What's in a Name?

Let me start this off by saying that my husband and I are not very far into our marriage. We will actually celebrate our second anniversary this November. So, we are still, occasionally, discussing the possibility of buying a house, getting pets, having children, and the like. When it comes to children, I think every couple discusses the possibility of quantity, gender, and naming quite often.

Naming things has always been a sort of quirk of mine. I don’t think I was every really good at it as a child, and now that I’m an adult with the chance of gifting a living, breathing human being with one, I’m pretty much terrified.

I mean… Come on, I named my cat Shoubi (again, pronounced Show-Bee), and I was, most definitely, lucid at the time! I spent a lot of time choosing that name. Imagine what I could possibly come up with for a child.

The choices are unfathomable.

Needless to say, D and I have discussed names for our progeny at length.

Now, I’ve told you all of this to draw you further back in time nearly fifteen years ago (when I was still in single digits on the age board). I can honestly tell you now that I really like my name. I love it. I love to write it. I love the way it sounds, and I love the way its spelled. However, fifteen years ago I wasn’t really fond of it.
In particular, I did not like my middle name. You see, I had always wanted to have a beautifully flowing name - especially when written, and in my nine-year-old mind to be “flowing” it needed to have a ‘y’… or a ‘g’… or anything that dipped beneath the line on my wide ruled notebook paper. I assured myself that it had to be more fun to write your name with one of those extra little loop-de-loops in it.

Even in my teenage years when I decided that I couldn’t be the crazy cat lady, I was still a little caught up on having one of those pretty letters in my name. I decided I could have one… if I married the “right” guy. It amazes me now that I did look - for several years - with a certain scrutinizing quality at every man’s last name.

Fortunately, I found my husband (or rather, he found me), and he didn’t really give me a choice on whether or not I wanted to marry him. He really just decided that I was going to marry him, and that was that.
It took me a long time to appreciate my name for its own swirling loops and hoops. I just had to learn to look at it from a different angle. It turns out that capital ‘S’ and ‘L’ can be quite beautiful when written the right way.

And my little girl, if I ever have one, will get a pretty ‘q’ in her name.
 

What Is All This Marriage Stuff About?

My brain came up with this question all on its own today when I was reading (skimming) some articles on CNN about marriage and its possible demise. Every couple of months it seems like they come out with something new. Something shinier. Some article or clip about how the world is changing and everything is going downhill in a handbasket straight to hell.

Way to be positive, world.

Even in my darkest days as the crazy cat lady, I still believed in the institution of marriage. I didn’t always think *I* would be one of the ones becoming institutionalized, but the sanctity of it all has always struck me as a beautiful thing.

My opinions of love vary from most of the people I know. I’m not generally an idealist. I think that love is something grown from a single seed of hope. In my mind, every person could marry any one of several potential mates - it just takes the right timing and circumstances to make it all happen. My own husband strongly disagrees with me on this matter.

He said he fell in love with me at first sight. (Yes, he is a little dramatic.)

I believe him. He is an idealist, and I think he always has been. He likes to see the innate good in people and think that things will always turn out for the best.

I don’t. I’m a planner. I make lists. I look at the pros and cons and determine which is a more likely outcome. In every situation, I see a math problem. My husband married me because he was ‘in love’. I married my husband because I saw the unique potential in our relationship. I knew that he was the best possible partner for me. I knew we would make things work through all the tough situations.

I knew it would last between us most of all because he’s a dreamer, and I’m not a quitter.

Now, two years later my love for him grows every day. I see our children in my dreams, and I feel our years together in old age in my heart. He’s helped me become a dreamer, and I’ve taught him what it truly means not to be a quitter.

All of these sappy thoughts and the CNN article made me question myself about what marriage really means. Being true to myself, I could only think of one way to express it - so here’s my list:

1.) Marriage is something sacred. It means you are allowed to wake up next to one person for the rest of your days on earth together - even if one of you has recurring bad breath.

2.) Marriage means even though you still get to maintain your own identity and opinion… you now only get half a vote.

3.) Marriage means that if you want to argue you might as well go ahead and get it out of your system because the person you’re yelling at is still going to be there after you deflate. You might want to make sure you don’t say something really stupid because the other aforementioned person also might choose to remind you about what you said for years to come.

4.) Marriage doesn’t mean you have to be on a schedule, but if its getting kind of late you might want to make a courtesy call if you don’t want to hear any yelling or sobbing when you get home.

