Marriage

She Didn’t Want Me There

My wife woke up at 6:30 screaming into her pillow from a nightmare. I told my son—two days out from his wedding—that it was either a bad dream or the crushing realization that she still shares a bed with me. He laughed and said I could self-deprecate with the best of them. I’ll take what I can get.

The real blow came an hour later. She needed my Sam’s card to buy rehearsal dinner ingredients, then followed it with, “I appreciate you, but I don’t want you to come.” Since the card lives on my phone, I was simultaneously needed and unwanted—emotional support livestock, essentially. She didn’t want me wandering beside the cart providing observational commentary on industrial-sized cream cheese or calculating the GDP of the pie aisle. She wanted peace. Focus. Things I occasionally threaten without trying.

Because she took my phone, I became a middle-aged Amish man sitting in the living room wondering where my digital life had gone. No audiobook. No bank account. Just me and my thoughts. Her apology later had all the warmth of a hostage video, but that’s Year 36. Nobody’s trying to impress anyone anymore. You’re just trying not to create paperwork.

What she’s conveniently ignoring is my personal growth. Earlier this week, a woman approached me in the Sam’s parking lot—new job starting tomorrow, two kids, needed rent money, and mentioned she was a Christian. I gave her something from my wallet with one condition: “If you aren’t really a Christian, this is a pretty bad thing you’re doing.” Compassion and spiritual accountability in one transaction. I’m basically a weird Baptist Batman.

I also spent half a day driving store to store hunting overripe bananas for banana bread for the Indian relatives coming in for the wedding. More than one store told me they’d just thrown the old ones out. I kept going. Thirty-five years ago that news would have triggered a level of self-righteous frustration usually reserved for HOA presidents. Now I absorb adversity with maturity and grace. Mostly because I’m tired. Growth should be measured in hesitation, not perfection.

My wife knows mornings are my best hours—when my verbal filter still has structural integrity. She knows that placing me near a pallet of cheesecake ingredients before 10 a.m. creates unnecessary risk exposure. She was not wrong to leave me home.

But the universe has a sense of humor.

My son mentions that his mom called because she can’t log into the Sam’s account. In my most supportive tone I said, “Tell her to call my phone.” Silence. Then I grabbed his phone, because apparently nobody appreciates timing. My wife informed me she had been calling my phone several times before realizing the vibrating device she kept hearing was in her own pocket.

After a couple of six-digit verification codes and some light mockery to keep the marriage oxygenated, she got logged in. She didn’t want me there. She needed me anyway. That’s probably marriage in its purest form.

There’s a currency in long marriages—emotional debits, financial credits, historical grievances filed away with perfect recall. I’m wired for all of it, which isn’t a quality I’m proud of. But somewhere in 35 years, Judy figured out how to make me softer without turning me into someone I wouldn’t recognize. She never tried to fully tame me, which was wise, because I’d have been unbearable in captivity.

I didn’t marry someone fragile. I married someone strong enough to argue with me, laugh at me, and occasionally still choose me anyway. She might wake up some mornings screaming from dreams I apparently star in—but she keeps crawling back into the same bed.

I’m counting that as affection.

The Budget That Lived Briefly

Judy set a wedding budget. Then she exceeded it. By how much is still unclear — probably double, possibly more, definitely enough that when the DJ called asking for his balance, her response was “Oh, I forgot about that one.”

I’ve been married long enough to know what that sentence means.

The original number was $2,000, plus we’d cover the rehearsal dinner — a reasonable, grown-up figure that apparently functioned more as a conversation-ender than an actual plan.

Here’s what I did with that budget: nothing. My wife said she had it handled, and I believed her, the way a husband learns to believe things when the alternative is a much longer discussion. I am a man who does well with specific instructions. “Pay this person on Venmo for the cake” — done. I noted “cake” as wedding-adjacent, did not open a spreadsheet, turned off my critical thinking like a responsible partner, and performed the task.

What I did not do was connect the cake to the flowers to the cheese cubes to the small jar of gherkins now living permanently in our refrigerator. Somewhere along the way, the wedding became a slush fund — gentle, loving, entirely intentional — designed to cushion our son, who has been mostly carrying this thing himself. His bride just finished her doctorate. She’s looking for work. The traditional “bride’s family pays” rule did not survive contact with reality, and Judy quietly decided we’d pick up the slack without making it a whole thing. Hard to argue with, honestly. Tracked? Absolutely not.

