Living Our Values as Parents (or By Choosing Not to Be Parents)

Years ago, long before I became a mother, I was riding in my boss’s car along with several other co-workers on our way to an off-site department lunch.

“So, Cheryl, do you have any children?” one of my co-workers asked my boss.

“No,” replied my boss. “Children were never on my to-do list.”

I’ve always found that reply amusing, but it’s only been recently that I really understood that what she was saying was that she was prioritizing her career as a scientist over a potential role as a mother. This doesn’t mean that she couldn’t see value in a mother’s role, it just wasn’t her value for her life.

This, to me, is the essence of voluntary simplicity: Looking honestly at our values and aligning our lives with them, even if this means our lives don’t look like the brochure. This is a simple thing to say but it can be difficult to implement because often saying “yes” to one thing means saying “no” or at least “not now” to a slew of others.

Periodically I ask my husband if he’s happy with the amount of time he spends with our kids.

His answer is always yes.

“I like spending time with them, but I also like the work that I do,” he explains.

As a scientist engaged in biological research, he’s only recently been in a “job” job. After his bachelor’s degree, he went to more than ten years of school and postdoctoral training. He didn’t get his first post-post-doc job until he was solidly in his 30′s. He’s devoted much of his life and his time to his career. It’s something he values and that he finds enriching. Through science, he believes he can make his mark on the world and do the most good he can for humanity.

He values his children and his role as a father. He is very engaged in our children’s lives, devoting essentially every hour he’s home in the evenings and on the weekends to being present with them. He arranges his schedule at work so he gets in to lab before the kids wake up in the morning and comes home in time for dinner between 5:00 and 5:30 so he can see them and play with them and read to them before they go to bed.

He wants to make a mark on the world through his role as a father as well as through his role as a scientist.

On the other hand, I don’t have a career calling, at least not that I’ve discovered. I enjoy writing, and I can see how I could make a mark on the world through my writing. But being a parent is the primary way that I believe I can make my mark on the world. Parenting feeds and, I think, enhances my writing, so the two are intertwined, but I prioritize my parenting over my writing. As a result, I spend the majority of my time with my children and write in the evenings and on weekends.

My husband and I have arranged our lives around these values. The way this looks in our lives is that my primary occupation is at home with our children and his primary occupation is at lab with his scientific career. We’ve done this even during the lean postdoc days in the high-cost San Francisco Bay Area where we lived simply but just barely voluntarily. Even then, we didn’t feel like we were sacrificing because we were living our values.

Our roles are synergistic in a way that reflects and supports the priority we place on our values. My husband’s salary as a scientist is, for now, the sole source of income for our family. My caring for our children and teaching them at home allows him to work at a career he loves and bring home the money that supports our family’s needs. When he’s home and spends time with our children, he supports my writing.

When we decide to live by our values, we have to admit that we’re prioritizing many important things, which can be a difficult process. Our family is arranged in one of the couple of ways that are deemed acceptable by our culture, which I think makes it a little easier. The way my husband and I articulate our values vis-à-vis children and career is pretty darned traditional and therefore (besides the homeschooling) accepted by our culture, but if our values were switched, I think we’d end up with a little more difficulty.

Even if it accurately reflected my family’s values, it would be less acceptable for me as a woman to say, “You know, I love my kids and value my role as a mother, but I see my career as the way I’ll make my mark on the world. I’m comfortable leaving the daytime child-rearing to others and having my time with the children after work and on weekends.”

The answer a woman must give to be a “good mother,” the only acceptable answer, is that she’s torn up inside about leaving her children, but that she has to work to bring in more money. Even women whose spouses have very high-paying jobs express this “I need to work for the money” when they choose to continue their careers after birthing their children.

Even though my husband and tons of other men state clearly their priorities for career over child-rearing and it’s seen as normal and even admirable, if a mother makes a statement like this, she’s callous or unmotherly. I don’t know why this is.

Whatever the reason, any deviation from the cultural norm is viewed with suspicion. If he valued being with our children over having a career (and acted upon that value), my husband would be looked at with raised eyebrows and given less societal support than stay-at-home moms get (and that’s precious little to start with).

