Happy July 4th!
HAPPY 1st ANNIVERSARY BABE!
1 day ago
Showing posts with label anniversary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anniversary. Show all posts
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Marrying A Medical Student: The Final Chapter
The night before our wedding we had a cocktail party at the hotel - a precelebration. Featured drink: 'Tamtini'. We snuck up to the suite to exchange wedding gifts just after 11pm. The days leading up to the wedding had us spinning with out of town guests, rehearsals, bachelor/ette parties, and final details. With friends and family waiting downstairs we knew we only had a few moments alone. And in those moments... we fell asleep.
PART ONE
PART TWO
Marrying A Medical Student: Part Three
With medical school in full swing we were living the dream, but it wasn’t easy. Like the day he studied for 14 hours while I remembered his dad’s birthday, did all of the laundry, went to the grocery store, lunched with friends, paid the bills, made him a dentist appointment and did it all with a headache and a paper cut. I spent that year studying Hebrew and attending classes to complete my Jewish conversion. I began teaching second graders the aleph bet on Sundays at temple. I kept up with the house and spent time with the cat while medical school pushed him to learn the highest volume of information the quickest pace you could ever imagine. Sometimes even the mundane jargon of everyday life got lost in the shuffle. I remember one evening, while grilling hamburgers, he looked at me and said, “Hey can you hand me the yogurt so I can flip these.” Without pausing I handed him a spatula and wondered how medical school could turn a grilling utensil into a probiotic pudding and my beloved into a zombie. There were mornings that he left to prepare for class long before I was awake, and I was dead asleep by the time he came home from studying. My serendipitous job attainment at the university meant that we were in the same building for most of the day. So early on, after days without seeing each other, we decided to have lunch dates. We met up each afternoon to spend a little time together. We would eat in the cafeteria amongst the bustling undergraduates and I would brief him on current events and he would vent about his upcoming exams. Over time, I learned to decode his sentences, work around his study schedule, cook edible food and respect that being a medical student was a full time job, and the endless hours he spent in the basement of a library were equally as important as the ones I spent working three jobs.
The summer after his first year of medical school, he proposed to me overlooking the ocean on the Oregon coast where he grew up. He fumbled with his words and reached into his pocket to present me with the diamond that belonged to his late mother. A woman I had never met, but who raised him to be the man that was standing before me stripped of all his brains and confidence, simply asking me to be with him forever. That day I said yes a million times over, cried tears of joy and felt a rush of excitement, the rush of commitment.
We gave ourselves eleven months to plan our Fourth of July wedding. The date chosen less out of our love for American independence and more out of scheduling necessity; we would wed two weeks after the medical boards and two weeks before he would start his clinical rotations. We laughed at the irony coining it, “Dependence Day.” I gathered magazines and played every minute of what it would be like again and again in my mind. When I was little, as most girls do, I would always picture my wedding day. I pictured the flowers, a poofy beaded dress, and my hair all done up nice and fancy. I would see myself dancing and laughing and cutting a towering white cake. All of these things were my idea of a wedding; but there was never a groom. Looking back it made perfect sense because, my dreams, much like everything in my life at that time, were about me. And then, I started picturing my wedding to this man, the tall broad chested know-it-all who sat next to me in graduate school. But I couldn’t see the flowers or the dress anymore – all I could see was him. I dreamt of him standing there at the end of the aisle waiting for me, and then us standing together, confessing our love in front of all of the people who we love and love us. I began to set the stage for our wedding, planning out every last detail on a shoestring budget. I wanted our wedding day to reflect who were as individuals and as a couple; his Jewish upbringing and my sentimental style. We wanted all of our loved ones to travel to the city in which we had built our young life. We wanted them to eat at the places we had shared romantic dinners in and sit in the reclining chairs of our temple where we had rediscovered faith together.
For six months, I worked on my vows each morning on my way to work. He committed to me by the ocean with unfettered words on bended knee. I wanted my words to echo what my heart had been telling me for the past five years: He is what you have wished for all of your life. With tears welling up in my eyes during each commute, I would recite out loud all of the reasons that I loved him. Things I always knew but never really told him.
“I treasure your advice; and whether I take it or not, I always grow from it.”
“You encourage me to speak my mind, even when it’s you I don’t agree with.”
“I have gone from someone who attacked the counter with Lysol at the mere idea of salmonella to a woman who stirs raw meatloaf with her bare hands.”
