Like last week at happy hour.  I’m standing in a little circle with a few co-workers and we’re sharing war stories. A handful of people are collectively griping about a particular case that routinely requires all-nighters. They went around the circle: one guy worked for 36 hours straight; another girl got called back to the office at 10 p.m. and worked until 5:00 a.m.; another girl spent Christmas holed up in a conference room reviewing documents; a fourth person asked if there was any way she could get on that case, because things had been getting a little slow for her. She knew the case was hell, but you don’t want to get slow too long, because you risk falling behind on your billable hours, and not meeting the annual requirement. She needed work, she said. And then a few minutes later, it came out that she billed over 350 hours last month. That’s 12 hours a day, every day. Or 14.5 hours a day, six days a week. That, by the way, puts her way ahead in terms of meeting her billable hours requirement. She needed work like a Mormon needs another hour of church on Sunday (um, not at all). And this girl was looking for work, anxious about not doing enough, begging to be staffed to the case with the absurd hours and assignments.

This girl is all in. A total weirdo. But when she explained her predicament, and how 350 hours really isn’t all that much, my colleagues nodded their heads and went back to their stories, and I realized they weren’t griping so much as bragging and that if there was a weirdo in that group, it was me, with my lack of drive and my leaving at 7:15 and my gut instinct to keep a good distance between me and the crazy.

People always ask why I don’t go to happy hour. They assume it’s because I’m a Mormon. Or because I’m too busy. But really, I avoid happy hour for the same reason I avoid reading lifestyle blogs by overachieving women who seem to do it all. I can’t handle people who make normal and sane out to be an anomaly.

So we moved. I hinted before about apartment hunt and the accompanying fight with our landlord, but I don’t think I ever told you about our new digs. Which isn’t all that surprising, since I never told you about our old digs. [There is nothing more boring to me than interior design blogs. And I like design.] But I will tell you about our new hood.

We moved four miles north to Edgewater, out of our ideal little block in Lakeview East. It feels like growing up. Like trading the express bus for a red line stop with a round the clock cop parked out front. Intelligensia for Metropolis. Gays for Lesbians. Boutiques for tree-lined streets. The apartment we loved for an ungodly amount of rent to an apartment we love more for $400 less. Too much space for maybe too little space, but a back deck with room for a grill and a stone balcony off our bedroom. A vindictive landlord who lived just a few blocks away for landlords in New Jersey who don’t hate us yet. Month-to-month insecurity for an eighteen month lease. Lakeshore First Ward with its babies and hot young mothers for a long drive to the Foster Building and a ward that looks more Chicago. Melrose Diner for M. Henry. High rise condos for low brick walk-ups. Noise for wind in the trees. The lake for sun in our front room most of the hours of the day.

We moved four miles north and I pass three cemeteries on my way to work every morning. We live in spitting distance of four churches, not that I’d ever spit on a church. Edgewater isn’t hip or gritty or up-and-coming or known. It’s sort of just like home.

This is what I know:

2011 was not good. It was the year after the year I graduated from law school and got married and passed the bar and flew to Europe and moved to Chicago and bought furniture and got a job. 2011 was the year I learned that all those things don’t add up to much except a life that looks good in pictures, or on a resume.

2011 was the year I learned that Mormonism doesn’t make me happy. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to say it makes me unhappy. I mean to say, I used to think this peculiar religion was the key to everything sparkly and good. I embraced a fierce and devoted faith and came out of it still deeply unhappy. We don’t have all the answers.

An hour or so after midnight on January 1, 2012, I was huddled under a scratchy afghan on an air mattress in the basement entertainment room of the Rocky Mountain cabin that my in-laws rented for the holiday. I whispered through the dark to my husband. Last year was not good. I think this one has to be better.  Robert quietly disagreed, as he often does, but this time I was glad for it. He is right that even our bad years are good. I was right, too, though. This year has to be better.

This is what I want to know:

This will be the year I learn how to make a beautiful life. Not in the form of pinboards or clothes or pictures on my blog. No, I want to take the time to watch the sun set over west Chicago from the window of my office in the sky. I want to feel the air in my lungs. I want to know that God sees me, and you, and you, too. I want this to be a year for doing good, or at least moving closer to it. I will embrace a fierce and devoted faith and a family so fierce and devoted they put my faith to shame. I want to know that this year will be better.

