I’ve been on board the ship over 2 weeks now. I just received feedback on an old blog post of mine about “being an Expat, married and alone”. I want to thank Barbara http://theespressobreak.blogspot.com for her comment because it couldn’t have come at a better time.
You see, after reading Barbara’s comment I decided to re-read my own entry. And, I’m glad I did. Today is one of those days when married life is challenging me and my recent choices. Barbara made me feel like I am not alone in my quest to balance my life with both the rainbows and the rain.
I realized that when I am with my husband I put this imaginary pressure on our limited time together for everything to be ‘picture perfect’. Last week we were supposed to go out for dinner shore side. The weather was perfect and my husband had some time off work. Only, I didn’t want to go because I was out with friends late the night before, drank too much wine and quite honestly was feeling a bit hungover.
Fast forward to this week and we made plans again to go ashore together. We planned a relaxing day at the beach and a nice lunch. BUT, this is where my perfect picture gets a bit messy. You see, today, it is gray and raining. I decided who cares, lets go anyways but my husband calls me up from his office down the corridor to tell me that he has one more job to do and it’s already going on 3:00 pm.
I gave up on waiting for the ‘lunch’ part of our day…otherwise I would have starved by now. I went out on Lido deck and sulked for an hour and was thinking why can’t things be perfect when we are together? How ridiculous I am being is besides the point!
Then I came back to our cabin and read Barbara’s email and my old post. Life is not perfect and even when my husband and I are in the same country or on the same boat, it doesn’t mean that a little rain will not fall on us from time to time. So, thank you Barbara, you have been the rainbow in my day!
Help! I live with my Italian mother in law! 
Awww… again. Thanks Leah. This post too really hits home for me.
My husband leaves in two days from now. He’ll be gone for 7 months. Lately I’ve been thinking about how he has this infuriating habit of turning on all the lights in the house, but never turning them off. If I return from grocery shopping at ten in the morning, the lights are on everywhere — in the bathroom, the bedroom, the den, the kitchen, and in the living room where he is alone watching TV. Whatever time of day, if he is home, the lights are ON.
So I spend a lot of time going room to room switching lights off. Then he’ll enter a room, turn the light on, and I’ll have to go room by room switching them off again. It’s infuriating. I mean, doesn’t he care about the environment? Doesn’t he care how much energy it wastes? And what about all that time I take turning the lights off when he could just turn them off himself when he leaves the room?
As the day approaches for him to leave, all I can think is that from now on when I enter any room, the lights will be off. Then I realize, “My God! I’m going to spend the next seven months in the damn dark all the time!”
Saluti from Naples.