Birthday Reflections and Self-Evident Truths

Today was Little Dude's second birthday. We had a nice little family party with balloons, presents, veggie burgers, and a very cool bus-shaped birthday cake that FoxyJ made.

One year ago we celebrated LD's first birthday with yummy food and cupcakes and a few friends. Besides the additional company, the big difference last year was that, even though I helped out with the barbecue, I was technically a guest. Foxy and I had been separated for a couple months at that point, with plans to divorce. For LD's birthday, though, we played the role of happy family, not to fool our friends who were very aware of our current situation, but because the role came rather naturally to us, all things considered.

I have a very distinct memory of sitting on the floor during the party, watching the kids play while Foxy chatted with the adults. I looked around and thought, "This is my home. This is where I'm happy." As far as I can recall, that was the first time since moving out that I really questioned whether being divorced is what I really wanted. I had questioned to the point of obsession whether it was the right decision, but until then I was fairly convinced that it was what I wanted, speaking strictly of selfish motivations.

Wary of making a rash decision I'd regret later, I didn't act right away on that thought. I let it sit for a few weeks and in the meantime paid close attention to how I felt when I was with FoxyJ--we had an arrangement during the separation where we were having family dinners together at least twice a week, and then there were the drop-off and pick-up times on the weekend as well. I was far from miserable in my newfound bachelorhood, enjoying above all the time alone it gave me, but I was surprised to find that I felt even happier when I was with Foxy and the kids. I found that, all questions of morality and religion and responsibility aside, I actually liked the life I'd had and chosen to leave behind.

The next question to answer was whether Foxy was happier with me or without me, and after a bit of trial time she decided she could live without me just fine, but if she had a choice she'd rather not. It's nice when things work out that way.

It's strange now to think about how different things were a year ago. Objectively I recognize that less than a year after reuniting it's premature to make any sweeping conclusions about the longterm success of our marriage, but speaking subjectively and in the moment it's hard to imagine anything other than the us that exists now, to imagine that it was ever in question or that it ever could be. I'm a complete person alone but I'm completer with Foxy and the two of us together with our two children feels to me like a self-evident truth that stands at the center of the universe.

Perhaps this is why I've talked about our marriage here quite a bit less in the last year than I did before that. In the past my talking publicly about our reasons for getting and staying married has led some people to believe that I was opening the topic for public debate. How can I debate truths that are self-evident to me? Thankfully, when it comes to matters that affect only our family, I don't have to. So long as the same truths are self-evident to me and Foxy, we're good.

At any rate, I'm happy to have spent today with my son, my daughter, and with a woman who makes creative cakes, who folds origami boat invitations for our daughter's upcoming going-away party, who writes thoughtful posts on the seemingly miraculous birth of our son and how that fits into a world where similar miracles are denied to others, who answers just about every random trivia question I throw at her (and knows what she's talking about 95% of the time), who gets annoyed with people who ask how I feel about being a "Mr. Mom" but is empathetic enough to understand the cultural norms behind such sexist terminology and judge not the people but the norms, who cooks mostly vegetarian because the meat industry is destroying the environment, who regularly exposes me to cool foreign and classic films that I might never have heard of if not for her, who has now qualified twice to be in Jeopardy!'s contestant pool, and most of all who continues to love me despite my personal shortcomings, my eccentric obsessions and time-consuming hobbies, my inability to express emotions in a healthy way, and my passive-aggressive tendencies. I look forward to celebrating LD's twelfth and eighteenth and forty-ninth birthdays by her side.

For My Birthday Girl

(As a sidenote unrelated to FoxyJ's birthday, this song featuring FOB singer Patrick Stump was supposed to be on the Roots' latest album but when it leaked a couple months ago longtime Roots fans cried "Sell out!" and the band pulled it off the album, except for the iTunes version where it appears as a bonus track. I bought the iTunes version just so I could get the song. Sell out or no, it's a cool song.)

A Very Cheesy Post for FoxyJ

(Because I know she loves her dairy products.)

Yesterday morning Foxy flew to Davis to tour the school and be wined and dined by important people. She'll be back tomorrow afternoon.

This morning the very first thing S-Boogie said when she came into my room was "The house isn't pretty without Mommy."

