Today

You know how every Valentines I pour my heart out on a card for you? Well here it is. The card I mean. The pouring out comes next.

Dear love: I really don't know what possessed me to address you this way but your private self will have to deal with it. Lately, this blog has been absorbing pieces of me. In this partial repository I speak some of our son, more of myself and hardly any of you. There's a reason for that which you know - your own personal request. Before I continue further, I'll have you know that I am honoring it even as I write. This is not about you, but about us and I want to, for this one time, perhaps not the last time depending on how this goes down, tell of you and me.

Eight years into knowing you, more than six of them loving you, I do not know what our future holds. This envisioning puts me in mind of what Alejandra A. once told me about that couple who were friends of hers and who'd been happily married for years and years. One time, when she asked them what the secret of their marital bliss was, the woman looked at her husband and said: We take it one day at a time and turn that day into another. When I first heard A.A. tell this story, I remember that I didn't even know you but I perked my ears because all girls with dreams of happily ever afters listen up when tried and true advice about good marriages is freely handed out. So I listened and afterwards, I was disappointed with what I heard. There was no magical formula there. No deep epiphany to fathom. I wondered, was that it?

As a witness to the longevity of my parent's own marriage, I can tell you many things about what works for them but I'm not, and was never such an ingenue, that I didn't understand how one person's recipe could end up as something completely different in someone else's pot. Still, I thought, there had to be a step process, there had to be a set of directions, a universal something that would tell the heart, my heart, how to go forward when the time for me came.

Well there you have it. That's it. My love letter to you. It has no measurements no outright professing of anything. What you know of what my love is, you have on a daily basis through what I do with you and for you and out of a love that wells up, unstoppable, for you and you alone.

They had it right, those friends of Ale. In five years of marriage, we've taken it one day at a time. Together. Every morning, we've woken up together and every evening we've lain together. This relationship of ours is all about the now, about the moment. I know you know that I love you in each and everyone and from this second into the next. From this day till tomorrow and from that tomorrow into another.

Happy every day jan.

Your loving every second of her life with you,

Wife

My life half-baked

When my husband and I started to date seriously, he was living halfway around the world from me. This was a complication in an already unconventional courtship but we got through it fine by being good planners and travelers. Having no other personal commitments beyond what it took to care for ourselves and with the advantages of generous vacation times at both our jobs, we ended up averaging a trip every month and a half for almost two years, before we made honest people of each other.

Did I mention yet that this feat required advance programming of the kind I excelled at? I was a successful planner. The kind of person who had her calendar locked up tight and good. I could tell you what I'd be doing six months in advance down to the week, sometimes even the day. I walked around with a palm pilot (the old time version of a blackberry) and a paper agenda for good measure. How come then, I barely succeed at getting out of the house these days without forgetting the kid's juice box or his nap mat? To see me now, you'd believe I'm the most disorganized human you've ever laid eyes on. I hardly manage to shower in the mornings and every accomplished task seems like it has happened by the skin of my teeth.

What's different? Truly? I'd like to say that having a baby changed everything and in a way, my son's existence is partly to blame for this malaise but if I have to point a finger, the actual culprit is my very own nature. I was always disorganized, I just hid it well and I fought against it constantly. With singular determination, I forged myself into something other than the true scatterbrain I am. It was like a straight jacket this organized persona of mine.

I've been told by my mother that I resemble her mother. With my own eyes, I've confirmed the truth of this. Grandmother and I, we start out a task and halfway through (sometimes not even that) something else calls out to us and off we go. By the time we come around to what we'd originally started with, time has passed and other semi-finished jobs litter the way.

Now where does my toddler fit into all this? He just makes it easier to get distracted. He's at an age where my main task is to put out fires with him. I haven't finished uttering the word no to something he shouldn't be doing when he turns around and does something else that elicits the same response. Under the circumstances, it's very hard to remain focused. My most productive times then are the early morning or the late at night moments. That's why I'm an early riser and a late sleeper. I'm finishing all my half-baked jobs.

What to do? Nothing much really, just keep on trucking. I'm beyond trying to return to that other self at this point. I'll continue to get everything done slowly and haphazardly but surely. No palm pilots, no agendas, only post-it notes like scattered breadcrumbs to show the way through the thicket of my tasks. Finding my head is a challenge but when I wake up in the mornings and find it still attached, I realize I've succeeded for yet another day.

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