Michelle Duggar Saps My Brain

Admittedly, I'm no expert in large families.  I have a sister and two brothers, a fairly normal sized group for my era.  I personally birthed three of my own.   So the number of children I consider acceptable is vastly different from the Queen of All Things Uterine and Fallopian,  Michelle Duggar.

I bow to her reproductive system.  And scoff and sneer and rage against the machine.

Why?  Simply, why?  I get the whole 'we have the children God sends us' litany - I don't buy it because I know where babies come from.  And how to prevent them from coming.

God also sent you a damned brain.  Come out of that Stepford bubble for a minute and face facts: 

You. Have. Nineteen. Kids. 

You and that shellac-headed moron you married.  And you gave them stupid names for the most part.  Ginger with a 'J' just to continue your prejudice against the other 25 letters of the alphabet?  C'mon.

I watch this show - actually I stop while surfing when I see it on - just as I watch boxing while flipping channels - amazed that anyone would do either.  I think I'd get into a ring with Joe Frazier before I would become a baby-making menace.

You can't parent nineteen children.  It is emotionally and physically impossible.  One episode had TQATUF sharing her parenting tips.  Each child is evidently given a 'buddy.'  (Translated - one of the older children is given a toddler as soon as it's weaned so that Michelle can continue her ongoing mission to birth a nation.)  She did say that each new baby was her buddy at first.

Wow - you mean each new baby gets your undivided attention for awhile?  Sorry, don't believe it.  Having three kids divides your attention - a passel just sends it off the charts.

I realize that the Duggars were doing their imitation of rabbits long before they began whoring their family out for television.  I do wonder how many more they would have had if TLC hadn't knocked on their door.

Their last baby was born monstrously premature.  This poor child faces a lifetime of physical problems.  And why?  'Cause Mommy and Daddy are irresponsible.  They sold out, and honestly, who can blame them - somebody's got to feed all their little 'buddies.' 

I could understand this disaster easier if I thought they were doing all the birthing for religious reasons.  If Dumbass Dad was a minister of some weird sect and saw this as a way to truth and enlightenment.

But they're used car salesmen.  Does that species really need advanced?

I know that the number of children other people feel they can have is not my business.  The children seem very well-adjusted and happy.  They aren't asking that I help support them and they're home schooled so tax dollars aren't even going to educate them.  The Duggars evidently pull their own weight.

My hope is that each of the nineteen children lead purposeful and meaningful lives. 

And that one day Michelle wipes the adoring, blank gaze off her face, gets a prescription for birth control, and tells Jim Bob to blow beets.

Amen.

Prissy

Five days a week, 187 days a year I dress and leave the house.  Semi put together, with make-up and jewelry anyway, ready to face adolescents.  I think I'm known for my unique style, one that I suppose has evolved over almost 57 years.  I give my morning routine no more thought than just another way to prepare for the day.

I go native in the summer.  Shorts, tee, flops.  Toilette consists of showering and washing my hair.  Period.

Except.

After being au natural for several days I feel the urge, nay, the compulsion to be me again.  I actually don real clothes, makeup, and jewelry.  And perfume.

The natural look is great most days. The hummingbirds, Harper Lee, and hydrangeas don't seem to notice that I have on the same pair of khaki shorts I've worn three times this week. They all eat and drink what I offer whether I'm wearing eighty-three bracelets or not.


Right now I'm nursing the infirm and the Tabgaze doesn't register whether I'm all gussied up or wearing burlap.  The lunch I pack for JT still tastes like a turkey, mustard, and cheese sandwich whether I've rosied my cheekbones with blush or not.  Facebook friends don't know when I'm sitting at the computer with a WE tshirt from 1997.

But I don't do it for other people.  I do it for me. 

Why?  Because I feel more like myself with eyeliner, subtle though it is.  (Ink by Bare Escentuals in case you were wondering.)  And after awhile I need to be reminded that I'm grown now, and grownups are expected to do certain things.

Like get dressed.

"Now is the winter of our discontent...

...Made glorious summer..."

Really?  I'm waiting, Willie.

So far this summer I've been part of far more doctor's appointments, surgeries, tests, x-rays, and ongoing recoveries than I would normally choose. And before anyone points it out, I realize that the patient is much more involved than I, but honestly?  Sometimes I think I'd like to change places.