Who's Your Daddy?

This evening Little Dude and I were looking at one of FoxyJ's mission photo albums. He enjoyed pointing out Mama on every page. When we saw group shots of the district Foxy and I were in together, I asked him where Daddy was. He consistently pointed to the missionary Foxy used to have a crush on (i.e. not me).

The Future Dr. J

FoxyJ got her first acceptance letter today, to the comparative literature PhD program at UC Davis. We're still waiting on two more schools before she decides where she goes, but it's good to know she has at least one option. Feel free to drop by her blog and congratulate her if you feel so inclined.

Foxy Exposed

I haven't and don't intend to link to every straight spouse interview I post on Northern Lights, but I suspect several Fobcave readers may be interested in reading the interview with FoxyJ I posted this afternoon. Wondering what my wife really thinks about Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley? Click here to find out!

Penance or Blasphemy? You Decide

As penance for last week's Weekly Confession, Scot suggested I perform ten Hail Scotties. This sounded like a good idea until I stopped to realize that Scot is a member of that most abominable of species: married men. Never mind the fact that he's married to a man; his sole purpose in life can only be to oppress women and take advantage of his patriarchal power. Add to that the fact that he's a former Mormon and it becomes quite clear that his goal in making such a suggestion was to oppress FoxyJ by luring both her and me into some kind of polygaymous marriage arrangement.

So I've decided to take another reader's suggestion and do ten Hail Foxys instead. If I'm about to offend any devoutly Catholic readers, stop me now.

No objections? Okay, here I go.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Hail Foxy, full of grace, Blogger is with thee; blessed art thou among bloggers, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb, S-Boogie and Little Dude.

Foxy Foxy, mother of blogs, blog for us sinners, now and at the hour of our disconnection. Amen.

Year Seven, Day One

This morning FoxyJ and I woke up in the loft of a farmhouse on Whidbey Island, with a view overlooking Useless Bay. Thanks to Tolkien Boy for changing his work schedule and skipping a class in order to give Foxy and me a night away from the kids.

And thanks, of course, to Foxy for six years of marriage.

Weekly Confession #2

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. I married my wife for all the wrong reasons. Well, no, that's an overstatement. Several of the reasons for which I married my wife were not good ones. Rather than tell the whole story again, I'll copy and paste the narrative as I frame it in "Getting Out":

So I came home from my mission less sure that marriage and family were in my future. I’m not sure what kind of life I envisioned for myself—a lonely celibacy, I suppose—but for a month or two I’d resigned myself to it.

Here’s where Epiphany #1 comes in. This must’ve been in January, because I’m pretty sure it was before Jessie came home from her mission. I’d attended one of those BYU firesides where they tell you to get married. I pretty much tuned out the entire thing because it didn’t apply to me, but then I got home, sat on my bed, and had a distinct impression that yes, it did apply to me. Yes, I was gay, but that didn’t mean I was excluded from Heavenly Father’s desire for his children to marry and have families.

I thought of a sister missionary that had been in my district for nearly eight months and was coming home soon. I really admired her intelligence and her love of reading, and her complete disregard of whether people thought she was cool or not. She seemed like the type of person I’d like to marry. So I planned it all out. I’d email her when she got home, and we’d build our friendship while she was in Maryland. Then she’d come out to BYU and we’d start dating and then we’d get engaged and then we’d get married.

I think more than anything I liked this plan because it seemed like a Normal Mormon Guy type of thing to do (or at least a Normal BYU Student type of thing—it’s hard to distinguish after being in Utah Valley for so long).

What we have here, basically, is premeditated falling in love and courtship. This is at best creepy and at worst misogynistic. I think the truth lies somewhere between those two poles, personally, but since I'm the one confessing my sins and you're the one absolving them, I'll let you be the judge of that. I have acknowledged this creepiness before. In the paragraph immediately following the above, in fact:

To my surprise, the following months happened exactly as I’d planned. This is quite disturbing, now that I think about it. It must have disturbed me then, too, because on the morning of the day that we were to mail out the wedding invitations, I was still worried that I was marrying Jessie for the wrong reasons. I didn’t want to marry her just to prove to myself and others that I was normal, or to avoid hurting her feelings, or because it was the right thing to do. I wanted to marry her because I loved her and I wanted to be with her. Which I was pretty sure I did.

