Nesting

Our winter crop

No, we’re not pregnant. Sorry, moms. But we seem to be nesting, preparing ourselves for the day when we might be. Andy baked banana muffins today and is planning on pickling some peppers we got from a farm stand last weekend. We bought a replacement glass for the French press and yesterday I planted our winter crop, optimistic once again that the dirty dirt patch might draw in enough sunlight to provide a healthy bounty. (This time we’re hoping for chard and arugula.)

I’ve been traveling for the last four weekends, or put another way, I haven’t spent two days off in my home since August. I know, I shouldn’t complain. I feel pretty damn lucky to get to explore the Olympic Peninsula for work, to bask in the glory of Yosemite Falls with my strategic planning team, and to be married to someone who’s willing to pack up the car and head towards the sun. It’s a good life. But it’s also jarring, not to feel the comforts of one’s own bed without the impending alarm clock threatening to disturb your sleep. It’s distracting, seeing the piles and dust bunnies that accumulate without proper time or energy to attend to them.

Banana bread batter

So now we sit. We nest. We bake and can and plan. Trying to be patient while waiting to hear if we’ve been pre-approved for a loan, hoping for a nest of our own. Is there any chance we can scrape enough together to put down roots? Who might be willing to lend us a hand, to offer advice, to invest in our future? This place we call home can’t hold the growing family we hope to have some day. So we wait, and dream, having cast our net wide. Are we settled enough in our jobs? Will our past mistakes weigh heavily on our current standing? Can we make the monthly sacrifices necessary to set aside the required payment? These decisions are no longer up to us. So we wait. And bake. And hope we can.

RIPNT

As a child, I never thought I would keep my last name. My parents were not married when they had me. I was the intentional fruit of their love, an attempt to “stick it to the man” or rebel against mainstream society, or something of the sort. Thus, I was given the curse of the hyphenated name. Now, some combined last names can be lovely, but mine was neither lyrical nor easy to pronounce, especially by my own self, given my slight lisp, which hinders my enunciation. My middle name is the maiden name of my great-grandmother, who, as the story goes, was born when the boat docked, carrying her parents from France. I’ve always liked my middle name. It’s short. I can say it easily, with grace. I can’t remember when it was decided that when I became an adult I would drop my parents’ names and take my middle name as my surname, but this has been my understanding for as long as I can remember.

And then I married an historian. Andy comes from a long line of Risingers. They have family reunions every summer. They have special names for things (like those contraptions you use to keep your beer cold? You know, called “koozies” by the rest of us? Well, amongst the Risingers they’re called Darryls. No one even knows why).  And I know that it matters immensely to my husband that his middle name is the same as his father’s, who had it passed down from his father. Yet, given the importance of tradition to the man I married, he never asked me to take his name. In fact, each time it’s come up, he’s clearly been against it. “I never thought my wife would take my last name,” he says simply.  “I would never ask her to do that.” It turns out that Andy’s fear of what other people would think trumped his deeply rooted need that tradition be upheld. Given that on our first date he proudly pronounced himself a feminist, I shouldn’t have been surprised by his reaction. He scorns hype of any sort and has no patience for conformity. Yet, as stated above, he has a passion for history unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Slightly contradictory? Yes. Confusing? Sometimes. Especially now, as with marriage comes the complicated choice of deciding how to proceed legally as well as publicly, now that we’re officially considered a unit in both the eyes of that state as well as all our loved ones. So here were the choices as we saw them:

A.     Keep my hyphenated last name, retaining my connection to my parents

B.     Drop my last name and legally adopt my middle name as my last name

C.     Become a member of the Risinger clan

D.    Find some way to combine all our names into a new amalgamation

My concerns were as follows:

