The Grocery Cart - Marriage, Month Two

I promised to tell the truth about my marriage.  So here is my awful admission: I have not cleaned the house in almost a month.

 

There have been spurts of taking out the trash, doing dishes, and other miscellaneous cleaning, but there has been no organization, no sweeping, no mopping, no cleaning the stove.

 

Why?  Because I have a shopping cart in my living room.

 

Matt decided he didn’t want to carry things up and down the stairs.  (We live on the second floor of our apartment complex.)  It was easier, he said, to have a cart and use the elevator.  So he went and stole a shopping cart from someplace.  Maybe we can put ribbons on it, he said.  Make it pretty.

 

There’s something about a shopping cart in your living room that makes you want to not clean.  It’s gray, dirty, and ugly.  It’s white trashy (yes, my elitism is popping up).  It’s not what you want in your living room.

 

That’s what marriage has been like this second month.  It has not been fun.  It has not been easy.  It has been fighting about a shopping cart in the middle of your living room.  It has been fighting about decorating styles (he is minimalist, I am French country).  It has been arguing for a half hour in the middle of Michael Levine because he thinks you want a floral print for the couch slipcovers, and he wants a solid burnout slipcover, and then he finds out that just because you say, “Oh this is pretty!” about a fabric doesn’t mean you want it, and you actually did want the solid burnout like he did. 

 

There is still good in the last month.  Eating dinner on the bed every night.  Finally succumbing to frozen dinners.  (The pressure is lifted!!)  Bubble baths.  Him calling me from the parking lot, coming home from class – “Turn on CarTalk [NPR], I want to see if I got the weekly puzzler right!!”  (He did.)  The Valentine’s Day flowers still making the bedroom smell heavenly. 

 

So it is not all bad.  It is not all good.  And I’m realizing that “for better or worse” doesn’t mean “in better years or in worse years.”  It means “on better days or worse days,” “in better hours or worse hours.” 

 

But I am wondering if this is all me.  I’m just too sad right now, and so maybe this gloominess is my brain lying to me.   I’ve been struggling lately with depression, again.  As soon as my health insurance kicks in, I’m going to try to get fixed.  Maybe things will get better then.  I’m very bleak right now, and I’m quite certain that this entire darkness about marriage, the grocery cart, and life in general will go away once I am medicated.  So this is my hope – that I can get fixed, and that things will get better.