Extremes

I just realised I've almost reached my 8-month mark of living in the UK.

8 MONTHS!!! Wow. It's gone by so quickly!

It's been a hell of an interesting road so far, that's for sure.

So, between the observations, the ranting, the quiet times, the hilarity of it all, what's been the good and what's been the not so good?

Fun:
Setting up home with the mister.
Spending time with his family.
Exploring a new world.
Finding a beautiful flat.
Getting an awesome job.
Walking around everywhere and taking it all in.
Seeing my parents' excitement when they visited.
Celebrating our 2nd anniversary in yet another country.
Settling down and getting a routine.
Learning about myself and facing challenges.
Getting used to different words and phrases and brands and habits.
Drinking more and having more fun.
Observing people and the way they behave here.
Being able to travel to European countries on the cheap.
Meeting people through my work.
Seeing myself be brave.

Not so fun:
Missing the mister when he travels.
Being in a flat that is a bit removed from the village-y parts of London.
Missing my parents.
Missing all the familiar feelings that I had in New York.
Missing my friends (especially the fiercely huggable ones like Sean and Amanda)
Feeling lost. And actually getting lost!
Not having any friends here.
Because of my work hours, not being able to take evening classes for fun.
Not being invited to parties with the mister.
Feeling lonely and a bit sad.
Not having my own world- just having work and home, and that's it.

The good always outweighs the bad, so I just have to take those lemons and make Spanish Fly. Challenges are meant to be just that: NOT easy. But routine is never easy either. The hard part is that it's two extremes now. Nothing in between. And I realised that I'm making that for myself. I'm making it tougher by using my mister as my entire world here. I mean, it's easy to do that since I don't have anything else here, but per my previous post, I have to dig deep. It's not fair to put the onus on one person to keep you entertained. You have to have your own ME place, and so does that other person. THAT's what completes the puzzle. I need to do my own thing, and maybe then the attention that I need and the loneliness I feel will dissipate, because I would have created my own London life. My own London world.

Why have I never learned this? Why does it sound like I am only just now growing up, though I am a woman in my 30s? Because I never had the strange comfort of a semi-anonymous blog to psychoanalyse myself. Plus, I'm a late bloomer.

Go figure.

It comes from somewhere.

There's a band called The Weepies, and on their latest album I've been addicted to this magical, quiet song with some of the most beautiful lyrics I've ever heard. It's a sublime little whisper of a melody, and I highly recommend it, lyrics are below.

I've been listening to it on and off because I've been a little bit introspective. The mister, as you know, travels incessantly for his job, and because he's a superstar at what he does, he feels compelled to go if someone asks him. It is a highly orchestrated chaotic life of timezones, sleepless nights, late nights out with colleagues, flights, love notes and missed phone calls. And I haven't seen him for a while, because he's been on a nonstop trip- first to Spain, then the US, then China, then back to Europe. We've seen each other just a few times this month, and the empty space beside me as I go to bed yearns for his tall frame to fill it. I make him laugh on the phone and I'm great at just getting on with it, but as soon as we whisper our "I love you" and hang up, I have to swallow my whimper, and tell the lump in my throat to go down. I go for a run, I go for a horseback ride, I clean the house...I just shove it all away and don't think about it. But when I lay my head down at night and he's not there, the house feels cavernous. Empty. Yeah, it's just goddamn hard.

I've had to dig deep for strength sometimes, since I've lived here. It's only the second year of our marriage, and I feel like we haven't settled yet, haven't created a routine, haven't seen each other enough. And to be in a strange city without my best friend a lot of times, it's tough. The few friends I have here, they have kids, so I don't see them very much. My parents-in-law are always there for me, but I don't feel right leaning on them too much. Sometimes I feel like I'm an invincible Superwoman, other times I feel like I'm a faint whisper on the breeze, just drifting, yearning to feel something grab a hold of me and pull me down. To need me.