Now, I come from a literary school of thought that values subtlety, so when I'm acknowledging a bad quality in myself I generally don't come out and say "and this is a very bad quality, of which I am deeply ashamed and hope to rid myself completely" because I assume my readers are intelligent enough to figure it out. I assume that if I say, for example, "I am a narcissist," that everyone knows I don't mean it as a compliment. It's come to my attention, though, that the subtlety in the above paragraphs has been lost on at least one person, so I'd like to be clear about what I'm confessing to here. Among the possible motivations I had for marrying FoxyJ were:

1. God told me to.
2. In abstract, "she seemed like the type of person I'd like to marry."
3. That was the way I'd planned it.
4. It "seemed like a Normal Mormon Guy type of thing to do."
5. To "prove to myself and others that I was normal."
6. To "avoid hurting her feelings."
7. Because "it was the right thing to do."

Let me be absolutely 100% completely and for totally sure clear: These are all Very Bad Reasons to marry someone. KIDDIES, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Yes, even if God told you to marry someone but you're not sure you want to, please take Emily Pearson's advice about "the danger of taking 'every spiritual experience ... at face value" in situations such as these" (as cited in Holly Welker's "Clean Shaven"). If the narrative of "Getting Out," framed as it is in the discourse of personal revelation, seems to excuse the Very Badness of the reasons listed above and makes them seem Not So Very Bad, then I have compounded my sins by representing them as That Which Is Good and True. Which they are not.

I said before that to say that all my reasons for marrying FoxyJ were bad ones is an overstatement, and I feel the need to clarify what I mean, even if doing so detracts from the purpose of confessing my sins. So here are the good reasons I had for marrying FoxyJ, some of which are present in "Getting Out" and some of which are not:

1. "I really admired her intelligence and her love of reading, and her complete disregard of whether people thought she was cool or not."
2. I was "pretty sure" that "I loved her and I wanted to be with her."
3. She had said that she loved me and wanted to marry me.
4. I felt happy when I was with her and could see that being with me made her feel happy.
5. She and I shared many values such as our faith, education, family, liberal politics, and social justice.
   
6. She wanted to marry a traditional Mormon patriarch no more than I wanted to be one. (That is to say, not at all.)
7. Despite the strong feelings I had and knew I would always have for men, I had been surprised over the course of our relationship by how excited I was to be with her--the tingly sensation at first holding her hand, the butterflies before our first awkward kiss, the unignorable arousal we both felt once we finally figured that kissing thing out.
   
8. She was not afraid to talk frankly about sex, to acknowledge that she was nervous and excited about having sex, and to discuss (or joke about, as the case may be) the logistics of our future sexual relationship. (One of the funnier discussions we had was about whether it's okay to have sex on the Sabbath. Or when you're fasting.)
   
9. One of my happiest memories is driving home from a date with her and putting a mixtape she had made into my sister's car stereo. The first song was Lauryn Hill's cover of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." I felt giddy all over and almost cried at the realization that this very mature college student, this incredible person with whom I'd had so many intellectually stimulating conversations, would do something so teenage-romantic as making me a mixtape to say she was in love with me. And she'd used a Lauryn Hill song!
10. Marrying her meant I wouldn't have to buy my own copy of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

So there. I've confessed the Very Badness of some of my reasons for marrying FoxyJ, as well as the complexity introduced into the issue by the good reasons I also had. So what penance can I do to make up for these sins? How do I right this wrong?

I decided earlier this year that the bad reasons outweighed the good--it's easy when one wants to focus on the bad to ignore the good, or vice versa--and that the best way to make this right for me, for FoxyJ, and for our children was to divorce and start over. I would have a man who loved me, Foxy would have a man who loved her (the way that only a straight man could), and our children would have not only two parents who loved them but the added bonus of two stepfathers who would love them just as much. The problem with this plan was not that divorce is inherently bad or even that divorce is an inherently bad option for us. I believe that for the three months we were separated we did an exceptionally good job of co-parenting and relating to each other respectfully as formerly married friends--this is much more to Foxy's credit than to mine, as it is easy to be nice to the person you have wronged but not so easy to be nice to the person who has wronged you. The problem with this attempt at penance, see, is that just like in the case of my original sins I was doing something Very Very Bad: I was deciding for myself what was best for us. Divorce was never Foxy's idea; it was all me.

