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| Chunky Monkey Ice Cream by Emilie Eats. This recipe makes banana problems go away. ;) |
We are doing it again. For the third time in our marriage, my husband Z and I are living in two places, maintaining two households, burning up the ozone going back and forth like crazy people on a mission to make a change in our lives.
The first time we lived apart, I was a grad student and my husband was a marketing guy. After I moved home, we had a baby and attended a wedding where one of the servers, an older lady named Dotty, told us she'd been married for 18 years and had never spent the night away from her husband.
"That ship has sailed," my husband said under his breath, biting back a little bit of laughter.
I immediately felt depressed. I like to win, and I would never be able to beat Dotty. 1-8 years. E.i.g.h.t.e.e.n. y.e.a.r.s. And then the bride leaned over and put it all in perspective: "Bl-e-e-sss her heart," my friend whispered. We were deep in the heart of Texas, and the bride, my BFF, was right--what kind of life is that? I immediately felt better.
But, even though we knew we would both travel separately in the years to come, we had no idea that six months later, we would be separating our households once again so that I could start a new job and Z could wrap up one and then join me.
I learned a lot about Z in those two separate living situations. I learned that if I needed to talk to Z about anything more complicated than a Seinfeld rerun, I had to call him in the sweet spot of morning--right after he got to the office, but before someone called him with a brand standards emergency.
I learned that, if left alone too long, he developed scary obsessive habits. The first time we lived apart, he took up running and lost so much weight that I barely recognized him.
I learned that living apart is hard to do, and I learned that re-entry--combining households once again--sucks even more.
For one thing, there's the banana problem. The second time we lived apart, our then-little guy loved bananas, but neither of us could confirm if the bananas were at one house or the other, so we kept buying bananas. Z's best friend tells the story about how he went to the freezer for ice one day only to discover that the freezer compartment was completely filled with frozen bananas. Some had been peeled and bagged and some had just been stashed, still attached as a bunch, to keep them from rotting on the counter, where, inevitably, two, sometimes three more bunches of bananas waited and ripened. The whole situation became ridiculous.
Things are so different now. The baby boy we had right after grad school is now a Teen and has been joined by a sister who is a Tween. We have breakable dishes that mostly match, math homework, themed birthday parties, a cat, and a healthy ratio of counter-to-freezer bananas. Now that the Teen and Tween are older, we would stay put until they finish school, wouldn't we?
We thought so, until this summer, when an opportunity to move our family from the northeast to the southeast presented itself. This meant no more snow shoveling, and opportunities for all four of us.
We never really discussed how we would split up the family: kids with me to move before school begins), Z hanging back to wrap up his job, finalize our house and moving, and some other things I'll get into in a different blog. We knew instantly how to make dual households work (except fort the partial-quotient long division math situation (seriously, wth?) because sometimes living apart is the path forward.
This blog is all about how to live apart, how to maintain dual households, and how to bring them together again. Do you have any questions you would like to ask? I will answer questions about everything but math.
