Retiring Romance

Recently my husband and I sat down with a retirement specialist to discuss our financial future. I may have erroneously referred to this as a lunch “date.” Or maybe it was no accident. I am the consummate multi-tasker. Not that it wasn’t romantic. Especially digging through our files to find copies of what we fondly refer to as “coffee money,” aka our combined 401k accounts, Roth IRAs, and statements from some option we bought during one or another bubble.

Several years ago we sat down in a bright Dallas office of Charles Schwab and worked out a suitable asset allocation based on our low tolerance for risk and high desire to have a lot of money someday. After that, life interfered. The systematic review of our assets went the way of date nights. That is to say, it was neglected.

Then there was the whole stock market issue. Remember 2009? Or don’t. Neither my husband nor I had the stomach to look at our accounts for months. I kept telling him, “Don’t worry, everyone’s in the same boat.” When the communal sigh of relief was heard throughout the land as the Dow began to rise, our portfolio was still looking like a latte finance plan. I switched my encouragement to, “Don’t be such a baby. It’s not a trailer park; it’s a mobile home community.”

Because it was a date, and because my husband was coming from work, where he is still expected to wear something a notch up from yoga pants and flip flops, I dressed for our appointment with the banker. As I pulled on big girl slacks, I thought I’d better not gain weight, or lose it either. Ever. These may be the last nice clothes I’d ever own.

We were greeted, served coffee, and showed to an office where our retirement specialist explained to us the process of mapping out best case and acceptable case scenarios for our non-working future. We spent what I thought was an inordinate amount of time discussing the age at which my husband would retire.

“Fifty-five is ideal,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “That’s in ten years. You have no hobbies. What would you do with the rest of your life?” And, I thought, I’ll be fifty. My need for cosmetic procedures will just be ramping up and those are not cheap.

“Okay, sixty.”

“Sixty-five.”

“You know,” the nice woman with the calculator said, “there are considerable benefits to waiting until you’re sixty-seven to stop working.”

“Ha!” I said. Such a romantic.

After a brief discussion of Social Security and far fewer questions about our saving and spending habits than I expected, we came to the “extras” section of the interview. This is where my husband asserted his need in retirement to buy a boat—a big one.

“Except I want to buy it now,” he told our trusted counselor.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll work that into the calculation.” She turned to me. “One last question—how do you want me to treat your income? Should I count it as extra or include it in the overall forecast.”

“Put it toward my world travels,” I told her.

“Your travels?”

“Best case scenario.”

She turned to John. “Did you know about the traveling?”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t like my boat.”

A Night at the Wine Bar

On a recent Girls Night Out with some friends, we found ourselves at a ‘wine bar’, which I think is code for a bar with comfortable seating frequented by the 35-50 demographic. As soon as we walked in and claimed our real estate, a boisterous gentleman let’s call Bob greeted us. Bob was attentive and seemed intent on making sure the six of us had a good time. At first we assumed Bob was the proprietor, or maybe an especially fulfilled employee.

However, when Bob failed to take our drink order, suggested we call him Big Bob, and embarked on a long reminiscence of his high school basketball career, it became evident we were on our own in the drink department. Amid Bob’s gregarious tale telling we collected drink orders and sent a scout to the bar. When she tried to hand the bartender a credit card, Bob intervened. The Big Man wanted to cover our round. Back in the circle of revelry much fuss was made over Bob’s generous contribution and soon we were sipping and chatting about other things.

At the same time, two more women showed up and joined our group. On one of his showy trips to the bar to fetch our drinks, Bob’s seat was taken. Instead of gallantly standing by, continuing to enjoy our company (including those of us who were also standing or less-than-comfortably perched on hard furniture), Bob asked one of us to get up so he could have her seat. Also, he wanted her to sit on his lap.

Um… no.

You don’t have to be young and sexy to get our attention. We appreciate conversation and appreciation. Even boring stories and the ill-advised hand on the leg we can accept, so long as you are entertaining us. But don’t push it.

“I just bought you drinks and you won’t even sit on my lap? That’s not very professional.”

Dear, sweet, pathetic Bob. Perhaps if you’re looking for a professional, you hit the wrong bar

Dating at the Prime of Life

For all its pain and suffering, marriage does have one distinct advantage: we don’t have to date. From all I hear it seems really, really, painfully difficult. And it’s not just that I’ve been married so long that I have forgotten what it was like. I never actually dated. I was one of those dreadful girls who just went from one boyfriend to another to my husband with precious few periods of ‘dating’ in between.

