The World According to Angela

As you all know, I was single a lot more years than I’ve been married.  And as a single woman, there were certain things that I did for safety reasons.  One of those was keeping a tank full of gas.  When I left home for my first job, my mom made me promise two things: 1) keep a tank full of gas, and 2) keep a blanket in the car in case you break down.  I’m sure she gave me other guidelines but I remember those two, probably because they fit with the situation I’m about to share.

My husband doesn’t have this obsession with the full tank of gas.  In fact, he will sometimes wait until the gas light comes on before filling up.  This I don’t understand.

Our philosophies came to a head yesterday when we had to pick up a colleague from the airport.  Hubby had taken me to the doctor earlier in the day and had commented that he needed to get gas before we left for the airport.  Well, somehow he never got around to doing it.  You can guess the rest of the story.

I was fiddling around on the computer grading papers and the time to leave for the airport sneaked up on me.  In a rush, I got myself together and headed out.  Hubby and I realized as soon as we got in the car that we had not gotten gas.  I suggested stopping at a local gas station before we left town.  Hubby declared that we could make it to the airport.

Though I was anxious about it, he turned out to be right.  We made it to the airport with a little time and very little gas to spare.  So we pulled into a gas station near the airport.  As hubby shut off the ignition, he made that sound he makes when things aren’t going right.  Guess what?  He had forgotten his wallet.  Guess what else? I hadn’t brought my purse.

So here we are at the gas station with no credit cards and no cash.  Well, I didn’t have any cash.  Turns out hubby had $4.50.  So we get $4.50 worth of gas and head to the airport to pick up my colleague.

Our car has a gauge that gives an estimate of how many miles we can get on the remaining gas.  It was close, but the numbers seemed to suggest that we could make it home.   Though my colleague offered to pay for gas for us, we decided to make it home on our fumes.

As we ride down the interstate, I’m watching the miles go down, down, down.  I breathed a sigh of relief when we made it to our exit, knowing my husband would pull into the first gas station and take my colleague up on his offer to pay for gas.

But no.  Hubby decides we can make it to his favorite gas station.  Unfortunately, about this time the mileage gauge reads “****”, not a good sign.  So we end up pulling into the next station (not my hubby’s favorite) and allowing our colleague to buy $10 worth of gas.

At this point, we are less than two miles from home, so we go by the house, pick up some cash and repay my colleague.  So all is well.

This is not the first time hubby and I have found ourselves with no money, no credit cards and no gas.  It happened once after church.  Fortunately, that time we were in town and stopped at hubby’s favorite station.  They know him there so they allowed us to pump and pay later.

So what did we learn from this?  Two things: 1) Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus when he comes to filling up the gas tank, and 2) Keep a $20 bill in the car at all times.

What’s embarrassing about this?  Just this week, hubby and I had been stressing to his daughter the importance of keeping gas in the car.

Another embarrassing thing? That colleague that we picked up at the airport was a job candidate.  Talk about making an impression.

This post continues my earlier post on how we spent the holidays in 2011.

Our second stop was to rescue my husband’s daughter’s car from its resting spot on I-94.  Yes, we had to get the car towed.  Nobody knew we were in town until we showed up, along with the tow truck and the car.   We were greeted with happy smiles.

We still had Christmas gifts for his grandchildren to buy so the next couple of days were spent shopping.  My husband found the toys and I found the educational gifts.  I ended up getting the LeapFrog “My Own Laptop” in violet for his granddaughter and in white for his grandson.

One of my husband’s sisters invited us to her Christmas dinner, which she held on Christmas Eve so her children and grandchildren could spend Christmas Day at their respective homes.  Hubby went over early in the day to help cook.  When he came to pick me up for dinner, he sorta fell asleep.  For a long time.  By the time he woke up and got back over there with his daughters, all the food was gone and so were the people.  He couldn’t believe it and neither could I.  The look on his face when he realized there really was no more food was too funny. I wish I could have captured that look with a camera.  Being the good husband and father he is, he bought his daughters Chinese and gave me the last serving of mac ‘n cheese and dressing.  It was delicious!

After dropping off the gifts for the grandchildren the next day, we had Christmas dinner with my husband’s older brother.  He cooked, we ate, and then we watched football on TV.  And my husband talked to various relatives who called during the day.  There were a lot of calls!

