My sweet husband, however, in our almost fifteen years of marriage (how in god’s name we’ve been married this long seems impossible, given that we’re both only 29), has perfected any number of important staying-married skills.  Here are a few high points for other husbands (or wives, whichever seems appropriate).

1. Husbands do not wake their wives up for sports.  Husband loves the New York Rangers with a deep and abiding passion. He is a Fan. I am not a Fan, or a fan, or even someone who particularly likes hockey. Nevertheless, I am aware that having the Rangers in the Stanley Cup playoffs is a Seriously Big Deal. I mean, the last time that happened was in the previous century, for god’s sake.  Stanley Cup Playoffs is the good news. The bad news? We live nine time zones away, which means that in order to watch the games, Husband gets up at ungodly hours of the morning: 3:30, 4:00, 2:00.  Here’s how much he loves me: the nights (or mornings) he’s going to watch the game, he sleeps on the couch in the TV room because his darling wife has become an insomniac and if he stirs out of bed at 3AM, she will wake up and never go back to sleep. This will make her grumpy. She has been known to bite when she is tired.

2. Husbands offer unconditional tech support with little or no explanations. Yes, I know, I know, I should learn how to do various techy things myself but really? I don’t want to and it gives you such pleasure…just download, install, sync, upgrade. There is no need to explain your decisions to me; you’re the one who reads Wired. I have nothing to offer in this conversation.  (And for all those times I haven’t said thank you? Thank you.)

3.  Husbands offer unsolicited compliments, foot rubs, and gifts. These things do not all have to happen at the same time – sequentially is fine, but unsolicited is key.

4. Husbands remind their partners that “hot” doesn’t always have to refer to feverish children, soup, or last night’s leftovers. Husbands should also be aware that sometimes “hot” really DOES mean children, soup, leftovers, and that maybe it’s a good night to watch reruns of last year’s Premier League games.

5. Husbands know these things: how to make a crisp G&T; how find joy playing with their offspring; and that the grosser elements of housekeeping (clogged drains, clogged toilets, dead bugs, live bugs) will be his domain.

6. Husbands remember: birthdays, anniversaries, milestones.

In the interest of even-handedness, however, here are a few handy-dandy tips for my husband, if, hypothetically, he were in need of a few Husbandly adjustments.

7.  When removed from one’s feet, socks should generally be deposited in the dirty clothes pile, which is sometimes (but not always) known as “the laundry basket.” If “the laundry basket” is not available, then the floor can be the sock repository.  The table, couch, counter, or chair are generally not the dirty-sock-putting-place, even if the socks in question have been folded.

8. Doing the dinner dishes may count as foreplay. At very least, it can’t hurt. Should you also wipe down the counters, put away the leftovers, and take out the trash?  The Magic Eightball really likes your chances.

9. If a person is not at home but out driving around doing errands and receives a phone call asking where something is, at home, and the person calling is, in fact, in the house, then the person answering the phone is likely to be rather testy. She is trying not to be killed by some crazed expat driver and cannot actually stop to think about where the tape dispenser might be. She may even suggest that the caller do something untoward with the tape dispenser if and when he finds it.

10.  If a person wants to organize the contents of a person’s desk, the surface of which has long disappeared, using the entire corner of the living room as a sorting station is entirely justified.  Be aware, however, that the phrase “I’m working on it” ceases to have meaning after about day three and may result in the loss or injury to Very Important Papers, which may or may not become raw material to youngest son’s constant interest in making paper airplanes.

Mostly, of course, what Husband does best is put up with me, his snarky, frequently grumpy always perfect wife. And god knows there isn’t a list long enough in the wide world to itemize how he manages that task.

Nine months. If I continue my pregnancy metaphor, we’re due. When I was pregnant with baby #1, people with kids would say “your life is going to change…” and I would nod and smile and think to myself “maybe your life changed, suckahs, but I am a superior form of human and my life will go on like always, except I’ll have this charming bundle to look after.”

Bwahahaha.  Hubris, my friends, pure and simple. Babies kick your ass (and mostly we love them for it); they make us better people (except when we have to read Thomas the Tank Engine for the 458th time); they are little flesh-wrapped bundles of hope that will, I think, despite what Dr Sears says, flourish even if we occasionally put them down or let them cry.

Nine months ago, when we told people we were moving to Abu Dhabi, they said “oh wow, Dubai sounds really cool.”  The next question, inevitably, was “are you going to have wear a…y’know, a thing?” and they’d sort of flap their hands around their heads. They meant “veil,” but it looked more like “goalie mask” or “diving helmet.”  And always, always, they’d say “wow, that’s going to be a big change.”

