Overall, Things Are Good

Dinner with the in-laws went well enough. My mother-in-law and father-in-law showed up sober. My father-in-law and I didn't say much, just sat. MIL caught up with the kids, and my wife cooked. We ate dinner, talked a bit about how everyone is doing as we ate, and then in-laws left.

Earlier, my wife and told me her plan of taking her mother in another room and telling her that, from now on, if she takes one drink while we are around her, we will leave (usually, this will mean leaving their house). Anyone else can drink, but not my MIL. I told my wife that was not realistic, and since we know when she's going to get out of hand, we know when to leave. The problems have been when we've been in other locations where it isn't so easy to leave quickly without being rude to innocent people.

And then I learned a lesson I should have already learned:

Do not question. There's no point being anything but enthusiastically supportive of my wife's plans and decisions pertaining to her mother's drinking. Because I doubted the effectiveness and motivation of her plan, my wife got angry enough to once again liken my fornicating long before I knew she existed to her mother's drinking.

I have made this connection on this blog before. In my wife's mind, my not being a virgin when we married (very few men are, at that age), is all tied in to her father's adultery and her mother's drinking.

Warning: Gripe Session Ahead!

Let It Go, or Nip it in the Bud?

Married Man Sex Life brought up what he calls the "Second Date Rule". It applies to what you should do if your wife does something that is bad or is something you dislike.

If what she just did happened on the second date, would there have been a third date? If the answer is "no", it's probably best to say something about it and not just suck it up for the rest of your marriage. The behavior will likely continue without it being addressed.

My father had what he called the "second wife" rule. He saw all of these guys putting up with things in their second marriages that they wouldn't have - or didn't – put up with in their first marriage. So when my mother did something he didn't like, he'd ask himself, "If this was my second marriage, would I let this slide?"

Of course, he left my mother (or she threw him out, depending on who you ask) and claims to have "blocked out" much of his memory of that marriage and is now married to his second (and hopefully last) wife. So I guess the "second wife" rule may not work. But the "second date" rule just might.

This is one of my big problems, and I seem to have inherited it from my father. I tell myself, "I'm okay", and maybe I am. My first reaction to my wife doing something I don't like is "Can I fix this in my head?" Or, even when my wife (and it happened with girlfriends, too) asks, "It that okay?" my first reaction is to say "Yes" when I should think about it more.

The problem comes in when whatever the bad/annoying/inconvenient/dislikable/tedious/uncomfortable thing isn't a one-time thing, and happens many more times, even regularly, or turns out to be part of a larger pattern. Perhaps "I'm okay" has turned into "I can live with this" – but I really can't. The longer it goes or the more it happens, the more frustration or resentment or discomfort will build up until it explodes, surprising the other person who thought I could handle it. This kind of thing contributed to the demise of my parents' marriage because that is what my dad did, and my mother couldn't figure out why he "suddenly" had a problem with X, Y, or Z. So she chalked it up to him simply not wanting to be married anymore and looked at his legitimate issues as excuses to cover a determination to divorce.

So, a rule I have tried to use has been "Even if I can handle this for now this one time, could I handle it if it happens again? How about if it happens many "agains"? When I manage to do this, I might tell my wife, "That's okay this time, but I don't want this to become a habit."

I don't think there's a major gripe I have with my wife that I haven't covered in this blog. I think I've brought them all up, in varying levels of detail. And while I will not minimize the problems we do have, overall, things are good. We don't fight much. I enjoy coming home to her. I trust her. She's my partner and ally, not a competitor or saboteur. Of course, we would have more fights if I brought up everything I've griped about on this blog. Maybe I should bring up more of those things and endure some friction now instead of an explosion later.

Do you have a "rule" that helps in deciding what's worth bringing up?

Caffeine is My Friend

Wanted to check in with an update on one of my "gripes".

I am consistently getting way too little sleep these days. I'm talking like five hours a night being the norm unless it's a day off. I'll return from work, having been gone for over twelve hours, and my daughter will be itching to get out of the house and burn off some energy. It's too dark already these days to take her to the local park. Instead I drive to what is basically a mall and we walk around for a while in a place that is more interesting and safer than the local park.