I stopped looking at the credit cards. If I don’t look, the gherkins are just groceries.

Now here’s where I become the punchline.

A couple of years ago I had what I generously called “success” with algorithmic trading bots. Then came the other part. I let the situation run longer than it deserved, checking the account periodically, hoping something would turn around. This week I finally closed every bot that was “unlikely to ever recover and make profit,” which was all of them. Everything is now in a normal, managed, boring retirement account. The math is simple: more went in than came out.

Judy’s response: “I wish you had never put money in that thing, but I’m glad you’re done.”

No lecture. No monthly callback. Just — glad you’re done.

So when the DJ called, and Judy said she forgot about that one, and I felt that small hot flicker of “we had a budget” — I thought about the bots. I thought about what it looks like when someone decides not to make you pay for something indefinitely. And I closed the credit card tab.

We were careful in our earlier years, because we had to be. That discipline is part of why a blown wedding budget is uncomfortable now instead of catastrophic. We earned the right to be a little imperfect with money, and we’ve both used that right with some enthusiasm.

She keeps terrible track of wedding expenses. I once handed real money to a robot that lost it. Neither of us is keeping score.

That’s probably what a long marriage eventually becomes — you run out of the moral high ground you thought you were standing on, and then you just have each other, some leftover gherkins, and a wedding that’s going to be really nice, rain or shine.

35 Years and the Keys on the Table

My wife and I hit 35 years of marriage yesterday, which feels less like “against all odds” and more like, “Well, if we both managed not to die yet, this checks out.”

We said “Happy Anniversary” yesterday morning with the same casual energy you use when you say, “Hey, we’re out of milk.” Not because it doesn’t matter—because it’s so baked into daily life it’s almost ordinary now. Slightly surprised we both lived this long? Sure. But once we cleared that hurdle, the anniversary part felt attainable.

In less than two weeks, our son gets married. Watching him prepare has made me realize how wildly underprepared I was at the starting line. Back then, I was still trying to untangle my father’s death five years earlier—carrying a grief I didn’t fully know how to name, let alone process.

My son is walking into this differently. He and his bride did real counseling—discussed expectations, conflict styles, cultural differences, and finances. The counselor was raising issues my son hadn’t even considered yet. They have a follow-up appointment scheduled after the wedding, which is the relationship equivalent of actually reading the warranty instead of tossing it in the trash. That sounds less like young love and more like two adults who want this thing to work and are willing to admit they might need help to keep it working.

Our premarital counseling involved a pastor named Maynard. I believe there were one or two sessions. Judy doesn’t remember anything life-altering, and my memory is basically: we met, he talked, we nodded, somehow we’re married. We made it 35 years, so either Maynard was a quiet genius or we survived on stubbornness and grace. I’ve never met another Maynard since, which tells me either the world could use a few more of them—or it wisely decided one was enough.

Our wedding itself was less “special moments” and more controlled chaos.

We didn’t have a choreographed dance. Most of the reception was speed-walking table to table, shaking hands like we were running for office and the polls closed at midnight. I barely remember any of it, but we hired a videographer who documented the whole thing like wildlife footage, so apparently we were there.

What I do remember—because people will not let this story die—is the keys.

During the toast, one of Judy’s bridesmaids stepped to the microphone, started out normal, then veered into chaos. She announced that Judy had apparently shared her apartment key with many different men over the years, and before we officially began married life, it was only right for those keys to be returned. Any male who had one was invited to come forward.

We thought it was a cute joke. One key, maybe two, a laugh and move on.

Instead: wave after wave of men and boys walked up. My brother worked at a truck rental company and had access to approximately every unused key in North America, which helped the prank scale well beyond reason. By the end, there were 50-plus keys on the table.

Then my grandfather shuffled up, dropped his key down, looked at Judy, and said, “Really hate to give this one up.”

He had a knack for the perfectly-timed ornery comment. The laughter was loud—and that’s the moment the whole reception was building toward, even if none of us knew it at the time.

The limo, for the record, abandoned us. Photos ran long, the driver had another appointment, and we rolled up to our own reception crammed into the back of a bridesmaid’s car. The schedule for the afternoon weddings creeping into the morning ones.

