Monthly Archives: July 2007

It’s Not Typical


Yesterday it was over 30 C……in the house. I was actually sweating sitting still. As I sweltered, I remembered a certain Canadian telling me about the beautiful summer weather here in Alberta. The low relative humidity and basically milder temperatures in comparison to the sauna days of an Iowan summer. Yeah, that was all crap. It is just as nasty hot up here in the Great White North as every other place on this globally cooked planet. The difference between the Midwest and the western Provinces, though, is that back in the States we aren’t in denial about the weather. We have air-conditioned homes and here, the Edmonton paper gives people tips on how to use ice and fans to cool down rooms. 

Rob refers to me as a “weenie” when it comes to the heat. I take a tiny bit of exception to that. Until I bought my first home back in ’97, I had never had central air in my home or at work. The school buildings I worked in were old and barely had working heating systems, so AC was a fantasy. I can remember being nearly 8 months pregnant and simply informing my principal that he would need to find someone to cover my afternoon classes because the temperature in my classroom was well over 90, and I was going home. He simply replied, “Have a nice weekend.” Back in the days when my asthma was fairly mild, I loved to go for evening runs in the summer when it was so hot and humid it felt like being wrapped in a damp, steamy towel when you stepped outside. Sweat would be trickling down my arms and legs before I hit the end of the first block. It was nothing to knock out five or six miles on those runs and this was after a day spent at the pool with my friend and her young daughters. Swimming and diving. My summer wardrobe consisted on shorts and halters or bikini tops. I may have been born during the winter, but I was a summer baby at heart.

It was my asthma that killed my love of the dog days. Humidity of any kind is akin to slow suffocation. The accompanying congestion and coughing sent me in search of indoor activities and climate controlled venues. There is no AC  in the house where we are currently living, and to be fair it would be a waste of resources to install it. Heat waves here are short-lived, generally, and are an infrequent enough occurrence that people just ride them out. Kind of like we used to back in Dubuque when I was a kid. If it weren’t for the asthma, I would be less of a “weenie” (actually that is “weenie princess” according to my beloved who followed up that assessment of me with kisses and proclamations of how cute, lovable and utterly desirable it makes me.)  

Eddie and Brenda from across the street came over the other day to introduce themselves as I sat on the shaded front steps watching my daughter frolic under the Dora sprinkler. As is natural among the newly acquainted, the topic of weather came up. I was assured by both that the current baking we are receiving is not typical of a Canadian summer at this latitude. Not typical. Maybe not in the past. I think that it will likely become more the norm though, and that our next house is going to be centrally air-conditioned. (Rob says we are just going to keep moving north.)

Not Pregnant


My “monthly” (a term I thought was just another Canadian word but turned out to be my husband’s reluctance to use the word “period” in a non-punctuation manner ) didn’t arrive yesterday, and I spent a sleepless night worrying about the possibility of being pregnant at 43. It was not a silly worry. Pregnancy, as I remember it, is physically taxing, and I have been running on fumes for quite a while. There is also the added degree of difficulty that my age presents. I remember being quite put out with my OB-GYN for referring to my age as a negative when I was pregnant with my almost five year old daughter. I thought, and felt, that at 37 I was in the best shape I had been in my whole life. I think that had my late husband not gotten ill, I would have considered that pregnancy, and even the first six months of my daughter’s life, a challenging but not overly taxing life event that could have been repeated, God willing. In light of the actual chain of events however, I am not as keen on anything to do with the creation of new life beyond the initial fun stuff .

Rob and I had talked about having children of our own early in our relationship. True, we are middle-aged by social standards (Methuselah-Like by medical ones), but the fact  remains that we are both still in ”working condition”. It would have been foolish of us to ignore the issue though in a way we ended up doing just that anyway. He was concerned that I be sure I didn’t want any more children. His own were in their twenties, and while he was committed to the idea of my daughter, he was reluctant to start from scratch. But I had already put the idea of another child to rest. I truly had. I have no interest whatsoever in going through another pregnancy or experiencing childbirth and those mind-numbingly exhausting first months of a newborn’s life. I had quite unexpectedly ended up one of those militant nursing mothers who let their children self-wean and having only just gotten my daughter to give up “nursery” and sleep on her own, I selfishly wanted my body back.  I assured Rob I didn’t want another child.

But, for two people who were looking forward to someday, before they were too old, being on their child-free own, we sure didn’t take many preventative steps to ensure this. I occasionally wondered about it. Even pointed it out, though I hardly needed to as he was as aware of the contradiction between words and deed as I. There was an ambivalence on both our parts about the whole issue. Perhaps we were hoping that fate would decide the whole thing for us. I guess it nearly did.