After realizing this grave error, acknowledging the complexity of my reasons for marrying her and the fact that I did indeed still enjoy spending my life with her, I regrouped with Foxy in order to come up with a plan together. We talked more honestly than we had ever before about the problems in our relationship. We discussed frankly what each of us would need to sacrifice in order to make this marriage work, and whether the benefits of the marriage would make it worth it for each of us. We considered together all the less-than-noble motivations that might underlie our mutual desire to reunite--chief among these questionable motivations was the financial stability our continued marriage would provide for the duration of my master's program and her doctorate. Ultimately we decided together that we had enough genuinely good reasons to stay together and enough faith in our ability to work through the difficulties that it was worth another shot. I am happy with that decision, and happy most of all that we made it together.

As penance for my past sins, then, I propose the following:

1. I will continue to take intuition (what I once would have called God speaking to me) into account when making choices, but I will not do so at the expense of other factors and certainly not at the expense of other people.
2. I will do my best to love FoxyJ not as an abstract idea of the type of person I'd like to marry, but as a real human being.
3. I will not adhere strictly to plans I have made when those plans involve the lives of other people; rather, I will include those people in the making and evaluating of such plans.
4. I will not do anything because it's the Normal Mormon Guy thing to do. At this point in my life, I think that goes without saying. In addition, I will not do anything simply because it's not the Normal Mormon Guy thing to do, or because it's the Normal Agnostic thing to do, or any such stupid reason.
5. I'm going to stop trying to prove to myself and others that I'm normal, or that I'm anything. This one's a bit harder, because I tend to put a lot of energy into proving all sorts of things about myself, and really I just need to get over it. I'll do my best.
6. I will avoid hurting Foxy's feelings, but not by thinking only of what I think she needs, but by listening to what her feelings really are and working with her to honestly address those feelings.
7. I will not do things because they are the right thing to do. Rather, I will do things because I and others affected agree that those are the best things for everyone's best interest. This is a subtle difference, I know, but the important thing here is thinking through the consequences of choices I make and not objectifying others in that process.

I am sorry for these and for many other sins of my past and present life. I hope that through my penance and FoxyJ's continued Foxy-ness we can make the next six years of our marriage even better than the first six years have been.

Weekly Confession #1

Forgive me, Blogger, for I have sinned. This is my first Confession.

I covet my wife's intelligence and worse, I am proud of it. FoxyJ is one of the most well-read and well-educated people I know, both in the sense of formal education and that of informal education, in the form of the wide array of facts she can recall from the thousands of books, newspapers, and websites she's read in her lifetime. When I need to know something about history, literature, politics, or whatever, I ask Foxy, my personal living Wikipedia (except with less web vandalism). I am truly grateful to live with such an intelligent person, not only for the education in trivia she provides regularly, but for the inspiration she gives me to learn more about the world. I have to admit, though, that I am not infrequently jealous of Foxy's intelligence. Why am I unable to recall every random fact I've ever come across? Why can't I glance at a page and process in an instant every word on it? Why don't I have the interest in the first place to read the New York Times on a daily basis and devour nonfiction books about war, food, and famous people? The downside of living with such an educated person is that I feel, in comparison, very uneducated.

The greater sin, I believe, is the pride I feel in regards to my wife's education. I brag about her master's degree every chance I get, find ways to work into conversations the fact that she passed the test to be included in Jeopardy's contestant pool. I am proud of my own high score on the GRE, but even prouder of her perfect score on the verbal section. This may all seem innocent enough, perhaps you're even thinking that it is forward-thinking and decidedly unsexist for a man to be so proud of his wife's intellect, but that's exactly the point. I flaunt my wife's education precisely because I believe it makes me look good. Ultimately, this is no better than the man who shows off his trophy wife, the perfectly pretty woman who exists solely as a symbol of his own social status.

