November 10, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.

I know I’m tempting the Gods by saying this, but I’m going to do it anyway. This is very risky…I’m a little nervous. Okay, here goes…

We bought and installed our new router, and by “we” I mean my husband. Now the Internet, after nearly three very painful months, seems to be working!!!! This is very significant as now I can finally work from home one day a week!!!

As I type this, the husband is also attempting to fix the doorbell, which long ago went from being charming and quirky to extremely annoying. Thursday, I found a missing screw that holds together the handles on my one very expensive and very new purse. I also found my Ipod which somehow wormed itself into the bowels of the sofa — and it only took two hours of searching over seven days and five attempts reaching my arm under the cushion feeling around for it before I found it.

All this goodness is making me a little nervous. If we make it mountain biking today, I most certainly will go headlong into a river or collide with a tree.

My husband gets the award for epitomizing “That’s Love” this week. Not only has he spent countless hours troubleshooting the Internet (though he could have bought a new router a month ago as a test!), he’s also helped me with the myriad issues with my website, making dinner when I was too heads down in working to do it myself, always makes sure we have a DVD to watch, and always picks up the carry-out on the nights we’re too lazy to cook. He was rather a jerk in my dream last night, but I’ve forgiven him for that.

My husband comes by his goodness naturally. My mother-in-law is a wonderful woman. She always remembers to call or email to see how we’re doing, and is diligent about sharing pictures from recent adventures and family members, whom we seldom get to see otherwise. We love her!

And then there’s my friend at Art of Life who is kind, talented, inspired, and really wants to make the world a better place, long after I’ve given up any hope for humanity. At least someone still has the faith.

Have a beautiful, joyous weekend, and don’t read my next post if you want to stay cheerful.

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October 31, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.

Today my mother turns 65. When we went to Baltimore for her birthday party, I considered writing a poem and making a speech, but how do you capture in words all the love that a mother gives you over the years?

There’s the routine of every day life, making sure that you have a nutritious meal to eat, clean clothes, a roof over your head. There’s the life skills, how to read a map, say please and thank you, only curse at the Orioles in the privacy of your own home…or was it to not curse at them…something…anyway… be financially responsible, treat others kindly, do your homework, brush your teeth, take your vitamins, don’t lose your house key (I was really bad at that one, even when I had the humiliation of having to wear it around my neck on a chain). Cultural and educational experiences, Orioles games, plays, Indian and Irish festivals, soccer games (remember the Blast!), hockey (and the Skippers), Colts (let’s not go there), Bolton Hill dinner theatre, the Walters and Smithsonian…There’s the love and warmth of someone who loves you more than anyone else ever will. And finally, there’s the really, really important stuff like making sure you never ran out of Utz and Dunkin Donuts, making sure every summer you attended at least one all-you-can-eat crabfeast (those were the days!!), got crabs to go a few times from Bo Brooks, tediously picked your crabs for you before you learned how to do it, taught you about removing the lungs but eating the mustard, and pulled over countless times for the spontaneous visit to the snowball stand for an Egg Custard or Spearmint snowball with marshmellow or without, depending on your mood (these are the things I miss so much about home).

How can you possibly enumerate all the gifts that a mother and father bestow on you throughout your life? One is left only with an inadequate word of “love” which fails to capture in any meaningful way the feeling in your heart about someone you love and treasure dearly, and cannot imagine not having in your life.

Happy Birthday, Mom! You may dress like a witch or a devil today, but you’re really an angel inside.

Maybe a little devilish, but definitely angelic too. I love you!!!

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October 30, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.

I apologize that this week’s edition of “That’s Love” is a few days late. The reason will become clear shortly.

My mother is about to celebrate her 65th birthday, and how should I say this…she likes to know what’s going on. So, because she comes from a sadistic family that likes to torment her, her sisters organized a surprise birthday party, withholding all the details, including the date and who was attending. The only thing my mother knew was that at some unknown point in the future she would be told to be ready in Halloween costume. She would then be shuttled to the party destination, possibly blind-folded, and maybe gagged and bound, depending on how much trouble she was making, or just for the fun of it, depending on our mood.

