2011 lookback: An embarrassment of riches

Even when I kept a paper journal, back in college, I always loved writing a “year in review” entry at the end of December. This meme, while a meme, makes it easy. Without further ado:

What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Ran a half-marathon in two hours, stood on Cuban soil, became an aunt, took a four-week photography class, took a staycation. Went to six concerts (Iron & Wine, Mason Jennings, Death Cab for Cutie with Frightened Rabbit, Mountain Heart, Amos Lee, and the Civil Wars). Walked on Lake Shore Drive after a blizzard. Attended a mayoral debate. Kept a daily gratitude list for a month. Cheered on runners in the Chicago marathon. Named my son.

Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My 2011 resolutions were to run the half-marathon again and beat my first time (done!), become comfortable driving again (woefully not done!), continue reading at least one book per month (done), take a more in-depth photography class (done), and hang out in my neighborhood café in the winter when I feel sad about the lack of light (semi-done; I could have indulged in this more often).

2012 is going to be a year like no other. Of course, my resolutions are focused on Will—on doing the very best I can to make him feel safe and comfortable and happy in his new home. I’m going to do some intense reading on attachment this winter. I want to focus on patience and calmness. Overall, I want to start learning how to become the best parent I can. I also want to focus on keeping our marriage strong as we embark on this huge change in our life.

I am so, so excited to love my child in person.

I’d like to run my third half-marathon; I think I can do it, depending on the timing of my maternity leave. I want to write here at least once a month, and I want to keep taking ballet classes when possible.

Where did you travel in 2011?
San Francisco and Havana, Cuba! Closer to home: northern Michigan for a weeklong camping trip.

What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Obviously, Will.

What dates or images from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory?
November 10, the day I received the phone call at work that changed everything. November 13, the day we knew for sure that Will was our son.

Then, in chronological order:
--April 17, the day I held my week-old nephew for the very first time, and looked down and saw my family in the tiny, red, scrunched-up face of a newborn.
--The Friday night in late May when I stumbled across a blog post discussing the fact that Korean adoptions would be on hold for the rest of the year.
--The morning of June 22, when I wandered into the kitchen and found a small gray box waiting for me on the counter. Beautiful, beautiful diamond earrings from a husband who continues to surprise and delight me after 10 years of marriage.
--The very early morning of August 14, watching the cobalt clouds rush across the downtown skyline as I walked toward the start of the half-marathon.
--December 8, seeing the island of Cuba from the sky for the first time, the passengers clapping as we landed, my hands shaking and a little Cuban-American boy yelling excitedly to his mother, “We’re in CUBA!”
--December 10, visiting the neighborhood where my mother grew up, walking the rooms where my ancestors lived. I will never, ever forget this day and the way it made me feel.

What were your biggest achievements of the year?
As with last year, running! I had a personal best of 24:35 in a 5k, and I shaved 15 minutes off my half-marathon time. I wrote here almost every month, and I took four photo walks: two in Uptown and Edgewater after the blizzard, one in the Loop, and one in the neighborhood this fall. I celebrated 10 years of marriage, and I started taking ballet classes again after 21 years.

What was your biggest failure?
Driving more often. I really, really need to get on this.

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Some illnesses here and there, but I’m so happy to be able to type that none of them was serious.

What was the best thing you bought?
New plain white dishes. An oil painting in Cuba. A flowered dress from Akira. My iPhone.

Whose behavior merited celebration?
Cuban bloggers who are brave enough to speak out against the oppression and propaganda of their country’s government. Read them. The wider their audience, the more protected they are from persecution.

Whose behavior saddened you?
I wish the Korean government would embrace an adoption policy that works better for children who need families.

Where did most of your money go?
The mortgage, Cuba, adoption fees.

What did you get really excited about?
Will. Cuba. Running. Game of Thrones. Eating at Topolobampo for our 10th wedding anniversary. Living outside on our deck in the summer. Girls’ weekend in Chicago. Our staycation. Working on Will’s nursery. My neighborhood. Lagunita’s A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Ale. Big Star. The Violet Hour. Watching Stella run on the beach.

What song will always remind you of 2011?
Anything by The Head and the Heart and The Civil Wars. The Beatles song “Till There Was You,” which John learned to play on his guitar.

What do you wish you’d done more of?
Photography and driving.

What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worrying; thinking in terms of “what ifs.”

What was your favorite TV program?
Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and Modern Family.

What was the best book you read?
I read 12 books this year—three less than last year, but four of them were giant books in the Game of Thrones series. The New Yorker continues to take up a lot of my reading time! The GoT books and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen were my favorites.

