Dear Diary,
I am starting this post like a diary entry, perhaps inspired by the terrifying character of Amy in Gone Girl, who writes seven years of fake entries to fool the police. Tell me I didn't just ruin the book for you. The book does its own work for me there.
Perhaps because anytime a woman begins writing about her relationship there is something at once secretive, nostalgic, and confessional about it.
When faced with the subject of "our husband/partner/wife" we all get a little dreamy. You know, when we're not picking them apart at the seams.
I am making many assumptions, but let's soldier on.
I am in a long distance relationship after all, and there are miles to go before i sleep.
Beard and I met when I was a never-been-kissed nineteen year old.
We spent two and a half days killing time while our best friends
(who had met on the internet back in 2000. This was a BIG DEAL. I came along mostly to ensure that whoever this boy was who was coming all the way from Virginia to meet my gal pal wasn't going to chop her up and bury her in a camp site. I'm pretty sure my future Beard came along with his best buddy as the ultimate wingman), flirted obnoxiously, and we rolled our eyes.
A few years, and Myspace comments, later, found me living in an apartment in San Francisco, trying to figure out my life as a twenty three year old with a liberal arts degree and some encroaching idea as to my own irrelevance. It found my Beard newly single and lonely in his apartment in Virginia.
We began sending idle emails, that turned into phone calls, then visits, and after about four months, I moved away from the Pacific to "see where this was headed."
We've been together ten years now, married for seven, and we've been apart no longer than a week since.
Let's be honest, Long Distance Relationships work because we know the climate is temporary. There is an element of excitement and urgency to pining away like some kind of teeny-bopper, composing emails at two in the morning, or falling asleep with their voice on the phone at night. The giddy stomach dropping sensation of getting a text from across the miles that says, thinking of you takes on more meaning, because you aren't there to fan the flames. You actually have to pop into their head at random, as though they genuinely like you or something.
LDR's are the romantic ideal really. You listen to songs apart that have meaning for you together. You take yourself on long walks and wish they were there to slip their hand into yours. You look in the mirror and make faces, or talk out loud about the future you want to have with them. You're constantly on the lookout for little items and trinkets you can mail to them. After visits, you pull out the swiped hoodie or t-shirt you stole from their laundry, and you sleep with it, because it smells like them.
You do a lot of swanning about as they say.
And it's all SO FRAUGHT with emotion because you're figuring out, based on these phone calls, these visits, these little amuse-bouches of love, whether you want to buy the whole goddamn restaurant. It's tricky and scary and so very bittersweet. Eventually one of you has to make the plunge of moving to the other, and you have to put the relationship to the test.
Can we actually stand each other now that we have to be around each other all the time?
A lot of relationships get this far, and then collapse in on themselves because after all the build up, the real thing just can't compete.
It's one thing to be dying on the end of the phone line, sexting your brains out, and crying into your morning latte because they aren't there to share it with you, and it is entirely different to be with that illusory magical romantic human when he/she farts, gets food poisoning, doesn't take the trash out for weeks on end, forgets your birthday, picks a fight with you or horribly all of that at once.
Somehow, Beard and I survived the transition.
The first year we were still kind of in LDR mode. We hid all our ugly habits from one another. We never fought. We cuddled a lot and watched "Oh I don't care, whatever you want is fine, baby" for hours. I put make up on every morning, threw away my ugly pajamas and underwear with the elastic band all stretched out, and made his coffee first every morning.
He dressed the gothy way that had hooked me, kept his hand permanently glued to my lower back, and constantly asked if I was okay. He texted me "I miss you" while we were at work. He sent flowers to the coffee shop where I slung espresso on our anniversary.
We generally swanned about a lot still, but all over each other. I'm sure it was revolting for anyone to watch.
Then we moved to Massachusetts.
We had trouble finding jobs and blew through our savings pretty quickly.
I was surprised at how living in New England made me feel as though I hadn't done anything since high school, and when the best job I could find was making bread at a local bakery, I had the quarter life crisis I'd been putting off for a year to be stupidly smitten.
Beard had more trouble finding work, and when he finally did it was a corporate retail job that treated him like garbage. We had to move to a cheaper apartment on the shittier side of town. We had to put off getting married because we couldn't afford a wedding. We both started cracking, and showing our cracks, and it was hard.
We had some ugly fights.
We both said things that made the other person look at them like they were a stranger.
We left the room sometimes and didn't come back for a few hours so we could get our heads on straight.
Some nights we went to bed so angry we couldn't even touch feet in the bed.
Some mornings, we opened the fight back up again, and didn't know how to close it.
But we also learned.
We adapted.
We didn't give up.
