Yay!

Thanks to The Glamorous Grad Student for posting my review about the town!!! :)

If you haven´t read her blog, you should! She´s got great advice, great looks and great taste!

http://theglamourousgradstudent.blogspot.com/

Life

Ever since I got back from home I have neglected the blog. Maybe it´s because our relationship has been going pretty smoothly lately. The biggest issue we had was when his computer broke down a couple of weeks ago! Which in our case, it´s really relationship-threatening!

This past week, however, something happened that made me look things in a very different way.
One of my closest friends from back home got married a few years years ago. Her relationship was never very good. Let´s just say she was easy to manipulate and he used that to his advantage. She was also very afraid of never getting married, and more than anything she wanted to have a baby. Well, they got married and had a baby girl. They moved to a town far away from her family and friends because of his job.
Things were not working out and my friend was very unhappy. After a lot of painful thinking she decided to move back with her almost 3 year old daughter to her mother´s houses. It was not an easy decision for her, but it was one she had to do to give her daughter the happy environment she deserves to grow up in. She moved out a little bit after the end of year holidays passed, when her new job started.
Even though she was the one who left, she has had a hard time coping with the separation. She knew it was the right thing to do, but she was very unhappy about her marriage not working out.
Last week, just 4 days after her daughter´s 3 years old birthday and a day before a business trip that marked her new independence, she got a call from the hospital in her husband´s town. He had had a heart attack and died. He was barely 30 years old.
He could no have died at a worst time. With the separation going on, his family hates my friend and blames her for his death. He also did not have any kind of life insurance or anything to take care of his daughter if he died, and he had a lot of debt that my friend now has to pay for. Two weeks ago, my friend was dealing with an already painful broken marriage and now she´s struggling to make ends meet, while battling her in-laws for everything from inheritance to visitation rights.
I´ve been remembering the time when my friend got married and she had the baby. I can´t help but to think how she got married more out of fear than out of love. She was afraid to remain single, she was afraid of not having a child, she was afraid of never finding someone to love so she married the first guy she could, without ever considering what he was like, how he managed money and what kind of relationship she had with his family.
All this situation has made me think about how every single decision, and specially who we have as a partner, can have an unknown and huge impact in our lives...

Before going home...

The week before I go home-home, I always feel a little bit like I don´t want to go.
It´s not really that I don´t want to go, I REALLY want to go!!

But before I leave I always have to leave everything at work ready which is crazy on itself, and then there´s the actual travelling: catching a bus at 2:30 am, 3 h of travel to the airport, and then all the planes, to finally arrive home at 10 pm... I can´t wait to hug my husband, but I can´t help to dread the process of getting there!

The funny thing is that the day I´m actually travelling, I feel great! I actually enjoy airports, specially the people watching! I guess I just hate thinking about all the travelling!

Does anyone else have these kind of mixed feelings about going home?

Longest week in the world

I´m going home-home in one week!! I´ll stay for three weeks, which is the longest I have stayed in over two years :)
I´m SO excited! I´ve ven been having a hard time falling asleep. I haven´t kiss or hugged him in about 6 months, about a week after our honeymoon. In just one week I´ll get to look into his eyes! :D
We´re planning all the cool stuff we´ll be able to do in these weeks, which is mostly the everyday-things people who live in the same house take for granted. We´ll be able to make dinner together, watch TV together, go grocery shopping together and cuddle!!
Since it´s important to have time to do special things, we´re also planning on spending a couple of days in our ¨love cabin¨. This is the place where we got engaged and then spent most of our honeymoon :)
I haven´t stayed home for more than 1.5 or 2 weeks, in the past 2 years. I´m a bit worried that the extra week is going to make me get used to life with him and coming back is going to suck even more :(
In any case, I CAN´T WAIT TO GET THERE!

Blogging again

I´m not sure if anyone noticed, probably not, but I closed the blog for a few days.
Since I started it, it´s been a secret blog. I have not told anyone that I have it, not even my husband. I feel bad that I have this where I discuss our relationship and he doesn´t know about it, but at the same time, it has become a bit like a journal, a tool to understand myself and the relationship. I realized that have not discussed anything in the blog that I haven´t talk to him about. I reopened it, because it has helped me think about our relationship out loud, and I think doing that helps me be better in the relationship.
I plan on keeping the blog to myself for a while. At some point, perhaps as we approach the end of the long distance part of our relationship, I will share it with him. I think it will make a great record of this part of our lives.

Walk by myself

This weekend I also had my masters commencement.
I got to wear a gown and cap, which was fun considering that in my home country we use regular clothes for our graduation and my school colors here make me look like I´m from the house of Gryffindor :P
I didn´t have anyone visiting in town so I went to the ceremony by myself. My school does live streaming of the ceremony so some of my family and friends from home were able to see me walk. It was a bit ackward in the beginning, walking around by myself when everyone else was taking pictures with their family. But I managed, and in the end, it was kinda nice: I walked by myself, but I wasn´t alone.

Tulips!

This was a pretty exciting weekend: I had both my birthday and my masters commencement.

This is my second birthday far away from home, I was a bit sad, but my husband sent me a beautiful flower arrangement! I love tulips!

My husband had told me to stay home, but instead I went out for lunch with my roommate and left a note on the door telling the delivery person to leave the flowers on our porch. The delivery guy instead left a message on our machine asking us to call back to arrange a new delivery time... We ended up having to go and pick them up at the store.

It wasn´t that big of a deal for me up to this point, but by husband was pretty disappointed about me not getting the flowers at home.

Later that night we talked about it and at first it was not a pleasant conversation. He was all serious and disappointed, which made me upset and a bit mad because he was making me feel upset about the flowers I loved and worst of all, on my birthday! We were not yelling or anything like that, we were just not talking in the same way that we usually do and that made me sad. At some point in our conversation there was a pretty long pause where neither of us said anything. After that pause, the tone of our conversation changed. It started to become more and more like our usual conversations and we ended up laughing at the whole incident.

Now, I´m not saying that I´m completely ok about his behaviour. It was still my birthday and he made me feel bad about something that was supposed to make me happy. But after we talked, I understood much better what the gift meant to him.

This was a pretty special weekend for me. One that I would have liked to spend with him. The tulips were his way of telling me that he felt the same.

When he was looking for the flowers, he had this whole picture in his head of me getting the flowers and how exciting that would be for me. That was a big part of the present, and me not being there to get them was a bit like saying I didn´t care.