This "Babies Business"

The hardest thing I've attempted to do in my life is figure out what kind of person I want to be.  I've sorted through being married or single and come up with someone else in my bed.  I've pondered to be a person of faith or not; though not someone who proclaims need of admiration in my faithfulness, God and I are tight.  I decided to be the person who sacrificed fun and frolic for a paycheck and graduating with honors for the many years I spent a student.  I even decided I was going to be the kind of person who colors Disney princess coloring pages into my 20's.  But the hardest thing I have yet to sort through is babies.  And I suppose, eventually, children.  And even more so, how being responsible for a little human fits into everything else.

This whole "babies business" started about four years ago while I was volunteering for a at-risk youth program here in Birmingham.  One day I was talking to the head of the program and she made the comment "If your children aren't your whole life, you shouldn't have kids."  At 21, I hadn't really given much thought to kids or being a mom other than I eventually would, but with that statement, I believe my uterus started the paperwork to be cryogenically frozen.  I was appalled.  It was like someone had passed a death sentence for 18+ years of my life, only to be lifted when my yet-born children left the nest.  I had goals; go to grad school, tour Italy, swim a mile nonstop, buy red high heels, things and tasks that didn't necessarily involve my children.

For the next four years, I pondered these things.  I asked people and got every answer from "Well of course" to "That's just absurd."  The only clear message I received was the joy in the people who were that shampoo commercial mom, like it was a badge of honor to not have slept in five years or to have adult friends with whom you spend time, and the same people who gave that message gave just as much disgust for the other mom.  People I loved and respected gave me different viewpoints and conflicting messages, and my response was sheer panic.  I didn't want higher risk for birth defects and other complications from waiting until my 30's, so I deduced I better figure this shit out, and soon.   The clocks were a'tickin' waiting for me to sort out what kind of mom I wanted to be.  I bounced from the fear of being a selfish mother, wrapped up in her degrees and trips to Europe, and being that mom you see on the shampoo commercial who finally got time to wash and fix her hair.  I didn't want to be either of those, but I wasn't seeing anyone who was.  I wasn't seeing anyone who lived somewhere in the middle between Soccer Mom of the Year and Dr. Ellis Grey from Grey's Anatomy.  I can't blame all the confusion on the women I know.  At least some of all this is the media and modern feminism; homemaker wives, successful career women, women dying with their grandchildren at their bedside, running away to Italy to lead an examined life, mom juggling a grocery bag and a briefcase, "finding yourself" with wine and salsa lessons, all melted together and poured into a mold that serves only to send mixed and overwhelming messages to those of us who want both and all.  And all this fried my oxytocin receptors and produce a visceral reaction to any and all babies, baby clothes, baby aisle at Target, baby talk, baby planning, and baby making.  All babies business was an evil reminder that I didn't know anything except all the things I didn't know.

Sometime along the journey in grad school, that time of my life where my budding maturity as a 22 year old, failed relationships, interactions with intelligent people from different backgrounds, and ever-growing friendships were bathed in counseling theory and skills, I learned that it is okay to not know, to not know how you're going to end up wherever you do.  In the last year and some since meeting the man I want to have babies with, I've morphed into a person that isn't completely appalled at this "babies business".  I still don't want them any time soon.  I can't imagine actually having a child at this very moment; for now, all I want are my ski trips and video game afternoons and high heels.  I'm still afraid of my husband loving our child more than me.  I'm afraid I won't like my kid.  I'm still scared that I'll be disappointed in them if they don't lead the kind of life I value.  I still don't like babies or think baby clothes are cute.  I do, however, think I'll be freaking adorable pregnant.  We have picked out a girl's name, and I do talk about how's she going to be fabulous and brilliant and Bobby talks about how she's going to be in a convent.  I can imagine myself with a 13 year old; I have a hard time thinking of ages birth-13, but I'm so much farther than I was.  I don't precisely know how I got here; chalk it up to wanting to make babies with someone as pretty as Bobby, I don't know.  What I do know is this- I will love my children.  I will raise them to be productive, kind, faithful, loving human beings.  I won't sacrifice all of myself for my children.  I will still go on vacations with just my friends.  I will still fuss over my hair.  I will wear high heels.  I will eat sushi and feta cheese and arugula and weird hamburgers that most kids don't like.  What I don't know is how to get there, but I don't know how I got here anyway.  So maybe this "babies business" for me is just this- Have them.  Love them.  Have yourself.  Love yourself.  Figure it out.  And if it all goes to hell in a handbasket, I know some good counselors and Italy will still be there.