Then we return home and have dinner long after I should already be asleep. I'm thankful my wife makes dinner, and she notes that I do not get enough sleep. When she makes that notation, I pretty much bite my tongue. Unfortunately, I can't think of any way of address the situation without depriving my daughter or hurting my wife's feelings/getting her upset at me... which wouldn't result in change anyway. She would probably point out that the situation is temporary. It might be. I fear that it won't be, though. It seems like there has been one temporary thing after another, and they've all had the effect of keeping us from settling into a routine we both think is best. My wife has always been somewhat of a homebody, and if she doesn't feel like she can keep the kids safely under her control while out and about, she's not going to do it. But are her feelings based on reality? I'm not sure.

I feel like crap whenever it is clear that my daughter hasn't burned off enough energy during her day – like when I have had to work an extra long day and I get home too late to take her out. She'll ask me to take here somewhere, and it kills me that it would be even more impractical than usual to grand her wish.

If we had moved close to my family, my daughter would be getting outside and getting her exercise while I would be taking care of work. I enjoy spending time with my daughter, but I can enjoy it at home with her, instead of prepping her for a drive, getting her into the car, and driving there, being in a location where I have to be alert and on guard, and then driving back.

My mother and sister both tell me I need to get more sleep. But my daughter has needs, too. She didn't create this situation. So her needs come first.

Again, my gripes are relatively minor. In general, I love my life.

Alcoholism, Infidelity – Part II

This blog entry is the last part (for now) of a short series dealing with my gripes. You can read the introduction here. You can read the first part of this gripe (the entry immediately prior to this one) here. I wrote about the things I'm thankful for about my wife and our marriage in this entry.

My wife knew she wanted to save her virginity for marriage before she even knew what that meant. She was told her mother married her father (as his second wife) as a virgin, and so she wanted to marry as a virgin. She grew up pretty much being a churchgoing "good girl", and when she was born-again as a college student, she had all the more resolve to marry as a virgin. In this regard, save for her mother, she is the black sheep of her family.

She knew from date one that I was not a virgin.

Marrying a virgin wasn't one of her requirements in a spouse, nor was it one of mine. Yes, both of us actually had a list of requirements in what we needed in a spouse, and it was very helpful. Actually, all other things being equal, I probably would have chosen a woman with a little experience over a virgin, for several reasons - one of them being that... I was not a virgin. While I admire moral resolve and appreciate my wife saving herself for marriage, whether or not my wife was a virgin was not important to me in the same way that, say, having common goals was. My wife was (and is) very attractive, and she never lived in the boonies, so I know she must have had many opportunities to have sex. So I knew that her virginity meant one of two things: 1) She had strong determination and self control; 2) She was not very horny. I suspected it was #1. Makeout sessions later confirmed my guess. But I'm getting off-track.

On that first date, after she confirmed through her questioning that I was not a virgin, I told her if that if it was going to be a problem that I was not a virgin, we should call it a night, move on, and save ourselves a lot of trouble. She quickly said it wouldn’t be a problem.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have told her at the end of the date to seriously reconsider the issue about not expecting her husband to be a virgin. Obviously, her emphasis on being a virgin meant certain things that had implications for how she was going to view her husband, based on his history. The past doesn't change, after all, and so again, there's nothing I can (or could) do about the past. I need to deal with the present in planning for the future.

My past experiences and her father's infidelity (and the infidelity on the part of her revered maternal grandmother) have been somehow connected in her mind. That's my explanation for some of her actions and some of her requests of me - plus, she has told me that "if they could cheat, anyone can cheat". Also, my MIL didn't "allow" any talk of her husband's first wife, even though he had two children with her. MIL could talk about her ex-boyfriend, though.

My wife's explanation for her postnuptial behavior, which goes against her "it's not a problem" assurance, is that she had no idea that once she experienced the intimacy of sex herself, her feelings would change. She said she didn’t know it was going to be this way until after she experienced it herself. Thus, things that didn’t bother her before now bother her – that's her explanation for the change in her attitude that she admits to having.

The attitude change has manifested itself in various ways. She distrusts me almost as though I have behaved like her father. She wants me to report to her any contact (e-mails, instant messages, etc.) I have with anyone I dated, no matter how mundane, as I remained friendly with most of them – which she knew early in our dating. She insisted I drop all contact forever with one of them. There is one anomaly to this, where my wife is supportive of ongoing communication with my ex-fiancee and her husband. Usually that means the once-in-a-blue-moon phone conversation that takes place in front of my wife, as we all like to talk with each other. I suppose our ongoing contact with my wife’s most serious boyfriend from the past (whose penis she handled many times... they were together for years) has something to do with this, as she probably feels obligated towards some "fairness" in this area. Probably because of her feelings, I have let contact with all other past dates die off. While I know that a lot of people don't keep in contact, the thing is I was friends or somewhat friendly with a lot of these women before we started to date, and our partings were amicable.