I hurried into work and jotted down my thoughts as I pieced them together. I wanted to tell our story. I wanted to tell him that he has made me a better person, because our love for one another is reflected in the way I live my life. With this man I felt more alive, more capable and more beautiful than I had ever known. A classmate, a teacher, a medical student, a son – he was so many things to so many people and soon he would be a husband to only me. There was not a dry eye in the room when I told him how I felt about him on our wedding day. I wept with joy because in that moment I realized the true meaning of commitment. In new-aged courtships, the etiology of a marriage is often years of togetherness, cohabitation and premarital responsibility to the nth degree. Lost are the traditions of brides over thresholds and wedding night jitters. In many ways our twenty-first century cart was before the horse. But on Dependence Day 2008, we met for the first time under the chuppah and walked out connected in a different and unexplainable way. My vows didn’t even say I love you, until the very end. This common salutation finished off the deepest cries of my heart on the most important day of my life.
I am applying to go back to school to obtain a terminal degree in my field. I will have married a doctor and become a doctor fulfilling both my mother’s dream and my own. I know now that feminism and misogyny don’t have anything to do with being a loving wife, and if it is your night to have dinner on the table, well then it had better be good. If you ask my mom, she will tell you that she is proud of me and of the man I have married and that through our journey, two stronger people have evolved. He’s not a rich doctor just yet, but every single moment of this life we’ve built together makes me proud to be his partner. I know our story is far from a fairy tale but I can’t help but think it is something special that anyone can have if they work for it. We are married because orange Jeeps and charismatic muscle heads were never enough for me. We are married today because of our friendship and two year’s worth of lunches together in the university cafeteria. We’re married because both of us committed to the complicated journey that is the medical profession, even if it does result in putting family second sometimes. We’re married because we worked hard for everything we have and somehow, early on, we knew that we were going to spend the rest of our lives making us work.
It’s funny how I eventually found myself taking my mother’s advice. I guess mothers do know best. I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for us. I see days filled with kids and travel but I am sure there is more beyond the scope of what I can imagine. Because I married my medical student and each day that passes is more than I ever could have dreamed of.
PART ONE
PART TWO
Marrying A Medical Student: Part Three
With medical school in full swing we were living the dream, but it wasn’t easy. Like the day he studied for 14 hours while I remembered his dad’s birthday, did all of the laundry, went to the grocery store, lunched with friends, paid the bills, made him a dentist appointment and did it all with a headache and a paper cut. I spent that year studying Hebrew and attending classes to complete my Jewish conversion. I began teaching second graders the aleph bet on Sundays at temple. I kept up with the house and spent time with the cat while medical school pushed him to learn the highest volume of information the quickest pace you could ever imagine. Sometimes even the mundane jargon of everyday life got lost in the shuffle. I remember one evening, while grilling hamburgers, he looked at me and said, “Hey can you hand me the yogurt so I can flip these.” Without pausing I handed him a spatula and wondered how medical school could turn a grilling utensil into a probiotic pudding and my beloved into a zombie. There were mornings that he left to prepare for class long before I was awake, and I was dead asleep by the time he came home from studying. My serendipitous job attainment at the university meant that we were in the same building for most of the day. So early on, after days without seeing each other, we decided to have lunch dates. We met up each afternoon to spend a little time together. We would eat in the cafeteria amongst the bustling undergraduates and I would brief him on current events and he would vent about his upcoming exams. Over time, I learned to decode his sentences, work around his study schedule, cook edible food and respect that being a medical student was a full time job, and the endless hours he spent in the basement of a library were equally as important as the ones I spent working three jobs.
The summer after his first year of medical school, he proposed to me overlooking the ocean on the Oregon coast where he grew up. He fumbled with his words and reached into his pocket to present me with the diamond that belonged to his late mother. A woman I had never met, but who raised him to be the man that was standing before me stripped of all his brains and confidence, simply asking me to be with him forever. That day I said yes a million times over, cried tears of joy and felt a rush of excitement, the rush of commitment.