What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Civil Wars

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I finally tried on a pair of skinny jeans and felt sad that I’d waited so long. Also, I happily wore lots of dresses and skirts in the summer.

What political issue stirred you the most?
Gay rights and health care… same as last year.

What kept you sane?
Late Sunday afternoons with a glass of wine and InStyle magazine, preferably on the deck. Summertime camping. Any stretch of a few days where I didn’t touch a computer. (Mind you, these are exactly the same as 2009 and 2010.)

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Our family and friends provide us with an embarrassment of riches. I can run faster than I’d ever imagine possible. Also: What you think about the reflection in the mirror isn’t the point; just put on the leotard and go.

One decade

Ten years ago today, John and I were married. The wedding was in a Catholic church in our neighborhood in Michigan. The reception was just down the street on the grounds of an old mansion. It was outdoors, under a lit-up white tent, surrounded by green grass and candlelight. It rained during the ceremony, briefly, but it stopped just before we exited the church in a gentle storm of bubbles and cheers. Wine flowed at the reception. There was a lot of laughing, especially at the toasts. The dance floor was full at all times. The blessings of that night were so amazingly great I could not wrap my arms around them. I couldn’t fathom the joyfulness.

Ten years ago, I was 25 and John was 26. (Where we lived in western Michigan, we felt we were on the “older side” to be getting married; we’d already attended many, many weddings together.) He was a staff accountant who’d just passed his CPA test. I worked in corporate communications and had recently graduated from filing papers and proofreading emails to editing and writing for employee publications. I was Catholic and John was Christian Reformed.

After our wedding, he moved into my one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a rambling old Victorian house. A raccoon lived in the turret above our bed. We had no Internet connection. I had been wanting to move to Chicago for awhile, and John, who had never left his hometown, not even for college, was game. We looked for jobs, combing the classifieds at work and at the local library’s computers. By late fall, after a few trips around the lake to interview, we’d found work at a CPA firm and an academic press. We moved to the city on Nov. 30, 2001.

Our first apartment had huge windows and one tiny bedroom. When the back window was open, you could hear the crowds cheering at Wrigley Field. During our two years there, we started to put down roots in Chicago. We settled into our jobs. I began attending grad school for a master’s in writing. We decided to become Episcopalians together. We went to Wrigley bars, and we discovered “new” food—Thai! Middle Eastern! I started to run along the lakefront. When the woman who owned our apartment decided to sell it, we decided to move and buy a condo of our own.

We relocated about a mile and a half north. Two bedrooms now, and central air, and free washers and dryers in the basement! We’d stay in this building for six years, becoming close friends with several of our neighbors and getting involved in our block club. John was promoted, then promoted again. I started a new job at a marketing/publishing firm. We had Moose, our beloved greyhound; he lived with us there for four years, until bone cancer took him. Stella joined us a few months later. I graduated with my MA. John brewed homemade beer. I realized I could run three miles at a time, and we started doing 5K races together. We celebrated our fifth anniversary. We turned 30.

The housing market fell, the government offered a credit to first-time homebuyers, and we decided to sell, and to stay in the city. We fell hard for a place just a bit west of us, and the stars aligned, and it was meant to be, and we sold our first condo and bought our second. Three bedrooms, our own washer and dryer, and the huge deck we’d been wanting for years. It was our dream home, and after almost two years there, it still is. In it we’ve watched Stella blossom into a dog who’s no longer afraid of her own shadow. We’ve entertained friends, planted flowers, and mowed the (OK, very small) lawn. And we made the decision to become parents through adoption.

In the past ten years, we have traveled to the Outer Banks, New Hampshire, Key West, Colorado, New York, St. Augustine, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. The British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas. France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy. Next year, Korea.

Of course, I can’t fully describe a decade in one online post. In the past ten years, we have laughed a lot. We have felt grateful. We have worried, and cried, and faced some hard things. But we’ve still, always, felt grateful.

Now, on June 22, 2011, we are 35 and 36. We are both managers. (We have gone through ten married tax seasons together.) I’m a half-marathoner. John is an accomplished guitar player. We’re better cooks, we’re more well traveled, we have different ideas about religion than we used to, although we’re still at the same moderate-liberal spot politically. My hair is grayer, John’s is a little more sparse, and both of us have laugh lines around our eyes. Although we’re healthy and in good shape, I should say that my back hurts if I stand at a concert for too long.

I have a partner who is adventurous, patient, understanding, fun, honest, loyal, and supportive. He is a man who is going to be everything our child could want in a father. I look at the past decade, feel extremely satisfied with it, and feel excited to turn the page. I will never stop realizing how lucky I am to turn that page with him.