And if both my husband and I had careers that were central to our lives and our fulfillment and we chose not to have children, woe betide us for being so selfish as to recognize and live by our values. It would be more culturally acceptable if we had children anyway and then outsourced their upbringing, complaining all the while that it sucks but we both need to work to support the financial needs of our family and sacrifice time with our children to do it.

I don’t get why this is. Don’t all children deserve to be raised by people who value child-rearing over essentially everything else in their lives and who don’t feel acutely in every moment that they’d rather be somewhere else, doing something else?

Here’s the thing: when we live in line with our values, we don’t feel it as a sacrifice. We might feel pressure from family, friends, and society at large to make different choices, we might look wistfully into an imagined alternate future, but we’ll ultimately know that we’ve made the right choice based on our values.

A sense of sacrifice is a sure sign we’re not living our values.

I spend my days with my kids, and I don’t feel that I’ve sacrificed my career because I’m living my values. My husband works full-time outside the home and doesn’t feel that he’s sacrificed time with his kids because he’s living his values. Even though we each complain on the bad days, the way we’ve arranged things works for our family because it’s in line with our values. A feeling of sacrifice would signify that we’re not living in line with our values.

We don’t feel like we’re sacrificing. We feel like we’re simply living.

Adventure for the Non-Adventurous

Wasn’t it about this time last year when I was fixated on the idea of selling everything and moving into an RV? I wonder, if I looked at my journals from the past two decades, if I would find that every late-winter brings me this “itchy feet” sensation.

What’s interesting this year is that my husband seems to have it, too.

“I think we should have some kind of adventure,” he said last weekend.

“Adventure?” I repeated, one eyebrow raised. “What kind of adventure?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe a road trip.”

“We’re going to western Mass in July,” I said. “We could drive up to Acadia and camp sometime. We could drive down to DC and see my dad, visit some museums. Oh! We could fly to Mexico and visit Tucker and Victoria before they head across the Pacific!”

“I’d like to see Vermont,” he replied.

“What about the big Canadian/Upper Midwest road trip you wanted to do?”

“I still want to do that,” he said after a slight hesitation.

“We’ll need to plan it, then. Hey! We could camp all through Canada on our way to Detroit!”

“Umm…” my husband replied.

“The kids and I need passports, and to get those, we need you to come with us to the post office between 10 and 3 one day.” It doesn’t take much to get me off and running in planning mode.

“Okay. Let’s do it. We’ll make the deadline for applying for passports March 1st.” I was impressed by the decisiveness of his reply.

Of course, we’ve not done anything else towards this goal. The passport applications are still collecting dust on the desk. We’ve not investigated routes or campgrounds or timing for a Canadian adventure. We’ve not seriously considered whether our car is big enough for camping equipment for two weeks AND the family.

And it’s not all my husband’s fault. I talk a lot about taking adventures, but when it comes to action, I’m as guilty of procrastination and equivocation as he is.

As much as we’re craving adventure, we realize that our definition of “adventure” is different than other people’s. For us, the 30-mile trek into Boston is preceded by weeks of planning (and then eventually scrapped because it’s too much work/the kids won’t get much out of it/parking will be a pain/it’s too expensive/what will I eat? I missed the Pompeii exhibit at the Museum of Science for all of these reasons).

We will, with little hesitation, pull up stakes and move across the United States, something that other people find unthinkable, but at the same time, the trip to visit my dad in DC has been postponed indefinitely because I can’t decide if he’d be offended if I bought a salad spinner, brought along my Vita-Mix, and filled his fridge with kale during our visit and because between train, plane, and automobile, I can’t think of any way to travel alone with my children that would actually be “pleasant.”

But should adventure be pleasant? My friend from middle school, Maggie, who recently spent a year traveling around the world, wrote about sixteen-hour bus rides with no bathroom facilities (and along narrow roads cut into the sides of cliffs…not sure which part I found most unnerving about this). She wrote about trips down the Nile that resulted in her contracting some kind of parasite. She wrote about almost getting kidnapped and robbed by a motorcycle cab driver in India. She wrote about drinking some unidentifiable liquor during a power outage somewhere in Africa. She risked injury, illness, and death on three continents, and this was all still part of her definition of adventure. It falls more in my definition of “near-death experiences.” Chances are, it’s a little of each.

What, then, is our (our family’s) definition of “adventure”?