We gave ourselves eleven months to plan our Fourth of July wedding. The date chosen less out of our love for American independence and more out of scheduling necessity; we would wed two weeks after the medical boards and two weeks before he would start his clinical rotations. We laughed at the irony coining it, “Dependence Day.” I gathered magazines and played every minute of what it would be like again and again in my mind. When I was little, as most girls do, I would always picture my wedding day. I pictured the flowers, a poofy beaded dress, and my hair all done up nice and fancy. I would see myself dancing and laughing and cutting a towering white cake. All of these things were my idea of a wedding; but there was never a groom. Looking back it made perfect sense because, my dreams, much like everything in my life at that time, were about me. And then, I started picturing my wedding to this man, the tall broad chested know-it-all who sat next to me in graduate school. But I couldn’t see the flowers or the dress anymore – all I could see was him. I dreamt of him standing there at the end of the aisle waiting for me, and then us standing together, confessing our love in front of all of the people who we love and love us. I began to set the stage for our wedding, planning out every last detail on a shoestring budget. I wanted our wedding day to reflect who were as individuals and as a couple; his Jewish upbringing and my sentimental style. We wanted all of our loved ones to travel to the city in which we had built our young life. We wanted them to eat at the places we had shared romantic dinners in and sit in the reclining chairs of our temple where we had rediscovered faith together.
For six months, I worked on my vows each morning on my way to work. He committed to me by the ocean with unfettered words on bended knee. I wanted my words to echo what my heart had been telling me for the past five years: He is what you have wished for all of your life. With tears welling up in my eyes during each commute, I would recite out loud all of the reasons that I loved him. Things I always knew but never really told him.
“I treasure your advice; and whether I take it or not, I always grow from it.”
“You encourage me to speak my mind, even when it’s you I don’t agree with.”
“I have gone from someone who attacked the counter with Lysol at the mere idea of salmonella to a woman who stirs raw meatloaf with her bare hands.”
I hurried into work and jotted down my thoughts as I pieced them together. I wanted to tell our story. I wanted to tell him that he has made me a better person, because our love for one another is reflected in the way I live my life. With this man I felt more alive, more capable and more beautiful than I had ever known. A classmate, a teacher, a medical student, a son – he was so many things to so many people and soon he would be a husband to only me. There was not a dry eye in the room when I told him how I felt about him on our wedding day. I wept with joy because in that moment I realized the true meaning of commitment. In new-aged courtships, the etiology of a marriage is often years of togetherness, cohabitation and premarital responsibility to the nth degree. Lost are the traditions of brides over thresholds and wedding night jitters. In many ways our twenty-first century cart was before the horse. But on Dependence Day 2008, we met for the first time under the chuppah and walked out connected in a different and unexplainable way. My vows didn’t even say I love you, until the very end. This common salutation finished off the deepest cries of my heart on the most important day of my life.
I am applying to go back to school to obtain a terminal degree in my field. I will have married a doctor and become a doctor fulfilling both my mother’s dream and my own. I know now that feminism and misogyny don’t have anything to do with being a loving wife, and if it is your night to have dinner on the table, well then it had better be good. If you ask my mom, she will tell you that she is proud of me and of the man I have married and that through our journey, two stronger people have evolved. He’s not a rich doctor just yet, but every single moment of this life we’ve built together makes me proud to be his partner. I know our story is far from a fairy tale but I can’t help but think it is something special that anyone can have if they work for it. We are married because orange Jeeps and charismatic muscle heads were never enough for me. We are married today because of our friendship and two year’s worth of lunches together in the university cafeteria. We’re married because both of us committed to the complicated journey that is the medical profession, even if it does result in putting family second sometimes. We’re married because we worked hard for everything we have and somehow, early on, we knew that we were going to spend the rest of our lives making us work.
It’s funny how I eventually found myself taking my mother’s advice. I guess mothers do know best. I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for us. I see days filled with kids and travel but I am sure there is more beyond the scope of what I can imagine. Because I married my medical student and each day that passes is more than I ever could have dreamed of.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Part Two
This morning I pulled our cake topper out of the freezer to thaw. I had never opened the box and as I lifted the lid, I could not help but smile. Surrounding the cake were some of the flowers from our wedding, frozen, but the petals were soft. I pulled out a cream rose and twirled it around in my fingers. My happiest memories were made on that day and this rose was part of it all.
PART ONE
Marrying A Medical Student: Part Two
We had an unconventional start. We were friends before benefits, which was a first for me, but we built on that foundation. He told me that I wasn’t a republican and I told him that his clothes never matched. We began to think about the future, a future that would have to involve jobs and bills. A grown-up future that was, at that point in time, looking somewhat bleak. He wasn’t accepted to medical school so he took a teaching job an hour away. After suffering through eight months of unemployment I decided that living together, albeit in sin, was better than being lonely and broke. My six year bachelorette hiatus was up and as we donated two boxes of unused body lotion to a gay and lesbian shelter to make room for his razor in the medicine cabinet, I realized I was entering into an uncharted stage of commitment with great hesitation and a pinch of excitement.
