Oh, hello – been a while, eh? Just over 3 years, actually, since my last post here; I think that easily fits the definition of “a while.” Rest assured, the Mushakians of Mushakian.com are alive and healthy, we just fell out of practice of writing here. Well, no more! I had considered doing this sooner — writing about life again, sharing new hobbies, and discussing the downs and ups of the last several years. I figured, though, if I’m going to do that, I better start off with the biggest up and the most important person in my life… my wife!
As of today, Sydney and I have been married for five years. It’s been a darn good five years, too, so in honor of our first half-decade together as husband and wife, please join me for a little stroll down memory lane as I look at each year we’ve been hitched. This won’t be an extensive historical presentation (mainly because I’m old and forgetful), but more of an expanded bullet-point list with focus on the relational.
Year One
I previously covered the first couple of months of our wedded bliss in a Thanksgiving Day post, and then shed a little more light on our life together while writing about the first month of quarantine, back when I thought dealing with the initial Covid shutdown for just 35 days was a long time — so young, so innocent.
The first 6 months of our marriage were fairly routine: going to church, seeing family, exploring what living with each other was like day in and day out. We worked in office buildings that were literally right next to each other, so we carpooled to and from work, which was fun. It was all fun, really. For our first Halloween as husband and wife, we took part in an event with our church youth group where we dressed up as a zombie bride and groom, which was a hit, and then for Christmas we bought a real tree which was Sydney’s first real Christmas tree that she could remember. Marriage is interesting, that way, in that there are very obvious first experiences, but then there are the smaller and more subtle firsts that sort of happen organically and can be easy to miss. I think that’s what a lot of marriage is – having first experiences together, positive and negative, and then learning how to address that newness. There was a first time for one of us getting upset by the other’s tone or one of us feeling disappointed when expectations aren’t met, and then we needed to figure out how to work through that. Sometimes we got these things first try, other times it took a while.
One of the more interesting “first experiences” was actually a global one — when the world shut down for Covid. From March 19, 2020, when CA lockdown first went into place, through our first anniversary, it was just the two of us and our new cat in our apartment. The back half of our first year being married contained a couple of years’ worth of togetherness compressed into several months. Talk about a stress test for the strength of a new marriage! Thankfully, we kinda really like each other, so as someone I know phrased it about their spouse, “Thanks, Past-Me, for picking the ideal quarantine partner.”
There were definitely negative sides in this home to the Covid lockdown period, though. After months of it, Sydney started to struggle with the isolation and not being able to go outside. For her birthday, I wrote a short story that was supposed to be a fun little escape (it was a fantasy tale), but when she finished reading she got teary-eyed real fast as we talked about it. Why? Because I started the story by having the characters go out on a date — and it had been a long time since she and I had been able to go basically anywhere in real life. I held my wife in a long hug, laughing at the fact that my big present to her was to make her cry. The next day we went out to the beach, I believe, for some needed escape.
Our first year of marriage in lockdown also saw a damper to our social life. We had been excited to have friends over, host church groups at our home, and enjoy the relational aspects of being newlyweds amongst our peers, but in our new quarantined world, that just couldn’t happen. We didn’t have a huge social circle to begin with, but it shrunk during Covid and then didn’t really bounce back the same after. Oof, I better be careful here or I’m going to unintentionally make my wife sad with what’s supposed to be a fun story again!
I don’t need to explain the lockdown too much, because we all went through it together, but it definitely made for an interesting last half of the first year of marriage.
Year Two
We started our second year of marriage by dipping (then diving) into a new hobby — boardgames. Coincidentally, the first hobby boardgame we bought and played in this new endeavor was Pandemic, which had a strangely cathartic feeling to it, playing to victory in elminating a global pandemic in the game while the world was still mostly hiding away. We weren’t going out to enjoy holidays with family, so Covid continued to put a strange spin on our first experiences as a married couple. Since I worked in healthcare, I was part of the first wave of folks who could get the new Covid vaccine, so in January of 2021, I joined hundreds of others at Petco stadium and took the first step towards reclaiming normalcy. As shots became more available for all, we eventually were all safe enough to be able to see my parents in person again, for a couple of birthday celebrations in May of 2021. The next month we met my friend’s second child, and the world was coming back to normal.
So much so, that we were able to actually do something special for our second anniversary and took a week-long trip to Solvang, CA. It was very good for us to be able to celebrate each other and being together, though as with anything in life, the trip wasn’t perfect at every turn. That’s something I’ve learned a lot while being with Sydney; there are ups and downs, disappointments and hurting each other, and that is all very normal. I grew up experiencing my fair share of my parents fighting, and Sydney’s parents divorced when she was young, so it would be easy for us to be scared of these moments — for me to cling to the fear that when something isn’t going perfectly something must be wrong. But I love my wife, and for every minor rough patch or unpleasant first experience we’ve come across, we’ve also seen it through together.
Any relationship that’s even semi-deep will change you in some ways, and all the more is that the case in marriage. I’ll use myself as the example here, but I can have very strong opinions on art. I strive not to be a jerk about it and unnecessarily tear down something someone loves, but if they ask my opinion… they’ll get it. Sydney, though, would sometimes get hurt by this intensity, and I had two choices: to continue and hurt her a little each time, or to learn. I chose the latter. I remember the impetus of this choice very clearly, when we watched a movie that she really enjoyed, and when it was over, while I kept my negative opinion of it to myself, she asked what I thought — so I told her, very directly, that I hated it. We talked our way through that situation, both in the moment and then later after giving things a bit to breathe (another important life/marriage lesson). She taught me how to soften my approach even more than I thought I already had, and I can say that in this and so many other ways, I am a better person for having known her.