I’ve referred to taking the kids on the bus through downtown Salt Lake City as an “adventure.” There was an element of the unknown. We were doing something out of the ordinary, although not unprecedented. It required ignoring the unpleasant (like the smell of the guy in the seat in front of us) in favor of focusing on the pleasant (my son’s amazement at finding himself inside this huge vehicle, my daughter’s elation at getting to pull the cord to request our stop, my own satisfaction at successfully reading a route map/schedule). But there was little danger of physical harm or even of getting lost. If all else failed, we knew how to get home thanks to the grid system upon which the roads are laid out (my daughter learned early on to ask, “What South are we?” a habit that’s less helpful in New England). And I always traveled with ample snacks and clean water, in case we found ourselves stranded on State Street where there would be nothing but fast food places and adult bookstores (like the one advertising “used” magazines. Ew).

Tucker assures me that adventure is different for different people and that my little anxiety-filled adventures are just as adventurous as his family’s upcoming voyage across the largest ocean in the world. I have the sense that this is at least mostly true, but I’m not  entirely convinced.

I mean, which do you think sounds more adventurous? “We took our two kids and sailed our boat across the Pacific Ocean,” or “We took our two kids to the children’s museum in Salt Lake City via public transit”?

Or how about, “we camped our way across Canada from Boston to Detroit with two kids and a salad spinner?” (Yes, I know neither Boston nor Detroit is in Canada, but there’s some Canada in between the two cities.)

 

Sitting With Disequilibrium

I’ve been feeling very much off-kilter for the past couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard to just let myself feel off-kilter, but I much prefer to take a situation and reason it into submission if it’s not turning out the way I want it to. I’m a big fan of creating plans. And schedules. And lists. And making major changes and not waiting around for the dust to settle before making another major change.

But I’m still meditating. Still meeting with myself every morning to confront the very noisy silence and the restlessness in my body that just wants to get up and DO something.

Every morning I whine to my husband that I just don’t want to meditate.

Every morning I find piddling little tasks to postpone the trek downstairs to the yoga mat and the meditation cushion. I need to put these beans on to soak. I need to look up that smoothie recipe for breakfast. I need to set out today’s homeschool books in a line on the table, even though they’re all going to get stacked out of the way before we can start the math lesson anyway.

And then I pout and stomp downstairs and sit or stretch or sit and stretch, even though the struggle to get there is tough and the short-term benefits are minimal. Many times these past couple of weeks I’ve lamented that meditation “just isn’t working anymore.” But still I keep on doing it.

This week, though, several things have come together to help me feel a little more optimistic and to see that maybe the meditation is still “working,” it’s just on a different time scale than the one I’ve got in my head.

The other day, Leigh from Live Your Bliss posted about the detoxification effects of the Gerson Therapy for cancer. The “lots of veggies” shift I’ve made in my diet over the past month hasn’t been nearly (nearly) as intense as the protocol for the Gerson Therapy, but it’s still significant. Leigh’s post reminded me that perhaps some of my sense of disequilibrium (physical and emotional) is a sign that my body’s adjusting to the healthier diet and letting go of the cravings and other things I don’t need.

The weather has been warm and the children cooperative, so I’ve been able to walk every day this week. On Monday, we took an hour-long hike and found our first letterbox. On Wednesday, the kids and I walked to the library and back (5 miles round-trip). Tuesday and Thursday, the kids and I took little 20-minute walks around the neighborhood, the toddler in the mei tai on my chest and zipped into my jacket, my daughter’s hand in mine. I don’t know if it’s the vitamin D or the fresh air or the exercise or just the promise of spring (or the oxytocin from the pleasant closeness with my kids), but walking has brought me a sense of peace each day.

Then today my daughter’s history lesson was about ancient India and included a brief retelling of the story of the birth of Siddhartha, aka Buddha. After our walk, the kids and I snuggled on the bed and read Buddha by Demi, which included more details about Siddhartha’s life and short versions of two of his famous parables. As I read aloud about Siddhartha’s life and teachings, my son fell asleep in my arms.

What beautiful reminders these all have been to live in the moment.