It was actually a pretty fulfilling time; I found a job with a reproductive rights organization and he taught suburban tenth graders about evolution and mitosis. We were able to pay the bills and travel. He golfed and I was involved with a local community theater. We volunteered for causes we believed in because our time and able bodies were the only expendable resources we had. We reveled in our adult relationship, yet embraced the future with a sense of uncommitted individuality. It had been a year and my heart was content when I first whispered that four letter word that begins with “L.” His response: “Thank you.” I was crushed and somewhat discouraged. I let my guard down after unequivocally promoting him to live-in-boyfriend status, and now, no confirmation in return. But despite my disappointment, I was not interested in moving back in with my parents or having to explain to yet another guy that yes, I sometimes listen to rap music and why I hate cheese on my salad. I wasn’t going to throw away the potential I saw in him because he wasn’t ready to utter three monosyllabic words. He wasn’t ready. So for two years my heart’s confessions continued to elicit a congenial, but unattached response.
I remember the day he told me he loved me for the first time. I remember because it was the day I was leaving for Chicago for a business trip. We had been together for over two years and I felt like I waited forever to hear the word love, nestled softly between I and you. Instead, just as I left for the airport he blurted them out quick and sharp almost as if they had been said a million times before. I remember being furious at him for saying it at such an inopportune time. No magic. No tears. As I sat on the plane casually flipping through the free magazines of things nobody needs or wants, my colleague casually asked if I had a good morning. “Yeah, I guess.” I answered nonchalantly,“...my boyfriend said I love you for the first time, I think.” I was so rushed with the panic of traveling alone to a city I had never been to before, I had no time to absorb the highly anticipated moment that I had wished for over the course of our relationship.
Six months later, my fully committed boyfriend was accepted to medical school, quit his job and made an offer on a three bedroom ranch with a basement. We never discussed the rushed ‘I love you’ and it became a common salutation. Somehow the short phrase that I waited so long to hear was simply uttered before hanging up the phone on my way home from work. I guess at that point, felt like commitment was more than a salutation. Commitment was found in the life changes that we were about to make, a house, medical school, and me as the bread-winner. I got a job at the medical school doing research and using my degree. We missed having extra money to eat out, so when my cycling instructor left to have her second baby, I began teaching the class. The former independent warrior inside of me roared at this new opportunity to embrace the “sugar mamma” gender role, but the traditional ideals of society had me taken aback with doubts of investing in an uncommitted future. I thought about my mother’s aspirations of me marrying a doctor. Although it was a long time ago, I was pretty sure she mentioned he would be rich and thinking back, she never said anything about scraping by with a poor medical student. She never said, “Honey I want you to find a great guy with a great job and then support him when he quits his job to incur a quarter-million dollars in debt to become part of a service profession that may result in putting family second.”
My sweet mom, the wife of a police sergeant, knows all too well about occupational necessity of putting family second. No one can ever prepare you for what your life will be like, no matter how hard they try. They can give you advice, offer up little hints and antiquated epithets beginning with “When your dad and I first met…” But no one from either of our humble middle-class upbringings could offer up a realistic perspective into what this new journey would be like. Simply, “It’s probably going to be hard.”
If it was going to be hard, I needed some reassurance. Not in the form of a ring, but I wanted to see his future with me in it long after the tests were taken and patients were cured. We laid in bed late on the eve of his first day of class, a year after he rushed through his I-love-you, and he told me the story about why he chose that particular morning to tell me his feelings. He told me he laid awake the night before my trip thinking about how I was nervous to travel alone and how he wished he could be with me to help me navigate the airport and the big city. He said that he wanted so badly to take away my fear and replace it with confidence and that was the night he realized what he had been feeling was undeniably love. The night he told me that story was the night that I saw my future. I realized the silent support he provided me was one of the reasons I chose him. He embraced my fears as his own, yet he let me face them myself and become a stronger person in the process. With this man standing beside me I was slowly becoming a confident traveler, and furthermore a more articulate professional, and loving partner.
To be continued...
