Chapter 1

An Awkward Blogger

My wife inspires me. She tries and mostly succeeds in updating her blog towards the end of every month, not the beginning though, because that's typical.

That's a joke.

So here I am on Memorial Day, which is just two days shy of the end of May watching my wife write her way into keeping her committed schedule, a rather faithful one (at least to my standards) she has kept since January of 2017.

I made myself dinner and sat next to her while she deliberated, considered, and all those other things that writers do when there is nothing for the fingers to do. Conversation was sparse, so I decided to watch her.

She looks at her computer. Then she grabs her phone. She looks back at her computer. Then she looks somewhere off to the left. Exclaims out loud something that she did not know, but apparently her mind has been blown. Using her hands, she further exclaims "Who knew?! That's crazy." She leans in closer to the computer in front of her with her brows narrowing in line with her newly piqued interest. At this point, even I am curious but like the NatGeo narrator I am, I know that interfering just is not how this works. 

“Dang it. OMG.”

She leans back, and places an elbow down on the table. Her head soon follows into her palm, where for a few seconds of respite, she regathers her thoughts, closes her laptop, sees me and wonders if I am really blogging about her writing a blog.

My answer of course is 'yes', and I read to her so far what I have. She thinks it is funny, her eyes twinkle at what I presume is the sort of appreciation a spouse has when their counterpart makes that investment into the relationship with the currency of attention, and then affectionately tells them about the person they have been for the last hour.

She gets up from the table, turns on the faucet, and starts to tidy up our kitchen. She cleans a mess that she did not make, and clears dishes and utensils that she did not use. I am the one who mainly cooks, she is the one who mainly cleans, so perhaps our arrangement is fair in that sense. However, part of who we have become as a couple has been about ownership of what we do, and who we are personally. This of course puts both of us in the context of individuals, responsible to no one but ourselves, and to an extent at the exclusion of one another. It is this exclusivity that puts the appreciation of something like cooking and cleaning for each other into a unique perspective.

Maybe this is how we keep 'us' from being obligatory. Maybe this is how we keep 'us' from being boring.

Who's Awkward Now?

She concludes her kitchen duty and proceeds to inform me that she is retiring for the evening. I ask her, "So did you post your blog or what?" she says she did, but that she has not put it out on social media yet, and apparently that means she technically has not. You can find her blog here.

This baffles me. If your rest depends on knowing the following the detail, be assured that I will have spent more time than necessary before hitting Save & Publish.

Then it hits me. Maybe I am the awkward blogger.