As my penitence, Blogger, I vow to show my appreciation for Foxy's other positive qualities, whether such appreciation makes me look like the feminist-minded man I want to be or not. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, for example, how much I appreciate the delicious food Foxy cooks every day, because I fear that puts me in the category of chauvinistic men who expect their wives to be barefoot in the kitchen, preparing nice meals for their husbands to enjoy upon returning home from work. The fact of the matter is, though, FoxyJ is a chef extraordinaire, and that is a talent she values in herself, so I should not be ashamed to admit that I do too.

I am sorry for these and for all--well, most--the sins of my past life.

Return of the Angry Feminist

Next weekend is my birthday. It will also be another anniversary--one year since the morning I was bored at work, Googling myself, and came across the Angry Feminist, who had blogged a couple times in response to my essays in Dialogue and once in response to mine and FoxyJ's appearance in the Salt Lake Tribune. The gist of her blog posts was that I am a misogynist because I dared to marry a woman and that Foxy is a stupid brainwashed cow because she married a gay man. I had come across quite a few tactless comments about us on the internet before then, but these attacks by the Angry Feminist were colder, more thought out, and more personal than any of the others. This was clearly a woman who had issues with me, and I'd never even heard of her. I commented on her blog in my defense, and it all went downhill from there.

I would feel bad about caricaturing this woman with an offhand blogonym like "the Angry Feminist," but truthfully she fell into the realm of self-parody when she started using stock phrases from her 1963 edition of The Angry Feminist Handbook like "male defender of patriarchy." That and, believe me, there are much worse things I could call her (and believe me, I do).

I spent much of the months following my discovery of her attacks and our ensuing comment war trying to figure out why I was so bothered by this random stranger's critique of me. Seriously, even now, a year later, my hands get shaky just thinking about it.

Tolkien Boy suggested at one point that perhaps I reacted so violently because somewhere deep inside me I believed her accusations. Was it possible that I believed I really was a misogynist? It would make for a nice, tidy explanation, but the more I thought about it the more I knew it wasn't true. My parents divorced when I was four and my brother went to live with my father when I was nine, leaving me with my mom and various combinations of my five older sisters, so I was basically raised by women. I have long believed in feminist ideals of equality and subversion of the status quo--though admittedly not so much in feminist ideals of Men Are Evil Scumbags and Should Be Subjugated To Make Up For Centuries of [their ancestors'] Male Aggression, but then most feminists nowadays are more rational than that. I wouldn't call myself a literary feminist because I haven't researched the theories beyond the representative excerpts found in the textbooks read by the average English major, but when push comes to shove I have always identified with--and defended--the feminine experience more than the masculine. It comes with the territory of being a gay man in what is still largely (and unfortunately) a straight man's world.

I concluded eventually that what threatened me about the Angry Feminist's accusations was that what she called misogyny I saw as narcissism. Yes, to be honest, I do all too often think of my needs before I think of Foxy's; but it has nothing to do with the fact that she's a woman and everything to do with the fact that she's not me. And I really don't like that about myself, so I'm not crazy about being called on it.

And then there's the fact that many of the Angry Feminist's arguments were so inherently illogical, which drove me crazy. She accused me, for example, of invoking the name of feminism in my essays without first doing my research. But see, the only thing I mentioned--and briefly, at that--was "women's liberation movements," which Angry Feminist snarkily pointed out to me is not the same as feminism, as if I were the one to equate the two. And then she had the gall to make all sorts of wacky accusations about me based on assumptions she was pulling out of her butt, rather than doing her own research. I mean, we're talking about really basic stuff here, facts I even mentioned to her, like that I was no longer Mormon, and yet she persisted in saying that I was benefiting from the patriarchal system of the Mormon priesthood and making bad jokes about me getting my temple garments all twisted in a knot. Or her equally bad joke about me living in Orem in order to be around closed-minded people like myself, when a cursory glance at my blog (which was linked from every comment I made on her blog, and sported a picture of Seattle's skyline at the time, in addition to the location prominently displayed under my name) would have told her otherwise. How dare you accuse me of not doing my research, you lazy snob?