Year Three
Despite vaccinations and a world that had mostly returned to normal, Covid wasn’t done messing with us yet, and in May of our third year of marriage I finally caught it for the first time — and then shared it with Sydney just in time for her birthday. So let’s keep tabs here: I’ve given her a gift that made her sad, given her Covid. Yeesh. There’s a reason she’s the gift-giver in this home! 🙂
My wonderfully weird wife loves Halloween and spookiness, so combine that with her great creative mind, and she’s come up with some really fun homemade costumes. Case in point, in this third year of marriage she made a large paper-mache pumpkin head and transformed herself into the Pumpkin Lady. I enjoyed just being her assistant for this project: being a second set of hands while building the head structure and snapping pictures for a photoshoot. That’s been some of the more fun times in marriage with Sydney, the times when she’s the shining star and I get to just be there alongside her for whatever she might need from me. She’s put that creativity into a lot of different hobbies and projects over the years, and I’m glad to be a helping hand, but more often I’m just her cheerleader, there to encourage her when she gets tired and then to be able to proudly draw attention to the wonderful final product! I’m proud of a lot of what she makes, and I’m always looking forward to her next endeavor.
Year Four
For our fourth Halloween together (is this a marriage post or a Halloween post?? Yes.), I took us up to Orange to take part in a haunted city walk. We got to downtown early, and spent the afternoon exploring the many vintage thrift stores and other interesting shops. Her feet started giving out, sooner than I’d planned, so we ended up needing to just rest up and pass the time in my car. We had hours until the event started, so we ended up watching a children’s Halloween movie she grew up with. There was a time when that sort of experience might have put a damper on the day. Heck, that sort of damper even happened during our previous anniversary trip to Solvang, but we’d grown since then. We adapted to the situation and ended up having a fun time together before the spooky night walk… and then we had fun doing that, too! Sydney is really easy to have fun with, and over the years we’ve only continued to have more and more fun together, so long as I can escape the impossible idea of perfection and she can remember to stay adaptable. I married her because she felt like home, but I had no idea just how much more comfortable she would feel only four years later.
Speaking of which, we celebrated our fourth anniversary by attending one night of the local outdoor music festival Ohana Fest. Sydney had lamented how she wished she could see her favorite band, Haim, in concert. They were touring with Taylor Swift, of whom neither of us is a fan, but I discovered that the band would be a headline act at this festival so I surprised her with tickets. That’s one of the more fun things in marriage — getting to surprise each other. It starts with listening, but ultimately boils down to knowing the other person. After being together for several years, it’s been interesting to experience just how much more natural that’s become. It’s a joy to be able to read her better each day, and to have her understand me more and more, and I love that I get to partner with this woman for the rest of our days. If it’s this good now, I can only imagine years 10, 25, 40, etc.!
Year Five
This past year has felt like our most settled and in-the-groove yet, even though it still brought plenty of changes. We finally bought Sydney a new car and I started pursuing help for my ADHD. Marriage is, in many ways, about being entirely oneself and comfortable with each other, so when the October 2023 eclipse happened, we stood out in our apartment parking lot with a simple cereal box sun-viewer I’d made — just looking like a couple of dorks and not caring at all. For our Halloween costume this year, she became an earthy Fair Queen and elected me to be her companion Mushroom Gnome. We worked together to create my giant mushroom hat, but when it was all felted and stuffed, I put it on and my heart sank — it was just too heavy. I tried really hard to move slowly and ignore it, but I knew that if I attempted to wear that thing for longer than a few minutes I was going to be in pain. I felt really bad that we’d wasted so much time and effort in putting that thing together, especially because I was the one who decided how big to make it. I was further disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to participate in her costume with her — at least, not as planned. That was, until I came home from work one day to discovered that in an afternoon she’d simply created a smaller mushroom hat using a wide-brimmed hat as a base. I had been so down about it all, but then she simply went ahead and fixed the whole situation. As well as we know each other, she still manages to surprise me in the best of ways sometimes!
I also started cooking our dinners for us this year. We had gotten into a habit of eating separately fairly frequently, and I wanted to get us eating healthier, too, so I decided to take the reigns of cooking dinner for us every night. The arrangement works out well, because I loathe having to clean dishes, and she hates the stress of having to plan dinners, so we work together to do that which the other dislikes, and it’s been a great plan. I’ve felt freed from the worry of dirty dishes to be more creative and explore making things I wouldn’t have if I had to bother cleaning up after, and she loves that I’m cooking for us. I don’t always want to make dinner, sure, but on those days my doing so is all the more an act of love, so I buckle down and do it.
Or we order a pizza, but that works, too. Marriage!
Continuing Onward
I love my wife, and I wouldn’t have wanted to live these first five years of marriage with anyone else. She’s hilarious and sweet, steady and creative, and every day that I get to know her is an improvement to my life. We are good for each other, and five years of marriage has shown me so much in terms of what love really looks like. I can’t wait until my Ten Years Of Marriage post, to see how much more we’ve explored together, but all in due time.
I could never sum up the entirety of our marriage in a single post — every way we’ve grown, every inside joke and memory. Not possible. For now, I’m going to simply wrap up with a heartfelt “I love you, Wife. Happy Anniversary!” and get ready to enjoy our special day together. And then go out to pay someone else to make us dinner tonight and let them clean the darn dishes!
P.S. – As for this blog, I’ve mapped out a few catch-up-on-life posts to come out over the next few weeks, many of which were already referenced in this post, and then I’m aiming to keep up with more regular writing here. At least semi-regular writing. Unfortunately, the handcrafted anniversary gift that I’ve been working on isn’t done on time to share a photo of it here, but keep an eye out for it in my upcoming post… on woodworking. 🙂