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Dear Joy,

About a year ago, Marty and I watched the 2015 Grammys together, completely by accident. We got the kids in bed and collapsed on the couch. I'm usually working when the kids are sleeping, and we typically watch zero hours of TV per week, but that night, somehow, we ended up in front of the TV together, and there were Ed Sheeran and John Mayer, in the middle of a killer duet. We realized we'd stumbled onto the Grammys, and we kept watching it until the end. I'd describe our knowledge of pop culture as ranging from "adequate" to "slightly, awkwardly oblivious," so it was fun to be able to sit there and unashamedly nudge each other. "Who is that?" "No idea." "Google it." "On it."

That's basically all I remember about the 2015 Grammys. (My memory is so bad, I started writing about Idina Menzel's "Let it Go" performance in the above paragraph... but when I had to google how to spell "Idina," I realized that, nope, she didn't perform it at the 2015 Grammys, but at the 2014 Oscars. Guess we watched those, too. Whoops.)

This year, when we found out about the 2016 Grammys a week before they aired, we looked at each other and smiled -- "DATE NIGHT, write it on the calendar BABY!" -- because, when you've got an unscheduled, unpredictable, do-what-I-want newborn, you grasp for a sliver of control wherever you can find it, and any scheduled event becomes a very big deal, inside or outside your own house. 

So, last Monday, we had our date night, and watched the Grammys together. And if I don't write anything down, a year from now I'll remember about as much about this year's Grammys as I do about last year's. Of course, it's not about the awards show at all, but about this tiny slice of our life, frozen (or not) in my memory. And I want to remember.

I want to remember February 15th, 2016, in all of its ordinary Monday-ness. I want to remember how we were coming off of ten straight sick days stuck in the house, preceded by my first week home by myself with our three kids, preceded by a week of postpartum recovery, preceded by the arrival of our sweet baby girl, Lily, after five short and not-sweet hours of labor. If I don't write this down, I might forget how my big guy and two little guys and I danced to Cake by the Ocean and Uptown Funk in the kitchen after dinner while Lily slept in her bassinette, and how Charlie laughed hysterically when I kept whacking him in the head with a potholder (you had to be there). I'd definitely forget that lump-like feeling I had in my stomach, thinking about the sleep I wouldn't be getting later that night, because of that newborn sleeping in the bassinette. I'd forget that I had a cold and all the kids had coughs, including the baby, and that getting the boys to bed involved humidifiers and diffusers and two different kinds of medicine.

There were other things, too, little details that are easily forgettable:

• How I bought a bottle of extra dry champagne for us to drink during the show, and learned that "extra dry" is actually less dry than brut champagne (who knew?).
• How we sat on the couch, taking turns holding our little round ball of a newborn baby, and she was still young enough to sleep almost the entire time. (She woke up after the Grammys ended, of course, and Marty stayed up late, watching movies in the basement with her and bouncing on the exercise ball, so that I could sleep for a few hours.)
• Or how about Johnny Depp, onstage with scary Alice Cooper? I really don't like rock and roll at all, but how did I not know that Johnny Depp was an actual musician who plays the electric guitar?  (I warned you: slightly, awkwardly oblivious.)
• The fact that, that night, I was rocking some pretty awful yellow-orange highlights, from a dye job gone very bad the Saturday before. (My hairstylist came to the rescue the night after the Grammys, and Marty is so very thankful, because now he doesn't have to hear about it every time I glance at a reflective surface: "AHH, yellow orange HAIR!")
• The sound of Joshie, tip-toeing down the stairs forty-five minutes after we put him to bed, a three-year-old who only just discovered that yes, it's absolutely possible to leave one's bedroom after one has been put to sleep. (We let him sit with us for fifteen minutes before marching him back upstairs, because he was extra cuddly. This backfired on me the following day, when he emerged from his room five minutes after I put him down for a nap, and preceded to wreak havoc in my bedroom, unbeknownst to the sleeping mom on the couch downstairs.)
• The guilt I wasn't feeling about the budget that hadn't been done, the house that hadn't been cleaned, and (yes) all the writing that didn't get written. I was having too good of a time, sitting in our messy basement next to my husband and my baby, watching a bunch of celebrities and envying them, not because of their money or whatever (who cares?), but because all those people could sleep in as LONG as they wanted to the following morning. "Hey gorgeous Taylor, I see you giggling and owning the whole night and everything. Bet you're not worried about whether you'll get two hours of sleep strung together, after this whole shebang is over, huh?! YEAH. That's what I thought." These were my literal thoughts at one point, watching the Grammys. But still, I was happy, even while pathologically fantasizing about sleep.