This isn’t to say I’ve not done some scheduling and planning (exhibit A: the detailed and unrealistic homeschooling schedules littering our dining room table). But just as in meditation when I bring my mind back to the present when I find it’s begun to wander, I’ve been gently bringing myself back from the plan-schedule-ruminate rut I usually fall into so easily. These things—the walks, the blog post, the picture book, the snuggling with my kids—have all helped bring me back.

I’d love it if I were back for good, if I no longer had to work to just be present. But I’m here now. And that’s about the best I can do.

And today I had an awesome (and enormous) salad with watercress, romaine lettuce, walnuts, pears, and dried currants. Awesome salads don’t hurt, either.

An Uncomfortable Silence

Today is the last day of Week 7 of my self-guided Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program (based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living). This was the week when I didn’t use any of the recordings for my yoga or meditation. While I made it through the week, I found meditating in silence to be very challenging. My mind went 770 miles an hour without Jon Kabat-Zinn’s instructions to focus on. I guess that’s the point, but I definitely found it challenging to be all alone with my thoughts. They’re very noisy without something else to drown them out.

Up to now, I’ve used a combination of several different recordings. There’s a Jon Kabat-Zinn CD I got as part of the in-person MBSR class I did (in part) in Utah. I’m not sure where my instructor got it, although it might be from The Mindful Way Through Depression audiobook. On the recording I have is a 30-minute body scan track, and then three 10-minute sitting meditation tracks that each build on the next so you can choose a 10-, 20-, or 30-minute sitting meditation practice. I enjoy using all of these tracks. I also occasionally use the Sitting Meditation track from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 1 recordings. It’s 45 minutes long and includes much of the same guidance as the choose-your-duration recording I have.

For yoga, I use one of four recordings. My favorite is Shiva Rea’s Yoga Sanctuary. I use the Lunar Practice CD and do tracks 1, 2, 3, and 6 for a 40-ish minute practice. I sometimes add in track 4, too, which is inversions, but I’m not a huge fan of shoulder stand since I had kids, so I don’t do it that often.

I also use Lauren Peterson’s The Yogi’s Companion CD, although that’s a little more intense and takes a little more concentration to keep myself from striving to do more in my practice (rather than staying present with my breath and body).

The other two recordings I use for yoga are the 45-minute yoga practices in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 1. They are very gentle and really promote a connection with the body. The only reason I prefer the Shiva Rea Lunar Practice is that it opens up my muscles more. Regardless of which I use, I feel warm and rested after I practice yoga and ready to start my day.

This week, instead of using these recordings, I mostly used an awesome free online meditation timer to keep track of my time in sitting meditation or practicing yoga. I downloaded mp3′s for 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-minute durations (with the Tibetan Bells option, a 40-second delay, chimes every 10 minutes, and three chimes to signal the end of the practice), and burned them to a CD so I could listen to them while practicing down in the basement.

Two mornings, I tried keeping track of time by listening to music I used to use while practicing yoga back in my early 20′s. Charles Sorgie’s Odysseys Into Alpha: Prana is very relaxing and worked well to keep me focussed on my breath for a 45-minute sitting meditation (incidentally, I once listened to this on my headphones while getting a root canal). The other morning, I did a shorter sitting meditation followed by a more energetic short yoga practice. For this, I programmed some tracks from Land of Forever by 2002 and used the song changes to tell me when to move from meditation to yoga.

I liked the music pretty well, but I found I preferred the silence. Such as it was. My son almost always wakes up about halfway through my practice. I hear my husband greet him.

“Hi, Buddy!” he says.

“NO!” our son replies.

He accepts no substitutes in the morning. When I come up from my practice, I find him sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting for me.

“Mommy!” he laughs and holds out his arms.

While I prefer to have a little more time to make some breakfast and maybe—if the stars are aligned—read for little while before being on Mommy duty, it’s difficult to maintain my disappointment with his sweet little arms around my neck and a wet little toddler kiss planted on my cheek. It’s a little more challenging when he starts in with the 2-year-old “NO!” to everything I say, but after a good mindfulness practice, I’m in the mode to live in the moment and appreciate the sweetness while it lasts.

For Week 8—the final week of the program—Kabat-Zinn sets us free to choose just how we want to practice. Sitting meditation, walking meditation, body scan, yoga, music, guided meditation cds…it’s our choice.