Since my brother-in-law also has grandchildren, he had a beautifully decorated tree and a family room full of toys.  When we got there one grandchild was banging on a drum set and the other was riding on some kind of cart.  I told my B-i-l he’d regret buying that drum set when his ear drums started hurting.  My husband and his brothers are all very good cooks so we ended up with plenty of leftovers to take back to the hotel.

The next day we spent with my husband’s mother.  We don’t get to see her as much as we see my mother so I was happy to spend some time with her.  She’s a sweet woman who has welcomed me with open arms into her family.

She lives in an assisted living building that I think is perfect for seniors.  Her apartment has a small kitchen area, but the facility also has a dining room where they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Residents can cook for themselves, eat in the dining room or have their meals brought to their rooms.  The good thing is that my mother-in-law has made good friends in the building.  While we were there, one friend brought her over some cake the woman had baked.

The next few days were spent with my husband touching base with various family members and spending some time with his kids.  I went along on some of these visits, but not all of them.

On the day we left for home, we went to visit with his son and his family in Detroit.  This gave us a last visit with them and the grandkids.  Guess whose LeapFrog laptop was out of commission?  The grandson’s.

After that stop, we were headed back home.  We drove about five hours to our normal stop at the Holiday Inn Express in Carolton, KY.  Again, we paid with hotel points.

The next morning we began the last eight-hour leg back to Tuscaloosa.  We’d had a great trip but it was good to get back home.

My mom has already planned for us to spend Thanksgiving with her in Atlanta next year so I guess that’s what we’ll do unless we get an invitation from Michigan.  In that case, we’ll have to have a family holiday negotiation session.  Isn’t married life wonderful?

I could have titled this post, “How I spent my Christmas vacation.”

As newlyweds, we’re still figuring out how to handle holidays.  In the first two years of our marriage, we spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family.  This year we spent Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his.

That means Thanksgiving was spent in Atlanta with my mother.  We had a good time.  My mom and my cousin and her husband did most of the cooking, with my husband adding the ham.  I’m not usually called on to bring a dish because I’m not much of  a cook.   Things have only gotten worse since our marriage, since George is a much better cook than I am.

My mom is big on family meals so for Thanksgiving we ate in the dining room and we used the good dishes, or should I say, china. I was given the task of saying the Thanksgiving blessing.  Everybody laughed at me when I was done because I went on so long.  I laughed with them, but I stand by my prayer.  We had a lot to be thankful for and I didn’t leave anything out.  My cousin and I both survived breast cancer surgeries, my cousin’s husband had been hospitalized for something, my husband’s daughter had survived a second brain surgery, the rest of the family was thriving, and everybody was now in good health.  I think all that demanded a long Thanksgiving prayer.

The cousins spent the night at mom’s house along with us and we were treated by a visit from my brother from Kansas.  He was without his wife and three daughters this time, since he was on quick trip to take care of his aging father.  My mom was especially grateful to have both her kids under her room for a couple of days.  I should say all three of her kids, since my cousin is like a daughter to her.  We had a lot of fun, laughing and remembering old times, and being grateful for the lives we had.

My husband and I were teased a lot about not getting to places on time.  We have a bad reputation for not arriving at our scheduled time.  When we say we’re going to be somewhere on a certain day, our hosts joke that they’ll see us the following day.  It’s so bad that my mother and cousin debated telling us Thanksgiving dinner was going to be held the day before Thanksgiving.  It didn’t come to that though as we arrived in Atlanta on Wednesday just as we said we would.

We spent Christmas with my husband’s family.  To be honest, this trip came in the midst of some unwelcome long-distance family drama that I can’t rehash on this blog, but that I will certainly explore in a future book.  The good news is that God fixed our hearts so we could overcome the drama.

For our Christmas trip to Michigan, we didn’t tell anyone we were coming.  We just got in the car and headed out.  It’s about a 13-hour drive so we made our usual overnight stop at the Hampton Inn in Franklin, KY, about five hours from our home.  This spot is a regular for us when we’re traveling because we always use Hilton points since it’s only 7500 points a night.

After a restful night, we headed out for the remaining eight hours of our trip.  It went blessedly fast, with hubby doing most of the driving.  We arrived in Ann Arbor around 7:30pm.  Our first task was to check-in at the Sheraton Ann Arbor.  Again, we stayed there because we had hotel points.  Our 8-day stay cost us about $25/night.  We were able to get an upgraded room so we had plenty of space, along with a microwave, refrigerator and 42-inch flat panel television.  We were set for the week.