I think that's part of the LDR turning into the LTR*. You know you're both in it for the long run, so you don't try to "win" at fights. You wait until the inferno blows over and you try to approach the shitty situation rationally. You have a safe word.
That's right, a safe word.
When we are having a fight, and one of us realizes it's getting out of control, or it might be about the fact that one of us is really stressed or tired, or we just know that this is going to be the time we say something so hurtful there's no apology in the world that makes it better, one of us says,
banana
Yes. That's right.
One of us invokes the rule of Banana. And no matter what it is we are fighting about, we both have to drop it. We both have to walk away.
I don't attribute my marriage lasting seven years to the Banana Rule, but I attribute a lot to that development, let me tell you.
If you are in an LTR and you don't have an anger safeword, make one. Make one now. You'll thank me later.
Anyway,
so what's the point?
Why does it matter that my LDR turned into an LTR?
Because we've come full circle my friends.
And having a baby has put me and my husband back into the same situation that started it all.
The night feeds and wakings are typically my jam because I don't have to go to a 9-5 and make pretty with actual humans. In fact, if I feel particularly shitty after a bad night with the were-baby, I don't even have to shower, but Beard has to clean up, nut up, and show up every day, so I get those night hazards.
Typically, we have about ten minutes in the morning, while he fills his travel mug from the dregs of the coffee pot I have already crushed because I've been up for two hours. The baby is in his high chair cooing and eating puffs or bits of banana, and I get in a decent hug before the gent heads out the door. We sort of look at each other filled with a deep sense of melancholy knowing that this is the most coherent we're going to be around one another for another twenty four hours, and then off he goes.
Most nights he gets home by 6pm, which is about an hour before Baby bedtime. In fact, we have eaten, bathed, and possibly even read a book by the time Daddy walks through the door. Our final bedtime moments are spent watching Daddy eat dinner (which he does while attempting to visit with the baby, and I slide in any important things I need to say like: hey we have a doctor's appointment on Saturday or I picked up your prescriptions here they are et cetera).
By seven, I am attempting to rock and nurse the baby to sleep. We trade off for the hour it takes to actually accomplish this, and then I am confined to the bed, where I sometimes indulge in an hour of looking at instagram and being disgusted by how beautiful everyone else's life looks in comparison to my milk-soaked, nonsense existence.
Beard comes to bed after the first hour of the day that he's had to himself, which i assume he spends either crying into the toilet, speed eating turkey jerky, or watches the vilest horror movie he can possibly find to make himself feel better about his life in comparison to being chained to a radiator by a demon infested hooker who keeps eating pieces of his genitalia.
We saw each other more often when we lived on opposite sides of the country.
We are in a long distance relationship.
Somehow, over the last ten months of me staying home with baby (and contributing a meager bit of moolah from the writing classes), and Beard going forth into the world and bringing home the old school bacon, we have devolved back from our advanced degree in commitment directly into the weirdness of the LDR.
Exhibit A.
We text.
Yes, this is 2016, everyone bloody texts, but we text each other shit like
I miss you.
or
It was hard to say goodbye this morning.
and
I miss feeling your hand on my lower back.
Exhibit B.
He sent me flowers on our anniversary.
To the house.
Then he texted me to go outside and check if an amazon package had arrived for him. It was a genuine surprise. Red roses. Yeah, that's right. Fucking red roses.
I loved them.
He also got me a Halloween present, which he hasn't done since we first moved to New England some eight years ago. A whole host of very spooky Hocus Pocus paraphernalia. Just out of the blue!
Delightful.
Exhibit C.
We send each other bits and bobs on social media.
Last week, my husband, who balks when I use the word feminist and constantly argues with me about the fact that while white, middle class men are the bane of human existence, white middle class women are pure evil (and he's not wrong), sent me an incredibly cool article from The New Yorker about Shirley Jackson's life as a domestically abused housewife and her genuinely creepy response to oppression through writing.
Seriously, it's an amazing article. Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson
I also send him links to things like the scariest amusement parks in the world, or Halloweentowns that actually exist in Middle America, or they just discovered a new room in the fucking Winchester house! No, really they did...
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/09/new-room-discovered-winchester-mystery-house/
Anyway.
The trick of the LDR is to moon a bit.
Be a little romantic, and if that means being dumb, be dumb too.
Because it won't be long before the kid is sleeping in his own room, and we're forced to spend all the time together again and remember how human, fallible, and annoying we are, so in the meantime, being goofy kids who are sighing over their window sills because they don't get to spend every night asleep in a treehouse together is pretty nice, and it reminds me what's waiting for me on the other side of this strange haze of new parenthood, and what's waiting for me is a pretty great guy that I might like to see more of.
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