Psycho

Confession: I was a little nervous about moving in with my husband. Okay, so maybe I was more than just a little nervous. 

My husband and I spent the first two and a half years of our marriage living separately: Liam and I stayed in Charleston in order to get all of his surgeries and doctor appointments taken care of, and my husband stayed in Kuwait for work. If you want to know what the perfect marriage looks like, that was it. Or, at least, it was the perfect marriage for a woman who likes her space, a woman who needs her space. I’ve always been a person who enjoys living alone. I like to be in complete control of my space. Of course, one tends to give up some of that control living with a toddler, but it was still my house. And, the truth is, I was very content with my life in Charleston.

Surprisingly, the transition has been relatively easy. That’s the word we both use to describe our relationship: easy. It just somehow works. Well, except for the three weeks we spent actually packing up and moving to the Middle East. That was almost disastrous. Had it not been for some wise advice from a family member – telling me that moving ranks third behind death and divorce for most traumatic experiences – I don’t know where we’d be. I think it was his use of the word “traumatic” that really drove the message home.

So, except for those three weeks, life has been easy, peaceful in fact. I’m learning how to balance my time between my son and my husband, which has been difficult given the fact that Liam has had my undivided attention since the moment he was born, and he is not giving it up easily. Sometimes I think living apart was actually beneficial to his progress, and my sanity. I had the luxury of devoting every ounce of myself to Liam’s surgeries, therapy, doctor appointments, etc., without having to stress about finding time for my husband. I barely had time for myself, so making time for my spouse would have proven difficult. Phone calls and daily emails kept us connected, though, without feeling like a burden. Thankfully, these days, Liam is slowly but surely becoming more independent.

There is one other problem, however. This:

This piece of “art” is hanging in our Master bathroom. Need I say more? Every time I take a shower now, I have visions of being attacked, which forces me to peek out from the shower curtain every couple of minutes. Even Liam points to her and says “Oooohhhhh!” each time he crawls into the bathroom. Because I’ve essentially taken over the whole rest of the apartment, I haven’t had the heart to take it down. But, when I first moved in, my husband and I did have a conversation about his interesting choice of bathroom art:

       Me: Um, buddy, did you buy this or did the previous tenant leave it?

       Husband: Oh yeah, I bought it!

       Me: So. You thought it was a good idea to buy a poster of the scariest shower scene

       in all of movie history, and hang it in our bathroom!?

       Husband: What? It matches the shower curtain.

Sometimes men just don’t get it.