appreciate my husband every day

He is so helpful and understanding. He brings me Kleenex and washes the dishes and boils water for my tea. What a fucking champ!

Today I slipped a little drawing into the laptop case for him to find at work.

I feel bad tonight because even though my husband has done nothing wrong and is probably one of the nicest guys on the planet, I had to ride his ass about the “romance factor.” It all started over X-mas presents – I guess I felt like he hadn’t put any thought into it yet, contrasted with when we first met and he was always coming up with really unique gifts and surprising me by showing how much he paid attention to the minutest expressed desires. Now sometimes it seems like I almost have to beat him over the head with what I want. Which makes me feel bad and makes him feel bad. That’s not right!

I think sometimes I fear that if there aren’t these little “romantic” moments (small presents, random reminders, unexpected treasures or gestures) we will somehow be more friends than lovers (my mom left my dad, who was her best friend, because she fell “in love” with her second husband). I know it’s not the case and it isn’t fair to expect him to express his feelings in a semi-contrived way when he does so many little things every day – warming up the car, sneaking out to do laundry for both of us, burning cds, studying for tests so that he can get a better job and try to improve our financial future. I mean, EVERY day he does so much to let me know how much he cares.

And I am just a brat! I don’t know why I think that some things are inherently more “romantic” than others. I will have to do some soul-searching. Because then I bring it up and it makes him sad that I’m sad and I really have no frieking reason to be sad!

Another factor may be that we not only live together, but work together and hang out with each other 95% of the time. So a lot of our time together is of the mundane variety, I mean, we can’t exactly be showering each other with affection when we’re on the job. That’s about to change soon, though, because once we move to Portland we will be apart so much – we’ll probably both look back and realize how special all this time together really IS.

So. Instead of trying to verbally compel him to act in a more spontaneously romantic way, I should LEAD BY EXAMPLE. And I should appreciate what I have, because I might not always be so lucky! I should be happy IN the moment, instead of thinking how it could be even better. Should, could, would, will. Okay, feeling better.

Yesterday I cleaned the crap out of the kitchen. And I made a big brunch. Both of us were somewhat amazed – we’d never seen so much surface!

And today I did all of the grocery shopping and made a nice dinner of Thai Coconut Ginger Shrimp. I even did the dishes so he wouldn’t have to wake up to a mess.

So I hope he knows I appreciate him, yesterday and today at least.

Sometimes I am not as good at this as I should be. I appreciate him every day, in my own mind, but maybe I fail to let him know it. And then on the same day that I am appreciating him madly to myself, maybe I will complain about something to him or even make it seem like I don’t appreciate him at all. That is so wrong.