January Resolutions
January is all about more gym, less cookies.
There’s always room for improvement, I suppose. But each January, the same dilemma weighs down my resolution list.
My husband comes home.
Two things I’d like to make clear.
One, my husband is the Romeo to my Juliet.
Except, you know, with less drama and death.
Second, my husband isn’t exactly gone the rest of the year.
He’s just not here.
Summer finds him working such long hours, he visits our township pool as a guest rather than a member.
Years into my membership there, he asked for directions to the bathroom.
When summer’s heat fades and the leaves crinkle and brown, he hunts. At his family’s cabin in central Pennsylvania. In Canada. In Wyoming.
Soon, he goes to Alaska.
I don’t know when.
A stretch of days will arrive, days where he won’t come home and can’t call.
Hunting gear won’t litter our home office. I’ll catch up on “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
That’s when I’ll know he’s in Alaska.
In spring, there’s more hunting. And planning for a successful fall hunt. And hikes on newly defrosted trails.
So he’s off again, until summer takes him to work and the whole thing starts all over again.
Which leaves us with January, when he comes home.
Most days, I don’t clock his absence.
Neither does he.
Once, when the kids were little, he was hospitalized for a few days.
The kids never noticed he was gone.
My husband and I both had fathers whose long work hours meant they were gone before we woke up and home after we went to bed.
And – for good measure – my dad was not only a Marine but a Greyhound bus driver.
The Red Cross had to fly him in from California so he could, you know, actually witness my brother’s birth.
It was false labor.
I’m not supposed to tell that story.
My mom is afraid the Marines might pursue disciplinary action.
I feel like they maybe have other things to do.
Our fathers were like deities – often invisible, always available.
Just ask the Red Cross military transport plane.
It never occurred to us to operate our own marriage any differently. The day we returned from our honeymoon, I asked him when he was going home.
“I’m not,” he replied. “I live with you now.”
That was twenty years ago.
I still haven’t adjusted.
So when January comes, and he’s home for two consecutive days, I scramble to make enough dinner for four people.
When those days turn into a week, I grasp for ways to fill the half-hour stretches of freedom when he chauffeurs the kids instead of me.
By week three, we’re jockeying for time with the washing machine.
February finds us in a warm embrace as he departs for an annual outdoor show in Harrisburg.
Parting, Shakespeare’s Juliet says, is such sweet sorrow.
We will miss each other.
Until January, when he becomes the resolution I can’t maintain.
Forbes says just 8% of us keep our resolutions until February.
I’m glad I’m not alone.
Actually, I’m glad I am.