It's not that I'm not happy, because we knew this would be a challenge, an adventure for us. But the times that I do see the mister, I just want to tie him down to a chair and force him to spend a month with me in the middle of nowhere. I want to monopolize him. I want our life to stop running away from us, just for a little while. But we can't. Because life keeps going forward and we just have to get on with it.

That being said, I'm so proud of the stories we're creating, what we're achieving, the challenges we're facing. And I remind myself that these crazy years will someday start slowing down, and someday, somehow, we'll have the life that we're working toward. The quiet life on a boat that we keep dreaming about...

I have to be strong and just keep walking forward, because, well, life would be boring if it were simple.

Yesterday, when you were young,
Everything you needed done was done for you.
Now you do it on your own
But you find you're all alone,
What can you do?

You and me walk on
Cause you can't go back now.

You know there will be days when you're so tired
that you can't take another step,
The night will have no stars and you'll think
you've gone as far as you will ever get

But you and me walk on
Cause you can't go back now
And yeah, yeah, go where you want to go
Be what you want to be,
If you ever turn around, you'll see me.

I can't really say why everybody wishes
they were somewhere else
But in the end, the only steps that matter
are the ones you take all by yourself

And you and me walk on
Yeah you and me walk on
Cause you can't go back now
Walk on, walk on, walk on
You can't go back now

Hmm. Depends on what's in the glass, I guess...

In a nation full of heavy drinkers, I've sometimes arrived at predictable moments of self-analysis while looking at the drink in front of me, mainly regarding my outlook on life: half full or half empty?

I was raised by a gentle father, a disciplinarian Type-A mother, and an old-fashioned Ukrainian grandmother. From about age 7-10, I was with Babchya (the grandmother), since my parents were working in New York City to make the $$, and commuting every Friday evening to come and see me upstate. Babchya was a criticizer. I am totally in love with her now, but back then, I couldn't do anything right by her, and I felt really isolated without my parents. When they would come up on Fridays I would be insane with joy, but when they would leave on Sunday afternoons to get back to the city, I would fiercely cling to them, sobbing and pleading with them not to leave me. It was heartbreaking, and I can still remember what that felt like. After a few years only seeing me once a week, Mamo (my mother) couldn't take the strain anymore and moved upstate to be with me and Babchya while Tato (my dad) worked as a broker on Wall Street. Mamo and Babchya fought a LOT, because I was both of their property, and both felt "right" in their decisions about me. It was then that I tried to make everyone get along by disappearing into my own little creative world, and being the happy-go-lucky perfect child that excelled at sports and music- but no matter if Mamo was proud, she would cut me down to make me try harder. She would push me to my limits, a lot of the times physically, in sports, to force me to be a stronger person (she used to call me "Miss Delicate").

As far as Tato, for the next 4 years we only saw Tato once a week, because he kept commuting, trying to take care of us. He would arrive on a bus Friday evening, get up with Mamo on Saturday morning at 7am to drive me to Ukrainian school and dance classes, and on Sunday, he would have to take the 3pm bus back to NYC. I cannot imagine the strain he must have been under, and how difficult it was for their marriage to only see each other once a week. He finally said "fuck it, I miss my family way too much, this is getting ridiculous" and left the city to be with us and became a boat salesman at a well-known marina. And up until 2 years ago, that's what he did, and loved every second of it, because he was finally able to be with us. And I was finally able to have that unconditional "you're the bestsest no matter what" every once in a while.

Now, reading that summary of my life, one would assume that I would be a fiercely independent tough cookie and relish time by myself, since all of those days of proving myself and sobbing when my parents left would have shaped me into a woman of steel. Right?

Nope.

The opposite happened, and that's just because everyone reacts differently to their childhood stimuli.

I became a person that from my teenage years up until my twenties, I craved affection, attention, and as soon as someone close to me went away, and that affection wasn't there, it was extremely hard for me to cope. Ridiculously, I took it personally. I felt like I was the reason they'd want to leave, because I'd never be enough to keep them around. The pattern that was repeated in my head was Where are they going? Why is it more exciting to be without me? Are they ever coming back?