She insisted I destroy "life drawings" (nude, in case you are not clued in) I had made with a longtime girlfriend as my model. (I was a de facto art major in college for a couple of years). She does not want me having lunch with female coworkers, saying that many affairs start exactly that way. There have been a lot of little things here and there where this attitude has reared its head.

I can’t see myself ever cheating on her, though I will be careful not to let my guard down anyway. I'm the kind of guy who enjoys pointing to my wedding ring, is quick to bring up my wife (positively) in conversation, and doesn't want to look at an adulterer when I look in the mirror.

The ironic thing I believe she is the one in our marriage more likely to cheat:

1) I honestly believe she is much more attractive to men in general than I am to women in general.
2) My experiences have revealed me to be a very loyal guy to the women I was with in the past without a commitment, and I take my vows extremely seriously.
3) Her family has the history of infidelity, not mine. As far as I know, nobody in my family (parents, siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts) has ever cheated.
4) The curiosity factor isn't there as much for me, due to my past experiences.
5) She is the one who is in a house with bedrooms, showers, etc. much of the day without me around, complete with visits from people like repairmen.
6) I have more to lose.

I don't know... maybe all of that doesn't matter because I was not loyal to what at the time was my unknown-to-me future wife. Maybe, statistically, I am the one more likely to cheat because she exercised more self control before marriage than I did. Regardless, I'd rather jump in front of a truck than cheat.

I have to believe that things would be different in our own marriage if her father had never strayed in his. Her father, past infidelity and alcoholism-enabling aside, is the sweetest guy. The infidelity is far back in the past now - his mother-in-law died and my mother-in-law, with her mother gone, finally cleaved to her husband, which she should have been doing since their wedding. MIL, by the way, is great - when she is sober. We simply can't count on her to be sober, unfortunately.

Lovemaking before I go to sleep is often not what it should be or doesn't happen often enough because, as I explained in my other gripes, I'm getting far too little sleep to begin with. My wife has never rejected me, but the routine is that we put the kids to bed, she puts me to bed, and then she stays up a few hours later. She doesn't want to change her sleep patterns to match mine, and I don't begrudge her that time alone at night, since she is otherwise always looking after the kids, and sometimes me as well. Unfortunately, because of our different sleep hours, we don't cuddle or spoon as we sleep. Ironically, (or is it paradoxically?) I did cuddle and spoon when I would stay overnight with the women I was involved with in my bachelor days.

Having me "nap" and then getting to it when she is ready to go to sleep (and I have had some rest) doesn't work, because her orgasms tend to fend off sleep much the same why mine (like most men), ease me into sleep. She has never outright rejected me (bless her), but she does worry that I won't get enough sleep, often bidding me goodnight with an insistence that I get some sleep and a suggestion that we do something the next day – even though the next day's schedule is often going to be the same. I suppose I could fix this (my end of it, not her worries that I'm not getting enough sleep) by being more demanding. I actually believe I would lose weight easier if I was occupying my mouth with my wife more, so there's an added plus to letting me spend more time bringing pleasure to her.

Two other relatively minor sex items:

1) My wife shot down using food/sweets (think whip cream, chocolate syrup, etc.) in our lovemaking. She says she doesn't want to associate those things with sex. I don't understand why she would have that reservation. Wouldn't that make eating those foods even more enjoyable? Hmmm, now that I think about it, maybe she thinks it would cause me to eat more stuff like that and gain more weight? But it seemed like it was about her, not me, and she already eats sweets without gaining weight. Maybe she's just really clever it that regard; finding a way of shooting it down without saying "you don't need any more calories." Part of my attitude towards marital lovemaking is that anything is fair game and should be tried at least once if a) the spouse consents; b) it doesn’t involve any other person or animal; c) it can be done in relative privacy so as not to be immodest in front of others; d) it isn't harmful. Experimentation and "mixing it up" are good. Not every session needs to be epic or follow the same pattern or have the same tone or pacing. Sometimes, it is just play; other times, an intense expression of passion. So, I would like to use this as playful thing, but she doesn't.