PART ONE
Marrying A Medical Student: Part Two
We had an unconventional start. We were friends before benefits, which was a first for me, but we built on that foundation. He told me that I wasn’t a republican and I told him that his clothes never matched. We began to think about the future, a future that would have to involve jobs and bills. A grown-up future that was, at that point in time, looking somewhat bleak. He wasn’t accepted to medical school so he took a teaching job an hour away. After suffering through eight months of unemployment I decided that living together, albeit in sin, was better than being lonely and broke. My six year bachelorette hiatus was up and as we donated two boxes of unused body lotion to a gay and lesbian shelter to make room for his razor in the medicine cabinet, I realized I was entering into an uncharted stage of commitment with great hesitation and a pinch of excitement.
It was actually a pretty fulfilling time; I found a job with a reproductive rights organization and he taught suburban tenth graders about evolution and mitosis. We were able to pay the bills and travel. He golfed and I was involved with a local community theater. We volunteered for causes we believed in because our time and able bodies were the only expendable resources we had. We reveled in our adult relationship, yet embraced the future with a sense of uncommitted individuality. It had been a year and my heart was content when I first whispered that four letter word that begins with “L.” His response: “Thank you.” I was crushed and somewhat discouraged. I let my guard down after unequivocally promoting him to live-in-boyfriend status, and now, no confirmation in return. But despite my disappointment, I was not interested in moving back in with my parents or having to explain to yet another guy that yes, I sometimes listen to rap music and why I hate cheese on my salad. I wasn’t going to throw away the potential I saw in him because he wasn’t ready to utter three monosyllabic words. He wasn’t ready. So for two years my heart’s confessions continued to elicit a congenial, but unattached response.
I remember the day he told me he loved me for the first time. I remember because it was the day I was leaving for Chicago for a business trip. We had been together for over two years and I felt like I waited forever to hear the word love, nestled softly between I and you. Instead, just as I left for the airport he blurted them out quick and sharp almost as if they had been said a million times before. I remember being furious at him for saying it at such an inopportune time. No magic. No tears. As I sat on the plane casually flipping through the free magazines of things nobody needs or wants, my colleague casually asked if I had a good morning. “Yeah, I guess.” I answered nonchalantly,“...my boyfriend said I love you for the first time, I think.” I was so rushed with the panic of traveling alone to a city I had never been to before, I had no time to absorb the highly anticipated moment that I had wished for over the course of our relationship.
Six months later, my fully committed boyfriend was accepted to medical school, quit his job and made an offer on a three bedroom ranch with a basement. We never discussed the rushed ‘I love you’ and it became a common salutation. Somehow the short phrase that I waited so long to hear was simply uttered before hanging up the phone on my way home from work. I guess at that point, felt like commitment was more than a salutation. Commitment was found in the life changes that we were about to make, a house, medical school, and me as the bread-winner. I got a job at the medical school doing research and using my degree. We missed having extra money to eat out, so when my cycling instructor left to have her second baby, I began teaching the class. The former independent warrior inside of me roared at this new opportunity to embrace the “sugar mamma” gender role, but the traditional ideals of society had me taken aback with doubts of investing in an uncommitted future. I thought about my mother’s aspirations of me marrying a doctor. Although it was a long time ago, I was pretty sure she mentioned he would be rich and thinking back, she never said anything about scraping by with a poor medical student. She never said, “Honey I want you to find a great guy with a great job and then support him when he quits his job to incur a quarter-million dollars in debt to become part of a service profession that may result in putting family second.”
My sweet mom, the wife of a police sergeant, knows all too well about occupational necessity of putting family second. No one can ever prepare you for what your life will be like, no matter how hard they try. They can give you advice, offer up little hints and antiquated epithets beginning with “When your dad and I first met…” But no one from either of our humble middle-class upbringings could offer up a realistic perspective into what this new journey would be like. Simply, “It’s probably going to be hard.”
If it was going to be hard, I needed some reassurance. Not in the form of a ring, but I wanted to see his future with me in it long after the tests were taken and patients were cured. We laid in bed late on the eve of his first day of class, a year after he rushed through his I-love-you, and he told me the story about why he chose that particular morning to tell me his feelings. He told me he laid awake the night before my trip thinking about how I was nervous to travel alone and how he wished he could be with me to help me navigate the airport and the big city. He said that he wanted so badly to take away my fear and replace it with confidence and that was the night he realized what he had been feeling was undeniably love. The night he told me that story was the night that I saw my future. I realized the silent support he provided me was one of the reasons I chose him. He embraced my fears as his own, yet he let me face them myself and become a stronger person in the process. With this man standing beside me I was slowly becoming a confident traveler, and furthermore a more articulate professional, and loving partner.
To be continued...
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