I’d nod and smile and say “mmhmm,” but inside my brain there was no hubristic nonsense. Instead there was “HOLY CRAP WE’RE MOVING TO ARABIA WHAT THE HELL ARE WE THINKING ARE THERE CHICKEN NUGGETS IN ARABIA MY KIDS ARE GOING TO STARVE.”

Despite my chicken nugget anxiety, we moved. Figured out how to move twelve huge suitcases, four people, and assorted carry-on bags half-way around the world (why yes, that was me you saw crouched in front of the departures counter at JFK, madly tossing things between suitcases trying to get the weight allotments right), figured out how to negotiate the grocery stores, figured out how to drive in a world where traffic laws are more like traffic suggestions, figured out that trying to make a strange place feel like “home” is almost as exhausting as having a newborn.

Nine months ago, if you’d asked me if we would stay in Abu Dhabi for another year, I would have laughed at you with the same incredulous laugh that you’d hear if you asked new parents when they were going to have baby #2: “We’re barely hanging on,” they’d say. “And you think we should do this to ourselves again?”

But then, you know, the baby smiles, it coos, it pats your cheek. It sits, babbles, drools, shoves oatmeal in its hair, crawls, and becomes generally the cutest baby ever in the history of babydom.  And then one day, as you watch this Platonic specimen of babyhood scooch across the floor, the thought bubbles to the surface: why not another one, because if this one is so damn cute, what would a sister/brother look like?

And so it was a few months ago that I started to think, oh good lord, we just figured out how to live here. Now we’re going to move back? Liam no longer believes that we ruined his life by switching schools; Caleb can read rudimentary Arabic words; Husband loves the work he’s doing here; there are chicken nuggets in the frozen-food section of the grocery store.  Being a typical mom-type person, I feel settled now that my family feels settled–and besides, if we moved, I would have to scrap this beautiful new blog design.

Do I really want to uproot again, move back to New York, give up our adventure before we’ve even really gotten started?

No.

It’s been nine months; the new baby has gotten cute; we’re doing it again.

We’ve not officially told the kids, but our contracts are signed, so…expat life? Here we come again – or rather, here we stay. I guess I’m going to have to figure out a different metaphor for next year’s adventures.

one of the lovely support systems (safety nets? escape hatches?) that helped me adjust to life in Arabia has been the community at yeah write, curated by the amazing Erica (she of this blog redesign).  click over using this button and see what’s brewing at yeahwrite this week…then come back to yeahwrite later this week and vote for your favorite posts

So here’s the thing. I swear. Like a motherfucker. Pretty much could make a sailor blush what with my f-bombs and whatnots.

I loves me an Anglo-Saxon curse word and think that fuck is like the little black dress of language: always appropriate, goes with everything, accessorizes nicely.

Long ago, waaaay before Go the Fuck to Sleep, on those days with babies when I was pretty much light years beyond the end of my rope, those days where you’re so fried you can’t really remember what it felt like to be an adult in conversation with other adults, what it felt like to have an actual shower of more than 2 minutes, to be free of spit-up and burp cloths and back-aches, gut-aches, shoulder-aches, wrist-aches–on those days, I had a particular lullaby I used to sing.

To whichever baby had sent me so close to the edge I could look over and see the abyss, I would sing, in the softest, sweetest, gentlest voice you can imagine, something along the lines of “you’ve ruined my life, I can’t do this any longer, fucking shit, what am I going to do, I am so tired, holy fucking shit what am I going to do please just stop crying for one goddamn hour…”

Okay – I wasn’t suicidal or PPD or infanticidal – I was just a standard-issue exhausted new mom. And I had a lot of love and support and everyone survived, so it’s okay.

I offer this story only to explain that me and swearing, we’re pretty much besties.

Here’s the thing, though. My babies are now old enough to hear my foul mouth and parrot it back, not in a oh-isn’t-that-cute-a-toddler-saying-”shit,” but with full force and understanding of the words coming from their mouths. And hearing my children’s sweet voices lilt around foul language is upsetting, to say the least.

So I had to stop. At least in front of them.

I’ve swallowed hard and reserved my love of four-letter words for solely adult company. Now, in front of the kids, I say “fudge” when something drops on the floor and breaks, or “holy cats,” or sometimes, “crap.”  But “fudge” has become my default word, when children are present. I figure they might know what I’m wishing I could say, but at least I’m not saying it.

Husband, however, disagrees with me. He says that the boys know I am saying “fudge” instead of “fuck,” and so I’m not really disguising anything or fooling anyone. I say I’m not trying to “fool” them, I’m just trying to ride herd on my fouler impulses. Husband is unconvinced.  He’s wrong, the fudge head.

