was a big problem. I had only recently become the Queen Bee, and to have my perch pissed on by a drone really got my back up. Okay, perhaps that's too many animal analogies. But I definitely felt like my toes were stepped on, and I didn't like being brushed aside and out of my own kitchen.

Things have been working themselves out, for the most part. Mostly because I've been advised to just accept that my husband has (mild) OCD, and that is working out. The acceptance.

Probably the biggest event of the year is something I mentioned casually a few posts back: Inspiration. I summed up the Inspiration post in My Story: "I'm a struggling writer, not a career woman."

Incidentally, my post "My Story" is one of my favorites. If you're the type of person that just wants a brief outline, then there ya go. If you want to really dig deep, click on the links and it takes you to the posts. I'm proud; I thought it was a pretty cool way of doing it.

The point is, I've realized (or should I say, my ego has realized) that I'm never going to be a career woman. This is not easy to admit, because I was raised to believe that as a smart, intelligent woman all I had to do was go to college, graduate, and the world would be at my feet.

Unfortunately, the "choose a career" part was implied as the first item on that list, and I sort of forgot to do that. Whoops. I graduated college with a generic degree and no clue what I wanted to be "when I grow up." Most days I don't regret my degree (my time at college was some of the happiest of my life -- finally the phrase "finding myself" made an iota of sense), but I do regret the whole not picking a career thing. I wish someone would have slapped me and said, "It doesn't matter; just decide what you want to do for now and if you change your mind later you can cross that bridge when you get to it." There is nothing worse than coming out of college, $50 grand in the hole, and competing for the same jobs as high school grads.

But the one good thing is that it's never too late to publish a book! I just have to write it. Which sounds really thick, and maybe I am just dumb (for crying out loud, I forgot to pick a career!), but it really did come as a revelation that day I wrote Inspiration. So maybe I'll never be the big shot career woman wearing a suit and bringing home the big bucks, but that doesn't mean I can't achieve my dream of being a writer.

And perhaps, just perhaps, bring in the big bucks too.