I was destructively half empty.

Even writing about that now, in my thirties, it strikes a tender chord with me, a bittersweet acknowledgement of what I used to be, and the woman that I've now become. It makes me want to hug that girl and tell her that she's always good enough because she lives a good life and she's nice to people, and she strives to be a good person that wants everyone in the world to have lovely love stories. I still have little remnants, little negative gremlins that creep up and say "ha, ha.. see? We told you that you'd screw up", or, I'd have a really lovely day out with the mister and then I'd say "well, how come we didn't do THIS also? That's disappointing.". But luckily, the mister recognises that trait and calls me on it before I start spiralling into more criticism.

It's not fun to know that that person still exists in me, but I know that the only way I can change that is to keep reminding myself of the amazing adventures that I've had, and will continue to have in my life as a Ukrainian woman, wife, writer, and hopeless romantic. And with my mister right by my side, solid and unwavering.

Half full.

Warm weather brings male eye candy

Some are big.

Some are small.

But they're everywhere.

My point? Now that it's summer, boobs are taking over this country. And in Britain, women seem take a certain ungraceful pride in showing their cleavage as much as possible, or getting so drunk they get their boobs out at parties. I've not seen one British girl with small boobs, so I think it just may be their national symbol. Now, I'm far from being a prude, but I do think it's a tiny bit unladylike to show your bits off just to get men to get them free drinks, or crane their necks and crash their cars/bicycles/scooters/buses. I think less is definitely more in this case.

Plus, I do find it entertaining that men, no matter if they're married, single, partnered, whatever, all act the same. They have to look. I've realised it is simply in their DNA. It's Freudian. Women look as well, but for entirely different reasons. I check out the entire person, up and down, to see their outfit, their shoes, how big/small/fat/skinny they are, how their hair is, how they strut. Men do it (according to one of my male sources) just because they can. Because a hint of cleavage makes them curious to see what's underneath. And when they start coming out in the spring weather (one of the mister's very married-with-children colleagues calls it "Tit Monday", which is a bit juvenile), they can't help but notice. The way I see it, men get their fair share of action with all kinds of sizes, but after the merry-go-round is over, they end up falling in love with the entire package, and not just the accessories. But they still enjoy perusing some of the accessories out there.

Maybe I'm saying all this because I have a skinny, size 0 boyish no-hips build, and though I love how healthy and strong my body is, I do wonder what it would be like with big ones. Or maybe I feel like saying to all the men out there "Hey, we get it. You like them. Just please stop being so obvious, and then try covering it up by saying you were only looking at her outfit."

Either way, my British friends, please try and be a bit more discreet sometimes and keep them tucked in. The hint of skin is far more alluring, in my humble opinion.

And as for mine, well, I love my little bits. And I love that the mister fancies the pants off me.

2 years. Two little friends.

The mister has been travelling lately. A lot. And I don't hear from him very much if he's at a work conference, so it gets to be very hard. We both miss eachother tremendously, so to distract ourselves, we soak our brains in work, to the point of exhaustion.

So, this past week the mister flew me out to meet him after a work conference for a surprise holiday. Greece.

It was sunny...

though the sea wasn't very warm...

but really thrilling, since we visited some of the ancient sites.


It was also our two-year anniversary (yeah, yeah, I can hear you veterans giggling out there at how "new" we are...).

It was amazing, because even with just 4 days away, it recalibrated us. Calmed us down. And, as the mister plainly pointed out, it "took away the work and corporate crap that we get tricked into thinking is so important". It made us realise that nothing is as important as time together. Space to breathe. Just holding hands and walking down the beach and not saying anything. Dreaming of sailing boats.

And even though we're back at work now and the mister is travelling constantly for the next 2 weeks, we still have that little moment to hold onto for a while. That little hey...pssst...I love you that's like a mental love note that keeps our smiles twinkling.

Two years. It goes by so quickly. Too quickly, sometimes.