I’m a little nervous to have this much freedom.

A Recap of the Past 7 Weeks:

• My Bold Plan for 2012 (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• The Mindful Path to Perfection: You’re Already There (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Mindfulness Meditation, Week 1 of 8: Done (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Still Here: Week 6 Retrospective and Week 7 Preview (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Week 3: Still Sitting (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Mindfulness and Social Media: Reflections on the First Three Days of My Bold Plan (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• On Overcoming a Jinx (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• Yogariffic (With Kids!) (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)
• A Different Kind of Hedonism (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)

A Treat for the Macabre Child in Me: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let’s say I give this book 4.5 stars. I’m not sure it rises to To Kill a Mockingbird levels (my 5-star standard), but it’s pretty darned awesome.

When I was a child, I devoured everything macabre I could find. I was reading Edgar Allan Poe when I was 9. And not just his famous stuff, but his weird Victorian “alarms built into the coffin,” “fears of being buried alive” stuff. I read everything I could find about vampires and ghosts and telekinesis and, to a lesser extent, werewolves (because they seemed so much less plausible to me).

I loved reading The Graveyard Book as an adult, and I would have loved it as a child. I wonder, though, how old my daughter will be before I think it’s right to read to her. She’s almost 7 now and it’s not the death stuff I’d be afraid of exposing her to. We’ve already read Bambi: A Life in the Woods and are halfway through The Long Winter. Not to mention, we just read about the Punic Wars and how Hannibal drank poison when Carthage was sacked despite his incredible elephant-assisted victories against the Romans. I doubt she’d be bothered by the death part of this book any more than Nobody is.

The thing that would keep me from reading this book to my daughter right now is the intensity of the action. It’s so suspenseful and desperate, so full of deceit and doubt. It’s wonderful and human, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that part of the world to be revealed to her yet. Although I suppose I’d rather it be revealed to her in fiction before it’s revealed to her in real life.

At any rate, what was it I loved about this book? I think it’s mostly what I love about all of Gaiman’s books. They are contemporary but they closely link the present with the past. They remind us that the fears and worries and hopes that we have now are shared with those who came before us. Gaiman taps into this allegory, this timeless mythology that touches me at some very basic level.

That’s not specific at all. Specifically, I love the language. I love that I am in the graveyard. It’s one of the things I enjoyed about Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry. I remember walking through the cemetery near my Midwestern university and feeling the peace and the timelessness of the place. I long for the warmer weather so I can drag my children along as I traverse the New England churchyards. Gaiman brought that sense of peace and wonder and awe at the passage of time to his descriptions of the graveyard on the hill. It felt like home, in an odd (and rather cold) sort of way.

In addition, I like the way that Neil Gaiman’s books remind me that there is a real person writing the book. Granted, that’s a rather uncomfortable reminder since it carries with it the implicit “why haven’t you written a novel?” question, but it’s also reassuring that I could still, one day, perhaps, maybe, publish a novel of my own (that people will praise and pan on Goodreads and then forget about).

I could oversimplify things and say that this is at its heart a coming-of-age novel. Certainly the concept that home changes when you leave it is present for Nobody Owens, that no matter how much you long for the comfort of the place you call home, it changes as you change, and when you try to go back, you find that it isn’t the place you remember.

But it feels like more than a coming-of-age novel. Maybe that’s just because I’m on the Owenses’ side of the parenting adventure rather than Nobody’s now, though.

Bottom line: I liked it a lot. And I will be watching for the time when it seems appropriate to read it with my daughter (and my son, but he’s still on Cookie Monster, so it might be a while longer for him).

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Book Review: Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet

Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn’t Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies’ Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding by Gayden Metcalfe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a decent little book. There were a few spots that had me laughing out loud (like the woman who didn’t want to sit near a little boy in a tuxedo because she didn’t want a homunculus sitting in her lap) and many, many more that had me smiling.

While this book highlighted the fact that North Carolina (the only place I’ve lived in The South) is much, much different from the Delta, it did explain a couple of things I considered odd at a couple of the weddings I’d attended there. And I’m notorious for leaving early when I’m a wedding guest, which, according to this book, makes me quite rude. I did, however, send out my thank-you cards within just a few months of my own wedding, so at least I got the most important wedding-related thing right.