One of my aunts did the majority of the planning and organizing, but we all derived great pleasure from tormenting my mother for months. A week ago, one of my great aunts leaked the date of the event by asking in my mom’s presence, “What should I wear on Saturday.” Her subsequent words were quickly drowned out by my aunts protesting in unison, “SHHHHHH!!! SHHH!!! She’s not supposed to know anything!”

Friday, my husband and I flew up to D.C. and spent the day sight-seeing. Then my technically brilliant and slightly devious husband spent an hour setting up our Vonage in the hotel. Saturday morning, I called my mom from our home number, for the benefit of her caller ID, which she always checks before answering the phone. I spouted a stream of lies about fake errands, inquired about the weather “up there” as I looked through the hotel window at the passing clouds and wet road, and felt my shoes to see if they were dry yet after a day of walking in pouring rain in Georgetown, and laughed along at my mom’s stories of trying to extract more information about the night’s happenings from my aunts. Just in case my mom considered the possibility that I was attending the party, when our home number displayed on her caller ID, I was sure it would quash any notion that I was coming. I emitted a silent “muhahahaha” in delight, even though my heart was racing in fear that I would blow it.

Saturday night, we took a Halloween Cruise on the Bay Lady in the Baltimore Inner Harbor. An hour before the cruise, we changed into costume, or “fancy dress” as my husband calls it, in the car and arrived on the cruise a few minutes after my mom. She looked directly at both my husband and me, but didn’t figure out who we were. Proof that everything we know and understand in life is dependent on how our brains decide to interpret “reality.” Eventually synapses fired and my mom realized who we were. My mom was happy and a bit overwhelmed to see how much we all love her. Mission accomplished!

My mom and her sisters are the best of friends, and of course, I love her more than I know how to express. And that’s love.

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October 14, 2007 by enchantingsunshine.

For this week’s episode of “That’s Love,” I’d like to share a couple of stories.

Years ago I read several books that discussed theories about what makes for a happy marriage. I use the word “theories” because even with case studies, any conclusions are still based on a researcher’s interpretation of the data. Famous marriage expert John Gottman has done the most compelling and scientific research on successful marriages and provides “recipes” for happiness and disaster. Though not as scientific, other marriage authors offer interesting insights into marriage, even if most of their guidelines for marital bliss aren’t gleaned from labs but rather personal anecdotes and self-reports.

One of my favorite books on the subject is by Judith Viorst, called Grown-Up Marriage. Viorst proposes that happy marriages stem from a mature understanding of what marriage is. Marriage isn’t a fantasy created in Hollywood where two individuals feel amorous every single day and never get irritated with each other. Individuals in happy marriages accept the reality of life, and have more realistic expectations. We live in a culture of choices that gives us the luxury of being choosy and demanding of perfection. We are less tolerant of flaws, not wanting, but expecting perfection. We are in the habit of regarding people with the same critical eye as we do our things. In a culture where “good enough” is considered “settling” and a bad thing, even though we ourselves are imperfect, Viorst asserts that happiness is not to be found around another corner. In a mature marriage, we know and accept that people are fallible and imperfect, we tolerate imperfections in our partner, in ourselves, and in our responses to each other. We don’t pathologize one another, constantly over-emphasizing defects as an excuse to leave. Instead, we focus on what we love, putting our energy into appreciating, not picking apart a spouse who could never live up to the unrealistic standard of perfection we’ve invented. Happy couples aren’t happy every day and they’re not without recurring arguments. The reality of life is that you can love someone with your whole heart, but if you spend more than a couple of years together, you are going to really, really get on each other’s nerves sometimes. And what’s more, if you keep working to understand one another, you’ll also love each other more deeply than you imagined.

It’s been a long time since I read the book, so that summary may be a conglomeration of other things I’ve read too. Anyway, you get the point.

My favorite story from Viorst’s book was about a husband who liked to line the medicine cabinet shelves with aluminum foil. His wife was never able to learn the reasons for the habit and found the whole thing rather troubling. Sometimes she would find herself staring inside the cabinet, pondering his bizarre behavior and unnatural affinity for tin foil and think “Who is this man and why did I marry him?” Haven’t we all been there.