2) My wife "took something off of the menu". While we did make it to our wedding night as far as maintaining her virginity in the physical sense, things did get too naughty leading up to that. She did something that has to do with fellatio - something I really liked a lot. Although she claims she never did it (or fellatio in general) before, she did it three times with me - each time of her own initiative, each of the three times she performed fellatio on me prior to the wedding. Since the wedding, she has been "unable" to do that particular thing again - and I know, because I've asked and we've talked about it. Thankfully, she has not stopped fellatio in general. Perhaps she is feeling guilty for having done it while we were engaged, though she has no problem (thank God!) enjoying cunnilingus as I do that on her - even though that happened before we married as well - nor the fellatio in general. To my wife's credit, she discussed this with her mother (how many mothers and daughters discuss the finer points of fellatio? But then my wife's parents were forthright about where babies grow from the earliest ages of their children) and my wife says is willing to work on it... just not right now for temporary reasons I'm not going to get into. Unfortunately, this thing is strong turn-on for me.

Hey, maybe all of my other gripes would bother me a lot less as long at that one thing was restored to the menu. ;-)

Well, there you have it. My gripes. As you can tell, things are generally great, considering these are what I have for gripes. I mean, other some other husbands, by their accounts, are living in hell, while I am usually happy.

Maybe I can make things even better? What do you think? Do you see a need for my wife in all of this that I am not meeting? If I can make things better or me, then that will be good. If I can make things better for her, than that would be better. Like I said, I know she could gripe about a bunch of flaws of mine. I try to praise and thank her several times a day, and she does the same to me. For the most part, I do feel appreciated.

Alcoholism, Infidelity: Not My Problems, Except They Are

This blog entry is part of a short series dealing with my gripes. You can read the introduction here. I broke this topic into two parts, so this entry is part one. I wrote about the things I'm thankful for about my wife and our marriage in this entry.

Disclaimer: I actually generally like my in-laws and we get along very well. My wife claims they really like me (and I let her know that my family really likes her).

We can't trust most of my wife's family as babysitters. (We can trust my mother, one of my sisters, and my sister's husband, but we don't live close enough to them.) The one sibling of my wife's we have relied on before has a baby of her own to deal with now, and as our children get older we may not want to leave our kids with them anyway, as their worldview is so different than ours and they vocally deride much of our worldview.

The others are eliminated for general irresponsibility and substance abuse.

My mother-in-law's main excuse for drinking is that my father-in-law, the guy she chose to stick with despite California’s marriage and family laws being generous to divorcing wives with higher earning husbands, fooled around many years ago with some of their au pairs. Why they had au pairs when my mother-in-law was a stay-at-home mother, I don’t know. Possibly because she was so busy doting on her mother, which is one reason her husband fooled around on her, according to my wife. (Example: MIL married as a virgin, meaning that her experienced, previously-married husband agreed to they wouldn't have sex until they were married. My MIL was content to sit and talk with her mother into the night after the wedding reception – a sign of how the marriage would be.)

Or maybe she was already getting drunk. I don't know.

Of course, any excuse will do.

As a result of this substance abuse and infidelity in my wife's family, I get to suffer.

I have never been drunk in my life.

Neither has my wife.

In her case, it is because she's never touched alcohol. However, most of her siblings also have substance abuse problems - which is why they can't be babysitters.

It is also why I can't enjoy some wine at home.

My wife knew I drank occasionally before we even had our first date. She did not insist on a husband who doesn't drink.

My father regularly drank red wine in the evening, and I can't remember any ill results. Heck, it probably allowed him to stay with my mother as long as he did. My mother drank very rarely. She saw buying drinks as a waste of money. My paternal grandfather felt the same way.

With my family and personal medical history, I should probably be drinking red wine for the health effects.

My wife, however, insists that there won't be any alcoholic drinks in her home, because of what it did to her family while she was growing up. Maybe I just don't get her objection since it wasn't a problem in my family and didn't mar my childhood.

I point out to her that she stocks our kitchen with ice cream, candy bars, and various junk-sweets, even though I really should lose weight and much of my family has struggled with being overweight. She refuses to stop bringing that stuff home. She just expects me not to eat any of it - and, mostly I don't. I need to cut back on the ice cream, though. Yet she can't afford me the same freedom when it comes to wine, even though she has never personally had a drinking problem, whereas I have long had a problem keeping my weight under control.

She has told me that I'm free to drink wine when we are out at dinner or at a reception or whatever, and she can be the driver on those occasions. That would be too rare to have the desired health benefit, more expensive, and I have a much better driving record than she does anyway, so I prefer to drive.

Oh well... enough of this gripe.

We'll get to the good part - sex - in the next part; what I think will be the last part of this series for now.