I do regret having to return the book to the library before I had a chance to try some of the recipes on my family.

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Book Review: Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman

Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I like the concept behind the eating plan in this book, but I found the book itself longer than necessary.

I heard the “one pound raw, one pound cooked” daily recommendation for vegetable consumption years ago and have been gradually attempting to modify my diet accordingly for some time. This book helped me to better conceptualize just how I could eat this much plant matter each day. It also helped me recognize that what I’d always considered “hunger” or even “hypoglycemia” was nothing of the sort. And I’m enjoying the recipes, especially the smoothies (but not so much the romaine/cashew butter/banana wraps).

I just think a pocket guide would be sufficient to get the ideas across, especially since I’m not persuaded to make major dietary changes based on “before” and “after” pictures.

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Book Review: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very fun book. The layering and interweaving of the stories felt a tad contrived, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment following Shadow through his various adventures.

There were some interesting ideas about America and Americans, about faith and what we as a culture hold sacred, and what the sacred becomes when we forget its origins and follow only the ritual (or when we forget even the ritual). There was also a lot about the nature of sacrifice. And, of course, some walking corpses and giant spiders.

Incidentally, I was thinking that Mr Nancy ought to join Toastmasters. I think he would enjoy getting up and telling his stories and getting applause from the group.

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Book Review: The Alchemist

The Alchemist – 10th Anniversary Edition by Paulo Coelho
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a cute story that I might have liked better had it been shorter and had it been a little subtler.

The part about talking with one’s heart (and the general oneness of existence) tied in with the kind of thing I’ve been looking at in my own life and meditation practice, so that part was a little more interesting to me. But I really would have appreciated if the author had employed a less direct manner of passing along the insights in the tale.

It’s too bad I missed the book club discussion of this book. I would have liked to have heard what the other members thought of it, especially after they all hated Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

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On Love and Marriage

We lived in California when same-sex marriage first became legal in Massachusetts. I remember seeing  Rev. William Sinkford, then president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, on television performing the first legal same-sex wedding ceremonies. I remember feeling incredible pride that I was a UU.

When we moved to Massachusetts this past summer, New York had just legalized same-sex marriage and the article I read mentioned that it had been legal in Massachusetts for eight years.

“Oh, yeah,” I thought, remembering seeing Rev. Sinkford on TV all of those years back. “This is the first time I’ve lived in a state where same-sex marriage was legal. Neat.”

Then a couple of months ago, my daughter’s flute teacher referred to her wife. It was in the context of her wife having pneumonia, which wasn’t cool at all, but her using the word “wife” had a powerful positive effect on me.

My thoughts ran something along the lines of, “I am a wife. I love being a wife. I have a husband. I love having a husband. She’s a wife. She loves being a wife. She has a wife. She loves having a wife.”

All of my adult life I’ve had friends who were in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships, marriages in all senses but the legal one. This was the first time I had shared the language of marriage with someone who was part of one of these relationships.

I was surprised at just how joyous I felt—and feel—about sharing marriage with my friends who were previously denied this right. I’ve never been a big fan of weddings (I once—to my shame—stepped aside and let the bouquet drop on the floor rather than catch it when the bride threw it). I can’t stand Pachelbel’s Canon, feel unaccountably annoyed when I hear that bit from 1st Corinthians, and just generally think a lot of the talk about marriage is corny and cliched.

But marriage equality may have pushed me over to the romantic side just a tad.

I love love. I love seeing people in love. I love being married, and I find that I love seeing happy married people, especially those who’ve not been allowed to marry in the past. It’s like a brand-new celebration! And I feel practically giddy talking about who’s taking whose last name (which is another major point of sharing as my husband and I chose to be unconventional with our name-sharing: we both hyphenated our last names).

I feel almost embarrassed at the intensity of the glee that I feel about marriage equality. I want to hug and congratulate every same-sex married couple that I see. I don’t, though, because that would be way too corny for me. And besides that kind of weird.

But this Valentine’s Day, even though I’m refraining from hugging people I hardly know, I wanted at least to share with all of you how happy I am to live in a state where all people who love each other can be wives and have wives, be husbands and have husbands, and be married, just like I am so thrilled to be every single day, even after more than 12 years.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you!