embracethepotholes

No one is going to argue that marriage is filled with compromise and every marriage has that “thing” that symbolizes a failure to wedded bliss.  Perhaps it’s that old lazyboy with the grease stains on the arms or the floral couch with one leg missing.   For others it’s the t-shirt that gets worn every Saturday and is so full of holes it only covers one armpit and the left clavicle.  Don’t forget the collection of old beer cans or the boxes of Nat Geo in the garage.  If those sound like sexist choices, I’ll add the fifty throw pillows on the end of the couch and the three closets of craft supplies that must be moved faithfully from house to house each move over 20 years although no one has opened them in 30. For me, that symbol was the South Park dolls Lance lovingly used to decorate the soffits between the kitchen and the formal dining room.

Backing up a bit, when Lance and I married, I moved all my worldly possessions and my cat out of my cute skylit townhouse into the house where Lance had been living with an ever-changing number of roommates.  If I were to give unsolicited advice to couples wishing to start co-habitation, it would be to each move out of their respective spaces and start life together new and fresh in a new place you both have chosen together.  But that’s not always possible…  By the time we were married, the housing bubble had popped and neither of us could sell our homes without losing that Saturday t-shirt neither of us wanted to give up.  So we decided one of us would move and we’d rent out the other property until the market had a chance to recover (anyone want to rent a townhouse?)  After difficult and drawn-out negotiations (Lance’s truck didn’t fit into my garage and Lance’s place was three miles from my office), we decided I’d move into Lance’s house.  To be fair, I’ll also acknowledge that Lance’s house had double the bedrooms and triple the bathrooms of my townhouse and perhaps you’ll understand the sacrifices that needed to be made
on my part.

I think a more confident woman than me would have come in and stripped Lance’s house bare to the cobwebs and started from scratch but It had been years since I’d had to share a space with anyone and it was important to me that my new husband didn’t feel I was erasing his identity.  I was NOT going to be the strident redecorator who forced my husband to conform to my style and allowed him his little slice of “man cave” and no more.  My solution was to shoehorn my things in amongst his and make the styles work together.  The living room was decorated Modern Spartan with a fish tank and 4, 2-foot high South Park dolls (only Cartman talks).  This was his functional space as he used it to fly his RC Helicopters for the amusement of fellow geeks.   Without much drama, I was able to move my second hand couches, coffee table, and small dining set into the space.  The one lonely fish eventually died and his high school buddy decided the fish tank would be a nice addition to his bachelor pad, so that moved on.  But don’t get the impression that my things could fit as easily anywhere else in the house.

The style of the rest of the house could best be described as “Every Tech Gadget Known to Man, meets Every Article of Furniture Abandoned By a Former Roommate”.  To say that Lance likes his technology is such an obvious understatement it’s like saying the world has a few people living on it.  From the sleek, flat screen TV on the family room wall to the lovingly hoarded, original Commodore 64 computer that is somewhere under the dust on the basement entertainment cabinet that hides the Atari 2600, Lance has a bit of technology…I’m ok with that.  We live in a world of technology and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  I fully embrace that, while our children won’t even KNOW what a VCR is or why anyone would need to program one, they’ll be able to restore the pictures on my IPhone next time I fail to do the back up properly – and do that before they start kindergarten.

But the “Former Roommate” hoard was another story…  As I was looking for space to set down my boxes I would innocently point to a pressboard desk, or a box of magazines, or a closet filled with old clothes and ask if those items could be moved to which Lance would inform me those belonged to a roommate who moved out in 2006 and he doesn’t dare get rid of them in case said roommate wants them back.  Sometimes the article wouldn’t even belong to a roommate, but instead to an ex-roommate’s ex-girlfriend who visited one Thursday 3 years before.  (Again, in the interest of fairness, I will share that after living in our new home for over a year, the doorbell rang and it was one of Lance’s old roommates.  He recalled leaving a coat in the front closet and asked if he could retrieve it.  He seemed surprised that it was no longer there but consoled himself by removing a large supply of empty computer boxes from the crawl space in the garage ceiling that he had also left behind.)  Many, many negotiations followed before I was able to fit all my boxes into the house.  It’s no wonder I still have some left to unpack after 3 ½ years – I can’t find the space.  (No need to imply it’s me who has too much crap, this tirade hasn’t been about me has it?)

Am I happy with the way our belongings have merged together?  For the most part – yes.  We desperately need updated couches, the kitchen is ridiculously short of pantry space, and the basement still looks like storage for video games but it feels like home.  Lance has some truly unique pieces he’s collected in his travels around the world and they settle nicely with my candles and throw pillows.  The one strident point for me has been those stupid South Park dolls.  If you enter our front door and look straight ahead into the living room, your eyes are pulled directly to the decorative soffit where four plush, brightly colored dolls sit with spider webs crisscrossing Kenny’s hoodie, Kyle and Cartman’s stocking caps, and the other dudes green ear-flapped atrocity.  It’s the first thing anyone mentions.  Do they notice the end tables lovingly handcrafted by my father or the photos from our wedding or the authentic fossil on the piano?  Oh no, it’s just those ugly dolls!  So why don’t I take them down?!!

WEREN’T YOU LISTENING?!!! I don’t want to be THAT woman!!! I don’t want my husband to think he can’t have his things in this own home!  I want it to be HIS idea to move them damn it! ——–

And there it is…Do I ask him to move them?  Do I let him know how desperately ugly I think they are?  Do I dust off a perfect shelf for them next to the Commodore 64?  No, instead I mumble, I stew, and feel as if I haven’t completely moved into my own home.  I let those ugly, obnoxious dolls keep me from enjoying my own living room and I forever apologize for their very existence to my girlfriends who visit.  Surely the fact that they are still there means something is out of harmony in our relationship…

Then you know what I did? In a postpartum fog I had a passive- aggressive temper tantrum and told Lance that I was going to post the South Park guys on CraigsList so I could FINALLY display the ceramic Japanese Kimonos that had been sitting on the floor next to the couch for two years.  Then I waited with bated breath for him to explode about my overbearing ways and my obsession with wiping his entire personality from his own home.

To my shock and surprise, Lance just laughed and told me that he thought they’d look great downstairs with his video games and perhaps he should climb the ladder to take them down because he’s a guy and he knows how to use a ladder.  Know what else he did?  He dusted that damned soffit before he arranged those gorgeous ceramic Kimonos and did it all this past Saturday while I was in the shower and didn’t even point out to me that it was done.  He just let me notice that something was up when Kaysa broke into my bathroom riding the swiffer duster like her very own witch’s broom.

So here I am, one passive-aggressive temper tantrum later realizing that I did something else I was never going to do…I was THAT woman who let herself get all annoyed at her husband because she didn’t have the courage to actually tell him how she felt and instead expected him to figure it out himself.  And I did it over 4 stupid South Park dolls.  Who’s the childish one now?…