testing the waters

I'm still not exactly sure to talk about this, but apparently I'm capable of making sick jokes to friends about the subject now, so maybe, just maybe, that means it's time. (Please note, there is a completely tasteless joke included in this post. I don't normally go around making these sort of jokes, but it's part of the story.)

When Bunny's dad died it was this huge, overwhelming, emotional life changing thing that happened to us that we needed to get through. Just making it through the day was about all that we could ask for at that time, but somehow because talking about being devasted by a death is acceptable I felt ok talking about it. People talk about it when the people close to them die. It took a lot of time to get to the point where we didn't need people to handle us as if we were marked FRAGILE! Handle With Care, but I felt ok walking around with that label. Everyone loses people, and so even if it isn't something everyone's experienced, people have a general idea of how to respond.

Sometimes with the tough topics, the not-quite-as-universal ones, it seems like there are only two scripts for talking about things. There's script A: "this terrible thing just happened in my life and woe is me please watch me cry and feel some pity for me". Then there`s script B: "This shitty thing happened and I'm over it, mostly so I'm just going to deflect it by making a joke".

When the next tragedy hit, neither of those options really felt like they worked for me. I didn't want the world to have too clear a view into the exact source of my pain, and I didn't know how to talk about it. I didn't feel like I was allowed to talk about it. I didn't feel like I had any right to the Handle With Care sign, even if I needed it a little more, and the information I would have had to give out to get that sign was just too incredibly private, and invited too many unwanted questions and too many stupid responses. Seriously, half of my friends who found out what was happening managed only to make me angry with their attempts to express sympathy and make me feel better. And these are smart, emotionally mature people who don't usually say thoughtless things - it's just not a subject that comes up enough for people to necessarily learn what inappropriate responses might be.

The other week though I was catching up with a dear friend who I don't talk with as often as I'd like anymore, and he was asking questions about the elopement and what had led up to that. Here's the conversation, almost verbatim:

J: So, what led to eloping? Not that I was expecting an invitation or anything, but I kind of expected you to do something more than that.
Me: We had a complicated year. Eventually it just got to the point where we needed to be married.
J: Well congratulations! And I know you wouldn't have gotten into complicated if you couldn't handle it.
(long pause)
Me: Well, it wasn't exactly the sort of complicated that we planned for.
(pause, cue me feeling awkward and like I needed to give some sort of explanation but not actually wanting a discussion)
Me: You can't plan for dead dogs, fathers, or babies.

Apparently announcing a miscarriage through a dead baby joke leads to lots of concern. Who knew? But that's thing crux of the issue there's no easy way to acknowledge that situation and own it without either seeming like I want pity, or being crass. Talking about this is like ripping a bandaid off and showing off a great big open wound and it's uncomfortably revealing and private in ways that I don't really want to share. I still don't know how to talk about it, but I'm trying to figure that out, because there is oh so much to talk about with it. So I'm going to start, with baby steps. (Even if I still used the terrible joke as my segue into this.)

Back in July I had a miscarriage that was absolutely and unequivocably emotionally devasting for me. It was without question the most difficult thing I've experienced in my adult life, and one of the most isolating. It also really cemented some rather profound changes in myself and in how I think about the world and other people in it. (But this isn't the time to get into that.) I still don't entirely want to talk about it, but I kind of feel like I need to. Because someone should be talking about this. It might just take me awhile to really truly figure out how to talk about it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hey all, it's Canadian Thanksgiving so you're only getting a baby post today, because I'll be busy. Bunny's home from closing up the trailer for the year (seriously though, I'm bummed that I missed the entire summer camping season this year) and my brother drove home from school yesterday and I haven't seen him in about four months. So I'm enjoying the visits and time with loved ones.

In the spirit of the holidays, here's a round of things that I am thankful for this year:

• Seeing my little brother
• Making it through the hard parts of 2012 to get to the fun stuff on the other side
• Being married to Bunny
• Having great friends and family
• Happy things happening to the people I love
• Being able to pay for Bunny's Hallowe'en root canal with no worries
• Catching up visits and chats with some of my favourite people in the world
• Life, because while it's a wild ride with plenty of downs it's got its upsides as well and I'm glad I'm on it

So happy Thanksgiving to all (even if you won't be celebrating it for awhile). What are you thankful for, this year?

autumn in the air

September is slipping through my fingers faster than I even know how to account for. The first full month of my married life has passed, my favourite season has officially started, and as much as I hate the cooler weather there are some awesome benefits. Somehow my bank account isn't keeping up with projected numbers, but certain planned expenses had to occur earlier than anticipated.

