The Things We Learn...

You know, after eighteen years, he can still surprise me.  

Every once in a while, I do google searches on my name, the Husbandly One's name, and the kids' names.  Call it a preemptive strike.  I do it to see what's out there, especially where the kids are concerned.  I do a search on my real name, and on my username for LJ.  

It's always the ones I do on the Husbandly One that surprises me.  One time, it was a post he'd made on a Democratic Underground forum that caught me by surprise, talking about how much he loved hiking with the kids and having adventures, sitting on the back porch with me to watch them playing in the back yard, and enjoying the quiet.  Another time, it was a scathing review of a truly awful beer he'd tried for Beer Advocate.  For those of you that don't know, the Husbandly One is a Beer Snob.

Today, however, I discovered two pages of book and product reviews he'd done for Amazon.  Now, most of the reviews one reads on Amazon.com tend to be of the , "I loved this book, it just rocked, you HAVE to buy it," or "this book sucked like my grandma's hoover, don't go near it, dude," variety.  In other words, wordy versions of thumbs up, or thumbs down, without any real indication of WHY they feel that way.

The Husbandly One, however, will tell you why he liked the book, what he thought of the writing, and how the story progressed, where it went wrong if it went wrong, and whether or not he thinks other readers will enjoy it, freely admitting that others might not share his point of view.  It was... revelatory, at the very least.  I sat there, floored.  It's not that I don't know how smart, or how articulate he is, or that he can write, and write well.  It's just... it's not a side of him I see all that often.  Though I should know better, considering the love letters he wrote to me when we were dating, and in the first years of our marriage.  

We get so busy living our lives, sometimes, taking care of the kids, paying the bills, cooking dinner, getting this or that together, worrying about our respective parents and their aging, and all of that stuff, that we forget to stop and look at each other and just say, "hello there!"

One thing about having kids is how many times we start a conversation only to have to stop, because it gets interrupted.  We look at each other and promise to catch up later, only to fall into bed hours later, exhausted, with barely enough wherewithal to curl up together and snore blissfully until morning.  This isn't to say it's like that all the time, because it isn't.  There are plenty of times that I'm washing dishes and find arms snaking around my waist and find myself being danced around the kitchen while he does that thing with his beard against my neck that makes me go all wibbly and girly.  And times that he's sorting laundry only to find himself with a lapful of laughing, squirming wife, and somehow, the laundry just doesn't seem to get done that day.  

But, it's easy to forget that we have intellectual lives, too.  That yeah, we like to get sweaty and physical together (and boy, doesn't that garden need WORK), and we like to play together, and we get silly together, laughing so hard we end up sore for days.  But, we also happen to be two rather intelligent people (with juvenile senses of humor, yes, I know, shut up already) who like to talk, and discuss, and argue, and have opposing viewpoints... and we forget to do that sometimes.  Discuss something other than the Big Project for the Weekend, or are we going to Houston or not, and should we think about ditching the minivan and getting a more fuel efficient car, or finishing paying the damn thing off...  There are other things to talk about.  And to do.  

Reading those reviews was a revelation.  I like discovering new things about that man of mine.  Maybe, I should make sure he gets another lapful of squirming wife, and see if he wants to discuss the latest book he's finished.  I'm dying for a good philisophical wrangle...