Now we’re helping plan their wedding, which means fielding ideas from people like me.

My wife started listing our son’s history of hobbies for her speech, and the list kept growing—frisbee golf, photography, coffee perfection, baking the perfect cookie, 3-D printing, and a brief affair with improv classes. So I suggested: why not do an improv skit at the wedding instead of a dance?

They actually tried it. The prompt word was “cabbage”—apparently that’s how improv starts. Our son launched into miming eating cabbage, got about three lines in, and decided this was not how he wanted to be remembered on his wedding day. Too much pressure. Not enough guarantee he wouldn’t end up performing indigestion in front of both families.

My wife got new material for her speech. And we got a preview of how this couple is going to handle parental suggestions for the next several decades: consider it, try it on, then set it down and back away when it doesn’t fit. That alone gives me hope.

Which brings me back to yesterday, and this 35-year mark.

Neither of us is the same person we were when we walked down that aisle hoping the limo would stay. There’s been loss. Quiet fights—not the loud kind, but the ones where the real problem was all the words we didn’t say until much later. Decisions one of us made that the other swallowed with a tight jaw. Health seasons and money seasons, a few blessings we both know we didn’t earn.

We didn’t always have our priorities sorted. We’re getting better at asking which choices will still matter five years from now, and letting that answer steer.

Retirement is out there on the horizon, getting bigger. I’m looking forward to stepping through that door and seeing what’s on the other side—maybe a little slower, maybe with more doctor’s appointments, but still us. The journey has been good. The companion has been better.

And if somewhere down the road, our son looks at his wife the way I still look at mine—half amused, half amazed he got this lucky—I’ll consider that proof we did at least a few things right.

Not because we had it figured out. Just because love stuck around long enough to grow up with us.

What We’re Actually Trying to Say

Two weeks before my son’s wedding, I’ve finally understood something I probably should have figured out years ago: inside every grown kid is still a person quietly hoping their parents will recognize the adult they’ve become. They want you to see that they turned out okay, even if they’re still improvising half the time.

So consider this my unofficial set of guidelines for how parents are trying to relate to their kids once marriage enters the picture. I’m writing from the parent side, but I suspect the kids will recognize themselves, too.

Saturday night we celebrated my son’s birthday at Hall’s Pizza Kitchen in downtown OKC. I’ve been downtown more in the past month than almost all of last year. Apparently, it takes wedding errands and playoff basketball to transform me from “man who enjoys staying home” into “local culture enthusiast.” My therapist would call this growth. I call it parking anxiety.

My son asked everyone to wear Thunder shirts. Half complied enthusiastically. The other half wore neutral colors—the universal signal for “I support the team emotionally but not enough to own merchandise.” I respect the honesty.

The table divided naturally: vegetarians on one side, meat lovers on the other. My future daughter-in-law’s family held the vegetarian end. Our side looked like we were preparing for winter hibernation. My son sat in the middle like a United Nations translator working to prevent an international incident involving sausage toppings. He chose wisely. The pizza, and the seating arrangement, reflected exactly where he is in life right now—one foot in each world, trying to keep everybody fed.

Conversation stayed polite but surface-level. Partly language barriers, partly two families still learning each other’s rhythms. Our future daughter-in-law handled everything gracefully. But at some point I noticed her attention drifting toward her side of the table, her family, her people.

Not wrong. Just different from how she usually is with us.

First guideline for parents: don’t panic when your child’s attention shifts toward their new family. They’re trying to hold two worlds at once. That’s genuinely hard, and they didn’t get a manual either.

I still experience my own version of this in my 60s, which is either reassuring or mildly alarming depending on how you look at it. When I’m with my mom or my siblings, some earlier version of me quietly reappears—somewhere between the Andy who’s been married 35 years and the one who existed before my wife’s civilizing influence showed up. She has done considerable work on this project and deserves full credit.

She does the same thing when we visit her family. There’s an unspoken arrangement: for a few days, her attention goes to people who knew her long before I did. I survive this temporary reassignment by walking a lot and reminding myself I’ll be relevant again once we cross the state line heading home.

When your kids bend back toward their families of origin after they’re married, it’s not a betrayal of their spouse or of you. It’s just old gravity still doing its job. Give it a little room.