I’ve been a hyphen my whole life up until this point and to be honest, I’m kind of sick of it. My parents both moved our here in the 70’s and we rarely saw our extended family. I don’t feel like a strong connection to either side. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit it but there’s the vanity issue. I LOVE Andy’s last name. It rolls off my tongue like honey. Plus, it originates from the German word for “traveler,” which I happen to think is awesome. And then there’s the clan. I’ve always wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself and the small house in which I grew up in. The idea of having an extended group of cousins, aunts, and uncles that I can belong to both excites and calms me. Yet as my dad so bluntly stated, “I didn’t raise a feminist daughter just so she could throw away everything we worked so hard for.” Ouch. Okay, so maybe it was said a little nicer than that, but that’s what it felt like. But I totally get where he’s coming from. I don’t want to lose my identity, nor do I want to let go of my connection to my family’s past, tenuous though it might be. And how weird is it that I can just become a new person overnight? I don’t like the idea that I’ll have to go through all this hassle and paperwork, while Andy’s identity remains unchanged. I’d like for him to somehow be legally and publicly altered as well, both because that seems fair in the logistical sense but more significantly, is important to me symbolically. But every combination we’ve tried sounds awkward, or silly, or worse, forced. And my middle name? Well, if you probe back far enough, well it’s still some woman’s husband’s name that she took in place of her own. Seems we just can’t take patriarchy out of the equation, no matter what we do. And the biggest issue for me is in regards to the children that we plan to have someday. Having been a teacher in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, I can tell you, I’ve seen every possibility under the sun. The hyphens I understand, but what happens when hyphens get married? Because three (or worse, four!) last names just seems ridiculous. And then there are those families where the mom keeps her last name and the children take the dad’s. Respectfully, that’s a big fat no in my book. That just makes me feel like an outsider, like I’m not a member of the club. So what then is a hippie raised feminist to do? Andy feels equally torn. He doesn’t want me to lose my own history, yet he’s not quite ready to adopt a completely new last name for himself.

And then we applied for our marriage license. And it came time to decide. Ultimately, the decision was up to me. Not my dad, and honestly, not even my husband. With a flourish of the pen and a smile, I decide to become an Risinger. Do I still question this? You betcha. But it comes down to this: all those other things do matter, for sure, but I want to be a family unit and that matters to me more than anything else. And knowing who my husband is, I can’t think of a greater gift than I can give than taking his name, even though he didn’t ask me to, especially because he didn’t ask me to. And dad? I didn’t throw it all away. I’m still a hyphen, and I will always be a hyphen, and even more importantly than that, you taught me to think carefully, to follow my heart, and make my own decision. And do you know what he said, when I whispered this to him on the dance floor at our wedding? Well, he squeezed me and said, “Strella, I may not agree with your decision, but I will always stand by you.” And that’s what really matters.

You Expect Me To Do… What?!?!

Its a funny thing, being married. You find yourself excitedly pursuing and planning things that you never, ever, never thought in a million, trillion years you would do.

Gardening.

My Favorite Things (Culled from Google Image Search)

The word itself used to make me shudder and groan. When we kids would jokingly ask each other what our own-personal-hell would be, mine was ALWAYS gardening. Moving dirt, pulling weeds, pruning, cutting grass… ugh! I can feel the 11 year old in me churning.

This was partly because of allergies. I was, and partly still am, allergic to so many things I half-jokingly claim “I am allergic to Spring, Summer, Fall, and part of Winter.” It got so bad sometimes that my eyes would swell shut and I had to lay down. It was always really hard to balance this scourge with my love of running through four-foot weeds, climbing trees, and rolling around in the grass in my mock-war imagination.

It always seemed cruel and unusual punishment when my mom would ask (order) me to cut the grass, pull weeds, move dirt, etc. We would fight it out and, in exasperation I would say/yell “fine!” and go do the chore, only to return shortly after with swollen eyes and glistening nose.

Our Very Dirty Dirt Patch

Now, I find myself wanting to do exactly what I said I would never do. I want to grow things, plant things, make a beautifully landscaped yard. I have been researching drought-resistant, native plants. I ask mi Esposa what she thinks of bamboo, cacti, juniper, and lupine. There is a constant adding and removing of the mental landscape in my head. Weird, I know.

El Toldo

It is especially difficult because we have a very dirty dirt patch for a back yard. This is mostly because of the big, beautiful Live Oak Tree that filters the life-giving sunlight. Also, we rent. Read as: can’t do anything!

So, I continue to dream and we do what we can. Container gardening is what we do, mostly. No beds, just buckets. We shy away from the decorative and move toward the functional (an analogy for my life?). We grow some of our own food, mostly small additions to our diet. We have grown tomatoes, chard, some beans, and an array herbs. But mostly we grow a vision and an assurance of what we could accomplish if we had the space . . . and sunlight. We don’t have fully green thumbs (we seem to kill more than we grow) but we’re getting better and we still dream.

El Jardín

The Wed

Andy: “How many times am I allowed to use the word “epic” in my wedding vows?”

My Lovely Bling

Me: “Uh…none?”

Andy and I got engaged in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a wintry night in a hot tub under the stars. After an emphatic yes, I am proud to say that the next words I uttered were, “Where did you hide the ring? Please tell me it wasn’t up your butt!”

