Swinger Sunday - To hell with "normal"

**Hey everyone! Welcome to another Swinger Sunday! Duke from Righteous Duke Designs  has graced us with a most amazing post this week. You should really take the time to read it... he's a great writer and I enjoyed giggling aloud this morning while drinking my coffee... maybe if I ask him nicely, he will make me some more... ;) Duke - you are most definitely invited back any time... Thanks... Readers... PLEASE comment w/ your opinions... he has earned them...**


We all like blogs that are juicy and self-revealing. (I don't know why it is, but any blog article I personally read I feel like there is this unseen grandstand full of fans, "GOOOOO FOR IT!!!!!" , and reveal every last detail, racing across goal-line of TMI. No one likes the awkward feeling of too much info --until we can read it in print. "Oh! An article titled 'All My Dark Secrets of Quirky Personal Issues Revealed'?? Don't mind if I do!!!"
If there is a first "Unspoken Rule For Spouses", it would also be that same rule that also makes a blog deliciously fun to read; you gotta be ready to embrace embarrassment. That writer is hanging themselves out there over the abyss of ridicule and hilarity, and God bless 'em, we hang on every candid word. So, with that -I feel a slight draft, because a'danglin' I go.
I've got some jacked up view of  roles, brother.
Its funny when you think about it; all our lives, all of us learn to live in and fulfill certain "roles". We have a certain role we perform when we "do this", a role we play when we "do that"; we are a certain way when we talk to our friends - and usually a completely different way we talk to our parents LOL or our boss.  We ignore and pass on prospective people to date because they are "not right for the part" of the 'role' we need them to play. We need -or more likely, we think we need- them to fulfill "this" role. Best friend, assistant, wife/homemaker, breadwinner, stay-at-home mom, knight-in-shining-armor.roles we mentally audition people for, all within the unspoken confines of our own minds, with the candidate none the wiser. These roles, the parts people we know play, and that we perform with them in turn, are rarely ever discussed, but yet they govern so much of our interaction with everyone around us.

When things get serious -"roles" collide at top-speed in a fantastic wreckage of talent, argument, areas where we're gifted, areas where we are weak, and best-laid-plans. In a marriage everyone starts out all "Wow & Fireworks!". But when you say "I do"... all the covers come off and your closet full of  "roles"gets examined by that other person. Yep -guess what; that hot dude or fine babe --they are gonna see all your mess, smell your not-so-nice odors at the most inopportune times... or want to come in and have a "serious talk" while your stuck on the toilet, helpless and with no dignity. Yeah, just another one plucked at random... you know, out of thin air. Not that that's happened to me.
My wife and I enrolled in the crash course of marriage hell, meeting and marrying in just under 3  weeks.  Sailing along on clouds of utter bliss and passion, we finally hit 5 months. The fight was on. Bliss and passion became mortal combat, and when we'd run out of emotional barbs and artillery, we'd pull out our left-over plastic cutlery from Wendy's and proceed to fight on, to the death -metaphorically speaking. We'd fight about such earth-shattering topics like the toilet seat -up or down- or how she leaves wet towels hanging on door-knobs.  Truly worthy causes for modern non-bloody warfare? Not so much.

Well; my wife's patterns -or "roles", her ways of doing things, and mine -led us to live in a running gunfight of verbal and emotional chaos for about 6 months. All due to patterns and roles we thought the other person "was supposed" to play. I was "in-character", performing my "role"  the way I was used to -"supposed" to be reacting, and she was turning in her Oscar-winning role, arguing the way she was used to arguing. We just played out our "Roles", leaving destroyed progress, smoldering in our wake. She'd make a statement, and uncannily, my "scripted dialogue",  how I thought I was supposed to respond, would let fly from my mouth a split-second later, and BOOM!  There went the heavy artillery, before I even had a chance to cease fire or raise the white flag of peace.
Admittedly,  I still treat counter tops as horizontal storage units, amassing a literal museum of clutter in a seemingly instantaneous moment. She still leaves her jeans... right where she drops them. And they stay. right.there. She pours heaping amounts of French Vanilla creamer in her coffee after she's already poured her coffee into her cup, while I rail against the heavens to her that it will taste better if she would just put the creamer in before she pours in the brown liquid gift from God into her cup. **Duke, I do the same thing... for you - i will try to change, lol except mine is Fat Free French Vanilla, ;)**

So, after 7 years, and 2 kids; we now work together, both professionally, and privately. Professionally, we own and operate Righteous Design; a graphic design & web-development firm, while privately we referee our sons, Batman and Robin, from taking over the world -and all of it combined utterly baffles our relatives. Why? Because we fit no pattern of what is "normal" to them.
We don't look normal. We don't work normal. We don't live normal. But, to bring this to a conclusion; what is normal? May I say again."To hell with normal!"  I have spent the last 2 years building @RighteousDesign while my wife worked her Network Engineering job of 10 years playing the role as "bread winner" for our house.  My wife, with her Jedi-like ability to fix anything with a power cord and draws electrical current, installs any appliance we get in the house or office.   Me.I cook. I do the dishes. I do the laundry. Now, before some of you kindly send me an apron and a hair-net, I also make forays out into ice-storms for comfort food, I kill the spiders and other wee beasties found here in the mid-west that cause my courageous, world-traveling wife to scream for help, as if we were  being invaded by zombie hordes. She'll lay out a problem, challenge, dilemma or list of options, and the lightbulb will go off over my  head and I'll catch what she needs to do with what. Sometimes it is just a change in a color palette, or a tweak to a graphic, a change in approach. Whatever. Somehow I just "see" it, and we're off and running again.

If you are good at something; run with it. If your spouse is good at something; let them run with it. If your co-worker, your junior vice-president, your office manager, your assistant -your kids -if they show an aptitude, let them run with it. And you should too.

Goal number one: survive -whatever it is, however long it takes- with the important relationship(s) intact. (There are, of course, exceptions to this, as sometimes people show their true colors under stress. