Love and Indigestion

One of my social networking connections (someone I barely knew in high school whose friend request I accepted mostly out of a desire to avoid generating any kind of bad facebook karma) appears to be going through a virtual divorce. I recently opened my homepage to discover a back and forth among this woman and some other gals from hillbilly high on the subject of her romantic turmoil. Her husband, it seems, recently listed himself as single on facebook (ouch), throwing her into a state of despair and leading her to question the foundation of their marriage. I’m not at all clear on the back story here, but I should note that (as far as I can tell) we are talking about a couple of nouveau-bohemians who run a tattoo parlor in a resort town in Mexico. The whole thing made me feel a little queasy and voyeuristic. But she obviously wants it out there, so I’m kind of looking at it like a mini soap opera with no commercials. The heartache of a new age diva has me feeling pretty grateful about my tame little life here on the farm.

Not that everything’s in a constant state of peachiness. Au contraire: parenting and money issues have certainly taken their toll on my relationship with the old man. The spark is still there but often damn hard to capture through the murky haze of raising young children and all the petty bullshit that seems to go along with running a household. I often feel that family life is a long, hard slog interspersed with moments of great warmth and intense joy. We do our best to give our offspring what they need, while trying to remember (and maybe even occasionally recapture) what it was like when we were just a couple of carefree lovebirds (not that fighting wasn’t one of our hobbies before we had kids….). Like housewives through time out of mind, I so often find myself resentful of my spouse’s opportunities to spend quality time in the outside world. On top of that, for an Obama mama, being married to an Obama disser is a little taste of bitter tea every day. Overall, however, I would say that the aggravations of married life are far outweighed by the rewards.

Anyway, we are in many ways pretty conventional around here. But I certainly wouldn’t say we’re bound by convention. For example, we don’t really do Valentines Day. I’m not really a flowers and chocolate kind of gal. I mean, I like chocolate, but I’d rather just have a little brick of 70% to gnaw on than a heart shaped box of buttercreams. I stopped wearing perfume when Henry was born so that it wouldn’t interfere with the pheromones related to breastfeeding. I’m averse to giving and receiving useless crap and, at this point, I don’t want to shell out the cash for something really good. And greeting cards are, in my opinion, pretty much pointless. I’ve never enjoyed the restaurant scene on V-day—fighting the crowds for overpriced, mediocre food is not my idea of fun. Besides, we just had a date on Monday night (half price burger night at a local pub) and both of us ended up hung over after a beer and a half each. I’m usually up for putting together a nice meal myself. However, I had already outdone myself with a fabulous dinner for Christian’s birthday earlier in the week (roast pork tenderloin with plum sauce, potato gratin, and savoy cabbage sautéed with bacon) and was simply too exhausted to do it again. So Valentines in Lovetown consisted of leftover birthday cake and Merle Haggard on iTunes. And because it’s us, a beastly fight, resolved, with great effort, before bedtime.