for worse or for better

It's late and CNN is droning on in the background because I married a Brit with an obsession for American politics. I had no idea. About a lot of things. That's the thing about marriage. You think you know what you're getting and really you are utterly in the dark. I had no idea my husband (in true European fashion) would only shower every third or fourth day, that he would find it almost impossible to fall asleep without a movie (thank God for laptops), that he would not care one iota for fashion and would think wearing a fleece is "dressing up," that he would not know how to get from point A to point B (even if we had driven it 100 times) if I was in the car, that he would not be able to empty the dishwasher without leaving most of the clean items on the counter because he still doesn't know where they belong, that he would find it painful to get out of bed with less than a half hour warning. But I also never knew that he would be awed by seeing a chipmunk (for the first time!) and broken by putting a cat to sleep, that he would be able to spot a natural wonder every time we go for a walk, that he would be able to play with abandon (games with Liam and guitar!), that he would choose to hang out with me over any other evening option, that he would always and everywhere be himself and that he'd help me start to live that way, too, that he would be the greatest dad on earth (even when his role models truly sucked), that, if I really needed him to, he would get out of bed in a second and not complain. It's like American politics. You fall in love or take the best thing that comes along but you don't really know what you're going to get. When it gets rough, you think, hmm, maybe if I had gone with that other guy instead. When it's good, you think, oh yeah, baby, I picked him. And when the better outweighs the worse, well, thank God for that.

The Fiction of Us
Once as lovers in a fairytale
now living a mystery,
a nail-biting suspense.
The next chapter starts too soon.
I need more time
to read you.
We dabble in fantasy, the great escape,
and save a romance for vacation,
searching the shelves every day for poetry.
An ever-after
worked out line by line.

(c) Amy Wolgemuth Bordoni