AWP: Lessons #16-19

Lesson #16: I have a life outside of wedding planning

Seems logical enough, but I would do well to remember it.  Work right now (and by right now, I mean for the last two months) is incredibly slow, so I spend a good portion of my days on the computer playing around with wedding such.  I go home in the evening and think "Okay, what wedding task can I work on right now?"  It makes me incredibly anxious to always feel like I should be doing something, and it's a familiar feeling I used to get at the end of a semester.  I could never give myself a break from studying until after the last final was turned in- surely, there was something more I could cram into my head, more editing to do on that paper, more practice in counseling skills to do.  At the same time right now, though, I am remodeling the walls of the bathroom and, well, living.  You know, crazy stuff, like grocery shopping, cleaning the bathroom, working out, sleeping, all of which has fallen by the wayside due to WEDDING PLANNING.  I'm having to talk myself out of this feeling of constant pressure in order to manage my life and my house, and it's incredibly difficult at times.

Lesson #17: RSVP cards are fantastic

I love getting mail that's not bills, credit card offers, or addressed to people who aren't me.  Typically ALL the mail at our house is for Bobby, and boy does he get a lot of mail.  For the last two weeks though, little RSVP cards are waiting for me almost every afternoon, and I just plain love them.  It's so exciting to see that tiny off-white envelope and run inside to open and see who it's from.  They are a good reminder that, yes, I have actually accomplished things so far and I did actually finish some big thing in wedding planning.  Which brings me to my next lesson...

Lesson #18: "Will you forget the head-slicing thing?!"

If you grew up a child of the 1990's, you probably remember this:

If you weren't a child of the 1990's but had more Greek literature than I did, you probably still remember the monster Hydra, the beast who grew three heads for every one that was cut off.  That's how I feel about wedding planning this week.  I mentioned this in a previous blog about how things that should theoretically be simple are not, but now we've taken it a step further into "Why is this continuing to get more complicated as we go along?"

Let's use ordering flowers as an example.  My thought was, "Okay, walk into Whole Foods, I need this many this and that many that, here's a check, we'll pick them up on said date."  This is an excerpt from the email I received from the lovely Ally, head of floral in the Mountain Brook Whole Foods:

My deep blue single stem hydrangea comes in an assortment box with blue, lavender and purple.  The cost each box of 13 count hydrangea stems would be $81.78.  The price is price per case minus a case discount of 10% (90.87-9.09) for buying the whole case.  The problem is these hydrangeas would be an assortment of blue/lavender/purple.

I have not heard back from my wholesaler of flowers in Atlanta as of yet.  They offer the blue hydrangea “masja purple” retail is $8.69 a stem,  minimum of 40 stems, no case discount.. total of $343.60.  I will not know for certain on the hydrangeas until next Monday as my sales person at our wholesaler is unavailable right now but it is on their availability listings they send me.

I am well aware that the majority of this problem is my inexperience in anything to do with flower ordering.  But holy cow, how unaware of the world around me I feel as I try to knock things out only to make them more complicated.   Every so often there will be a break in the clouds and I will accomplish something (insert fanfare) but it is the planning equivalent of driving from Birmingham to Atlanta with a stop at Starbucks, stop for gas, stop for potty break at the state line, hit traffic on I-285, take a phone call from my mom, arrive at location, and turn around and go pick up food and then back to place of sleeping.  However, I will continue to attempt to stab this thing through the heart.

Lesson #19: I will never appreciate four walls and a bed the way I'll appreciate the one in Beach Cottage #4

I always knew I'd be excited about the honeymoon- the first week with my new husband, enjoying each other's company, being on vacation.  The reasons that I'm now excited, however, have taken me completely by surprise:

1.  We. will. be. alone.  Bobby lives in Troy; I live in Birmingham with a roommate.  We are never alone unless I visit him in Troy, which is usually once a month or less, and when I'm there, we only get about 4-5 hours a night together because he's working during the day.  I cannot wait to sleep, eat, watch movies in the cottage, and sit on the beach alone with Bobby.

2.  I can haz the sleep.  That pretty much sums it up.

3.  We will be in a private cottage and will be alone and isolated in order to, well, "be married."  That's detailed enough.

4.  We have one thing planned for the week, and that is to play with the baby tigers at the Gulf Shores Zoo.  It was completely intentional that we have no obligations other than arriving at the cottage, for reasons listed above.

I mean, come on, would *you* want to leave?

Seaside, Florida

Twenty-nine days.  Twenty-nine days.