When our oldest daughter got married, I wasn’t ready to be demoted. For years, I’d been the first call for every problem, every decision, every minor household catastrophe involving emotions or leaking plumbing. I had plenty of experience in both categories and was fully prepared to stay on retainer indefinitely.

But if we’d stayed her crutch, her marriage wouldn’t have the strength it has now.

She and her husband figured things out. They built the habits they needed. Our restraint—as unnatural as it felt—turned out to be the actual gift. She and I have a close relationship now, but it’s built on mutual respect rather than parental management. She’s no longer just our child. She’s a wife, a mother, and an adult running her own household.

I didn’t always want that. Selfishly, I’d have kept her eleven years old a little longer—mostly because eleven-year-olds think their dads are funnier than they actually are. Growing up was entirely her idea, and honestly, she handled it better than I did.

Not every family navigates this transition gracefully. Some parents keep treating married kids like supervised interns who need approval before making medium-sized decisions. Others read healthy distance as betrayal and make sure everyone knows it at Christmas. Some adult children never quite untangle themselves from their parents’ expectations and spend years quietly furious about it.

Everybody ends up frustrated, and Thanksgiving becomes an endurance event.

Here’s how I have found it works when it goes right: parents move from authority figures to mentors, then consultants, then—if everyone handles themselves reasonably well—friends. That shift requires humility from all sides. It also requires parents to understand that support and control are not the same thing, even when they feel identical from the inside.

On the in-law question—and every married person eventually develops strong opinions about this one—the only real requirement is that roles get respected. You don’t have to love your in-laws. You don’t have to enjoy every pizza dinner. You do have to honor their place in your spouse’s life, which is a meaningfully different and more achievable standard.

I’ll admit something: I’m very slow to weigh in on situations involving my wife’s side of the family, regardless of what I privately think. Partly because it’s not my call. Partly because her read on the situation is always more nuanced than mine—she has twenty-plus years of context I’ll never fully have. And partly because if I don’t initiate anything, I don’t have to manage the aftermath.

The guideline is simple: you’re not the sheriff on your spouse’s side of the family. At best, you’re a consultant brought in occasionally for a second opinion. Most consultants learn quickly that nobody actually wants their opinion on the family drama from 2014.

More weddings are coming in our family over the next few years. Some of those kids live farther away, which means we won’t have the same regular proximity we have with the ones nearby. Judy and I are adjusting to that reality at each encounter, and we don’t have it completely figured out.

What I do know from our own marriage is that over the years, the pull of my past has gotten quieter. The life Judy and I have built together feels more like ours and less like something we inherited or stumbled into. That’s not a rejection of where we came from. It’s just what a marriage does over time when you let it breathe and tend to it honestly. Eventually, you stop navigating by someone else’s map.

We want that for all of our kids.

We want them to build homes that reflect who they actually are—not extensions of us, not performances for anyone else. If they want six kids, we’ll show up and mean it. If their household goes fully vegetarian, we’ll eat beforehand and smile the whole time. We have opinions about both scenarios. We’ll keep most of them to ourselves.

They’re not obligated to edit themselves into a more comfortable version of themselves so the older generation doesn’t have to adjust. We’d genuinely rather deal with who they actually are.

There are values we hope they carry—faith, integrity, the willingness to keep choosing each other on the days it’s hard. We’ll be honest: we pray for all of it. But we’ve also learned that emotionally healthy people, people who know who they are and have done the work of figuring that out, tend to find their way toward those things more reliably than people who were handed a checklist. So emotional health comes first. Everything else we hope for has a much better chance of showing up behind it.

I had some misspent years sorting out my own feelings about the parents in my life—biological and in-law both. I don’t want that for our kids. We want to fill whatever role they actually need in a given season, not become the reason they avoid hard conversations or the reason they’re having one too many of them.

They’re also fully accountable for their own decisions. We didn’t raise them to invite chaos into their lives. The drama is optional. An emotionally healthy life is mostly a series of quiet choices to avoid the unnecessary ones.

What we’re actually trying to do—and we’re imperfect at it, regularly—is learn how to let go without disappearing. How to stay present without crowding. How to cheer loudly for the lives they’re building, even when those lives don’t look exactly like the ones we imagined.

That’s the guideline. That’s the promise.

We’re still learning, too. Hopefully that part’s obvious by now.