I also felt this pressing need to use the holidays to signify that our family was new and separate from our families of origin, so we made up new traditions, often without much thought. We bought a nutcracker and I made the executive decision that we would collect nutcrackers. We painted our own wooden ornaments. We started singing the 12 Days of Christmas on December 1st and didn’t know what to do with ourselves when we finished on December 12th, with the holiday still two weeks away. We scoured the internet for gifts and banned each other from our individual computers so that we couldn’t extrapolate from the other person’s amazon.com history.

All of this culminated in a massive fight on December 23rd.  I don’t remember what it was about.  [I never believe it when other people say that, but I really don't.]  I do remember yelling a lot and making the ominous threat to “remember this forever” and then running to the shower because that’s the only way to escape from someone you live with when you don’t want to put on a coat and boots and brave the sub-freezing temperatures outside.  I also remember that Robert took an angry nap, and that this also made me mad, because Robert always wakes up from angry naps confused and oblivious to the fact that he had any role in causing the dissonance between us.

This year we axed a lot of the Christmas preparations.  I only got two days off of work, the 23rd and the 26th, and I worked long-ish hours in December. We also moved between Thanksgiving and December 1st, and spent a lot of this month unpacking. We still bought a tree and did the Santa head/advent on the nights that we remembered and added a nutcracker to our paltry “collection,” but overall it was decidedly more mellow. Accordingly, my now-annual December 23rd meltdown only lasted ten minutes and since we were stuck in a car driving downtown when it happened, it didn’t end with me taking an angry shower and Robert taking an angry nap. I worried that we wouldn’t have the time or energy to enjoy the holiday season, but this last month has been one of peace in an otherwise stressful year, and these last few days have been more than that, more like brilliant spots of joy. I came into this year full of fear that my job would drain the pleasure from my life, and my marriage. Instead, it’s brought the things I love into sharper relief. And I’ll take two days of quiet, meaningful celebration over a month of singing the 12 Days of Christmas twice through next holiday season as well.

[Photo credit:  Robert.]

Now I am going to gripe about the downside of working in an office during the holiday season. I am going to sound like a cheap bastard, but hear me out. A few weeks ago, my floor started up a collection for the two women that pick up and drop off our mail. A few days after that, someone solicited donations from the entire firm for our receptionists. Last week I learned that we are also giving to some other mail people — I think they deliver mail outside the office?

And then last week, a co-worker in my department who shares a secretary with me asked if I’d pitch in to give her a gift. “Sure!” I said. I know and like my secretary, and depend on her daily. Giving her a gift would feel more like, well, giving a gift, and less like I’m getting hit up for a donation. My co-worker went on to say, “We’re all thinking of pitching in X dollars.” It doesn’t really matter how much X is. What matters is that X is the same amount that Robert and I set as the budget for gifts for each other last year, and double the limit we set in previous years. X is way more than double what I’m spending on any single member of my family. Yes, in theory I can afford to give X, but it’s pretty clear that my co-workers and I don’t approach Christmas in the same way, when the gift they want to give to our secretary is way beyond what I’ve ever spent on Christmas gifts for all my friends and family combined in a single year. So, I guess I do want to be a jerk about it.

I said yes, but I felt weird about it. Like, I was only saying yes because I didn’t want people to think I was cheap, which is a really unsavory way to feel about giving a gift. Also, we can afford X, but it’s a stressy amount of money. So today, I told the girl collecting the money that I was giving half of X (still a lot!). I explained some extenuating circumstances we have and she’s a nice girl, so I figured she’d keep it quiet, even if she didn’t really understand. 45 minutes later she called me back to let me know that everybody decided to get their own independent gift cards for our secretary. It’s not really clear to me why this happened. I guess nobody could handle looking like they gave less than X, since my gift of half X would reduce their average, and there’s just no polite way to let our secretary know, hey, I contributed more to the gift card than the first-year on the west side of the building.

Now that I’ve been freed from the burden of contributing to a gift card, I am free to give her what I’m giving to everybody else I know: a box of Robert’s fancy schmancy homemade salted caramels. I know, I know, she’d rather have the money. And maybe next year I’ll be comfortable with it. Until then, I think part of being a grown-up is learning to make decisions that are motivated by something other than, but what will people think?

The difference between us is most clear in the morning, when we get up and one of us puts the kettle on the stove. He pours the boiling water slowly into a glass vessel over freshly ground coffee. I splash it quickly into a travel mug with herbal tea before I run out the door. Sometimes the difference rears its head again at night, when he’s heating up cider. He might spike his, but I’ll take mine without booze, thank you. Is that what the interfaith aspect of our marriage boils down to? Different taste in beverages?

