About last night

I cannot begin to describe how very much I am looking forward to the end of this calendar year, seeing as it will spell the end of my interminable tenure on the project that has usurped my time, wrangled my creativity into a surprisingly strong Full Nelson and extracted my not inconsiderable mental acuity and caused it to pool into a decreasingly viscous puddle at my feet.  I worry that the building will shake as a large dozer rumbles by and it'll schlurp off into a floor vent to be lost amidst the bits of detritus that gather unnoticed like so much corporate dandruff.

It'll be a new me in January after a Christmas break and a return to more stimulating directives from The Man so I feel eager to accomplish something rather than like now, contemplating my first two cups of coffee of a morning, wondering whither went my initiative (down the floor vent, most likely) and if I should mix things up a bit and put THREE packets of raw sugar in my third cup of joe rather than two, and if my caffeine-palsied hands are up to the task.

Change comes, but some change is more perfervidly anticipated than other.

*****

Forced (all willingly) to care and fend all day for two small boys that still wet themselves and think nothing of it (though one now proudly exclaims having done so), my wife, already suffering from a bad back (attributable to working construction for her dad in early years), finds herself in need of the strong ministrations of my hands more regularly these past months since Tavish was born.  The eldest boy gets put to bed and Amy is likely to glance in my direction with 'that look' on her face.  She shrugs her shoulders suggestively.  Perhaps it's painfully.  I don't ask and prefer to think the former.

When we were still dating she bought me a fancy bottle of vanilla cream massage oil.  It's edible.  She and her back have been on the receiving end of most of it.  After more than four years the last of it was rubbed in last week.  Last night I pulled out the new (smaller) bottle of chocolate mint massage oil.  Declan was talking happily to himself in his bed and Amy walked out of our bedroom shrouded in our down-filled duvet, flopped on the couch and nuzzled her face into the pillow.  She smiled up at me and her eyes got wide in anticipation.  I rubbed my palms together and mumbled something about it being in my best interest to run my hands under hot water for a minute.

At least half of our conversations consist of verbal jabbing, all meant out of love.  They normally end with:  "Wow, you sure must love me a lot!"

"I sure do!"

So we were talking as I traced the tips of my thumbs down the twinned ridges of muscle either side of her spine.  I try not to talk about the dogs too much because, still, it's normally best.  But Jango had Houdini'd his way out of the backyard twice this weekend and I must have made some sort of disparaging comment.  I think I gave a knee-jerk apology.

"Oh, you don't have to apologise for teasing the dogs, Si."  Amy's eyes still closed.

"I don't?"

"No.  You can tease them, you just can't be mean to them."

"Oh.  I didn't know.  You have to be a bloody tight-rope walker to be a husband in this house."

Amy smiled and I kept rubbing. 

Those boys that induce such knottiness in my wife also sap a good deal of her energy.  An alarming side effect from my semi-regular evening flesh-wrangling is a complementary inducement of somnolence that, after 20 or 30 minutes, has my wife snoozing pleasantly.  When this happened last night, I sighed, sat on the floor near to her head and watched the first half of the Discovery Channel special on China, of which I'd seen the end earlier in the day.  When I got to the overlapping bit I walked downstairs, preceded by the boxer, who proceeded to yack by the back door, bringing my thoughts for the past hour full circle.  I cleaned it up and put her in her kennel.  I wasn't mean to her.

I frittered away valuable sleeping time on the computer and resurfaced shortly before midnight to coax my wife to bed.  She did, after all, still have the duvet.

This morning, after I filled up my truck at the Husky truck stop down the road from my office, I bought a large coffee and put three sugars in my first cup.

Comments

[rick]

But Simon- doesn't all that coffee just keep you awake at work?

[marian]

Ah, that was a lovely little bit of married with children.

One nice thing about being self-employed (sometimes) is that if you have to take on a mind-numbingly boring, soul-sucking job, you can usually charge more for it, (we call it the 'pain and suffering surcharge') so at least there are dollar signs glinting in your eyes as you watch the viscous puddle slide.

[Linda]

This post leaves me feeling, um... well, uh... Hmmn... You know, I, um, really...
*sighs* I just... If you, um... So do... Gah. Wait. Do? Why... uhhh. Shit. Never mind.

[Mark]

Nice snapshot of what's up in your neck of the woods. (grumbles at today's 92-degree high temp while up north Amy comfortably wraps up in warm bedding)

[Alvis]

You mean you give your wife a massage with the hope it will lead to something else? Shame on you. ;)

And that first paragraph, did you have thesaurus out when you wrote it?

[Simon]

Rick,
Yes, dammit.

Marian,
If I could come up with a viable solution that included self-employment, I'd be all over that. Like, now.

Linda,
Exactly.

Mark,
If there's one thing that people can never seem to agree on, it's the weather.

Alvis,
I'll use anything to lead to something else. And no, I didn't use a thesaurus.

[Paul]

Alvis, Simon is a Thesaurus.

[Linda]

I LOVE PAUL.