Love

The Trenchcoat

I was pretty stoked when I found this trenchcoat 
at the thriftstore a while back.
Did you know that it has a special pocket on the inside for a gun?
My hubby is the one that explained that to me.

I was just thinking how my hubby
would love for me to show up at his workplace
with just the trenchcoat.
If I packed a gun along with it,
I do believe it would make me 50% more sexy.

I got a free item with my purchase.
Of course I picked a book.

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Happy Valentine’s Day y’all.
I dare one of you to go to your husband’s workplace in just a trenchcoat.
Let me know how it turns out.

Sorry LG.
All you get is another dumb poem.

There are days.

There are days I want to strip down
and arrive at your workplace in
nothing but a trenchcoat,
but then I remember that you have co-workers.

There are days that I look at our children
and think how amazing we are
and how our posterity is the finest
and then I remember that they screw up,
but they are still the best kids ever.

There are days I can only feel love.
A love so consuming that I feel nothing else at all.
All I can think of is you with your arms around me
and then I remember how that actually feels
 to my skin
and it makes me love even deeper
which I never think is possible.

There are days I want to scream at you
because you frustrate me to no end.
Why don’t you do everything the way
I do everything?
And then I remember that you do the taxes,
and the technical support, and the math homework
and I am grateful that we are different.

There are days that I wonder where you are.
Are you in a man cave or another universe?
You retreat often inside yourself
because you are introverted and overwhelmed.
And then I remember what a great listener you are
which really helps me because I am the talker.

There are days in the distant past
(and hopefully many more in the future)
that the world consisted of just you and me
and we laid around and did nothing
but be together
and I remember those times as
the absolute best.
Ever.

There are days that are swallowed up in the busies.
And you and I run around serving our kids
our co-workers, and neighbors and friends
and we don’t have a second to think about ourselves
or each other.
And at the end of the day,
it’s all we can do to sneak in a good night kiss
and mumble an “I love you”
before the night turns into dreams
and I remember that I missed you
all day long.

There are days.
Many many days.
And hopefully many many more.
Where you and I are in love.
Through the think and the thin.
The wrong and the right.
The counseling and therapies.
And lessons learned and mistakes made.
The tired and the awake.
The kids and the jobs.
The cats and the dogs.
The sick and the health.
The sane and the crazy.
The summers and falls.
And winters and springs.
The basketball practices and dance lessons.
And doctor appointments and lunch breaks.
The afternoon delights and faraway business trips.
The jokes and the tears.
The broken down cars and the puking kids on flights.
The campfires and lightning bugs.
The mountains and hills.
The lakes and the oceans.
The hotels and pools.
The woods and the downtowns.
The pounds lost and the delicious treats.
The Christmases and birthdays,
and Easters and Flag Days.
The scripture readings and temple trips.
The vacations and lack thereof.

But really all those days
make up for the most beautiful thing ever.
Me and you.
Sharing the days.

Because through it all
we can count on one thing
and that is that
There are the days.
And they are ours.

My Man w/o a Middle Name

I love LeGrand Gold. I wish he was given a middle name so that I could say that I love LeGrand _______ Gold because that would seem so much more official.

I do love you LeGrand LG Gold. I hope you enjoy your new given middle name since that is what I mostly call you by anyway. I am so proud to be your wife.

I wrote about my man while sitting at church a while back. This blog seems like as good of a place as any to copy my words for the posterity.

Please ignore if you are single or just mad at your hubby. I don’t want to add to your pain. Just know that I have been single and mad at my hubby plenty. It’s just that right now I can’t imagine my life without the total complete insane love that I feel at this moment and so many others. I am one lucky lucky girl.

I look around the room. One dad takes a screaming toddler out while his wife sits looking relieved for a break and for her partner in parenting and I realize that you are him. 

Then I look straight across the way and I see another dad holding a newborn baby tenderly and I remember how much I love it when you hold a baby. You seem so much stronger in those tender moments. You are the protector for our little ones and the protector of me when I let you be.

I see the teenage boy excitedly taking notes and I think of you and doodling your L’s and your G’s in a boxy font so they array the way you like and I think of your special experience about the Savior of mankind and I thank God for it and how it has given you the courage to keep trying day after day. 

I look up at the Bishopric and remember the days when I was honored the privilege of seeing you lead with humility and devotion. 

I see the father with the teenage daughter and marvel that I did such an amazing job of picking a father for our very lucky daughters. You are a father that is fun, involved, kind and oh-so loving. 

Yes, LG, the 80% of you that is beautiful trumps the 20% that is still learning. 

I love you LG.