Five years

He did not want to move to Chicago. I know this. He would have been happy spending the rest of his days in the Michigan town where he was raised, went to college, and began his career.

It’s a nice town. But I couldn’t see myself staying there. I wanted Chicago, a publishing career, a big city where I could blend in (where it didn’t matter that I’m not a Calvinist of Dutch descent, like so many of the folks in John’s hometown). I wanted to go. And he agreed to go with me.

If I ever had doubts about what kind of person John is, they were banished in November of 2001. He left a decent job, a bunch of college friends, his family, and the town that he’d lived in for 26 years to move to another state—because I wanted to. I knew there was a chance that it wouldn’t work, that he’d be miserable, that we’d move back. But that didn’t happen. We both have great jobs, strong careers, good friends—we’re part of little communities in our building, our neighborhood, our workplaces, our church. We’ve built a good life here, something that belongs to the two of us. And because we moved a mere five months after we became husband and wife—on June 22, 2001—we’ve built a marriage at the same time.

I have been married for five years today. There is something almost nonsensical about that statement—how can it be possible that this much time has passed, that I’m 30 and he’s 31; was it really five years ago that we stood up in a small Catholic church and promised to spend the rest of our lives together? In that Michigan town, where people often married while they were still in college, I felt old and worldly to be marrying at 25. I had waited. I had lived alone for two years, supported myself, backpacked in Italy solo for two weeks. And now I was embarking on the next chapter of my life, a much longer chapter that would contain plot points I couldn’t even imagine.

I look at photos from our wedding day and I’m taken aback by how young and eager and fresh-faced we look. I think my face shows the joy I felt that day. It was the most joy-filled day of my life so far. I was so ready to bind my life to this person’s life.

John is a man who has never expected me to vacuum or mop the floor because I have ovaries. I have never felt denigrated because he makes more money than I do. The equal partnership we’ve created is incredibly precious to me.

He does, however, ask me almost every day what’s for dinner—even though we do the weekly grocery shopping together, and he does most of the cooking.

John plays the guitar. He taught himself when he was in high school. He can play Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson, REM, Bruce Springsteen, the theme song from Brokeback Mountain. When we had just started dating, I told him that I loved the song “Blackbird” by the Beatles, and he learned how to play it for me.

He was somewhat shy when we first met. He used to ask me if I would hold his hand. I always said yes.

On our third date (a swing-dancing lesson at a local bar—yes, it was 1999), he brought me a bouquet of carnations “just because it was a Tuesday.” He loves making chocolate milkshakes with malted mix. He loves Guinness and shiraz, guacamole and apples and salmon and chocolate pie. His favorite restaurants are Italian, Spanish, and Cuban.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, half-asleep, he’ll put his arm around me and kiss my shoulder.

He cried with me when Murphy died. I had never seen him cry like that before.

His favorite part of summer is camping. He loves it all—the fire, the grilling, the beer, sleeping in a tent, playing his guitar under the rustling trees in the dark night. I first told him I was falling in love with him during a camping trip. He proposed to me on a camping trip. (He is lucky I like to camp.)

He has a sensitive stomach. He gets heartburn (especially when he eats my mom’s food), and he has asthma. He hates cigarette smoke.

We have gotten drunk together in pubs in Ireland and Maine, and we’ve soaked up the sun on the shores of Cape May, Key West, Tortola, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We’ve driven up a mountain in New Hampshire, hiked up part of a mountain in Colorado, and explored the cities of Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, and Bruges. He is a good traveling companion, even though he likes to take mid-afternoon naps and I don’t.

I always know where he’s been in the condo, because he leaves the light on in that room.

He threw me a surprise party for my thirtieth birthday. I didn’t write about that here, did I? That boy organized a huge party for me at a neighbor’s house, and he invited friends and family from Michigan and Chicago, college friends and work friends and church friends and neighbors. He sent out invites, did all the shopping, agonized that I would find out, but I didn’t. The party was an incredible success, and I was nearly drowned by the realization of how much he loves me, to do something like that.

When he cooks, I do the dishes, and vice versa.

He is almost equally good at every sport he attempts to play. He loves softball and runs his work’s team.

He wholeheartedly supported my decision to go to grad school. Tuition wasn’t cheap, but he never complained about the bills. I don’t think I realized how lucky I was to have that support.

He doesn’t watch much TV besides sports, HBO, and The Daily Show. He loves the original series of The Office and taught himself to play “Freelove Freeway” on the guitar, much to my endless amusement.

He’s a CPA, but I pay our bills every month.

When he gets home and Moose comes to greet him, he says, “How’s the boy??” and rubs Moose’s head against his leg.