Sometimes, though, it becomes radically clear that the person with whom I am the closest sees the world with eyes I can’t fathom.  Like this morning, when the dog was careening around the kitchen table after the spot of light at the end of the green laser pointer Robert waved around with one hand (a spoonful of oatmeal in the other).  When Robert turned the light off, the dog looked expectantly at him.  Robert commented that, over the last six months or so, the dog has clearly come to know that we control the light. He’s also figured out that even when we train it to one spot in the ground at let him paw at it for several minutes, there’s nothing of substance for him to grab. The dog knows he’ll never pin the light down, but he chases it anyway. Ha, I said. There’s an obvious metaphor there.

And then we spoke at the same time: You’re talking about God, said Robert. I’m talking about the almighty dollar, I said, my answer overlapping his.

Is it possible for two people to be further apart? Probably not, but we just laughed at the moment and went on eating our oatmeal, sipping different hot beverages from matching mugs, and watching the dog.

Me: Does anybody have any holiday vacation plans?
Coworkers: I might take the 24th and 25th off.
Me: …

Coworker: I have to leave early today to pick up my suits from the dry cleaner.
Me: What time does your dry cleaner close?
Coworkers: 8 o’clock. P.M.
Me: …

*If you’re thinking that nothing says, relax, take some time to enjoy the holidays, and we appreciate your hard work this year like a booze-free breakfast at 8:00 a.m. on a Monday, well then, you must work be responsible for the absurd holiday party decision at my firm and I’d like to have a chat. Also to thank you for the Mormon-friendly hot chocolate bar amidst the various coffee beverages. It was delicious.

Really, I started this blog because I was a newlywed and being a newlywed is weird and hard in ways you don’t think of before you get married. It’s even harder when you don’t see families that look like yours, modeling how to move from one point to the next. I’m talking a little bit about interfaith families here, but mostly I’m talking about heterosexual couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner. I know these families exist, but they’re hard to ferret out. There are a ton of successful women at my law firm, some with kids even, but when I get to know them, it is invariably the case that they are married to other lawyers or consultants or day traders. If there are women married to artists or writers or teachers or, god forbid, bartenders, they don’t talk about it. And if it’s odd that there are no women bringing home the bacon at my absurdly progressive law firm, it’s certainly not surprising that I don’t run into women like this in my Mormon circles. Online, in the world of the parenthood and lifestyle blogs, there are a few. That’s it. A few.

So I started this blog to write about my gender bendy marriage, and I don’t mean that in a weird sexual way. What I mean is, Robert cooks and cleans the floors and bathrooms but also fixes things when they break and I work long hours but also make crafty centerpieces for Thanksgiving and both of us would rather die than iron a shirt, and we get into full-on shouting matches about laundry (laundry is the worst). And it never occurred to me that this wasn’t normal until I got married and chimed in to conversations about marriage at and started reading married lady books and blogs and realized that the people who talk about marriage don’t do it the way we do. Being in this minority means I have no one to look to or talk to about the hard questions that come out of this arrangement, like “What do we do when we have kids?” and “What do I do when someone calls me a sugar mama?” and “What do I do when these questions start to weigh heavy on our marriage?”

I know there is value to normalizing families of all types. I know this because watching “Up All Night,” a newish sitcom that consciously promotes working moms and stay-at-home dads, makes me less anxious about the future. I know this because snide, judgmental comments about working moms and stay-at-home dads make my blood  boil. I know this, because I like my job, and I like being able to support my family, and, if I have a daughter, I want her to know that she can do the same damn thing, and I want her to be able to do it without getting snarky side eyes, or worse, from people who do things differently.

And so, just so you know these things happen, I will tell you that I came home from work at 7 p.m. to newly-hung art on the walls of our apartment, a hot dinner, and three buttons sewn back onto my favorite coat. That’s right. I asked Robert to drop the coat off at the tailor, since it’s officially too cold to walk around with it flapping open in the wind, and, since he didn’t have any assignments from work, and because he is not tied down to old, gendered notions about what men should do, and because he likes to fix things, even if it means with a needle and thread, the man freaking learned how to sew.

For example:
I bet my male colleagues don’t hear echos of SNL sketches bashing Hillary Clinton’s pants suits every time they buy a suit. They don’t have to ask around to figure out if the judge they’re appearing in front of is of the ilk that women belong in skirts, stockings, and high heels. If they catch sight of themselves in a mirror in the morning and think, “yes, I look good today,” they don’t instantly follow that thought up with another: “Is this shirt/skirt/jewelry too much for the office? Should I change?” Then again, at least I get the option of wearing something other than a pants suit.