Book Review – The Magic Room

This is a paid review for the BlogHer BookClub.

The Magic Room: A Story about the Love We Wish for Our DaughtersThe Magic Room: A Story about the Love We Wish for Our Daughters by Jeffrey Zaslow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let me start this review by telling you that I got married 10 days after we decided to tie the knot. The day after deciding that we didn’t want to wait any longer, I ran into a local wedding-dress shop and asked for something simple and cheap. I tried on one dress off the clearance rack and said “I’ll take it.” I shopped alone and I called my then non-official fiance (he never really proposed) and asked him if he would o.k. me using $200 from my paycheck to buy the blasted dress.

I felt it appropriate to start this review with my own wedding dress story as this book is a compilation of wedding dress stories. In The Magic Room Zaslow did a great job of telling the story of Becker’s Bridal in Fowler, Michigan. In this teeny tiny barely thriving US town, there are a few constants, Beckers is perhaps the most impressive, only outlasted by the loyal long-standing families that reside there.

Even though I am not much of a romantic, I really enjoyed this book. I thought the author did a great job of interlacing the stories of various recent brides with the stories of the Beckers’ royal family. For five generations the Beckers have faithfully served a very large portion of the bridal industry within the United States, many times selling dresses to mothers who years later bring in their own daughters to the same shop to purchase a dress of their own.

Unexpectedly, I learned a lot about the worldwide and US trends of marriage in this book. Zaslow has a knack for making statistics interesting, statistics like “25% of first-time brides have children. Another 7 to 8 percent are pregnant” and “forget the seven year itch, UofM researchers have found that more divorces now happen in the fourth year of marriage than any other.”

Overall, this is a great book jam-packed with various intriguing biographies, families’ dreams and losses, wedding magic, and like it says on the cover it’s mostly “a story about the love we wish for our daughters.” Indeed, I do hope to one day take one of my four daughters to this magic room or at least one just like it in my own region of residence.

View all my reviews

You can read more discussion about this recently published book at the BlogHer discussion boards.

Only Have One

I’m a codependent.
A full-fledge flaming codependent.
What does that mean?
It means that I am addicted to others at an unhealthy level.
It means that my core issue is
needing other people to fill my love tank.
It means that I unconsciously do things
(all the time) to feed my addiction.
Things like making too many comments in Sunday School.
Or blogging for attention.
I often cry myself to sleep at night because nobody cares.

And then there are the times (too many times)
that I try to require things of my husband,
things that I need to let go.
I don’t do it to be wrong,
I just want to be loved
and I just want to love others
and so I hold on to that thing
far too long.

It’s part of my addiction.
I try to control other people.
Unconsciously.
To gain importance.
To get love.
I can’t have enough of love and importance.

Just saying it is part of the addiction
doesn’t excuse it
because it is still very much my life
and I have to own it and change it
and sculpt me into what I want me to be.
It does give understanding
and the first step to fixing is admitting.

So, this post is my way of letting something go.
Something hard.
Even though I have every right to care about it.
and I am completely justified in my desires
because they are pure.
Yet, they are my desires for him,
and not his desires for him,
so I have to let it go.
Even if he is wrong
and doesn’t see it.
Because I can’t live his life.
I can only live my life.

Apparently JJ Heller understands
why I cried myself to sleep last night.
Next time I am going to sing this little song
instead of getting all frustrated with myself.
Because let’s face it,
nobody gets it right every time.
Everyone needs room to screw up.

And I have decided that true love is
really only one thing.
Loving each other through your screw ups.
And boy do I love that man.
I’m the luckiest girl that he loves me back
even when I try to control him.

Beautiful Heartbreak

I’ve experienced heartbreak.
More than one.
I remember vividly a day years ago when my friend Lindsey
walked in my front door
to find me completely debilitated,
inconsolable, defeated, and heartbroken.
I was on my couch crying uncontrollobly
while my three small children
were running around neglected.
When I told Lindsey what was going on
she cried too.

Earlier in the day, I had tried to go to the library
to escape the pain,
my toddler was a monster,
surely responding to her mom’s emotional state.
A mean old man confronted me
and told me I was a horrible mother.
Of course, that day I was a horrible mother.
It was all I could do not to shoot myself in the head.

He didn’t see all the other days.
The good days.
The days before the crippling pain.
But the other mom did.
She was usually by my side for weekly storytime.
She rushed out to my car and prayed for me
while I bawled some more at the wheel of my car.

