Diary of a Marriage: Stuff We’ll Tell Our Grandkids

Em, enjoying her very first post-honeymoon meal, cooked by her new husband J.: pasta with a side of rice.

I think I’ll look back one day and realize that J. and I actually got married pretty young — I was exactly one week shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, and he was a month away from the ripe old age of twenty-eight. And as I’ve mentioned before, we didn’t live together before we tied the knot. This means that we’re learning a lot of Big Adult Life Stuff together on the fly, as all couples do, from the things that come with home ownership (mortgages and interest rates and how to properly care for your very first few square feet of land) to prickly domestic issues (how to iron a pair of men’s dress pants so he doesn’t look like he slept in a Dumpster) to the really tough stuff (dealing with a sick parent and being laid off from your first job).

I also think that I’ll look back one day and realize that the stories that came from figuring some of this stuff out are actually pretty funny — the sort of stories we’ll tell our grandkids one day. The stories that will get exaggerated over time and become a bit of legend to our great-great-grandchildren.

For instance, we’ll probably tell them about the time our heat stopped working — conveniently the night before I was to throw my first-ever official dinner party, in the dead of winter — and we had to sleep and waddle around the house in full snow gear until the following day when the handyman cheerfully informed us (a mere 20 minutes pre-party!) that J. had simply replaced the heating filter incorrectly and, really, it wasn’t a big deal; the chill would wear off by the time my guests arrived.

We’ll also probably tell them of our first New Years Eve when, in the middle of getting ready for a party, I decided that I’d finally had enough of the whole closet-sharing thing, and J. got out of the shower to find everything he owned lying in haphazard piles around the bedroom and me delighting in my newfound closet space. (He’s since taken over the guestroom closet and, after two years, he has finally stopped grumbling about it.)

And we’ll most definitely tell them about the first time J. made dinner for us, right after we’d returned from our honeymoon. I came home from my first day back at work — to a husband for the very first time — and found that J., who’s a teacher and always home before me, had prepared his very first meal ever: A heaping pile of pasta served with … a side of rice.

I remember gamely eating it all, wondering why we were carb-loading but vowing to never say anything, until the same dish appeared the day after that, and then the day after that, at which point I gently informed him that if I continued eating 40,752 carbs a day, I’d be roughly the size of a large house in a month, and suggested that he maybe try adding those microwavable bags of veggies we had in the freezer to his repertoire. (He now has a much better grasp of the food groups.)

Even if he isn’t exactly giddy about being unceremoniously kicked out of the closet, and even if I still get petrified every time he ventures near our heater, I’m sure we’ll laugh about it all in a few years, if not sooner. And if our great-grandkids end up embellishing our stories years down the road, that’s fine. I have this blog to prove how it all really went down.

What sort of sort of things will you and your husband or husband-to-be have to tell your grandkids? Any disasters turned into funny stories? Are you writing it all down or keeping track of it in any way?

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