What really bugged me, though, and it bothers me that it's taken me nearly a year to consciously recognize this, is that on top of her attacks on my character, she was attacking one of the most important people to me and attempting to strip her of what makes her who she is. Suggesting that only a stupid cow brainwashed by religion would marry a gay man is not only incredibly insulting (and, by the way, misogynistic), it's simply untrue. Foxy has a master's degree in Spanish and is currently applying to (and will probably be accepted by) PhD programs at Oregon, Davis, and Berkeley. She presents papers at feminist conferences on women's literature. She's brought to light, through her translation work, obscure Renaissance women's writings. Sure, Angry Feminist, if you bothered to learn any of this you could claim that these are all superficial signs of intelligence, that any idiot can get a degree. If that's the case, though, I'm afraid you've lost the only proof of your intelligence, as it sure doesn't show in your rational thinking skills.

So at any rate, I wasn't too happy this afternoon when FoxyJ told me that the latest issue of Sunstone Magazine has an article written by the Angry Feminist and which appears to be an adaptation of her presentation at last year's Sunstone Symposium, which by the way was dedicated to insulting me and Foxy. We'll find out when we get our copy, but I'm hoping that someone on the editorial board at Sunstone had the class to say, "Hey, Ms. Feminist, you've got some interesting ideas here, but slander really isn't in our mission statement, so could you maybe cut back on the haterism? Because honestly, redirecting the anger you have toward your gay ex-fiance at some other guy, then dressing it up in the rhetoric of literary feminism, does not equal scholarship. And it's not very empowering to women."

We can only hope. If that's not the case, you'll hear more from me--and FoxyJ, who has been publicly silent about this all so far, but is just as pissed off as I am.

Traffic

One of the many things I obsess over is the number of people who visit my blog each day. Yesterday I had 156 hits, which is about one-and-a-half times as many hits as I usually get on Mondays through Thursdays and about twice as much as I usually get on Fridays. My hits over the last few weeks have been a bit higher than usual, actually. This is due, I think, to a number of factors, all of which have to do with FoxyJ. Last week, Foxy included a link to my blog on a comment she left on a post about homosexuality over at Feminist Mormon Housewives. The week before that, she wrote a guest post at Northern Lights, which brought to her blog not only NL's regular readers, but also readers of Times & Seasons and Exponent II, where her guest post and blog were noted by admirers, and many of these readers ended up hopping from her blog to mine. In general, though, I think a lot of the rise in hits has come from the vague and untraceable Big News effect that caused my hits to spike when we announced the separation in April, surpassing even last August's numbers, when the Fobcave was linked to from the Salt Lake Tribune. Our reconciliation has not caused so dramatic a rise in numbers, but there do appear to be curious people checking in. Which, I'll be honest, I'm happy to have people checking in for any reason. I'm vain like that.

The 156 hits yesterday has little to do with all of that, though. As it turns out, about half of those visitors came from a search engine query for simpsonizing. Right now I'm fourth on Google's results for that query, but yesterday I was third. Simpsonizing, as it turns out, is not a very commonly used word, and Google doesn't appear to stem the word to search for simpsonize, which yields 50 times as many results and actually gets you the site you're probably looking for. And the cool thing is that I don't even use the word Simpsonizing in the post that's showing up on the results page. But the thing is, that's not how search engines work. They don't care so much about the words you use as the words people linking to you use. And it so happens that FoxyJ wrote a post the other day in which she used the word Simpsonizing to link to my post about Simpsonizing.

So thank you, FoxyJ, not only for sending readers my way, but for helping them to find what they're really looking for--and ultimately, what we're all looking for--a way to make ourselves look like famous animated people.

Addendum (A Fifth List)

Reasons FoxyJ and I Have Decided to Keep Working on This Marriage Thing

1. Because we want to.
   

Northern Exposure

FoxyJ has a beautifully-written guest post up at Northern Lights. You should read it. Really.

The Hostess With the Mostess

In case there was any doubt, FoxyJ proved her ability to push past cookers' block for Little Dude's first birthday bash tonight. She made about twice as much veggie-kabobs, shrimp-kabobs, chicken-kabobs, couscous, fruit salad, and oh-so-rich chocolate and vanilla cupcakes as could possibly be eaten by seven adults and two children. It remains to be seen whether I will ever find room in my stomach to eat again.