You may think I am just some dramafied attention mongrel,
but you will never know.
The heartbreak is one I have shared with very few.
But it was awful. It is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

I have worked for years to overcome that pain.
The only thing that finally gave me solace
was turning it over to the Lord.
Over and over again.
I have become
an expert at handing it over.
So much so
that I have become a new person.
A better person.
A stronger person.
A happier person.
A more peaceful person.
And a person who seeks the Lord.

I have experienced a beautiful heartbreak.
More than one actually.
I have experienced a repeated heartbreak
until I gave it to my Lord
so many times that it
became beautiful.
Just because I shared it.
And He turned it into beauty.

So, I loved this song this morning.
Even if Hilary Weeks
stole it from this life-changing blog post.

I hope we can all be Lindsey’s
or praying moms,
but really sometimes we may
be moms who neglect our kids
or ornery old men who are mean and critical.
And hopefully other people will just remember
that we might be at the bottom,
or trying to hike our way out of the
beautiful heartbreak.

But even though I don’t have a video made about me
or I am not an inspirational speaker
or a famous blogger,
I can testify
with all the honesty of my heart
that God will bring us through
our worst pain.
He may even take us through it on purpose
so that we can have a new and beautiful vista
when we reach the top
where we have learned to
stay right by His side.

P.S. Help DeAnne not to experience the heartbreak of coming so close to first place as HeroMom of the year and not winning. Please go vote now. If you get someone else to vote, besides you, leave me a message and tell me who you got to vote and I will add you into a real special post coming up very soon.

Peace and Quiet

Yesterday I was reading a blog
where the mom was keepin it real.
I like those kinds of blogs.
The real ones.
As opposed to the fake ones.

The blog’s author (who I have no recollection – sorry)

shared her concerns
over not having adult conversations
and what it would be like to go back to the workforce
someday while her working-mom counterparts
build their careers as she changes diapers.
She talked about her fight with depression
over the years.
I personally think she needs to up her meds.
It’s amazing what you can tell about a person from their blog.
She was real and she was also somewhat depressing.
I’ve been there.
I have those days.
But thankfully, because of some psychiatric drugs that work,
they are few and far between.
Not a day goes by that I am not grateful that my anti-depressants work.
Overall, I am a pretty content person.
I am such a happy mom.
I love my job as a stay-home mom.
I don’t know if it will last forever,
but I love it for now.
And the longer I live,
the more I understand that
the now is all you should worry about.
I love my kids.
I love spending time with them.
I love teaching them.
I love nurturing them.
I love watching them grow.
I love building friendships with them.
I love discussing with them all kinds of things:
fashion, hygiene, religion, boys, music, cooking: 
the list is endless.
I love it when they make me laugh.
I love it when I make them laugh.
I also love getting away from them.
And having adult time.
Free time.
Me time.
Peace and quiet.
Any mom who doesn’t admit this is a liar.
Or is generally psychotic and needs therapy.
I told this other blogging depressed mom that there
have been two practices that
have kept me sane
through the years.
#1. 
I try to have a lunch-date with a girlfriend once a week.
It can be the same friend or different ones. 
It can be with kids or without,
but for some reason that connection 
really helps me to be happy.
#2.
I have to have my weekly date with my cute hubby. 
It is a MUST.
I HAVE to have it.
Like the air that I breathe.
Even if it just means that hubby and I sneak away to the library for some peace and quiet.

Peace and quiet is sometimes better than you know what.
Especially the longer we’ve been married
and the more kids we accumulate.

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Meet Me At Mid-Day My Dear.

Another poem for the love of my life.
Feel free to eavesdrop or ignore.

  Funny sidenote:
LG does not have a poetic bone in his body.
I was just translating this poem for him.
He says, “where our bodies can entwine, what does that mean?”
Then I showed him entwined fingers
while asking him if I needed to pull out a dictionary.

He says, “Our bodies entwine every night.”
I said, I know.
Don’t you get it?
All this whole poem is saying
is
Come home at lunch time and have sex with me.

Now, after barely browsing the poem the first time
all the sudden he is interested and even excited about it.
Men!
I work on this poem for an hour
and all he even hears is the last three words of my explanation of it.
sex with me.

He is now trying to fight me off the computer so he
can read the poem with an all new perspective.