Although I kept my fears to myself last evening, a sleepless night is a bit harder to cover up. So when I finally ‘fessed up after lunch today and followed that up with the news that all was well, I was a bit surprised to hear Rob confess to a bit of disappoint. He wondered if I wasn’t disappointed to and I admitted to the tiniest of regret but it is a bit more than that. Like him, I wish that we could have a baby together. Blondish and bright blue-eyed. Just like his dad. And I won’t say it is a silly dream, but it isn’t one that the universe is likely to allow us and we both know that. We have our girls. We have each other. We have a  pretty darn good today and tomorrow to enjoy, and a future to look forward to together. I am happy with what we have.

Chapter Two



I am not much of a fan of the term, or the idea even, of a Chapter Two where life after being widowed is concerned. It implies that I didn’t begin my life until the day I met my late husband,Will, and that everything and everyone who preceded him was but a prologue to actual living. I was 35 when we married. I had lived quite a bit of my life, and it was not a half-existence. There were many chapters in the Book of Me before that day arrived. The idea that Will was my chapter one and Rob is now chapter two is almost archaic but in a quaint sort of 1950’s Ronald Reagan sexist pig sort of way.

I didn’t realize until today how much I resent this chapter motif as it relates to marriage and widowhood. I was/am significant as a person, a woman and a wife. No one facet of who I am defines me so utterly that it negates another part. Not woman, wife, mother, teacher, writer, runner, friend, sister, daughter, aunt or any other title I wear, mostly simultaneously, on any given day. 

I don’t know why this angers me so much. It has been a near constant theme running through the various forums at the YWBB since I began posting back in the fall of last year. It is not just the idea of a second chapter to lives that were already books by the time our spouses came along, but also the deification of our dearly departed that sets my teeth in a barely stifled snarl. One woman today wrote something along the St. Husband line today that nearly goaded me into to a rather cold-blooded response. 

“…..we were loved so completely, purely, intensely, simply, and eternally by our spouse…”

This is such a load of crap that I don’t even know where to begin with it, but I doubt that Mary Magdalene had it this good with Jesus Christ. 

My late husband was a really nice guy. Ask anyone who knew him and they will tell you that he would give the shirt off his back for a friend. He was a good husband too. He put me and our marriage first. But he wasn’t perfect. He lost his patience and his temper from time to time. He didn’t plan for the future and actually it was a tooth-pulling exercise to get him to consider life beyond next year or the year after, let alone plan for anything like he or I dying unexpectedly.  He was a smoker, despite my asthma, though he tried time after time to quit. He loved me, but there were times when he didn’t “get me” at all. The one time that I did manage to pin him down on the subject of the future came during a road trip the two summers before we got pregnant with our daughter. We were heading home from visiting his best friend’s family in St. Louis and we were talking about who we would name as guardians for the children we wanted to have. The conversation eventually came around to what we expected of the other should something “happen”. Such a silly euphemism for what amounts to a complete up-ending of one’s whole frame of existence but those were innocent times. 

“So would you remarry if something were to happen to me?”

“Yes,” followed by a sidelong glance in my direction when the silence made him realize he might have answered that question a bit too quickly. “I’m only 27. I love you but if you were gone would you want me to spend the rest of my life alone? Look at my mom and how unhappy she is.”

He went on to say that he expected me to marry again. Actually, he made it sound like an edict, and I understood why. His mother had been widowed at 32. She never married again. Her late husband just couldn’t be replaced. A truer statement than you know because Will’s dad was a violent alcoholic but with widow-goggles he became a knight all agleam and resplendent. I would never have known this but for Will. Both my mother-in-law and his father’s family had sanitized his father’s memory past recognition, and I was actually shocked to learn the truth from him. But it taught me something in retrospect and I am distrustful of people who have nothing that sounds “real” to say about their late spouses or marriages. Having been married, then and now, I know that there is no such thing as perfect. We may marry people on the most perfect day we have ever known but we live with them on all the other days for years, and hopefully decades, to come. 

I guess I understand why so many widowed people downplay the idea of falling in love again. Opening yourself up to the possibility of a new relationship is scary and it can be a cause for self-reflection. It is hard to look at yourself honestly and realize that the things about you that aren’t that attractive may have been things that your late spouse simply put up with gracefully because they loved you. 

It’s hard to admit that you aren’t perfect either. I had a hard lesson in that when I asked a widower friend on the board to review one of my first online dating profiles and his assessment was essentially  along the lines of “I am sure someone will find that intriguing”.  And I knew exactly what he meant. I was completely myself in that profile and unfortunately when given the chance to express myself via the written word, I am myself in THX. Will loved that I was a cut to the chase kind of girl, but I am more blunt than the candlestick that Miss Scarlet used to knock off Colonel Mustard in the drawing room. I know that. Still it hurt to be reminded that Will was an exception and I would have to put some effort into meeting such a man again. 

Rude awakenings await most widowed people. The knowledge that  you were loved not in spite of your “flaws” or even because of them is a concept that even the most elastic mind will have trouble wrapping around. Our late spouses simply loved us for all of ourselves because the option, not being with us, was as unbearable as our loss of them would eventually be.