Our Time

~Tiffany

I picked this entry up and put it back down a couple of times before I was finally satisfied that it was done. Reasons: work, keeping up our home, adulting, a sick family member, life throwing us curve balls, and my own harsh inner writing critic. So here goes…

More often than not, Aly is the brains of this operation. I may troubleshoot when there are issues every once in a while, but when it comes to our day-to-day, I’m usually pretty happy following her lead. She’s the keeper of “the calendar.” Our friends know this term as the driving force behind every social engagement we attend, but for us, it drives doctor’s appointments, grocery shops, vacations, date nights, etc. On the rare occasion when I have deigned to make plans without consulting the calendar, disaster has ensued involving double bookings and hard learned lessons by yours truly. Our social life survives solely by this calendar and this calendar is kept solely by Aly for this reason. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have a say, it just means that I don’t touch it. See previous disaster to understand why.

We’re busy. We have two cats, a house, a handful of friends we see regularly and no family in the area, which requires travel anytime a gathering is to take place, or that said family gets sick. On top of all of this, we’re each other’s best friend, and more than anything else in the world, we love to spend time with each other, doing anything or nothing. Part of the reason we waited to start trying to have children was because we knew how significantly our lives would change. We knew, though probably not to what extent, that the time, emotional, and psychological investment, a child/children would require, would be massive, and being willing to make those sacrifices was something we needed to come to an agreement on and something with which we needed to come to terms.

While we waited on Dorian a few weeks ago to sweep passed us, we spent countless hours watching Las Chicas Del Cable (Cable Girls) on Netflix, with intermissions of games of Sequence. This was our weekend. It was absolutely blissful and filled with laughter, cuddling, counting of slaps in this English dubbed novella we were obsessed with, and lots of cat purrs from Boo who just wouldn’t/couldn’t have an inch of space between herself and us. I leaned into Aly at one point and said, “Sometimes I worry that when we have children, we won’t have moments like this.” To which she responded, “Why do you think I wanted to wait? I wanted to hang on to this until we were ready to share each other.”

We’re at that point now. Or, at least about there, where we’re ready to share each other. We’re ready for our time to not be just ours and for that to not feel like such a sacrifice.

What will “Our Time” mean for us later?

It’s getting closer to Halloween and we’re getting into what isn’t really a Fall for Florida, but is a Fall nevertheless, which means that it’s time to decorate the house. This is a cherished tradition of ours. We’ve acquired all of our décor over the years together, or inherited it from Aly’s childhood (i.e. Mcdonald’s chicken nuggets dressed in costumes – the charm alludes me, but it makes her happy, so they take the prime spot, front and center, on our entertainment center every year).

Our decorating traditions go something like this: I bring in the bins from the garage that are labeled, “Halloween/Thanksgiving”. We start to unpack, placing things around the house. Aly moves everything I have placed into the exact right spot she has in her vision for this year. One or both of us comment that we’re missing a bin or décor. We inevitably find it, but it was unlabeled and we vow to not do that again next year. Then, we go out and buy more stuff to decorate with and fill another bin that we will inevitably forget to label for next year and that will be the unlabeled bin for the year to come.

All of these steps are time-honored and cherished. I’ve stopped taking offense when Aly moves anything/everything I put down and submitted to the fact that her vision will make our house look beautiful and perfectly decorated for the coming holiday. She makes our house, our home. I’ve come to realize that.

These moments, when we’re taking the time to make it homier, I wonder what role our kids will play. I mentioned this to her this year. I asked her in jest if she would move the decorations our children placed around the house. To which she responded, “When they’re asleep.” I barked out a laugh and loved her just a little bit more. Because the times we’ll share with our children will be ours as well, just differently.

I don’t doubt that it will take a while for us to find a rhythm or to even find that time exists again once we have a newborn, but I also have no doubt that we will, even if it means having to figure out how to live without the calendar that keeps our world from falling into chaos, and I’m looking forward to every second.