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I am best at bed-time,
you at waking dawn.
When my energy is greatest,
yours snores at your dreams.
The sun rises to your heartbeat,
while mine is perfectly at rest.
Meet me at Mid-Day my dear
when our bodies can entwine.
You are such a thinker,
and I just dream away.
You understand the abstracts,
 I, only concretes.
Gravity draws you closer,
and magnetizes me to you.
Meet me at Mid-Day my dear
when our minds collaborate.
You are tall and strong.
I just tremble in your arms.
Masculinity is regal,
femininity divine.
You talk of now and later.
I reminisce of past.
Meet me at Mid-Day my dear
where marriage is ours.
You struggle to express
what I communicate in excess.
You make me feel complete
as your hidden feelings fill my thoughts.
I know you love me dear,
and you know I always want you near.
Meet me at Mid-Day my dear
where our hearts are as one.
Defeat afflicts my torment,
I hope you understand.
Instead of advising or fixing,
you hold my hand and cry.
Knowing that you share my anguish,
is all I need to try again.
Meet me at Mid-day my dear,
so we can endure together.
Wednesday is my favorite
but any day will do.
The sun at its highest
or better yet, with rain.
Before or after lunch,
but definitely in bed.
Meet me at mid-day my dear,
where our love unites.

Lyrics with Lessons

I recently really enjoyed this post by Cameron Smithson. Cameron used a great song to prove his point that if you want to be loved, you need to give love. You can love without being loved, but it sure does work better when it goes both ways.

Cameron was a Mormon missionary in Knoxville when we lived there and he came from my parts of California, so of course we fed him often. I’ve loved getting to know Elder Smithson as a person instead of just a missionary through his facebook and blog.

If you happen to cross paths with a Mormon missionary, I encourage you to ask them about their love for the Savior Jesus Christ. It may surprise you how close 19 year old kids can be to the Master himself.

In the LDS culture, we often play the do you know game. Well guess what I recently discovered about Cameron? His uncle is the wave at the bus guy I told you about a while back. Cameron’s aunt and mom left me some sweet comments after making the connection on facebook. Thanks guys.

When I told LG about Cameron’s kin all he said was, “Why is it no surprise that Smithson is related?” That was said in the highest complimentary way, of course. What cool people!!! It’s the California connection.

Anyhow, Cameron got me thinking about, how, I, like him, love songs with good lessons.

Lately this has been one of my fav’s.

I would like to dedicate this song to my husband
who is learning the other important life lesson about love.
You don’t have to earn love.
You don’t even have to be perfect to be loved.
In fact I think love is
almost received to a greater depth
when people are at their worst
because that’s when they need it the most.

LG, you are perfect to me.
Even at your worst.

Another one of my favorite lyrics is:

All you need is love.

I was really bummed yesterday
when President Monson
alluded to the fact
that it isn’t true
when talking about the
60’s hippy movement.
Bummer.

We love music around here.
Remember how I used Sarah McLaughlin’s lyrics
to make these adorable framed photographs in my dining room?

What are your favorite lyrics with lessons?

Happy Mail

You’ve heard of snail mail,
E-mail,
junk mail,
and even birthday mail.
I want you to know about my new discovery.
Happy Mail.

Happy mail is what I send to

my hubby from time to time.
I like to help him get through his work day,
and remember what he is working for.
Can’t wait until our next getaway.
The alone time we had on the beach
in California last month
was totally completely awesome.

Sharing Fortune

LeGrand took me for the yummy Chinese lunch buffet today.
He ordered me an additional dish
of my favorite walnut shrimp.
On top of the all you can eat buffet.
Just because it’s my favorite
and it wasn’t part of the buffet.
Now, that’s true love.
When it came time to pick a fortune, 
I felt equally drawn to both.
And when we opened and read, I realized why.
They applied universally.

We share.

Fortunes because they apply equally.
Moments because they are ours.
Secrets because we don’t want to share them with anyone else.
Intimacies because even being naked isn’t close enough.
Thoughts because we honor one another’s opinions.
Feelings because we want to be close.
Disappointments because they are easier 
when you have a hand to hold.
Triumphs because we did it together.
Congratulations because we both deserve recognition.
Children because they are our greatest creation.
Love because there’s no other word.
Belief because we believe we are a small part of a great plan.
Money because you earn it and hand it over.
Clothes because sometimes your shirt is just more comfortable.
Toilets because we’ve got stories.
Cars because you let me drive and I change the oil.
Food because two entrees are better than one.
Pets because you bring them home and I feed them.
Parents because yours and mine are ours.
Music because we dance.
Beds because your always warm.
Traditions because we combined our pasts.
and
Futures because they are intertwined.
Sharing is best.
Sharing is fun.
Sharing is growth.
Sharing is double.
Sharing is joy.
Sharing is bliss.
Sharing is necessary.
Sharing is right.
Sharing is our great fortune.
I love you my better half and best friend. 
14 more decades sounds still not long enough.
Happy Anniversary to the man with whom I share everything.