I’m not sure I could handle the scene at this age, which–if my friends are to be believed–includes the following:

• men who have grandchildren, yet still live with their mothers
• women who run credit reports before the first date
• limited small town prospects that make dating after divorce feel like getting tossed into a bag of ‘Shake ‘N Bake until someone sticks
• too-high bikini area maintenance standards
• modern communication: did he really get my text?
• so much corporate travel you have to MapQuest your own address when you finally get home
• the new math required to determine how many dates until…
• exes and custody schedules

But go on, y’all – date. I enjoy living vicariously through you. I live to give you my bullshit all-knowing advice without having to personally suffer the emotional upheaval it causes. Who knows? You may end up married like me. Then I’ll be very helpful.

Caught in the Act

After an enlightening conversation with a new acquaintance, I decided to ask my Facebook Friends if they’d ever been caught in the act by their kids. The response was overwhelming. The situations people were willing to share with me made me insanely jealous, and also wonder if they knew what that little turny-thingy on the door knob is for. Not a surprise: there were a lot of instances of women getting tossed across the room out of sight.

I won’t go into the individual stories, but I thought I’d let you in on the top excuses given to the traumatized children.

• We’re practicing our MMA moves.
• I’m just rubbing Mommy’s back.
• Sometimes Mommy likes to play Cowgirl.
• I’m looking for my phone.
• Oh come on, it’s nothing you haven’t seen on Channel 726.

and my personal favorite…

• Well I guess I’ll never be able to talk Mommy into THAT again.

Will My Husband Survive the Teen Years?

We’re sitting around the dinner table the other night when the phone rings. Three of us at the table know who it is. It’s the cute girl my 11-year-old son is ‘going out with’, the one I describe as a ‘fellow 4.0 student’ and my son describes and ‘nice’ and ‘accurate’, the one who has very good posture.

The only person in our family who doesn’t immediately know who is on the phone is my husband, John. In his best 1950s Father voice he asks, “Who could be calling so late?”

It is 6:30.

I answer the phone and tell the sweet girl that my boy will call her back. Then I tell John he may have a very difficult decade ahead.

When the Villain is a Husband

One of the most important things about creating believable fictional characters is to avoid making them one-dimensional. Real people aren’t simple, and you never want story people who are either all good or all bad. This comes up a lot at our writers’ critique group meetings.

Recently one woman was going on and on about how there’s nothing she hates worse than some mustache twirling villain that’s just one hundred percent bad. I reminded her that she had no trouble accepting the cheating spouse in my novel who is also stupid, vain, and terrible in bed.

“Oh that’s different,” she says. “That was a husband.”

Disclaimer: The quotations reported in this blog reflect the opinions of those who said them. (Which is why they’re anonymous.) They do not necessarily reflect the view of the blog writer, who is at this writing happily married, to a man who–it’s probably best–doesn’t read this blog anyway.

It’s Not You, It’s Not Me

When I took my novel to a writer’s workshop this summer, I didn’t think about the sharing and reading aloud. Had I thought it through I might not have been so brave about sharing those first chapters, which include penis cupcakes, vibrators, and a sexually deficient husband for our heroine to tolerate. But I got over it. It’s fiction, after all.

I was warned that my husband might not like it, might take it personally.

He too would get over it too, I was sure. Cut to the end of the summer and me presenting my stack of paper, secured with a big black binder clip, to my husband. I pulled it back slightly

“Just remember,” I said. “It’s not you. It’s fiction. Got it?”

He agreed and I handed it over.

Two weeks later when he finally started reading it, I had almost forgotten he had it. That night he said, “That guy had a little basket.”

“Huh? What guy?”

“That guy, Rick, in the book. He had a little basket for his change and golf tees.”

First I laughed, but I pulled it together in order to address his concerns. I admitted that yes, the closet was ours, but the characters were not. I reminded him it was purely a work of fiction.

“Little too close to home,” he joked.

I figured more reassurance couldn’t hurt.

“You’re not the husband, Babe. You’re the hot neighbor guy. Duh.”

Just like that – problem solved. It’s fiction.

The Trouble With Car Trouble

This is the June edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

A couple of summers ago I was unloading an obscene amount of groceries when I noticed a thick, pink substance on the garage floor. Lemonade maybe? But it appeared to be coming from inside the car. After I got my dairy and frozen goods out of the sweltering trunk, I dipped my finger into the pink stuff. It didn’t smell like anything and looked about as worrisome as IHOP syrup, which is only dangerous to my thighs.