Fall life has been busy. There's been work, and so many errands, Bunny leaving for his first camping trip as a married man. The quilting project is slowly starting to take shape, as is my newest cross stitch. I'm half way through a big, complicated mess of beautiful novel that I'm not even sure how I'm going to review. (So far: sci fi, a WOW ripoff, a team of hackers, Russian mobsters and a terrorist organization have all played major roles. And we're not even at the halfway point.) Unfortunately one thing that's fallen a little to the wayside is this blog: usually I have a week's worth of posts scheduled in advance, to be supplemented by whatever ramblings I feel the need to share with the universe. I have some more meaty ones planned for the near future, but finding the time to sit down and actually write them has been hard.

I'm starting to drag out my tights from the basement to pair with the pile of dresses that I can't wait to transition to fall. Because the heat is so fleeting I appreciate every drop of sunshine all the more.

In that past couple of days my KitchenAid has started to beckon from the kitchen counter. The heat has dropped to the point where turning on the oven seems like a good idea, as I proved the other night when I broke out home made macaroni and cheese for the first time in almost six months. I`m looking forward to a winter filled with soups and roasts and big beautiful baked dishes.

What`s your favourite part of fall?

crafting notes

You guys? I'm loving this quilting thing. It's as much fun as I'd hoped, and a lot easier than I thought it would be. I'm a little surprised at how quickly I can knock out these blocks and how awesome they look when I'm done. Of course, I'm totally acknowledging that I'm only doing simple things and it's a little amateur, but it's so darned cool!

A couple of quilting notes to myself, for future reference:

• if the pieces don't fit exactly the size I need, it's still possible to make it work as long as there's a small seam allowance
• maybe I make my seam allowances too large (which is an expensive problem in the way of fabric waste)
• dressmaker's chalk pencils are amazing, and are so much more effective (and faster!) than masking tape for marking off fabrics with dark backings
• rotary cutters are amazing both for speed and accuracy
• my need for everything to match and have an exactly perfect pattern must be suspended. embrace the slightly chaotic
• next time check the back of the fabric. I will like myself so much more if it's a pale backing. For realz.

in which I go very low brow and talk about television

Apparently I'm the sort of person who now thinks talking about tv is acceptable blogging. Because, well, clearly I'm about to talk about tv. Mostly because this past week there were two things that I was really excited to see on television that are both very much on my mind. So fair warning, if you are a Grey's Anatomy or Doctor Who fan and haven't seen the most recent episodes, there may be some spoilers.

Grey's Anatomy has somehow gone from being one of my guilty pleasure shows that I watch in secret, when Bunny's not around, to being one of our shows that we watch together, always. And was last season's finale ever a heart-rendering cliffhanger, where it was very clear that this season was going to start off by continuing pulling the heartstrings. They do like to do this at the end of the season (anyone remember the shooting a couple seasons back?) and I was prepared for some emotional mayhem.

What I wasn't prepared for was how tied up Grey's Anatomy was going to be with my father in law's death. Watching the scene pulling the plug on Mark Sloane somehow had both Bunny and I right back in the moment when we stopped the mechanical support for his dad. Watching the way the accident had affected the doctors, what with inability to get on planes and so forth, reminded me of the messy emotional aftermath of loss. And the final scene, where you see how bad things are for one of my favourite relationships on the show? Just broke my heart, crawled under my skin and I've been uncomfortable and consumed with this need to think about that pain for days. And it's all fiction, all things that aren't really that affectacious to me ... but they bring me back to a very painful person moment and experience.

Now last Saturday's Doctor Who, on the other hand, was just made of awesome. It was this perfect, epic goodbye to some of the best companions the new Who has seen, and a goodbye to perhaps the best friendship that the Doctor has ever had. (I mean, aren't the Doctor and Amy totally the most awesome best friends ever? It's heartbreaking to see him lose that.)