Back story:  This was supposed to be a summer of nothingness.  I had no beach house rented - the oil spill scared me from spending that kind of money for black tar tracking.  I planned to spend the summer in the yard, digging, moving plants, watering, weeding.  My idea of heaven on earth.

Plans changed.  My youngest, who was originally staying at school working, got a better job offer locally.  Added to the free room and board it was an offer he couldn't pass up.

I might have mentioned that his doppelganger is Pig Pen of Charlie Brown fame.  And no shower is complete without using every damned towel he can get his hands on.  And he eats like a mountain man.

My former husband had bypass surgery.  He is alone and there is nowhere else to recover but at my house.  A house I moved to after selling my HUGE house several years ago.  Present house?  Lilliputian in design.  You can cover it from one end to the other in fourteen steps, and yes, I know this from experience.

People who live alone do strange things.

A hoped for change in employment looks bleak.  New administrator + old relationship = massive fail.

Stress has made a deposit in my soul account and interest is compounding daily.

Whine over, August looms. 

I only wish I weren't already looking forward to it.

Decorum

I'm old.  I've seen it all.  And those truths still allow me to be shocked at much of what I witness daily.

As a culture (great way to start a rant) we lack decorum.  A group of people with every opportunity to get it right, and we fail miserably.  We don't get that just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should.

Can a Hollywood star(?) dress her three-year-old in heels?  Sure.  Should she?  I think not.  She's three.  What's wrong with Mary Janes? 

If I see one more muffin top on otherwise perfectly normal teenage girls - normal meaning you aren't genetically shaped like Barbie - I will  hurl.  Buy a damned pair of pants that fit you.  And please do NOT wear a skin-tight tee with the offending jeans - one view is enough.  Your midriff doesn't warrant a closer look.  You would be just as fashionable in clothes that fit.

Speaking on a personal note - once you hit 50?  Start dressing as you should.  Those oh-so-perfect ripped jeans with the boho top?  My daughter is right: the ensemble just looks kind of desperate.  And the camo pants for someone who has never seen a gun any closer than our SRO's holster?  Not really.

Guys are just as bad.  Please, don't ever, wear a tank top unless you're gay and out and live in New York City.  They do not flatter straight men, regardless of your natural or steroid-enhanced biceps.  We get it - you're a gym rat and you're proud. 

You're also rather silly looking.

And on the subject of Facebook, a topic I waffle on daily, please please PLEASE do not describe every aspect of your significant other's perfection to us.  We don't care - we've heard you before about a different bundle of wonderfulness.

The pictures of you at the beach, one of the 148 that you posted, with your tongue stuck out and throwing the deuces? So trite. So sad. So stupid.


Girls who are 19-21, married or not, who say "I don't feel well today?"  Yeah, in just a few more posts we will discover that Eureka! They are having a baby!

Forgive me if I don't jump for joy at yet another example of lack of decorum. 

Really?  You want me to be excited that you are adding to the already intellectually-depleted stock that I teach every day?  Not to mention the bursting-at-the-seams social programs that I help fund.  I want  you to have a healthy baby, but I don't necessarily want to throw you a shower.  Or attend.  Thank you.

Just say no.  And practice a little decorum.

Day is done, gone the sun...

I grew up on Army posts.  I swam in the pools and attended the Fourth of July picnics and watched twenty-five cent movies in the Post theaters and ate grilled pimento cheese sandwiches at the PX grills.  I knew no sense of permanence; that was found in a farmhouse in Ivalee.  We moved every other year for most of my childhood, settling in Atlanta in the 60s and allowing me the first taste of staying put. 

There was one constant - every day at sundown, on many different parade grounds, the flag was lowered and the mournful sound of 'Taps' signaled that the day was finished.  People stopped what they were doing, and pulled to the side of the road if they were driving, and turned to face the flag.  Paying respect to the symbol of what our parents had devoted their lives to, or what a new recruit hoped would help him find his place, or what silly teen aged girls found droll and bourgeois but meant that the Varsity would soon be packed with Georgia Tech boys we were all too young to date but certainly not too young to flirt with. 

Day was ending, night was upon us, and we were 16.

As I've grown - I hope - (at least I'm not still hanging at the Varsity hoping a 19 year old will smile at me) I miss that ritual.  The sameness, the poignant sound of the trumpet, the minute during the day where everyone could take comfort in knowing regardless of what was happening in the rest of the world our military was at the ready. 

