To Love, Honor and Vacuum: Thursday Thoughts

4. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. My husband was away last week for work, and it reminded me why I so appreciate him. The fire alarm started to beep with a low battery warning, and do you think the girls and I could figure out where the battery went? After researching it on the web, I found where the battery case was supposed to be--and then couldn't open it. After much prying we finally got it open (with three of us balancing on a chair, not smart), and removed that horrid battery.

And the thing kept beeping. It's wired in electrically, so it beeps if there's no battery, too. I don't get that. If it's wired in electrically, why does it need a battery? So I had to go out and buy another nine volt, and then we tried to put it back in. And we did. And it kept beeping. We were doing it wrong. So Katie tried it. And I tried it. And Becca tried it again. Still beeping.

Then Becca figured out a miraculous way to disconnect the whole thing from the electrical system, and so the fire alarm now sits on my husband's bedside table, waiting for him to come home.

That same day I had a phone call from my bank telling me my credit card had been hijacked. And we can't get the window in our laundry room closed because the little mechanism for holding it shut is broken. And it was freezing and raining that day.

So I want my husband home! At least he can close a window and fix a battery.

5. Abigail Adams. We visited the homes of John and Abigail Adams when we visited Massachusetts a year ago, and I just finished reading a biography on Abigail Adams last week. It was really interesting. Not riveting, but interesting to see how tough her life was. They were separated so much, she and John, while he was a politician and she was caring for their farm.

This whole idea that we are to spend our lives under the same roof as our husbands at all times is really quite a luxury. When travel was so difficult in earlier times, men often spent weeks and months away from home. In other parts of the world, people travel for work. Last week, two of my friends left for tours of duty in Afghanistan. Again, it made me grateful for my husband and for the blessing of living with him, under the same ceiling. Even if said ceiling is temporarily missing a smoke detector.

She also reminded me how productive women had to be in other eras. You worked or things just didn't get done--and there was so much to get done. She spent so much time in correspondence, and planning parties (which she detested), and caring for her family, even once her children were grown. She made the most of her time on earth.

And even though I'm Canadian, I still get goosebumps when I read about John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's death. To think they both died on the same day, 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. God smiled on America; there can be no other explanation.

6. I've been writing a lot about wedding nights and honeymoons lately, and it's taken me back to my own. And to tell you the truth, they weren't that great. Life is wonderful with my husband now; it wasn't then.

And I've been thinking about how sometimes we have to get over these romantic fantasies that we have, that we build up in our minds. I think I'll write a longer post about this later, but too often we women build things up in our heads so much that we're inevitably disappointed. I'm not saying that we should never want something so that we'll never be disappointed; only that too often what we want isn't realistic, or has a great chance of not actually occurring. And then how will we react? We need to learn to be grateful for what we have, and not always try to get the romantic fairytale. Ironically, that makes the fairytale more likely!

That's about all I'm thinking right now, as I desperately spend the last day I have to edit my three chapters before sending them in. Pray that I make good decisions today so that my arguments and thoughts flow clearly on the page!

What about you? What's been up with you this week?

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