About an hour later I had to run an urgent errand. (Running low on string cheese, most likely.) Because my husband was out of town, I had another car to drive, one which did not have pink goo oozing out of it. However, I chose to drive the leaky car. It started and drove fine, until the thermometer light came on. I tensed when it started to blink, even though I had no idea what that meant.

If I designed cars, there would be a light that said, Pull Over. And if you didn’t immediately comply, another light would come on that said, NOW! If you still didn’t get the hint, the car would turn itself off. But my car doesn’t have this handy imaginary feature. Despite the warning light, my trip was uneventful. I finished my urgent errand and drove home.

The next afternoon, after loading into my car five children, four snorkels, two masks, a box of crackers, forty-five fruit snacks, a gross of beach towels, and enough juice to flood a small country, the car wouldn’t start. I tried again while the children whined, hot and cranky. Clearly this was another urgent situation so I did what I had to do. I switched cars and went to the pool.

Then I had to make the call. “Do you want to hear the bad news?” I asked my husband.

I told him about the harmless smelling gunk, the flashing red thermometer, and the non-starting car. Luckily I married a man who remains calm in the face of mechanical trouble.

“Was the car leaking while you were driving?”

“No,” I said. “It was in the garage.”

“And the light, when was that flashing?”

Here’s where things started to turn against me. “Oh, well…. see…. I needed to go to the –”

“You drove the car?”

He’s even calm in the face of four-digit repair bills, but he felt bad for the car. I couldn’t feed his panic, but had to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about, just a task to accomplish. “What I need to know is whether I should have the car towed to the dealership or if you think we can put in some more of that pink stuff and drive it over.”

My husband sighed from another state and I heard the hang of his head. “I hope you didn’t seize the engine.”

“No.” I brushed it off. “I think it’s something else – something easy to fix.”

Neither my husband nor the mechanic agreed that it was something ‘easy’ to fix, but it didn’t matter. I may not be good with machines, but things always work out for me. For instance, my new car is very shiny.

When You Want to Run Away

This is the September edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

When I was a kid I never wanted to run away and join the circus. Now that I’m older, I get it. Although it’s not my dream to tame lions or become the bearded lady, I understand the lure of escaping to some exotic life where the tightrope you walk is literal as opposed to the figurative balancing act we do here in the world of diapers, homework, and ear infections.

My mother tells a story about her mother, who would tell her children that if they didn’t behave she would run off to Tucumcari, New Mexico and they’d never find her. To which my mother calmly responded that they most certainly would find her – in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Mom shouted similar warnings to my brother and I as kids. She would run away and never return. We didn’t have reason to believe her empty threats, but then again, you never knew. Moms are crazy like that. Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t mess with balance – work-life or otherwise. They didn’t have spa days or antidepressants or Oprah. They just woke up in the morning and did what needed doing. And if they lost it once in a while, well, they were entitled.

Genetics notwithstanding, I have yet to issue such a circus-running-off sort of threat. I prefer short periods of actual escape to fantasies of long-term flight. Running off for weekend writing classes and conferences recharges my depleted mama batteries and gives me strength to face the days of infinite laundry and incessant requests for Nintendo DS cartridges. I schedule my respites months in advance and write them on the calendar – in pen. In Sharpie even.

My retreats may not be as exciting as swallowing swords, but for me, some quality time with a spiral notebook and a half decent pen is usually enough to return equilibrium. And if it’s not, I run off to yoga class, where we make like a tree and stand on one leg, or rest our thighs upon our biceps. That’s balance. These are the things that keep me from losing it.

So next time you’re tempted to run away and join the circus, remember that you can juggle fire in your own kitchen and rig up a tightrope in your backyard. Just make sure you wait until after you’ve finished all that other balancing  – you know, the checkbook, the food groups, and the quality time spent with each child.

And if you hear of any writers’ meetings in Tucumcari, New Mexico, don’t come looking for me.

Lela Davidson is a Northwest Arkansas writer seeking to balance life, love, and laundry with a husband, two children, a dog, and an ever-changing number of fish. Read more at www.afterthebubbly.com.

Date Night Etiquette

Have you been slacking off in the date night department? If your idea of romance includes any type of foldable chair and/or canned beverages, the answer is yes. Don’t worry, I’m here to hook you up with a primer on dating etiquette. What would you do without me?

Check out Chasing Date Night Goes Back to School in this month’s Peekaboo – or follow the link!

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