Our Disco

We exchanged our first flirtations while trading Newsboys CDs in the parking lot of the youth center where we both volunteered every Friday night. We were quite scandalous. After a rather interesting and slightly awkward late-night car conversation while sitting in my driveway in which we agreed to “get to know each other better,” to which I wondered What have we been doing for the past six months? I attempted to look casual while I agreed, trying to pretend like I had conversations like this on the regular and wasn’t actually exploding internally with joy, anticipation, nerves, and anxiety. Looking back, it seems appropriate this conversation occurred on the Fourth of July weekend because my insides were shooting around like bottle rockets. Because he was giving a solo photography career a shot and working part-time, and I was an impoverished college student working as wait staff at the local Ruby Tuesday’s, cheap entertainment was one of our primary objectives. We sat in the nosebleeds at the Great American Ball Park, and he educated me on Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips while explaining the strategy behind pinch hitters. He loves sports and watches anything involving a ball, and I grew up reading stacks of books while sitting in my bean bag, so we took time to discover what could be ours. Riding around in his gray Chevy Malibu Maxx, “Give me love, give me liberty, disco, “Something Beautiful,” and “In the Hands of God” were the soundtrack of our summer and our love. Fueled by Chipotle and the local neighborhood ice cream stand, we began.

After three years of dating and nearly twelve years of marriage, we’re three kids deep, and our soundtrack has changed. Now, we listen to the original Newsboys with nostalgia, forever loyal to Peter Furler and Phil Joel, much like our parent’s reverence for the Beatles. The seasons of our lives have changed. The rhythm has picked up tempo. There is more high ‒ and sometimes shrill ‒ tenor.

Our summers now have less baseball. Sometimes he rushes home from work, we grab a freezer pizza, and we visit Grandpa’s house to splash in the pool for an hour or two before we wrestle tired bodies into the car and race them home for a later bedtime. Other evenings, we each take a boy, use an oversized belt or the baby carrier to strap him to us, and each use one of the two dilapidated lawnmowers we inherited with the home we purchased two years ago to mow our lawn because together, we have a fifty-inch deck and the mowing goes more quickly. We now have more than one photo of touseled, golden heads, blond highlights painted by the sun, nodding off to the hum of the lawnmower as the warmth of the evening sun dips lower and cools.

In the fall, as the leaves begin to turn, our sabbaths are more restful if we keep our children busy. We unearth old fishing poles we inherited from his grandpa, buy a pack of night crawlers from the local drive-thru convenience store, and fish at our local county park because they don’t require a fishing license. Some rhythms have changed, but our ability to find cheap entertainment has remained. Other times, we simply meander down the nature trails, cooled off by the canopy overhead. Refreshed by the quiet calm. The smell of rich, black soil. The trill of birds calling to each other in the evening air. The white noise of grasshoppers, crickets, and cicadas.

With our winters comes sickness. Around Thanksgiving, we have learned to buy all the vitamins, chicken noodle soup ingredients, Gatorade, popsicles, children’s Tylenol, Motrin, cough syrup, Vicks, and soothing essential oils. We play winter board games as we used to do, but the suggested age has drastically lowered. Instead of Settlers of Cataan, we play Pop the Pig and Clue Junior. After dinner, we ignore the dishes and gather on the living room rug to squeeze in a round before seven thirty bedtimes. Soon, our own sleep is often interrupted by, “Dad, I wet the bed,” or foreheads burning with fever. Our skill set has grown as we have become experts at carpet cleaning and nose suctioning. Convincing our disgruntled toddlers to allow us to apply vapor rub to their congested chests has morphed us into expert negotiators.

As spring dawns, weeds pop up in the flower beds, and we use our pale hands, skin softened by their disuse to pry into the chilly earth to uproot quackgrass and clover. Our boys dust off their toddler-sized wheelbarrow, and we work together to prune and rake and mulch, cleaning away the winter neglect, fresh with anticipation and possibility. This last spring, our four became five as our wee little girl joined the world along with the spring bunnies and the spotted fawns who creep through our backyard in search of sustenance. Drew and Ellie Holcomb often sing Feels like Home as we look at each other with contented bemusement and love over the heads nestled in our laps. 

Every couple of months when we leave the kids with grandparents and sneak away to keep our present strong and invest in our future, we’ve begun to talk and dream about what the years following these might look like. A mixture of our past ‒ just us two ‒ combined with visits from our present, as our children come and go, a new reiteration of our beginning. We fantasize. Our next stage involves frequent travel and eating our way through all the new spots that have opened in our local cities since we’ve been absent. We had a few years before children when we were both employed that we learned to enjoy slow, luxurious dining, savoring exciting new pairings and flavors. Currently, we’ve mostly gone back to eating Chipotle takeout when we splurge on dining out. We replicate the favorite dishes of our memories sometimes in our kitchen, now that naps and early bedtimes tie us closer to home, and keeping kids clothed and diapered and fed tightens our budget. We try to imagine when it will be just us again, and we pick up some of those pastimes from our former selves. But even when our home is no longer the primary residence of more than two, and we jet set around the world dining on authentic pasta and flaky strudel, we will, thankfully, never again be just us. Past, present, and future are all abundantly ours. More than we imagined. More than we deserve. Trading CDs in a gravel parking lot sprinkled with weeds and surrounded by neglect birthed our life.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series “Ours”.