Things I Love About My Wife

Okay, I have a couple of more entries to make about my gripes, but it is time for some balance. Not too long ago, I got tired of seeing how much people were using online social networking to "publicly" (non-anonymously) complain and whine about their spouse and their marriage, and not enough time focusing on the things they do like and on the good things about their marriage. Or, they'd spend hours answering stupid questions about themselves, but would they spend any time on making their spouse’s life better?

The list below is based on something I posted for everyone, especially my wife, to see. It has been altered to protect her identity and I made it a lot less "safe for work" because, well, it is easier for me to do that here on this blog and her family doesn’t read this. (People gave positive feedback to my posting, though they did not follow suit and do the same kind of posting themselves, which is what I was hoping to spark.)

In no particular order, and certainly not all-inclusive, I present...
37 Things I Love About My Wife

1. She gave me a daughter.
2. She gave me a son.
3. She is raising our kids and doing a darn good job of it.
4. Her devotion to breastfeeding.
5. She has a high pain tolerance, which is why she doesn't complain even with the breastfeeding has meant lots of painful pumping.
6. She's good with my family.
7. The strength of her faith.
8. We share political views.
9. She has achieved her professional and personal dreams, despite her disability.
10. She makes family her priority and would do anything for our family.
11. She tells me and shows me that she respects me and loves me.
12. She believes in my dreams and generally encourages me.
13. She acknowledges and appreciates the little things I do.
14. She almost always apologizes before I can even say something (which is especially good, because I tend to stuff it instead of saying something).
15. She laughs at my jokes.
16. She generally looks out for me and cares about my needs.
17. She packs my lunch.
18. She greets me warmly when I come home.
19. She makes our dinner.
20. She is generally careful about money, to the point of researching things large and small before she purchases.
21. Other than a mortgage, she didn't bring debt to our marriage.
22. She does the laundry and washes the dishes and doesn't complain about doing it.
23. She's handy with fixing stuff around the house.
24. She shares one of my biggest hobbies/interests.
25. She has spent a lot of time organizing my stuff (see #24).
26. She doesn't make me guess what she wants for gifts.
27. She keeps her hair long.
28. Her cute nose.
29. Her beautiful breasts.
30. Her lovely ass.
31. Her willingness to shave her vaginal area bare and let me enjoy it after she has.
32. She's in shape and generally beautiful.
33. She's the best kisser I've ever kissed (there may have been as many as a dozen women I kissed before my wife, with three of them being LTR's.).
34. She has never rejected me in terms of providing some form of sex, even when her sex drive has been nonexistent (during pregnancy and some other unusual times).
35. That has usually meant fellatio, which I enjoy immensely.
36. She has asked for suggestions on how to be better in this area.
37. She married ME!

Physical Limitations

This blog entry is part of a short series dealing with my gripes. You can read the introduction here.

My wife is beautiful. Her body is a feast for the eyes.

My wife also has a physical disability. Before I write anymore about it, I want to state clearly here that I am well aware that no matter how inconvenient it is for me, my wife's disability is something she deals with day and day out, and has for a long time now – long before I came along, and that I should count my blessings that I don't have a similar disability. I did know she had the disability before we married, but I didn't expect it would impact our life the way it has. That could be my fault for not being more observant or engaging my wife in activities that would have revealed more. Or, perhaps in putting her best foot forward, she wasn’t as forthcoming as she should have been.

With that being said...

It didn't prevent her from working long hours on her feet, often with children. It didn't prevent her from walking hand in hand with me on our dates when we did a lot of walking. She doesn't collect disability payments from the government.

The disability is bad enough, though, that she insisted on having a house with no stairs, and it is also why she doesn't take the kids to the park (they may outrun her, or someone else may take them and outrun her), why she saves errands for my days off, and why she usually has me pushing her in a wheelchair as I walk around the very places she and I used to walk hand in hand - before we got married. When you throw in a kid or two in a stroller, we're limited in what we can do without another responsible person along to help.

The thing is - she never used the wheelchair before we married (she doesn't use it around the house, shopping, or most places). She didn’t even own one.

She seemed capable of doing just about anything before we got married. I imagined that one of the benefits of having her be a SAHM was that she could take care of more of the errands and getting the kids out and about while I was at work. I didn't understand how things would actually turn out, and perhaps there is a way I could have gotten a better idea ahead of time, so I could have planned better; like taking a kid somewhere with us for the better part of a day. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nieces or nephews that fit that age range at the time. If I understood more about her disability or how she thinks about it before we married (and her family situation), I would have insisted more forcefully that we live closer to my family, so that they could assist us.