Mothers OR If everyone is special, then no one is

On this special day, I'm thinking of all the mothers in my life. And by mothers I mean not just my mother and the mother of my children, but all women who are mothers or who have ever been mothers or who ever will be mothers or who, by virtue of having two X chromosomes, are mothers in the Sheri Dew sense of the word. Because, as my friend Melyngoch frequently points out, all women are mothers, whether they have children of their own or not. And why stop at women? Aren't all men mothers, whether or not we have children of our own or even the biological apparatus to bear them? So this post is dedicated to the mother found within each and every member of the entire human race.

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In case my sarcasm is not made apparent by the title of my post, by my reference to Melyngoch, or by my hyperbole, I think the claim that all women are mothers by default is preposterous. To claim that one's gender magically gives one special nurturing powers above and beyond those available to a member of the other gender is offensive to both sexes and to women who are mothers as well as to those who aren't. In my experience, mothers are not born; they are made, or rather, they make themselves.

My mother dropped out of college after a semester, got married, and had two kids. A few years later, she realized it was in hers and her children's best interest for her to leave her husband, so she did. A couple years later she remarried and proceeded to have five more kids. When her oldest was nineteen and her youngest was four, circumstances called for her to be a single mother again. At first she did what she could to work at home--running a small sewing business, for example--but eventually she realized that would not support her large family. Once her youngest was in school, she found a job at a bank, but eventually she decided that the flexible hours and good pay (including tips) of a job as a waitress would be more beneficial for her family. A decade later (give or take a few years), when her youngest was in high school and all her other children were in or graduated from college, she enrolled in classes herself and worked her way up to a bachelor's degree, then later to a master's degree. Now, all seven of her children have bachelor's degrees and two have master's.

Throughout all this, despite her crazy work (and later, school) schedule, my mother made sure that the family traditions she considered important--regular healthy meals, weekly family home evening, daily family prayer and scripture study, and the constant maintenance of a clean home--continued. For the last five years I was at home it was just me and her, and still we kept the same family routines. It has surprised me in recent years to hear her say more than once that she does not consider herself a good cook--that she doesn't particularly like cooking. Growing up I had no idea that this was the case because I always enjoyed the meals she made, and she made them consistently; extremely rare was the evening we had a premade meal from a can or freezer. To me what makes this remarkable is not that she cooked--I'm sure many great mothers do not--but that she did so even though she didn't think she was good at it, because regular home-cooked meals were important to her personal value system (and, lest we ignore the whole picture here, to her budget). She did not maintain the standards she wanted for her family through the natural abilities God gave to all bearers of the double-X chromosome; she did so through hard work and dedication.

S-Boogie and Little Dude's mother, similarly, is not a great mother because she has two breasts that produce milk on demand; she is a great mother because she conscientiously sets out to raise her children as she believes they should be raised. My sister recently pointed out that while the nurturing aspects of parenting tend to come more naturally to me, FoxyJ seems to be more naturally inclined toward the nitty gritty details of parenting--what time and what foods children need to eat, how they should be disciplined, what kinds of educational opportunities are best for the developmental stage they're at, etc. While this may be true--and if it is, it's because Foxy has read countless books on these nitty gritty details in order to make herself into the best mother she can be--it is no slight to Foxy's ability, natural or otherwise, to nurture her children. When asked what her mother does for her, S-Boogie's very first response is "She gives me hugs and kisses." This is not because Foxy is a physically affectionate person by nature--I don't think she'd say she is if you asked her--but because she loves her children immensely and she will consciously express that love however they need to feel it.

Now, despite my criticism of Ms. Dew's claim that all women are mothers, I don't want to entirely throw out her point, which is that you don't have to be a biological mother to be a mother. One of my sisters, for example, did not have any children until she was nearly 40. This did not stop her, though, from being the most motherly of all my siblings. When I came to Utah as a seventeen-year-old college freshman, it was Lika who helped me buy all the things I'd need to live, who let me use her car whenever I needed it, who invited me over for dinner on a regular basis. It is Lika who is always concerned for everyone, who does all our worrying for us. When another sister found herself widowed and raising a one-year-old alone, Lika stepped up to be our niece's second mother--it was not uncommon, in fact, when our niece was learning to speak, to call Lika "Mom."