Our second task was to take care of a disabled car stranded on I-94.  No, it wasn’t our car.

Since this is getting to be a long post, I’ll tell the story of the car and the rest of our trip in a post later this week.

Actually, I’m not.  The truth is that my husband is a grandfather, which makes me the wife of a grandfather, not a grandmother.

I’ll bet some of you are wondering why I make the distinction.  Well, it’s because I’m too young to be a grandmother.  Not really.  I make the distinction because as someone married to a man with two adult children, a teenager, two grandchildren and an ex-wife, I’m careful to “stay in my lane.”

My husband’s grandchildren have a grandmother already and I have no desire to usurp that role, or dilute it by staking ownership to the title.  I’m not sure how I’d feel if the roles were reversed.  Would I want my grandchildren calling my ex-husband’s wife, “Grandma?”

At some point, we’re going to have to decide what name the grandchildren use for me, but we have a while for that since they’re still very young.  Maybe they could call me “Angel,” short for Angela.  I sorta like that.  I’m from the South so children addressing adults by their first name is a definite no-no.

What do you think?  How should my husband’s grandchildren address me?  Are any of you in a similar situation?  How have you handled it?

In sickness and in health

I took those words to heart as I contemplated getting married at age 50.  It didn’t take much to figure out that while my hubby and I had a number of good years ahead us, we had probably lived more days than we were going to live.  So when I married my husband, I was well aware that I could become his caretaker and I was willing to take that risk, and if it came to it, that responsibility.  You see, his medicine cabinet contains a lot more prescriptions than mine and he’s two years older so I figured if one of us became ill, it would be him.  Guess what?   He didn’t become ill; I did.  About three months before our first anniversary, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Let that sink in:  Three months before our first anniversary, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

As you can imagine, the honeymoon phase of our marriage turned abruptly into the hospital phase.  A cancer diagnosis means tests, tests and more tests.  It means surgeries — first for the biopsy and then for the cancer removal.  It means treatments — months of chemo followed by months of radiation.  To give you an idea of how long the process lasted, we celebrated our second anniversary a couple of weeks after my radiation treatments ended, but while I still was recovering from them.  That gives you some idea of what the year has been like for us.

I have to give my husband credit and praise for the care he’s taken of me—physically, emotionally, and spiritually–over the last year.  I’ve said to him more than once –  “You didn’t sign up for this, did you?”  And his answer is always, “Sign up for what?  You’re my wife and we take care of each other.”  Such simple words, but you’ll never know how much they’ve meant to me.  Or how much he means to me.  It’s one thing to love somebody when everything is going well; it’s another to love them through life’s challenges.

I know this is strange to say, but I think we’ve grown closer during the past year.  For many years, I’ve worn my independence as a banner.  I didn’t need a man to complete me.  Through this past year, I’ve learned that it’s real nice to have somebody to lean on when your own personal strength seems to be waning.  I learned what it means to work together, to sacrifice for each other, to compromise for the greater good, and to love in practical ways.  Overall, I think I learned what it means to be a wife, a life partner.

I know some of you are saying, “Well, God was with you.”  And, yes, He was and still is.   If I weren’t married, I still wouldn’t be alone; I’m not denying that truth.  What I’m saying is that God was gracious enough to send me someone to go through this time with me.  I thank Him for sending George to me.

This has not been a year of sadness for us though.  I think it has made us both more grateful that we found each other.  And we’ve had some fun memories that we often share with a laugh.  Our first visit to wig shop is one of them.  The owner gave me this Farrah Fawcett thing and told me I looked gorgeous.  Behind her, my husband was vigorously shaking his head, his eyes wide with alarm.  Our attempt to make our own wig out of my sisterlocks is another fun memory.  George went out and bought yarn and needles and we sat down to a pile of what seemed to be hundreds and hundreds of locks.  We looked at the piles, looked at each other, shook our heads, and promptly gave up on the that idea.  Then after we finally settled on a wig, my husband, eyes sparkling, looked at me and said, “I’ve got a new wife.”  Something tells me I’ll be wearing wigs every now and then even after my hair comes back.

I’m now officially a cancer survivor, but hospitals and tests are still a part of our future.  And testing needs to be a part of your life or the lives of people you know and love.  Early detection is important so get those mammograms.

As I close this post, I want to share a Breast Cancer Love Letter with you. It’s written by a survivor to the women she loves.  I share it with you because I love you.