This is all a long lead in to a weekly feature I’m starting called, “That’s Love.” I had the idea a week ago but a conversation with a colleague on Friday convinced me to proceed. It’s a way to remember that, even with Bush still in office, there are still so many examples of love and kindness in our world, and we notice what we focus on. So here’s focusing on the good stuff. Hope you like…

That’s love! Friday, a colleague, who I’ll call Jan, came into work in a sleepless fog because of a procrastinating husband. The night before, Jan’s husband was supposed to prepare the breakfast he was catering on Friday morning. Just before heading off to her monthly bridge club meeting at 7 p.m., Jan asked her husband if he needed help and was assured that everything was under control. When she arrived home at 11 p.m., her husband was just starting to make the food. Even though Jan was annoyed with her husband for procrastinating, she immediately started helping him make twelve dozen mini muffins, went to bed for a couple of hours while he continued to work, and then woke up at 4:30 to help him finish the catering work. When I said, “that was so sweet of you” she replied, “Well, I didn’t have a choice, did I?”

The thing is, she did have a choice. She could have come home, seen her husband working in the kitchen, kissed him goodnight with a slap on the rump and said, “Good luck!” and slept like a baby. She could have made him feel like a loser, lectured, and scolded, and made him feel two feet tall for a mistake he was already well-aware that he made. (Of course, if he has a chronic habit of being irresponsible, helping him might actually be hurting him, but that’s a topic for a different discussion.) With the love of a wife, Jan overlooked and forgave her husband for being imperfect, a fact they both knew, and even though annoyed at his behavior, sacrificed her own sleep to help her husband succeed. Friday afternoon, Jan received a call that the breakfast went off so well that her husband was asked to cater lunch the next day.

I have a few of my own examples of “that’s love” from the last week. On a trip to Baltimore earlier this year, I bought a poster of Memorial Stadium. Unfortunately, my childhood home isn’t in it, but even so, it’s a good picture. Earlier this week, my husband carefully unrolled it and weighted it down on the dining room table so that it would lay flat. Yesterday, when we were shopping, he suggested we get a frame, already having memorized the dimensions. While I searched for an item in a different part of the store, he looked through the many frames and picked out one that fits the picture and our decor perfectly. All without me ever mentioning anything about hanging up my poster. As I write this, he is hammering a nail into the wall behind me to hang it up.

Over the last four days, he’s spent his spare time trying to ascertain the source of our network issues (and still no clue, bless his heart). He researches on the Internet on one of the computers that can hold the connection for more than five minutes at a time, has tried reinstalling programs, unplugging this and that, back and forth, up and down the stairs he goes. If it were me, I’d have given up and bought a new computer and router two months ago. But with the patience of a saint, he continues to work at it, determined to fix our problems the right way, even though it means sacrificing time that he would rather spend doing other things.

Most importantly, one day I made coffee and as I poured it, remembered with disappointment that we were out of half and half. Half and half makes the coffee. It’s one of God’s most perfect foods. I opened the refrigerator and to my delight noticed that this most perfect creature I married bought a replacement, enabling me to enjoy the full glory of my coffee.

These things are like getting flowers. They’re an expression of caring that shows someone is thinking about you and your happiness, without the death and maintenance of replacing the water and cleaning up the dead flower bits that fall off on your dining room table.

In addition to the romantic relationship examples of “that’s love,” there are expressions of love in the ordinary, every day routine of life. Here’s what I mean. We often get homemade advertisements in our newspaper slot. They’re usually plain font, printed text on a white sheet of paper advertising lawn services, painting, home repair and the like. Often they’re unimaginative and unmemorable and aren’t read beyond the first couple of words as they make their way from my mailbox to the recycle bin. (I prefer to only use contractors found on Angie’s List.) This week though, there was an advertisement that said “love.” A paper flyer was accompanied by a laminated color business card complete with a logo. It was for a pesticide company, and as a good hippy, it’s not a service I’m hoping to need. Even so, I was tempted to save the card because when I looked at it, I could see the person on the other side, full of hope and excitement, lovingly creating a logo and laminating his business cards, excited about the prospect of running his own business, inserting it in my mailbox with hopeful anticipation of generating customers. A piece of the energy that went into making that business card and flyer came through to me. It’s those things that are done with love and care that melt my heart.

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