They played 'Taps' at my daddy's funeral five years ago on the coldest day of the year.  It brought home all those sundowns, some of them without Daddy there because of conflicts far away from the life a boy from Sand Mountain ever thought he'd have.  The song takes on a totally different meaning at times like that.

Every day I still do my own version of 'Taps.'  Sitting down somewhere, with a latte or wine, and thinking about the day.  Summing up.

And thankful that I live the life I do because of those who serve their country, in whatever capacity, and make it possible for me to enjoy their efforts in whatever way I choose.

'Day is done, gone the sun,

From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;

All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.'

Professionals

They are in every hospital waiting room - the people who seem to delight in the spontaneous heart transplant, or emergency appendectomy, or spinal fusion.  They hover around ER entrances, just hoping someone that their cousin's husband's mother knew might have a kidney stone she can't pass so they can get their greedy claws into that brand new audience - worried family members.

They have no other recreational outlets.  Their churches uninvited them long ago to serve on any committee and the few friends they have are their clones in make-believe concern.  They probably have a meeting place, dark, where they congregate to share possible traumas they might descend upon.

You all know them.  They appear halfway through a surgery, just as the family is getting settled in, to dispense advise and compare procedures.  Someone's uncle had the same heart surgery, but he needed 8 bypasses and coded 5 times on the table.  A lady at church nearly died from neglect at the same hospital, having the same procedure your loved one is having.  A nephew of their postman used to work at said hospital and the stories he tells....

I could go on but you know the creature being described.

The females always wear way too much perfume - usually Estee Lauder "Youth Dew," and they aren't afraid to reapply after an hour or so.  Just as your nasal passages and sinus cavities are adjusting to the last squirt of evil.  The males inevitably have slicked back hair and Chester the Molester eyeglasses and use their handkerchief, often.

I think, if hospitals were smart and all about teachable moments, there should be some criteria necessary for admittance into surgical waiting rooms.  Tenuous connections to someone one of the family members knew forty years ago really doesn't grant you a seat in an overcrowded waiting area of a business, and that's what a hospital is.

And please?  Leave the Rook cards at home.

JT ...

• is very tall
• is very thin
• loves Miles Davis
• loves steak so rare that it moos when it's turned on the grill
• is a connoisseur
• thinks almost exactly as I do on most subjects, except for those I'm not smart enough to think about
• is a great songwriter
• is much like Pigpen from Charlie Brown
• cares too much sometimes
• is accident prone - brick walls fall on him
• has a great laugh and uses it often
• would eat sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits every day, but only if they come from Jack's
• was/is a surprise
• takes thank-you notes to a new level
• once told  his godfather, when asked what Santa was going to bring him, "beats the  hell out of me."  He was 4.  We had a talk.
• sees the good in everyone and is sometimes disappointed
• wants to save the world
• trying to save himself
• is my heart
• is very fair, in every way
• studies Latin and Greek
• loves his family
• loves his dog
• working on loving himself
• has a birthday tomorrow.

Another JT said it best - "Don't assume that the life you left is the life you have to lead."

Happy Birthday.  And welcome to your future.

aut viam inveniam aut faciam

My little girl

Children grow up way too fast.  This is a proven fact and no one who has them would try to argue.  One minute they are crying to be fed and the next we're crying because they're leaving.

My daughter did that to me - grew up and away far faster than the speed of sound.  Yesterday she was refusing to eat any Flintstone vitamin other than Wilmas and today she is an accomplished writer and editor for a major magazine. 

What happened to the tow-head who replied "nine" every time she heard Peter Piper?  Only she could be that emphatic and positive.  She, who stole my heart the second she was born has spent close to thirty years being the most direct, definite, intense child I have. 

When she was three she told me that it was time we started looking for her castle. 

She always read and absorbed everything going on around her - that's what makes her good at her job.  And she is.  The best.  Her managing editor, a hard-boiled New Yorker, tells her that often.  She won every award in her journalism class and underclassmen, I'm told, still speak of her with awe.  She is special.

She's at a turning point in her career.  They closed her bureau in November so she has been free-lancing since.  Print journalism, folks, really is going the way of the dinosaur.  But she makes enough to support herself and she's getting to write about things that she enjoys. 