Wedding Vows: Mean what you say, Say what you mean

My "Month le Weddings" is coming to a close, and I have now attended three of them.  It's been very interesting going to all three weddings; all three of the brides I had grown up with in church, all of us in our small town Baptist raisin's, and yet our wedding are so very different.  One good thing about being the final wedding of the year for my Hillabee Baptist people is that I get to steal ideas from the other brides; so far, namely my cousin, Mary Katherine.  Her wedding was the closest to what I want mine to be.  She's definitely helped me out in the unity candle decision-crunch (I'm stealing her idea of doing communion); I'm also much more comfortable with my wedding reception time-frame I had in mind (both our weddings will be four hours from start of ceremony to leaving reception, and I didn't get bored at hers).  The biggest thing I've decided to play copy-cat on though is that she and her fiancee used the traditional vows and added onto them with personal vows.  Of course, I cried like a fool and thought it was the sweetest thing I'd ever seen.  I called Bobby on the way to the reception and asked him if we, too, could write our own vows on top of the traditional vows; he made some comment about them including a clause involving a 25-pound bass, but nevertheless he agreed.

Why I thought it would be a good idea to add on another item on the to-do list and one that's emotional to boot, I'm not entirely sure.  So, here I am.  My first concern was that I didn't want to make it overly English-essay-esque.  I have a tendency to write and speak with a flourish whether that flourish is needed or not; I feel that I can convey myself better when I think about and choose my words to do just that.  On the other hand, I don't want to write woodenly or plainly because that's not me.  My concern is more that I'll get too caught up in writing to sound pretty rather than writing to tell my husband and God what I intend to do in this marriage.

Which leads us to my second problem- what exactly do I want to say?  We decided to keep the traditional vows because they do cover all the bases- richer or poorer, sickness and health, as long as you both shall live.  All these things are very important, and when I started thinking about what I wanted to add onto, I became concerned that I wouldn't have anything valid to add onto that.  That was a fleeting thought, though, and I know that I do have some things I'd like to tell Bobby in front of everyone, things like how much of an answered prayer he is to me, how he's my adventurer, my life partner.  These are well and good, but then I arrived back at what I want to promise?  At first I thought nice and sweet things, like "I promise to tell you I love you every day" (which I do), but it doesn't feel like enough.  At some point the sweet thoughts turned into meaningful thoughts that led to thoughts that "Ah, yes, now we're getting somewhere" (metacognition's a wily sucker).  Things occurred to me like "I promise to work for our marriage, to communicate and compromise and build trust", which are all things I think are important for a marriage.  It's nice to say you'll go visit Italy, but you have to make arrangements to get there.

The more I thought about all these nice things I want to promise him that I'll do for him, the more it began to occur to me that these aren't just words that I'm saying to make my wedding extra squishy and happy.  It has already occurred to me that the traditional vows are just that, "vows."  The word "vow" means to "earnestly promise or pledge something" or to "promise to a god or saint".  I'm not just saying these things to Bobby; I'm saying them to God.  It's one thing to haphazardly pledge to a behavior with a person- "Sure, let's do lunch" or "I'll let you pick out the dog" or "You can come stay with me when you're in town".  We make flippant comments about doing things for people, and these aren't "solemn promises made to a god or deity" but those wedding vows are.  So when I started thinking about the things I was going to stand in front of people and God and Bobby and say, I realized that I better not say anything I wasn't committed to doing.  I was already committed to not leaving him because he loses his job, or desert him because he gets cancer, or give myself to another man.  Those are the big choices that you make many, many little choices that lead up to such.  The vows I'm thinking of are harder, because there the ones that call me to roll over and hug him and apologize before I fall asleep because I'm wrong.  These are the ones that cause me to question myself when I think I'm entitled to fuss at him for driving badly.  They're the vows that make me get and stay right with God so that I can be a better wife to him.  These are the vows that make me shut up and quick trying to sort out who's right and who's wrong and treat him with love and respect.  And really that's all I'm wanting to say.  I want to define more clearly for myself and for Bobby how I'm going to make that journey to Italy.  "I promise to love you" is an astronomically broad statement.  What are the specific things I'm going to do to act out that love for him?  What things will I do late at night and when I'm ill and when my pride's in the way?  What am I willing to promise and pledge to him that'll make the kind of wife I want to be to him?  That's what I want to say.

"Advice"

If there are two things in life a person receives constant advice about, it's children and marriage.  I understand this idea, in general.  I want advice in marriage from my grandparents.  Not only have they been married for 55 years next month, they've had a happy if not always easy marriage that was based in faith, in work, and in love.  For them also, I know that it's important to them to pass that knowledge on so that I can learn from their successes and mistakes and make a happy marriage for myself.  Clearly I'm at a point where this wisdom is relevant and needed.  In my life, for myself, all I've ever wanted was a happy marriage.  I'll sacrifice any amount of pride, freedom, sleepless nights, or selfishness to wake up next to Bobby 60 years from now.  I'll take sound advice from any place I can get it.

On the flip side, the random little gems of marriage "wisdom" that people throw at me are baffling.  I have been asked personal questions that I can't write without shuddering, questions that embarrassed the fool out of me in front of Bobby.  These little gems scare me, quite frankly.  They portray marriage as a light-hearted joke.  The media paints wives as naggy, overwrought women exasperated with their lazy, horny, moronic husbands.  They never have sex.  They can't stand each others company.  They tolerate each other and, outside children and a shared bed, their lives rarely cross.