She Stayed Home Anyway

Friday night was supposed to be a bachelor night. My son skipped his camping trip to celebrate his fiancée’s new doctorate. My wife was supposed to be at a women’s church retreat somewhere in southeastern Oklahoma, surrounded by people who say “I’ll pray for them” and “Bless their hearts” every few minutes, and mean it. A room full of actual personalities.

She canceled. She stayed home with me.

I have spent considerable time assembling a list of plausible explanations.

The weather. Earlier this week, an EF4 tornado hit north of OKC. The retreat was a couple of hours away. Most of those women have lived here their whole lives, which means they’d have known exactly what to do. Judy would have been in better hands with them than with her husband, who has graduated from watching tornado coverage on TV to calling it “fieldwork.”

The new job. She finished her second week and told me, “If I knew it was going to be that hard, I would have asked for more money.” The graceful glide into semi-retirement she’d been planning has been postponed indefinitely. A full weekend of singing and fellowship might have felt less like rest and more like a different kind of exhausting.

The wedding. Their photographer canceled this week — a death in the family, and the memorial service landed on my son’s wedding day. The caterer they’d lined up is closing at the end of June. Judy found out about both of these things Friday morning, and before the day was out, she had a list of approximately a dozen photographers to call and filed the situation under problems I can fix. This is her natural environment. When I eavesdrop on her talking to our daughter, I hear a woman who genuinely believes she can solve things, and who is usually right about that. A retreat would have taken her off the field during crunch time.

The house. Between saxophone recitals, a doctoral defense, and family dinners, deep cleaning has been hard to come by. Our son is still living here until the wedding, which means every room is in use, and Judy hasn’t been able to close a door behind her and declare it “clean” the way she likes. Saturday presented an opportunity. I recognize this possibility.

Me. Her first comment was, “You were certainly a factor.” She said it warmly, which is the charitable interpretation, and I’m going with that. I’ll acknowledge I’ve been crankier than usual this week — by evening, I’m running on low-battery notifications, more tired and capable of the sharp word instead of the kind one. I start most mornings reasonably enough, but the day works on me. Talking less or answering in vague generalities is usually the better move. The last remaining bits of common sense do what they can.

She’s always had a heart for a project. Apparently, I still qualify.

The truth is, I don’t fully know why she stayed. My best guess is it was the wedding stuff, and that I was a small contributing factor, and that she weighed a weekend of fellowship against the specific pull of problems she could actually do something about — and the problems won.

I am the guy who takes out the trash and reminds her we need to get to the bank Saturday morning. I am the gardener who calls the perennial company to get replacement plants sent, then makes sure they’re in the ground before we can go out for dinner. Our emotional lanes are pretty well established. The kids don’t bring their big life questions to me. They bring them to Judy, who has the patience to sit with the answers longer than I do. I give responses that are either too vague or too sharp. Not nearly as helpful.

So if she tells herself she stayed home partly for me, I’m not going to argue. I know she has a full world of people who make her feel needed. If I’m somewhere in that number, I’ll take it.

Whether it is with a toilet brush or a phone call, Judy will continue her mission to save the world. Mine is just to make sure she can.

The Nicest (and Meanest) Man She Ever Married

This morning, I asked my wife if she wanted a coffee refill. When she said yes, I pointed to the carafe, paused just long enough to enjoy myself, and then grabbed her cup and filled it.

“You spoil me,” she said with total sincerity. “You are the nicest.”

I knew better. “Yes,” I replied, “but I’m also the meanest man you ever married.”

She didn’t miss a beat. In that sweet tone of hers, she said, “I feel like I take advantage of you when you always fill my cup for me. I genuinely thank you for that.”

Since the caffeine hadn’t hit yet and I didn’t feel worthy of the praise, I had to do some soul searching. How does this woman continue to love a snarky, often cranky man who is constantly trying to deposit enough “I care for you’s” into the emotional bank before noon — before the day’s inevitable influences take hold?

In just over two weeks, we start our 36th year of marriage. As I look at the calendar, I realize I need to up my game just to keep pace with her. She is genuinely excited about everything on the horizon. Our future daughter-in-law’s wedding shower? She’s hosting it and is actually looking forward to entertaining. Her new job has come with more Day One problems than expected, yet she’s ready for the challenge. Our Europe trip this summer? Every excursion is planned, and she is anxious to spend two weeks straight with me. Based on that last point alone, she should probably be committed to an institution.