Essentials like insurance packages and retirement plans are not part of her life anymore, and she's beginning to think about things like this.  Free-lancing is great and pays the bills, but she's looking ahead and realizes that she won't always be twenty-eight and needs a plan.

She has two interviews next week.  Managing editor of a very large health magazine, with accompanying perks, and as a reporter for the largest newsgroup in the US.  She would be terrific at both.

The realist in me wants to encourage her to take the managing editor position.  It's safe, been around for years, and she would bring youth and enthusiasm to a lucrative subscription group - Baby Boomers.

The dreamer in me wants her to grab her trench coat and laptop and take the reporting job.  She would travel and be engaged in reality like she would otherwise not know first-hand.  She's single and doesn't even have a goldfish - there's nothing to tie her down.

She won't ask for advice; she gave that up in 1985.  But she will want to hear me pro and con both should they be offered.  I don't know what I'll say.

One of my girlhood dreams was to be Margaret Mead.  Travel in hot climates studying people and writing about an existence so far removed from my own that I really couldn't even imagine it.

Instead, I met someone when I was way too young and married him.  He was way too young too, and the fact that he looked like Richard Gere and drove a GTO couldn't make two totally different people learn how to be a couple.  We divorced, I met my second husband and when we married two years later I started living the life so many others have.

What kind of anthropologist would I have been?  I can't say that what I have done instead is somehow less important.  My life has merit and my children are people I like as well as love.  My career has fulfilled me, usually.  I have great friends.  I have no trouble living with the me I became.

But I will always wonder.

Robert J. Elisberg on Huffington Post is a man of genius. In response to Palin's latest attempt to appear as something more than a failed governor of a state whose population would rank it as only the 18th most populous city in the United States:

"It is egregious and irresponsible that there are still people who ask Sarah Palin what she thinks. And people who listen. Thankfully, the more she speaks, the smaller she appears. Thank God."

He was responding to her solution for the oilspill.  It was a beautiful thing.

Why do the arms of Morpheus elude?

Okay, I've never been a great sleeper - well, maybe when I was a baby.  I can't remember, and oddly that's the one topic my mother doesn't yammer on about incessantly.  (Just don't ask her about when I started to read.  My former husband and great friend once said that if she told the story one more time she would have me coming out of the womb with a newspaper in my hands.)

As a teenager my friends refused to spend the night at my house - I got up too early.  I was fine at their house.  I'd get up and talk to their parents: why are other parents so much cooler/smarter/better cookers than our own?  A query to be addressed at a later date.  Ad nauseum, as usual.

When I had children I slept because my body said to.  Middle of the night feedings for 20+ years, or so it seemed, tended to send out those warning signals that the ol' temple had to be replenished, so I complied.  And who doesn't remember the dulcet tones of a screaming baby waking us from our slumber?  Those days I could have slept years.  Or at least months.

The last fifteen years or so have not been kind, sleep-wise.  I cannot do it.  I seem to merely nod off for a couple of hours and then, cue the band, I'm awake.  And not just up - I'm ready to dig ditches, top trees, and leap tall buildings in a single bound.  Do I?  Of course not - it's dark outside.

My problem?  My mind doesn't realize it can stop working for a couple of hours.  I think too much.  About everything.  The Middle East.  The USA.  My children.  Why Bud couldn't wait for Deanie to get well in the mental hospital in Splendor in the Grass. 

And sometimes really random things.

People who go to bed and sleep for seven or eight hours have my admiration and envy.  I want to be you.  I want to turn it off for awhile and just rest.  My skin would look better and I could focus.  On what's important and what's not.

So as I sit here blogging (please help me come up with another name for this - I really hate "blogging") I wonder:  Can you really survive on as little sleep as I do?  Am I really walking around in a fog, recognizing little that is actually going on and seeing everything through a sleep-deprived haze?

I think I am.  And I think Morpheus does hate me.

Soul sistas

Reading another blog (and we MUST change the name, thank you) and the writer, someone twenty plus years younger than I, spoke of her lack of female friends.  And it made me think....

I would not be who I am without my girlfriends.  They have shaped my personality and my garden and have made this journey so much damned fun.  Most of us are middle-aged.   And the arrival at said juncture has surprised us all.  When did we stop being thirty?  And why do the faces that peer at us from our mirrors look so much older than the ones we see in our minds-eye?