To make matters worse, there's the children thing.  Everyone but everyone thinks they have wisdom of child-rearing to impart on the world, and since I am with the person I will make children with, everyone but everyone thinks it's their place to instruct me on children.  The child-rearing advice doesn't bother me too terribly; most of that I have my own opinions about, due to growing up with much younger siblings and two degrees in psychology/counseling.  It's mainly the opinions about when Bobby and I should have children that bugs me so much.  For a long list of reasons, I'm not ready to have children just yet.  My biggest fear is that, like much of the marriage business, I'll end up like these people I see.  Their lives totally revolve around their children.  They have no friends, no social life, no ideas or thoughts outside of what new thing their child did this week, and no life after children.  Mothers who identify themselves only as what relation they are to their children- no longer wives, friends, sisters, daughters, career women, just mothers.  Those things terrify me, and I am simply not ready.

While I'm scared of the way some other marriages are, I'm finding hope in that my marriage will be what I want it to be.  I've met several couples who are themselves only better after marriage.  I've yet to meet parents who are more than parents, and maybe that's why I'm still scared of that and not marriage.  Either way, I don't have to know what I want my parenting to be like just yet; I'm not a parent.  I know what kind of wife I'm going to be, and if my idea of that changes, so be it.  The only thing I want is to be still madly in love with Bobby 50 years from now, no matter what everyone else says.  It's a trepidatious adventure, a daily walk through what I want my life to be with Bobby.

Interracial Couple

I was inspired recently by a blog that my Best Friend Since Preschool recommended.  The Offbeat Mama blog (found here) is written by a wife/mother and about her adventures through both.  The blog entry was entitled  Why Our Multi-Cultural Family Rocks and talked about her experiences in being married to and having children with her husband, a man from Cambodia, and all the things she learned from such.

Quite similarly, my fiancee is quite the nuance to some.  Over the phone, you'd never mistake him for anything but the Kentucky boy that he is, especially when he feels passionately; that draaawl slides out and sticks right to my heart.  In person, however, he's 6'1" and looks decidedly... ethnic.  Bobby is 3/8th's Chinese; his father is 3/4's Chinese, his grandmother's father was English, her mother Chinese from Hong Kong, where both grandparents still live today.  Bobby's mom is Irish and Native American, all of which boiled down together to make a very tall ethnic lookin' man who, with short hair looks sorta Asian and with long hair sorta Indian.  However, he was raised in Kentucky, played football, baseball, soccer, ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes, watched Saved by the Bell, and wears jeans and white or black undershirts most of the time.  He's a blend of different ethnicities but is culturally American.  I don't much think about whether he's Chinese or Caucasian or Indian (I like referring to him as "ethnic" just because it tickles me), I just think he's amazing and I want his last name.

Back to the blog- I began wondering whether Bobby and I were an quote-un-quote interracial couple.  I don't necessarily feel interracial because, unlike the Offbeat Mama, my future husband was raised in Kentucky, not Cambodia.  I wonder, though, if people see us as interracial.  I broached the subject with Bobby the other night, who is so very good about my exploration into the idea of "I'm not marrying a blonde-haired white kid who's six generations are from Alabama" (like me).  I get tickled when people mispronounce his (our) last name, Kwok, which is pronounced exactly phonetically; I love hearing about his grandmother's doing Tai Chi in her backyard; I fantasize about people's reactions when they see my last name before meeting me; I looked up the Chinese symbol for Kwok only yesterday, which, by the way, is 郭.  Between Bobby and I, we have determined that sometimes we are interracial and sometimes we're not.  To us, I think we're just Heather and Bobby, the dynamic sushi-eating, nerf-gun shooting, happy life-ing duo; to some, they see us the same way.  To others, I think we're the nuance that they sometimes see Bobby as, especially when they hear our last name.  We've also decided that we don't much mind either way.  To be thought of as just a couple is freeing; never mind what we look like, we just are.  On the flip side, it opens an opportunity to show people how not-different we think we all are.  Somewhere over the course of my 6 years in college and graduate school, my unconscious perception of the gap between "me" and "them" narrowed.  I like to say that in my hometown, there are two religions, Baptist and Methodist, and that pretty much describes the cultural make-up of the town: white and black.  Meeting so many different people in college slow weathered away the differences in my mind, until I don't make as many assumptions any more.  For those that do see us as an "interracial couple", maybe there's a possibility that the ethnic Kentucky boy and the blonde Alabama girl can throw a little dirt in that gap.  And for those that don't, well, we watch the Bachelor together just like everyone else.

I'll tell you what we are definitely, and that is happy