There have been some get-togethers with other mothers and their kids, and sometimes she'll take the kids over to her parents' during the day, so it isn't like they never get out while I'm at work. Just not often enough.

In this aspect of the marriage, I really didn't know what I was getting myself into. Sure, you can marry an Olympic athlete and an accident or disease can leave them disabled... but that's not what happened here.

Since there was a little time between when some of her physical limitations started to change things (immediately after marrying) and when we started to actively try to have children, I did raise some concerns with her about taking care of the children. She insisted that she could handle taking care of them, and perhaps she finds everything hunky dory the way it is now. Whenever I bring up that the older kid needs to get out more, she gets defensive and doubts her ability to offer proper physical supervision. So that's why I try to take the kid out when I get home. On the one hand, I think I may have gotten a better understanding of the limitations if we had waited longer to marry. However, the year following our wedding, due to external factors, was very difficult, and going through that without being married to each other would have been so much harder. I can't do anything about that now anyway. I need to look for solutions.

I do try to be sensitive to her limitations. I probably overdo it in being protective of her, with her usually assuring me, "It's okay, I can do it." Getting the children out and about more is the one area where she is the one quicker to say she can't do it. The difference, probably, is that she is willing to take risks with her own comfort, but is overly cautious about the safety of her children.

A few members of my family could help. They'd love to either go along on errands to help keep an eye on the kids, or babysit the kids while she gets out. Ah, but we don’t live close to them. We live close to her family members, most of whom are eliminated from consideration as babysitters due to substance abuse. That's for next time.

At least we get to use handicapped parking.

By the way, I'm not demanding when it comes to things like how the house looks, or what we have for dinner. It's not like I expect her to keep the kids entertained AND keep the house spotless AND make a gourmet dinner AND run all of the errands – all with a disability. A "messy" house does not bother me, as long as it is sanitary. Laundry piles here, toys there... that doesn't bother me. And I'd be fine with peanut butter and jelly for dinner, though my wife often cooks up a nice dinner, and yes, she does the laundry - bless her.

My Commute

This blog entry is part of a short series dealing with my gripes. You can read the introduction here, along with the first gripe, which explains why I live where I do.

My commute and the traffic is almost always slow. Rarely is my drive "straight home" any less than 45 minutes. If there is an accident along the way, it will easily be over and hour. The going-to-work commute is usually shorter. But I don't mind the commute itself. Really. It is my alone time for the day. (My wife also knew from the start that I am a person who enjoyed my alone time, and she enjoyed hers.) I can think without interruption, I can listen to what I want to listen to, without considering what my wife would like to hear, or what I don't want my children to hear. For example, my diverse taste in music includes harder classic rock, whereas my wife isn't fond of that style.

The problem comes in that when I combine my long working day with this long commute. I always have a long working day because I have a short workweek. Sometimes, I need to work later than "normal", which makes the working day even longer.

This means that when I do get home from work, there isn't a lot of time to spend with the wife and kids or do anything else before I should be getting to bed. This means I almost never get a full night's rest during my workweek, and often it becomes more like an extended nap.

Hey, no problem, right? I have a short workweek, so I've got plenty of time for the wife and kids and relaxation on my days off, right? Well, sometimes. Usually my wife saves the errands for my days off, so that I can do them while she is watching the kids at home, or vice versa, or so that we can do them as a family. So my days off are often filled with running errands I thought my wife would be handling when we married as well as the typical honey-dos that any husband should expect.

If my commute was shorter, perhaps I'd have more time to spend with my family, more time to spend with the guys (that's practically nonexistent right now, as it has been for most of the marriage), or more time alone with more freedom to do what I want during my alone time instead of being limited to "thinking" or listening to talk radio/music as I try to avoid getting hit by other drivers.

Perhaps I will find employment closer to home. It's highly unlikely my current employer will be moving any closer to our house.

These days, I get home and try to get my "older" kid out to the local park for fun and exercise, and I can right now, but as the days grow shorter that won't be the case.

So why doesn't my wife do that earlier in the day? Well, it has to do with the same reason she didn't want a house with any stairs, and why she saves most of the errands for my days off.

I'll get into that in my next installment.

(Writing out these gripes reveals that I have very little to gripe about in the overall scheme of things. I have a job, I have a working vechicle, and most importantly I have a great wife and children. Still, I want to make things better, if I can.)

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.