My group includes five core members with several hovering on the periphery.  We have seen so much - births, deaths, and tennis championships.  We've spent holidays and Tuesdays in ordinary time together and we still like each other.  We hosted wedding and baby showers for each other, and then each other's children, and somehow remain separate but together - I might go weeks without speaking to one or more of them and when I do we pick up where we left off - with whatever silliness or  seriousness we spoke of last. 

You need girlfriends.  The ability to pick up the phone or meet for lunch to discuss whatever is on your mind is inestimable.  Husbands get tired of hearing about bad haircuts and the merits of one night cream over another.  And don't bother trying to explain the craziness created from one phone call from your mother - you're tuned out.

Girlfriends listen.  And commiserate.  And have opinions.  And aren't afraid to voice them.  Growth in spirit comes from hearing words you need but don't necessarily want.

And girlfriends understand that cheesecake is a perfectly fine dinner when you're at the beach, and knew your thighs before they went south, and will bring you soup when you're sick, and lift you up in their prayers nightly without being asked, and laugh at your bad jokes, and cry when you hurt and rejoice when you're happy.

They are your conscience and your barometer.  They provide ballast.  They see you at your best and your worst and still love you.  In spite of yourself sometimes. 

I can't imagine my life without these people. 

So my advice to young women, struggling with toddlers or teens or men, is to find simpatico souls to join you on your way.  Your life will be richer and brighter if you can share it with these fabulous creatures called girlfriends. 

Just expect them to tell you when you have a hideous haircut.

You are what you eat.....

My current roommate and one time love of my life, okay, still the love of my life, and I went to the Big City yesterday and shopped at my favorite market.  It's Mediterranean and the smells when the door opens speak to me - saying, "you're home."

Couldn't tell you why, unless you accept that I think I was Egyptian in a past life.  Probably during Cleo's days, but that's another post.

I bought all the food I love - tabbouleh and the like - and he said, "Do you realize you eat like a cow?  You graze on green stuff.  Even the bread you inhale is wheat."  And he's right.  Dammit.  I hate when he's right.

I haven't always had the luxury of eating only what I like.  Meat and three were put in front of me during my youth and I ate it or didn't get dessert.  Most nights I got to watch my younger brothers eat their pudding or pie while I pouted.  I was a great pouter and still am.  It's one of my talents.

I didn't then, nor do I now, eat meat and three.  Gimme the three and I'm happy.  I also don't eat food with faces.  (Chicken and fish don't count - beaks and gills cancel out the face part.  Or at least in my own little world.) 

My parents weren't happy when I refused to eat what was served; they were Depression children so they were glad to get any food and did not appreciate my evolved palate, at all.  Many tears were spilled into meatloaf or fried porkchops that I couldn't get down.  Mine, not theirs.  In my house you ate what was cooked and there were no arguments.

When I had children I resolved to never make the same mistake.  My children would eat what they liked and dinnertime would not become a battlefield.  Ever heard the expression "Paying for your raising?"  Yeah, I have.

I have the three pickiest eaters ever, and their choices don't overlap much.  Oldest son - meat and potatoes.  No chicken, or broccoli, or asparagus, or anything more exotic than steak and baked potato.  Thanksgiving?  I cook him a rib-eye and he will eat the mashed potatoes, but nothing else.  Except damned red velvet cake, his favorite and something I make once a year and hate.

My daughter flirts with veganism.  No butter, cheese, or dairy of any kind.  Flirts being the operative word.  She went two years looking with disdain at the rest of us enjoying shrimp or grilled fish but the last time she was home she wanted to get Burger King.  She is a little bipolar.

My youngest son?  My gourmet.  No green veggies except broccoli, asparagus, or artichokes.  No chicken except fried.  Hold the mayo.  Forever.  Loves a strip steak, baked potato, and salad with Greek dressing.  And lobster if you have it, with lots of drawn butter.  And trifle.  With raspberries, please.

Bottom line, in an attempt to repudiate my own experience I became a short-order cook for years.  I didn't enjoy it, but what great dinnertime conversations occurred because my family was not engaged in tug-o-wars that no one won.  Only one problem, I wasn't in there engaging in said convo - I was still cooking.

I maintain that my way was the best, however.  Not one of my kids ever left the table hungry and in tears.  And they got dessert if I had had time to make it. 