I bet my male colleagues have never been shamed almost to tears on a prison visit. I’ve been to prison enough to know not to wear a skirt, not to wear a low-cut shirt, and not to wear anything tight. So I show up in black slacks and a black button down shirt with a gray cardigan and I’m covered from head to toe and the (female) security guard asks me how dare I come to prison dressed like that and I realized my mistake was thinking it was okay to look even remotely tailored and attractive. I resent this, but I understand later when I’m walking through the yard in my black slacks and a puffy red winter coat getting the most vile cat calls you can imagine from men so far away I’m not sure how they can make out that I’m a woman at all, let alone one they’d like to do those things to. Then again, when I taught prisoner reentry classes, the turnout was always impressive, and my clients hang on every word I say.

I bet my male colleagues don’t have to explain multiple times that they are, in fact, the attorney of record, and not a secretary, when they call up a witness or a clerk or opposing counsel or pretty much anyone to schedule a meeting or an interview or ask a question and instead get blown off or told to pass along a message to somebody that matters. Then again, when I finally get in front of a witness, they open up and tell me everything, commenting with surprise that they didn’t expect to talk quite so much, probably because I’m a little more approachable than an old guy in a suit.

*I’m using the term hot loosely.  You really just have to be female.

Over the last few months, our ranks have dwindled. When we got together for lunch yesterday, there were only three of us. Two of our crew moved to warmer climes and the Baptist was busy. So we sat at a smaller table than usual and ate mediocre Italian sandwiches and after ten minutes of uninterrupted discussion between the Democrat and the Marxist about the LDS church’s happily progressive practical policy toward undocumented immigrants, I realized something had changed. The Libertarian sat quietly on his side of the table. I spoke freely and excitedly about things that matter to me. Merely by virtue of waiting, my viewpoint had become accepted, dominant even, in our little microcosm of the Mormon church.

It was like a promise, or a premonition. It was quite literally an answer to the prayer I’ve flung up for years to, please, Lord, help me find my people.

I’ve done a lot of waiting on the LDS Church and its membership. Even as a young girl, I waited for people to stop telling me my destiny was to be a nurturer, a homemaker, and a caretaker of children at the expense of the career was also apparently my destiny. [That's the message I was getting from all sides, anyway, and not just from the wicked, secular public schools, but from my parents and local church leaders.] And even though I fight my way through dated Sunday School lesson manuals that tell men to look for wives who don’t want to work outside of the home, I take great comfort in talks from the leaders of our church that explicitly recognize that every family circumstance is different and women and families have to do what works best for them (and isn’t that all the feminists ever asked for?).

In high school and college, I waited for my peers at church to value education to the extent that our leaders taught us to and to develop their capacity to recognize that we don’t have all the answers because nobody — not even us, not even the Mormons! — know exactly how this planet came to be. I waited for the day that a lesson on Genesis didn’t veer into (the extraordinarily tired) evolution/creation debate because it turns out that some of our leaders believe in both and it’s certainly not blasphemy for me to do the same. I waited uncomfortably, rarely speaking on days like those, until I moved to a graduate student ward in Michigan and found myself surrounded my scientists and educators and all manner of free-thinking believers and, lo and behold, suddenly I was teaching the Sunday School lessons, during which I let the blasphemy abound.

This is where I own up to the fact that I did not wait very long for a nice Mormon boy to marry. How could I? I met Robert when I was 19 and that was it for me. We waited to get married, though, and so I waited for the time that I, unmarried in my mid-twenties, felt on equal footing with everybody else in the church, with their babies and more babies. From the time we got engaged, I waited for my mixed-faith family to be welcomed with same the open arms that pull other families close into the fold. 

Waiting on these last two was and is harder than the first two, since it’s less about waiting on other people to accept me than it is on waiting for myself to own my life. I’ve been helped by the fact that during all these years of waiting, I’ve met enough similarly situated folks to realize that there are LDS women who work outside the home in every ward, that there are LDS people who love and value education and show it by respecting ideas that are difficult to square with fundamental religious beliefs, and that there are LDS people — tons of them – whose families don’t fit the traditional Mormon mold. Actually, I’m going to say that most families don’t fit the traditional Mormon mold.

I’m still waiting on the LDS Church and its membership. I’m waiting for this faith to be a place where everybody feels as welcome as I finally do. Knowing that there are more people like me than not, I have faith that if I wait long enough, every Sunday will be like eating lunch at that little Italian restaurant, unafraid to say what I feel and feeling like I’m with my people.