What followed was an eight month frenzy of crazy planning, crazy because we wanted to do everything ourselves. We were on a budget and being hardworking, self-sufficient people, who didn’t foresee this being a problem. What we didn’t take into account was that we both would be working all summer away from home, where we’d have no access to phones or computers. This was followed by the looked-over detail that come August, Andy would be starting his first long awaited teaching job, which left the planning up to me. Up until two days before the wedding, I couldn’t have been happier: We found the perfect site, a large estate we could rent for the weekend that was out in the countryside, about an hour from our home; I discovered crafting skills I never knew I possessed, as is witnessed by the bird-on-a-wire motif that I took on with abandon; I scoured Craigslist for décor that I thought would fit our style, including 50+ mason jars that we wanted to use for the cocktail and lawn games hour; and I read countless wedding blogs for inspiration (that is, until I discovered APW and abandoned all the others). And then the wedding weekend arrived. I was fine doing most things on my own, but when it came to coordinating myself as well as the massive numbers of people that kept rolling in and were looking to us, to me, for direction, I cracked. By the time the rehearsal dinner rolled around, everything was behind schedule and I was close to tears. But our families were together and the weather was glorious–85 degrees during the day, followed by a crisp fall evening, which was perfect for the pumpkin carving and hot tubbing we had planned. I took a deep breath, dragged my sister into the bedroom to help me find a clean shirt, pulled myself together and we had an amazing night.

Sunrise

The morning of the wedding, Andy and I woke up at the crack of dawn, overwhelmed by the daunting list of tasks we still had yet to accomplish. Yet before getting out of bed, we lay and watched the sunrise over the golden hills, taking in a moment of calm before the business of the day took us over completely.

What followed was an endless list of chores: putting up decorations (including the paper lanterns I worked so hard to find in our wedding colors), taking out and setting up the lawn games, arranging a dance area, setting up tables, chairs, and centerpieces, mixing the drinks, folding the Mad Libs Guest Book/ Wedding Programs, painting the tree for our guests to sign and “leaf” their print, writing out checks for all the vendors, and so much more. Andy’s big task was to build the chuppah and to keep himself from throwing up out of nervousness. My big task was to make sure everything else got done and to delegate wherever possible, which turned out to be harder than I’d thought. While I so wanted to have a DIT wedding, my true self took hold and I finally came to terms with something I’ve been denying for a long time: I cannot delegate to save my life. Somehow, most of the important things got done and I was whisked away to shower and get ready just as the guests started arriving.

Around that time, the glorious warm fall California day we had all been expecting took a turn. A cold front came in. Fast. By the time the ceremony started it had dropped at least ten degrees. And that was just the beginning to the seemingly never-ending list of things that went wrong. But you know what? Even with all the mix-ups (the programs we painstakingly created never being passed out, dinner starting late, the arctic gale that overtook us–forcing everyone inside and away from the lawn games, the candles that wouldn’t light, the ten pounds I gained in the year leading up to the wedding, the LED lights we forgot to put in our paper lanterns, the cute parasols we bought that we never opened, the cases of wine that were opened and never drunk, my bridesmaids walking up to the alter before Andy, his dudes, or our officiant), we’re MARRIED! And while the rest of the day was a bit of a mess, the ceremony was absolutely perfect. Andy and I married each other exactly how we wanted. Amidst our families and friends, we declared our love for each other that day and for all of our tomorrows. The flowers I held had been carried down the aisle by our family and friends, and were wrapped in a ribbon made out of my grandmother’s train.  He cried, I didn’t–just as we expected. And right at the moment we were saying our vows, a group of horses came to stand in the hillside behind us. I never felt more surrounded by love than I did on that day. Andy, the man who DOES NOT DANCE, held me in his arms and together, we rocked the night away. And you know, those ten pounds I cried over in the days before our wedding? Well, the dress fit better than ever before. Instead of lawn games, we had a bonfire. When the candles didn’t light and it was too cold to stay seated at our tables for the speeches, we piled inside.  Over a hundred of us crammed into the living room and what followed was such an intimate outpouring of love, I never wanted the night to end. Leaving late the next day after cleaning up, with the rain pouring down around us, blanketing the hills and washing away the last remnants of scattered cupcake, and pumpkin seeds, I turned to Andy, my new husband, and said, “Babe. You were right. That was totally epic. And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

Why This, Why Now?

Welcome to our new pursuit. This blog isn’t only to put our thoughts down but to share them with people we care about. Since we have friends and family all over the map, we figured it would be worthwhile to put our trials, tribulations, and successes in one spot.

Happy reading!