The whole season of Doctor Who has been a toss up so far for me. I miss the big story arcs, and I'm not as big a fan of each episode being more of a standalone experience. I'd be lying if I said I haven't liked most of the episodes (although Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was a little weak for my tastes), but it just lacks the drama of the follow through, and the way the last series ended left me hungering for more story arcs to follow. Without an arc to propel the viewer from one season to the next I haven't been able to get as invested as I want to be in this year's series, but the episodes themselves have been really good in and of themselves.

Leading into this episode I wasn't happy with the idea of letting Amy and Rory leave the show. I still hate that they've left. But this is perhaps the best send off I've seen a companion have on the new series. It played on that dynamic of Amy always being torn between Rory and the Doctor, which has been played up since that episode "Amy's Choice" two seasons back. They're the two most important people in her life, and she loves the Doctor dearly but she will always, always choose Rory first. He's the centre of her universe and nothing else matters when placed against that. The way they played it made it heartbreakingly sad in that they've forever lost their relationship with the Doctor but at the same time amazingly beautiful in the love story between Rory and Amy and how strong their love for each other is, that they'll wait for thousands of years and give up everything else in their lives to be with each other.

So, in the spirit of low brow entertainment and enjoying the small things in life, what's on the tv in your house lately? What's been moving you and engaging you and pulling you in?

Welcome!

Hello there!

If you've just hopped over here from A Practical Wedding I wanted to say hi and happy to have you on board. :) This blog is still (and probably always will be) a work in progress, and what I might feel like talking about varies wildly from one month to the next but mostly you'll find me talking about food, clothes and crafting as well and general rants and raves about the world at large and what's hitting my buttons at any given moment.

I'm hoping within the next few months to start and actually get such fancy things as an "About" page up and running to make everything easier to navigate, but right now life is just about balancing all the big things with all the fun things I do on the side.

settling in to marriage

Bunny and I never looked at the day of our wedding as a life changing event. Neither of us really had any expectation that there would be some giant, life changing moment or that we'd feel very different from the other side. And the day we eloped itself? Surprisingly normal. Calm morning, when I could drown out the fact that my mom was super excited and expressing it in ways that were making both Bunny and I anxious, and then the rest of the day was just a cloud of happiness and enjoyment of each other. But life changing? No.

After almost four years together, living with each other for more than half that time, we already knew each other's ins and outs. We'd already built up our own team spirit and team rules, and had supported each other on major life changing events like when Bunny had quit his job to go back to school. We kept our money in separate bank accounts, but our budgets were integrated and we both had a say in how money was spent and saved and we split expenses in ways that made sense to us rather than a fifty-fifty even split. After the year of deaths, unemployment and unexpected moves we had already done the "or worse" part of living a life together, and knew that together we could walk out the firestorm stronger than we'd been  when it started. It didn't leave a lot of room for change, even at the moment of marriage.

And on my end, the big cosmic shift of fireworks going off and choirs of angels singing to let me know that my world was changing occurred way back the moment I met Bunny. So I wasn't really expecting a repeat performance of that: the universe had already given me the celebration of coming home to the person I was supposed to be with.

For us, on the surface, marriage has changed absolutely nothing. Our day to day lives function the same, we're doing the work on getting bank accounts in order but we've already agreed on how the family budget runs (and it's an extension of how the old budgets ran), and we love each other just as much. Oh, now Bunny gets to call me "wifey" or "his lovely wife" depending on his mood and I get to call him my "wonderful husband". Our key pet name for each other is still "lover", though, just new ones have been added to the mix. I get called pretty more often now, but that's not a big change.

Underneath, though? There I'm not so sure. It's hard to describe but still there's this subtle feeling as if this one extra thing has shifted into place in our relationship in a way that doesn't actually affect anything but we can still sense it. The only way Bunny or I know how to describe it? Our relationship is exactly the same, but way more awesome. It took some time for us to recognize that extra awesome shift, but it's definitely there in a very subtle way.

It's strange how many different expectations we had going into the whole "being married" thing, and how we were exactly right and exactly wrong at the same time. But being here, married, now? It feels amazing.