Every Rose Has Its Thorn

Although I've talked a lot about my past mistakes, things I didn't like about past relationships, and male/female relationships in general, and I am blogging somewhat anonymously... I try to avoid using this forum to complain about my wife or our marriage.

Yes, I'm happily married. My wife is an amazing woman and I'm deeply in love with her. She keeps herself in shape, she keeps her hair long, she feeds me (yes, these are important things), she's generally a great mother, she's very good about our money, she understands that even if she isn't in the mood that I still need some, she tells me how much she appreciates me. I could go on and on about what a great wife she is.

But I am not blind to problems in our relationship. I do have some gripes (and I know she does, too, but this is my blog). Everything is not perfect. But that’s an elusive goal in this life anyway.

I also admit that whatever complaints I have are partially my responsibility, because I chose this woman to be my bride and I do have some power improve things in the marriage.

I don't want to complain to others who actually know us, and perhaps by sitting down to write about these things I will find some sort of solution, even it is comes down to a simple attitude adjustment on my part. If you have any suggestions, I’m open to considering them.

So let me get to my first gripe.

Where We Live

This plays a role is most of my other gripes.

I had a spoiled childhood in terms of where I grew up. Oh, I didn't grow up in the lap of luxury. By regional standards, it was middle class. But the neighborhood was special. I know a lot of people think their hometown is special. But this place really was and still is. I can tell because news media types and authors who do stories involving the city say so. I can almost guarantee you have seen this place, even if you've never been to my state. A lot of my classmates who left town upon high school graduation have moved back, especially after having kids or their kids reach school age - not to live with family, but because of the town and schools. The public schools are some of the better ones you'll find anywhere, and kids who really lived in different districts would lie about where they lived in order to get in to them.

I had moved out of this town for college. A few years after graduating, I moved back to this town to be close to my job. Our state has traditionally been full of movers. Everybody came from somewhere else, and they don't stay in one place very long. But in my hometown, once a family moves in, they seem to stay for generations. So there is a small town feel, even though it is part of a sprawling megalopolis, surrounded by a continuous sea other cities on each side. People speak English, even if some form of Chinese was their first language. The signs are in English. I don't want to get more specific than that.

I grew up on a tree-shaded street with single family homes and seemed like most of the houses were homes to families who had children somewhere close in age to me or my siblings.

My wife grew up in a different part of southern California, and although she has fond memories of her childhood home, she has no desire to live in that neighborhood today.

When we were discussing marriage, the plan was to move close where I would be working as soon as it made sense. Upon marriage, I moved in to her place (a condo) because she was paying a mortgage and I was paying rent for an apartment, and so living in her place made more financial sense while we made plans to find a house. This meant pretty much exactly the commute I had moved from my "college" apartment to avoid. But it was temporary, right? Ah, but things have a way of changing after marriage.

When we were finally able to upgrade into a single family home, my wife did most of the looking. My work location had been moved by my employer, but the commute was still about the same. Although I had always wanted a single family home with yards and the whole bit, two things had caused me to be open to the possibility of instead upgrading to a larger condo or townhome in a better neighborhood than her condo: 1) It was clear that neither of us was prone to spend much time in the tiny backyard we already had, nor keep the weeds from growing – how were we going to handle having larger yards of our own? 2) Housing in our region is expensive, and we could be in a nicer neighborhood with more security if we went with a condo instead of a single family house.

My wife would not consider the possibility at all. She actually cited as a reason that the only person she knew living in a condo when she was growing up (wealthier than I) was a single mother. And this was supposed to be a reason not to settle in a condo. Plenty of axe murders have lived in single family homes, but so what? Once me wife gets an idea in her head, it is nearly impossible to change it.

Another restriction: No stairs. I’ll get into why later. But it never occurred to me that stairs would ever be a problem for her. It never came up while we were dating. A house with no stairs - that severely reduced our options. Of course, we had to be able to afford the place, too - no crazy no-money-down ARMs for us.

When push comes to shove, she wanted to live close to her family, and they lived close to our condo. I have wondered why she just couldn't have been honest about this before we got married, so I knew what to expect. She insists that she wasn't counting on me to pick up a job with an employer closer to the condo, so that makes it seem to me like she always felt this way. On the other hand, it is possible that she was influenced somewhat by things that happened after we got married. Moving closer to my job would bring us closer to my family - and although she praises my mother as a great MIL and grandmother, she has been bothered by some things about my family since we married, including that she thinks I am too close with one of my sisters.

Now, I think she may be projecting a bit of her family on my family here, because she has a sister and brother who have moved out of her parents' place together, moved back in, and have moved out together again. They "party" together, frequently sit in the hot tub together, and I think they have even messed around with the same woman (though the sister dates men). My siblings and I don't have a history of even hanging out together sober, much less partying and stealing make-out buddies from each other. Mostly, I keep in contact regularly on the phone with one sister, and we talk about our parents and siblings. That's about it. Mainly, my sister wants to know about my kids.

So, we ended up with a house in what I'm sure used to be a great neighborhood in an overall city that I really do like. But most of the residents in our neighborhood don't speak English as their first language if at all, graffiti is an issue, a woman comes by every evening yelling in Spanish in hopes that someone will come out to her on the sidewalk and buy tamales from her, and I kid you not - the other day I saw a rooster walking around (no, there isn’t a farm nearby). Police helicopters circle overhead most nights. The elementary school sucks, but "we're planning" to homeschool, so what does that matter? (Except I fear that may change, too, like planning to settle near work.)

I wasn't expecting to be able to afford to live in the neighborhood of my youth. But I did think it would be possible to live close to it, and we'd be closer to my work and family.

My wife repeatedly tells me she loves our house, so I'm glad for that. To be fair, in addition to wanting to be close to her family (that's something I will get to later), she probably fell in love with the interior of the house. I'm also happy that I do have my own man cave in the house. Unfortunately, we had to install a whole HVAC system when we moved in – using the duct spaces originally in place for the old heater, plus adding some - and the living room/dining room was an addition with a beautiful ceiling, but it doesn't have insulation. While the rest of the windows in the house are new, the windows in this room are older. So it isn't the most energy efficient, and the AC has to be run hard in the summer. And, of course, work as is far away as ever.

So this brings me to my commute, which I will discuss in the second installment in this series.