Along with Ms. Dew I applaud women (and men) like Lika, who do take on a motherly role to the children in their lives. At the same time, I applaud women (and men) like Melyngoch, who are honestly terrified of children, or otherwise have no interest in raising them, but have other equally admirable qualities. Not everyone has to be a mother.

By the same token, not every mother is a great mother. Here's to all the great mothers in my life.

Happy Birthday to FoxyJ

Today is FoxyJ's birthday, the last of her twentysomethings (and I don't think she'll mind me saying so). FoxyJ is a great person, by which I mean not only is she capable of doing great things, but she has proven said capability by doing countless great things. Our children are proof of FoxyJ's capability, not only to bear them in the first place (which was no small feat), but to raise them in the conscientious way she does. Yes, I raise them too, but mostly I just follow her lead, as I do in so many things. A week from tomorrow FoxyJ will prove another capability she has when she defends her master's thesis at BYU. In her willingness to marry a gay man, to do everything in her power to make that marriage work, to continue to be his friend after he pulled the rug out from under her life, to work to make this new life the best possible for her and her children, she has proven and continues to prove that she is capable of doing hard things.

If you know and love FoxyJ or if you're one of the many people who love her without even knowing her, today would be a great day to remind her of your love. As for me, I love her deeply, and I hope she knows that.

A Very Brief and Only Vaguely Sexual Scene in the Fobcave (specifically, the Fob bedroom)

SCENE: Master Fob and FoxyJ are lying in bed, a foot or two apart and facing each other. Master Fob's right hand lies palm up , pointing toward Foxy. Foxy lays her right hand on top of Master Fob's, interlocking the thumbs, effectively imitating a handshake.

FOXYJ: Is this what they call missionary position?

To All the Girls I've Loved Before Conclusion

I've told the story of meeting FoxyJ on my mission, then courting her when we came home. Some of the elements of previous installments in the saga of my interaction with girls play out in this one as well: the decision to like her was somewhat of a conscious decision, and as with Red, I prayed to receive confirmation that I should marry Foxy long before we were at that point in our relationship, or even had a relationship to speak of. The reasons I decided to like FoxyJ, though, unlike Dandypratt's sister or Shannadoodah, were not founded in people or situations surrounding her but in Foxy herself. I loved that Foxy was incredibly intelligent and committed to the gospel. I loved that she had a good sense of humor--for example, she was known in the mission for winning burping contests with elders.

I return to the story of our courtship frequently, looking--as in the case of "Getting Out"--for evidence of God's approval of our marriage or--when I'm seeking excuses to get out in the more obvious sense of the phrase--for evidence of God's disapproval. It's easy, for example, to see what I interpreted as personal revelation as the result of my own neuroses fueled by years of Mormon brainwashing. I need to remind myself in both cases that none of this matters. Whether I chose to marry Foxy because an angel appeared to me and told me to do so or because the devil made me, ultimately the choice was mine and I made it. Success or failure will not come because of something I felt or didn't feel five years ago, but by what Foxy and I choose to do today. We will stay together because we choose to work through the weaknesses in our marriage and build on the strengths, or we will not stay together because we choose not to.

Today we choose to stay.

Married to a Scorpio

The all-knowing Absent-minded Secretary informs us that today is Married to a Scorpio Day. This is appropriate, because FoxyJ married a scorpio four years and three hundred sixty-three days ago today. According to the Search Your Love horoscope compatibility page, Tauruses and Scorpios make okay couples:

TAURUS - SCORPIO: They have the same strong sexual appetite. Besides, nobody feels a need for romance outside the liaison. Taurus may be obstinate while irritated, and Scorpio in anger will frighten all the signs. Compatibility horoscope Taurus expects a stormy relationship; marriage is possible only if both partners show extreme patience to each other.

(I know that I can trust this site because they speak so grammatically.)

There are many reasons that FoxyJ deserves her nym, but for today all you need to know is that she's patient enough to be married to a Scorpio.