My husband and I do share a bed, most nights. We do keep many blankets and pillows in the living room though because one of us is always falling asleep down here and we do not wake each other up if we have been sleeping for awhile. We both have bouts of insomnia, so neither of us find it acceptable to disrupt perfectly good sleep.
I do not know what a normal amount of hugging or kissing is. My husband's first wife had seizures and one afternoon he came home to find she had passed away. I know that if he leaves the house at any point in the day, I will get a kiss and an "I love you" before he goes, the rationale being that you never know if that will be the last time you see a person. While I cannot tolerate people up on me when I am trying to sleep, my husband will randomly come and do things like drop his head in my lap so I can scratch his cheeks. We have plenty of physical contact.
We also married at the JP. It was both of our second marriages and had no need for all of the headaches that come along with a 'normal' wedding. He invited his mother and then his sister and his closest friend. He suggested that I invite my parents, so they ended up coming. Our kids were there. I never understood why anyone would want more than that. Months or years of planning and money gone on one night? Yeah, no. We spent some money on a new stereo and a new computer and did not take a honeymoon. We were both content with the arrangement.
My husband is not a fan of small talk. He finds it petty and silly and of no importance. He says he does not want to bore me with insignificant details of his day. He had ADD, OCD, and a near photographic memory, so his head is a constant... it is like he has layers of thoughts all swimming on top of each other all of the time. It is hard for him to single out one detail when he sees it all. Small talk is nothing he deems important. He will listen if I need to talk, but I am pretty silent, so I rarely do. I will listen if he needs to talk, but he dislikes talking so he rarely does. Our household is kind of full of people who all do their own things in the same few spaces.
People tell us we are weird. Were someone to walk through our door it would not be strange to find five of us in the living room; one taking a 5000 page document of wiccan compilations and editing it down to 1000 pages so it is easier to get through for the others who share it, one of us playing a game boy, one of us drawing with their new graphite pencils, one of making beaded or wire bracelets, and another of us giving a large python a pre-shed bath on the floor by the piano. We do things together like that.
It is funny to me. For how little we all interact, my kids come to me with things they consider important. Their biological father is the go to guy for things like mall outings and chit chat. The kids all come to me or my husband with things they consider serious. While the quantity of words spoken in our house is low, the quality is is there. I do not understand people who need to run their mouths all of the time. You can say a lot by saying little and listening often goes farther than anything else. People tell us our house is weird, but I cannot imagine living any other way. I do not find it cold at all. I would find it cold to have to slap on some kind of false mask to be people we are not. We can relax with the others, we can do our own things and we all understand and support each other. I find that very warm.
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"...don't ask me why it's just the nature of my groove..."
26 Dec 2009, 6:55 am