No. Time is a funny thing, and so is memory. Next year, I'd only remember that Marty and I watched the Grammys together, and... I think we bought a bottle of champagne? And wait -- wasn't Lily a newborn?

Oh yes. Yes she was.

Love, Sherah

A Blizzard, a Road Trip, and the Certain Way to be Wrong About Marriage

UNSPLASH

Dear Sherah,

Thursday morning around 8:00 I was in bed with a cup of tea, checking our flights from Philly to Orlando on Saturday. My heart sank at the exact moment that my phone buzzed with a text from Pete. Southwest is offering free flight changes for Saturday but Friday is booked. Should we switch to Sunday? 

Two minutes and three texts later, we decided that the only way we could guarantee we weren't going to miss our first day of this Disney trip (which we've been planning with Pete's parents for several years now) was to drive down the east coast before the storm hit. Meaning that we had to start driving, immediately. 

Pete was forty-five minutes away. So while he drove home, I started calling hotels and airlines and car rentals to cancel and make reservations, my cell tucked under my chin while I threw laundry in the machine and pulled suitcases out from under the bed. Pete arrived and we kissed on the stairs in passing, finished packing, cleaned the house in a frenzy, yelled questions from across the house to finalize plans. I heated leftovers for a quick meal and bagged fruit for the road; Pete took out the garbage and lugged the suitcases outside. Anders rounded the corner wheeling his little suitcase with a $3 Target light saber sticking out of the front pouch. "The TSA will never let you bring that on the plane on the way home, buddy," I said, and he reluctantly took it out of his bag. 

By 11:30 AM we were in a rental car and on the road. Pete drove for the first leg while I edited in the passenger seat. (I had to construct a tent out of pillows to block the sun from my screen, and I had to listen to my white noise app to block out the sound of a chattery five-year-old. But I made my deadline.) Around six we stopped at a Waffle House where Pete and Anders ate and I snagged some wifi to send off my completed project. Then we filled up with gas, apparently having driven back in time to the 1990s ($1.49 a gallon?!) and got back on the road. 

Fast forward to two in the morning: Anders has been conked out in the back for hours, Pete is sleeping in the passenger seat with his baseball cap pulled over his eyes, and I've been listening to Ryan Adams sing "Oh My Sweet Carolina" for a good stretch of South Carolina. I pass a sign welcoming me to Georgia and switch to Vance Joy's "Georgia." 

Long road trips are always meditative and a little melancholy, but there's something to be said about driving straight through the night to beat a winter storm on your way to the happiest place on earth. There were a few times I had to turn on my wipers for pockets of drizzly rain and I kept bracing myself to hit something torrential, but it never came. I missed the sign welcoming me to Florida, so it wasn't until the sun came up over the palm trees and bounced off the silvery pavement that I knew we had made it. ("Florida Key" from The New Basement Tapes, if you're wondering.) 

Pete was looking at his weather radar today, trying to convey to me just how poetic the timing of our route had been. "If we had left an hour later, or if we had been just a little bit west, we would have hit it," he said. "You absolutely love that, don't you?" I teased him. "Oh, yeah," he said. "There's something so satisfying about mastering a machine in the elements." I snickered and fell in love with him a little bit more, which I've been doing for more than a decade whenever he says stuff like "mastering a machine in the elements." 

I read this a few years ago, and it stuck with me. 

PHOTO: UNSPLASH

I've had different reactions to that quote at different points in my marriage. Of course we control our marriage, I've thought. Who else controls it? We make the decisions. We call the shots. It's our commitment and strength of character that either pulls this off or fails. But that was back when I had very clear, very simple definitions of success and failure and not a whole lot of respect for journey. The more I've traveled and the longer I've been married, the truer this is. I may not know the certain secret to marriage, but I know the certain way to be wrong about it. 

I'm going to skip over all of my obtuse metaphors for life and storms and machines and marriage and just say that I'm really, really happy to be in Florida right now. There are a lot of reasons why this trip shouldn't have worked out—some you know, some you don't know, and a blizzard being the least of them. But we're here, and we're happy, and the sunshine feels great.

Love,

Joy