I am well aware of my flaws. I snap when my schedule gets turned upside down. I am prone to funking — my shorthand for being in a funk — where I become either disagreeable or retreat into stony silence for no apparent reason. When I’m tired, I’m nitpicky. I’m often someone I wouldn’t want to spend time with.

Yet somehow I’m a better person than the man who stood at the altar all those years ago.

Judy’s ability to look long has either rewarded her or cursed her — I’m genuinely not sure which. I believe I’ve incrementally improved, but it didn’t happen in the first five years. It may have only happened in the last five. In the chaos of shared life, a slightly nicer version of me has slowly taken possession of my faculties more often than the other guy. Maybe my tone is a bit softer. Maybe watching my kids live their lives and spending a few hours a week with my granddaughter has acted as a lubricant for the nasties, letting the good ideas flow while keeping the barely tolerable ones from doing too much damage.

She tells me every time we travel: “I like you more when we travel than when we are around the house.” I get it. At home, I’m weighed down by all the life things I feel responsible for. When we’re cruising, she handles the plan, and I just show up.

I travel well.

Maybe that’s why she puts up with me the other 50 weeks of the year.

Things My Wife Won’t Buy (Until She Decides They Were Her Idea)

We recently got a new coffee maker, which is something I’ve only been asking for since, roughly, the Bush administration. My working theory was simple: “Why does our coffee taste like flavored water?” Apparently that wasn’t a compelling argument. What worked was my wife getting a new job, which unlocked the “gift to myself” justification, which is the phrase people use when they have a little more money than they want to admit.

The new machine does make better coffee. It has a Bold button, which I respect. The Bold button charges you for the improvement in time — double the brew, double the wait — but the coffee tastes like actual coffee, so I’ll take it. She has full creative control over the settings. My only request is that every used coffee ground gets dumped on my roses for the next few weeks. My front roses have never looked better, which means at least someone in this house is consistently benefiting from my persistence.

My wife has also appointed herself Veto Queen of household ideas — specifically mine. The lamp situation is Exhibit A. We have a shared recliner, and there used to be a lamp right between our two seats until the recliner ate the cord. Poor planning or spousal plotting — jury’s still out. Since then I’ve been campaigning: “Can we get this lamp?” “What about this one?” My questions are never ignored, exactly. They’re just not acted on, which starts to feel like the same thing. Her explanation is always that she just hasn’t found one she likes.

This from a woman who can summon TEMU packages like she’s running a small import operation. The wedding shower boxes arrive daily. She knows how to search, scroll, and buy things she wants to find. I’m not saying she’s uninterested in my lamp. I’m just saying it smells a lot like she is.

The blackout curtain situation is a separate grievance. Our bedroom windows face east. This is wonderful for cool evenings on the back patio and terrible for a man who cannot go back to sleep once he knows the sun has clocked in and a hot day is waiting. All last spring and into summer I was awake before seven with no alarm and no plan to be awake before seven.

The blinds help. They don’t cancel the sun. I could wear a sleep mask, but I already wear earplugs to mute the night’s musical selections. Shutting down two of five senses before bed every night feels excessive. In tornado country, it could also be fatal. When my wife says it’s a shame I don’t sleep better, I smile and nod, confident in my own theories about why.

In a small act of rebellion, I ordered a chicken shredder. We grill a few pounds of chicken every week, and I have long believed our enchiladas would be better with shredded chicken instead of chunks. The device is simple — toss in the cooked chicken, twist a few times, done. Before I ordered, I made one strategic decision: orange. My color, unmistakably. Every household member would see that shredder and know whose idea it was. It was cheap, and I was prepared to absorb any guilt that came my way.

It arrived the next morning. She asked what it was with genuine enthusiasm. I explained — chicken shredder, better enchiladas, game changer. Without looking up, she said she’d had one on her list for a while and just hadn’t gotten around to ordering it yet.

Sure you did, dear.

The coffee is better. The roses are thriving. The enchiladas are improving. The lamp, I assume, is still under review.

Amateurs

We hit every red light on the way home from the last regular-season hockey game. Every single one. It was nearly 10:00 on a Saturday night, and the lights had not gotten the memo

My wife, in a tone that does not brook dissent: “What incompetent traffic engineers.”

