For our first eight years together, on my birthday I asked for only one thing:
William, will you get up with me in the morning, have coffee and share the newspaper across our kitchen bar, like real people do? This sounds as ridiculous to say as it is to write, but marriage is nothing if not the melding of eccentricities.
William is a healthy sleeper and was a committed night owl. When he wasn't working he liked to stay up late. Then he crawled into bed, cuddled up and slept until noon.
My schedule is contrary to his. I'm most productive in the morning. In the evening, I can't wait to put on pajamas, often before dinner, and scrunch into bed with a book by nine-thirty. This routine had me up by seven a.m. reading the paper, alone, over breakfast.
Thus: Once a year I made the request and bleary-eyed William complied because it made me happy and, as he likes to joke, I'm so easily entertained.
It went like this for years until I noticed that we do this almost every day now. They say married people look alike over time. We adjust. We catch up to one another. We match habits. I see more action movies and he's taken an interest in dramas.
One Christmas I asked for another special gift: Please come to one yoga class with me. Just try it. I promise you'll like the teacher, she's seriously cute.
He came, he tried and now we do yoga two or three times a week together. We continue to bend, shape and form ourselves into a kind of Henry Moore sculpture in both yoga class and our day-to-day lives.
Certainly I have grown to accept that he still loves to stay up late and sleep in when he can. I have figured out that his moods don't have to be mine. Nor does my emotional life get to rule the atmosphere of our home. I remind myself to speak up and speak truthfully. He listens and doesn't get bogged down in self-recrimination.
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