Today?  I never cook except major holidays - Thanksgiving lunch, Christmas Eve jambalaya and Christmas morning brunch, and Easter Low Country Boil.

And if they don't like what I serve?  Let them eat cake.  Before I finish it off.

Words

I commented earlier today that I was a "wordy damn person" and it's true.  I love words.  I love spelling them and using them in the right context and knowing their origin.

My word-love was nurtured by my parents.  They were linguists; lazy words, like "stupid" and "shut up" were never uttered in my house growing up.  Those were considered low class and vulgar.  Calling someone a "fool" was tantamount to a good strong lecture on the difference in intellectual discourse and allowing raw emotion to speak for you.  One was valued, the other forbidden.

Words have been my guiding star, my compass.  People who have great command of our language immediately earn my respect, even when I disagree with what they're saying.  Having a literal base has been the cornerstone of my everyday, sometimes mundane existence.

Reading at an early age fostered my love for words, of course.  I read books with words like "titian" and "blancmange" and "fortnight."  A treasured Christmas present was on my nightstand and I loved to find words I didn't know just so I could open the blue cover of my Webster's to discover what they meant.  I still remember the inscription on my dictionary:  "Brenda Houk   227 Lincoln Drive  Biloxi, Mississippi."  Under this I wrote "Mrs. Ricky Nelson" because I just knew that I would grow up and marry him.  I did not.

I married someone who loves words as much as I do.  And of course our children learned at an early age that we didn't tolerate lazy ways of speaking, either.  It might have been disconcerting to a friend at a baseball game to hear my 8 year old son tell him that he felt Paul Tsongas would not be a good president because he lacked stamina due to health issues, but as he laughed at my son's political statement,  I beamed with pride.  Another word-nerd in the making.

{The same son told me the other day, "I used to think everybody's family was like ours, but they weren't.  Good friends of mine didn't watch the Clarence Thomas hearings or presidential debates or Crossfire with the Dad.  They don't know what they missed."  Wait - we did something right???}

I  have words that I use constantly - fabulous, glorious, clarity, effusive - are but a few.  And words that I admire: honor, fortitude, calm.  Some words have become mine and I feel duty-bound to see that they are put out there. 

We don't use good descriptive words anymore.  We have become lazy, a venial sin in my household, and use words that are in vogue: awesome, cool, whatever the word of the month is.  Nothing wrong with either of those until you hear/read them 432 a day.  They lose something.

And "conversate" used as a verb?  Please don't.  Nothing wrong with the word converse.  Just another example of laziness/trendiness. 

Snobbish?  Probably.  I don't care how many degrees you have, or how many zeroes you can write behind a whole number on a check, if you don't express yourself well you are a loser in my book.  

The easiest way in the world to make a good impression?  Learn your language.

Almost

Had the divorce decree said October instead of August I would have been married 25 years.  If this were August instead of June I would have been divorced for 10 years now.

Those are milestone years, 25 and 10, or at least numbers that mean something.  Twenty four and nine?  Just numbers.  Not significant.  Not a quarter of a century or a decade.  Just numbers.  I seem to always stop short of committing to something solid.  Numbers or relationships.

The person I was married to, and had children with, and shared my youth, is staying with me for awhile.  He's had health problems for several years and they've gotten worse.  Carotid tests and lung capacity checks and bypasses are what we face in the next couple of days.  All of us. 

Last night, after the heart cath showed that a stent wasn't what he needed, we came in from the hospital and had a quick dinner and talked.  About mortality and money and arrangements and requests.  Topics that are necessary during times like this.

Then we went to the deck and had a glass of wine and talked about inconsequentials - elections and children and the oil spill.  And Al and Tipper Gore.  This staunch conservative I was married to for almost twenty-five years expressed regret that they were separating.  And said, "It's just a shame.  After all they experienced - near death of a child, campaigns, kids marrying - for something to end after 40 years."

I'm sure that the Gores are telling themselves the same thing.  They almost made it to that golden anniversary.  They almost had the happily ever after. 

I know what they are going through, though.  You really can grow in different directions.  You actually can look at someone who was your true north and wonder why that was the case.  You can look at a person one more time across the dinner table and see a stranger.  You can stop being excited that they are due in from work, or from a trip, and you can start resenting them for cutting into your time.  You start envisioning your life without them.  And it becomes your reality.

Almost.