This is not an unusual comment from her. We both share the impulse, actually. I come at it with sarcasm. She comes at it with how she would fix the problem. Neither approach accomplishes much, but both get to the root of who we are. I default to humor. She sees a problem and intuitively knows how to solve it.

If she could clone herself, she’d dispatch a copy to every corner of society plagued by inefficiency. We’ve had car-ride conversations where she single-handedly fixed healthcare, immigration, and the tax code before we reached the driveway. I realize the world is a lesser place for having only one of her — but if there were an army of her fixing the planet, I’d still only be married to the original. I can barely keep up as it is.

So I couldn’t let her traffic comment go without a small test. “We’re good at making brisket in the oven but not on the smoker,” I said. “Does that make us incompetent?”

Her reply, patient and obvious: “No, dear husband. We are smoking amateurs. We are not incompetent.”

This is the woman I love. Her humor is surgical. It doesn’t land with the same splash as mine, but it challenges me every time — and it’s a daily reminder that I don’t have a corner on wit in this household.

She had also handed both of us an escape hatch before Easter Sunday arrived.

We’ve attempted brisket on the smoker three or more times this hockey season. None of them were shoe leather exactly, but they involved more chewing than I prefer. Yesterday we swallowed our pride, pulled out the oven bag, and went with the hard-to-fail method. Six-plus hours, then a little time in the crockpot while we’re at church.

We may be amateurs in the backyard. At the table today, we’re professionals.

Values Don’t Retire

My wife and I are somewhere in the foothills of retirement. Not even close to the summit. There are still detours on this road, and honestly, we keep choosing them. We could draw a straight line to the finish — coast, let someone else worry about the spring weather.

But here we are, babysitting a ten-month-old and still figuring out health insurance. And I wouldn’t trade it.

Faith Is a Verb

Every time our kids gather around the table, we say a prayer. That’s not a performance — it’s just what we do. Faith comes up again before the meal’s over, usually more than once. We counsel our kids, married and unmarried, on building something with a Godly foundation. But we learned a long time ago that advice requires a listener. Acting on it? That part belongs to them.

We’re conservative Christians. We attend a church that reflects that — not perfectly, but pretty close. Our kids know where we stand. They also know we can’t believe for them. My granddaughter, as much as I adore her, will have to find her own faith someday. Her parents’ belief won’t carry her across that finish line, and neither will ours. What we can do is make sure the example exists. Doing nothing, after all, is the easiest thing in the world to imitate.

The Tangible Stuff

I’m not going to pretend grandparenting is purely a spiritual exercise. My granddaughter needs a babysitter, and I technically have “spare time” — though I’m not sure where I’m hiding it. My wife works remotely, so we tag-team diaper duty in shifts that would make any grandparent proud.

And yes — her job keeps us from raiding our savings for insurance premiums until we hit 65. These aren’t just financial decisions. They’re the quiet argument I make every day to my kids without saying a word: this is what showing up looks like.

Respect Isn’t Political

Everyone has value. The prisoner. The foster kid. The garbage man. We did foster care for six years — that wasn’t a hobby, it was a conviction. The political lines blur for me here. But the bottom line is simple: treat me and my country with respect, and I’ll meet you with kindness. As a Christian, at a minimum, I owe you a prayer. We’re all sinners. Just not all saved.

Generosity Without the Receipt

Could I give more? Absolutely — most of us could, and I’d be a fool to claim otherwise. We give to causes, including our church. Our kids know we give. They don’t need to know the number. The impression matters more than the invoice.

Commitment Is the Whole Game

Marriage is the biggest bet most people will ever place. We’re honest with our kids about it: it’s not easy. It requires two people willing to grow up and reckon with the fact that their decisions now affect someone else’s life, too. We hold an old-fashioned view on this. A marriage with a Christian foundation is simply better, in our experience. That’s not a lecture. It’s just what we’ve lived.

The Promotion We Didn’t Know Was Coming

Somewhere around the time your kids leave the house, you stop being a parent in the daily operational sense and get promoted — if you’re lucky — to trusted counselor. We’re hoping to earn that promotion unanimously.

We weren’t perfect parents. Our advice isn’t flawless either. But if our kids can feel the gist of how we’ve lived — if they’ve seen our convictions match our words, if they’ve watched our marriage hold — then it’ll be hard for any of them to look back and say, “Nobody told me that.”