5.) You also might want to make that call if you don’t want to sleep on the couch.

6.) Marriage also means that if you say you’re going to sleep on the couch, you should probably just go ahead and sleep on the couch instead of standing there like an idiot and huffing about sleeping on the couch. (Just a side note: Neither my husband nor I have ever actually ended up sleeping on the couch, but we’ve both talked about it way more than was actually necessary.)

7.) Marriage also means accepting the fact that you are now part of a pair, and if you ever go out alone everyone is going to ask you where your spouse is and how they are doing.

8.) Marriage also means that you aren’t alone anymore. At the end of the day, there’s always someone to go home and tell your stories to.

9.) In addition to that, marriage requires that you often listen to the same stories being told over and over and over. And over.

10.) Marriage is about compromise, and if you can’t handle the heat, you probably shouldn’t be in the kitchen.

The Truth of the Matter - Part 2

In my heart, I know that Shoubi is her own worst enemy. She has always been jealous of any new person (or anything for that matter) that came into our lives; I believe its because she has an undiagnosed mental defect that turns her into what I have deemed “crazy cat” at any random point in time - transforming from lovey-dovey kitty to demon-spawn hellcat in two seconds flat.


Because of this “delicate condition,” I noticed only a few weeks after her adoption that she was (and is) quite unwilling to accept other cats into our little family. This definitely threw a wrench into my crazy cat-accommodating plans. If I could only ever have one cat, I would definitely not draw the whispering and superstition I had hoped for.


And who in their right mind would talk about an old single woman with only one cat? I think there’s a rule somewhere that you have to have at least twelve before you garner any sort of notoriety.


However, I loved Shoubi more than any predetermined future. (Who wouldn’t love someone unconditionally who could keep all of your closest secrets to heart?) And because she is such a particular cat, I believe I have the right to blame my current situation completely on her furry little shoulders.


You see… it is completely her fault that I am now married to the man who explained to me that it was totally possible to have room for two in my heart. It is because of her that I look forward to a future of anniversaries and children.


D (my husband) was the first male that kitty dearest ever took a liking to, and since I couldn’t have any more cats, I had to marry him. Between the two of them, they really gave me no other choice.


It probably would have been easier being the crazy cat lady, but I’m a true southerner at heart. I’m sure the locals will find something else to whisper about eventually. For now, I guess I’ll have to be satisfied being a crafting-cooking-writing-working converted crazy cat lady.


So welcome to my life. I hope you enjoy the show. It's been a little bit of a bumpy ride, thus far, but I have the feeling we're only just getting started.

The Truth of the Matter

From the age of twelve, I was convinced that love was, most definitely, overrated. I watched my friends start the process of puberty and become blubbering balls of hormones faster than I could get my first pimple. Having a sister five years my senior, I was already quite familiar with several forms of heartbreak, and I wasn’t very keen to experience any of them. They seemed to warp her into some sort of sick self-sacrificing machine - that wasn’t at all appealing to me.

At fifteen, I had what I still consider to be my first real relationship. It was as terrible, if not more so, as I expected, and it pretty much cemented my plan to become a crazy cat lady. I know, I know. This is something a young girl wouldn't usually aspire to be, but considering my alternatives (love-struck and dumb), I figured it was my best bet for staying sane and growing up to be a fully-functioning adult.

So, for the next few years I developed my plan. I was always a little eccentric; my family knew I was “special” from the very start, and, at seventeen, I drove up to our local chapter of the Humane Society to adopt a pet that would be completely mine. An animal I would present to the world to show my inner personality and to help me bring out my nurturing side.

Can you guess what I picked?

She was barely small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and so covered in fur that she looked more like a hairball for the first six months of her life. She was black and white with the most beautiful green eyes I’d ever seen, and for me, it was, most definitely, love at first sight.

Forget the fact that she’d already been returned more than once for bad behavior at a mere twelve weeks of age. Also, ignore that she was just a tad bipolar and seemed to come a little unglued at the slightest provocation. She would hiss and scratch and bite at nearly anyone who tried to get in her tiny, world-dominating way, but she loved me.

And for an overly emotional seventeen year-old going through a world of physical and mental changes, she was exactly what I needed.

So, I gave her a ridiculous name, and I welcomed her into my world. I thought that she would be the beginning of my life as the crazy cat lady, and I opened my arms to greet a future filled with fluffy hats, cottage gardens, and Studebakers with mismatched paint.

It was the perfect plan... with only one fatal flaw.