I’m not sure what the boys think – they don’t say “fudge,” but I have heard Liam mutter “holy cats” under his breath (and, truth be told, he’s become fond of English-isms: bloody this and bloody that, and then “wanker.” We asked him to explain what wanker meant, and he insisted he didn’t know – but his dimples and embarrassed grin said otherwise: he does know but is too abashed to explain).

So what do you think? I should stop saying “fudge” and say…”fooey?” or “rats?” or “christ on a stick?”

Okay, that latter is probably an ix-nay.

But seriously – even if the kids know what I want to say, isn’t it better that they hear me not say it than that I let that f-bomb fly?

And by f-bomb, of course, I mean exploding fudge balls.

photo source

Yes, the Maldives. The islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean that are sinking due to global warming and where, just before our trip, they had an itsy-bitsy coup and ousted the president. The coup was fairly pleasant, as far as coups go (although probably not for the president, who now has to live in an ordinary place like the rest of us, instead of in paradise), and life along the atolls seems to have continued more or less as it has before.

Before we moved to Abu Dhabi, Husband and I daydreamed about a trip to the Maldives. We figured it could be his Big Treat for turning fifty (or maybe we call that a consolation prize?), an reward for moving the entire family to the middle of the freaking desert, a second honeymoon…we had all kinds of rationalizations reasons why we should go to the Maldives.

Then reality hit: we have children. And unless we planned to leave them in our apartment for five days with several boxes of Fruit Loops and a few computer games, we were going to have to bring them with us.

My visions of canoodling on deserted beaches and romping in azure water with Husband vanished, replaced by images of me sitting in a sweaty hotel dining room ordering yet another round of chicken nuggets while my children argued about how unfair it was that his portion of french fries was bigger.  My romantic vacation had morphed into…a family trip.

But I couldn’t let go of the dream, so Husband and I scraped together enough frequent flyer miles for four plane tickets, found a resort with a free “kids’ club,” ignored the coup, prayed the ocean waters wouldn’t rise too high too fast, and counted the days until we left.  When I told Liam where we were going, his response demonstrated the deep appreciation for other cultures that he’s developed in our time abroad: please please tell me there aren’t any museums or history that we have to look at?

Lovely. So mature and with such a global curiosity. Sigh.

As we flew towards Maale, where we’d get a speed boat transfer to our hotel, I warned myself not to expect too much. We were traveling with kids and we were staying at a Holiday Inn.  There was no way I was having the glam Maldives vacation I’d dreamed about – but even so, I told myself, I was still going to the Maldives.

Here’s what I discovered when we got to the Holiday Inn. Holiday Inn Kandooma has about as much relation to your highway rest-stop Holiday Inn as I do to Angelina Jolie.  Angelina and I are both women but after that… This Holiday Inn sure wasn’t the Holiday Inn of downtown Dubuque.

We took our shoes off when we got on the boat at the airport and didn’t put them back on until we left.  We seemed to have checked into Holiday Inn, Paradise Division.  My deliberately lowered expectations were crushed: no sweaty dining rooms, no mildewy hotel room, no beach littered with plastic water toys.

Just…this:

 I swear I’ve not fiddled with this picture in any way. That’s just the color (or some of the colors) of the water.  We snorkeled and swam and stared at the water; there were pina coladas for some of us and orange soda for others; there wasn’t a chicken nugget in sight. Bliss.

We might owe a small apology to the canoodling couples sharing the resort, however. Our kids aren’t in the “oh what a cute toddler” stage, and they’re not yet sullen teen-agers content to loll in the sun far away from their parents.  Nope.  Our kids were interested in the fish and other water creatures they could see as they snorkeled off the beach – a great thing, unless you happened to be standing in the tranquil water, deep in a passionate embrace , only to hear:  MOM LOOK A FISH! A BIG BLUE FISH! NO, COME LOOK, IT’S A MANTA RAY, I SAW IT! THAT’S NOT A MANTA RAY, IDIOT, THAT’S A ROCK. IT’S NOT A ROCK, IT’S A RAY. MOM, LOOK, A RAY! IT’S A ROCK, STUPID. IT’S NOT, I SAW IT SWIMMING AND HE SAID I WAS STUPID, MOM.

Yeah. Sorry about that, folks. See what happens when you make the sexy? You end up with children whose loudness escalates with their joy.

It was four days of perfect.

And then it was over. Beach treasures wrapped up for safe-keeping, damp bathing suits wadded into plastic bags to molder in the luggage, feet shoved into unfamiliar shoes.

Maldives. Say it with me: maldeeeevessss.  I think it translates to “you can in fact have a vacation with your children.”

I don’t know if the Maldivian ex-president will be able to return to his country, but I know that we will.