You were told. You were shown.

We’re not trying to make our kids into copies of us. We’re trying to make sure they don’t walk into the world without a compass. Call me boring. Just don’t accuse me of raising kids who’ll make the world worse. We fought too hard for that. And if they pass something worthwhile to the next generation of Gruenbaums?

That’s the whole point of the journey.

The Voice (Or: How I Learned to Nag Without Technically Nagging)

This is a further explanation of one of the titles included on my “semi-retired” business card. (Reminder Wrangler)

Somewhere after the last kid left for college, I developed a second voice.

Not a concerning one. Not the kind that tells you to do things. More of a guest narrator. A color commentator for the small, unresolved frustrations of domestic life. Specifically, my wife’s share of them.

It sounds exactly like my wife. Except sassier. And with slightly more self-awareness than she’d probably volunteer on her own.

Here’s how it works. The dishes pile up. Judy is, by longstanding treaty, the designated dishwasher. When the stack starts achieving architectural ambitions, I don’t say anything. I just wander past the sink, tilt my head, and murmur — in a voice that is not quite mine — “I wonder when the dish fairies are coming. You’d think they’d have been here by now.”

She knows exactly what’s happening. She’s been married to me long enough to read the subtext, which is: the dishes need doing. The Voice is just the delivery system. It’s a nag wearing a disguise, and the disguise isn’t even that convincing. But somehow it lands softer than the direct version, and we both know it.

The lamp incident lasted several months. We had a lamp behind the chair. The recliner ate its cord. I asked about a replacement — once, twice, roughly fourteen times over what felt like a minor geological era. When I finally deployed The Voice, it came out as: “Boy, I wish I could remember to buy that lamp. Andy hasn’t mentioned it today, so I guess he doesn’t want it anymore.” She smiled. She did not immediately buy the lamp. But the smile was acknowledgment, which is honestly most of what you’re after.

Then there was the peanut butter and jelly incident. These are the ones that make me regret The Voice’s existence.

I had made warmups — real food, intentional food, food that required actual effort and lived in the refrigerator with the reasonable expectation of being eaten. Judy opened the fridge, considered her options, closed it, and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I watched this happen in real time. I said nothing in my own voice, because my own voice would have had an edge to it that the situation didn’t technically warrant. So The Voice showed up instead.

“I know there are perfectly good warmups in there,” it said, with Judy’s cadence and Judy’s calm, “but the peanut butter and jelly is really speaking to me today. And honestly — Andy probably won’t even notice. He loves to throw uneaten food away.”

She laughed. I felt seen and also slightly ridiculous, which is more or less the emotional signature of a successful Voice deployment. The warmups, for the record, were eventually eaten. By me.

The bedtime reading situation is its own category. We both read before sleep. When she stops first, there’s an announcement — delivered with genuine tenderness but also the logistical clarity of a boarding gate closing — that I should probably wrap it up soon. When I stop first, I roll over and go to sleep. If I’m feeling spirited, I’ll glance over my shoulder and say in The Voice, “Don’t read too long, you know how it keeps me awake,” then pull the covers up with the serene expression of a man who has made his point.

I get sassier as the day goes on. Judy has documentation. By 9 p.m., The Voice has loosened up considerably and is operating with real creative confidence.

My wife is a kinder spirit than me — she has accepted this fully. Not just tolerated it. Accepted it. She even has her own version of my voice, which she deploys occasionally. Her renditions are, I will note, significantly more complimentary than mine. Her version of me seems to be a wiser, more generous person. I’m not sure who she thinks she married, but I appreciate the optimism.

Her responses track pretty cleanly to guilt level and degree of offense. Snoring gets a genuine “I’m sorry.” The dishes get something like, “They are piling up — I wish the dishwasher would come back from vacation.” The lamp gets a smile and a “Yes, I should get to that,” delivered with the calm of a woman who has decided to manage me rather than fight me.

The honest version of what The Voice is doing is this: it’s nagging with the volume turned down and a laugh track turned up. It keeps us from having the same conversation with teeth in it. After enough years of marriage, you develop these little systems — ways of saying true things without making them into a confrontation. The Voice is mine. It is weak camouflage. She sees right through it every time.

And she still seems pleased she married a sassy husband — which, after all these years, I’ve decided to take as a win.