He enjoys playing with our neighbors’ toddler, picking her up and swinging her around to make her squeal and laugh. He is going to be a wonderful father someday.

He’s a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. When we first started dating, I was like, “Springsteen? ‘Tunnel of Love’? Whatever.” He made me a mix tape, and then I started to get it, the supreme awe that the Boss can command. We own every Bruce Springsteen album ever recorded.

He also likes folk music, as I do, and I’m really grateful for that.

Right before we were engaged, I had to have a painful and somewhat scary biopsy done. That afternoon, he sent me an email that I can quote here verbatim, because I printed it out, folded it up, and have kept it in my wallet since that day:

Date: May 24, 2000
Subject: You’re invited
A date: this afternoon on the back deck at [123 John’s Street] with 22 oz of New Holland Zoomer Wit and malted-mix ice cream dessert (whatever’s left) at 4:00 or 4:30. Please RSVP by email.

*****

On our anniversary two years ago, I wrote this:

I’m still not sure what lies ahead for us—we’re not even 30. But I’m beginning to realize that the unknown isn’t scary, and the unknown doesn’t really matter. Because whatever happens to us, neither of us will be alone. And when death does part us, we’ll have created something beautiful and complex and strong and weatherbeaten and true—a marriage—and it will be one of my life’s greatest accomplishments.

Now we’re done with our twenties, and there’s still no way to look into our future together and know if it will be peaceful or turbulent, with illness or health. I don’t know how or when the family we’ve created will grow. But I still believe that the unknown isn’t truly all that scary, because whatever happens to us, neither of us will be alone. One of the reasons I love my life so much is because he’s in it.


(Thanks to Eliza, whose beautiful Father’s Day entry about her dad inspired the format for this journal entry.)

“Lost in wonder, love, and praise”

Originally posted to Diary-X

Three years ago today, I stood in front of friends, family members, one priest, and two photographers and agreed to bind my life to John’s. “I will love you and honor you all the days of my life,” I told him, and he promised the same. I was so incredibly happy that I was actually bouncing up and down a little in my big white dress. I remember that John was very tan, and his grin—one of the first things I’d noticed about him two years earlier—was very wide.

Later, he told me that during most of the ceremony he was afraid he was going to throw up. He gets nervous like that sometimes.

It’s kind of cliché to say that your wedding was the happiest day of your life, but honestly, June 22, 2001, was the most joy-filled day I’ve yet spent on this earth. In almost every picture taken that day, I’m wearing a face-splitting smile. Our guests sang the opening hymn, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," so lustily that our priest complimented them. His homily was perfect, although sadly I can’t remember much of it today. While we took pictures at the altar after the ceremony, the skies opened up and it poured dark rain. But half-hour later, when we stepped into Uncle Chuck’s old blue Mercedes to head to the reception, the sun was breaking golden through the clouds. Our reception, held under a white tent on the lawn of a Victorian mansion-turned-restaurnat, looked exactly as I’d hoped it would: candles glowing on the tables, white lights hanging everywhere, all set against a backdrop of green grass, green trees, and an old mansion. The DJ played only the songs we’d requested (there was no Hokey Pokey, no Chicken Dance, no bouquet toss, no garter shenanigans). People danced. Friends and fathers gave hilarious and emotional toasts. I wanted that night to never end.

We left for our honeymoon the next morning, setting out on a 16-hour drive to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we rented a beach house in the village of Duck. I still remember balancing my journal on my lap somewhere in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, frantically scribbling down every memory I could summon from the night before. I wasn’t sure what lay ahead for us, but I didn’t want to lose one moment of what had just passed.

Put plainly, our first three years of marriage have been good ones. We annoy the hell out of each other sometimes, but yet we can travel in foreign countries together with success. We make each other laugh and we make each other think. Sometimes we become frustrated with each other’s faults, real and imagined. I have been known to raise my voice. But when we argue, we have lines we don’t cross, and I’m proud that we stick to those. I think of our union as one of best friends, partners, lifetime roommates with “benefits.” It’s a model that works really well for us. Sometimes I look at him, and I know, in my mind and in my gut, that I’ve sealed myself to a person who will always be with me and honor the vows we made. And sometimes, when I’m kneeling in the pew after communion on Sundays, I pray for the humility and grace and strength to be worthy of that love, to not take that love for granted. It’s so easy to take love for granted.

I’m still not sure what lies ahead for us—we’re not even 30. But I’m beginning to realize that the unknown isn’t scary, and the unknown doesn’t really matter. Because whatever happens to us, neither of us will be alone. And when death does part us, we’ll have created something beautiful and complex and strong and weatherbeaten and true—a marriage—and it will be one of my life’s greatest accomplishments.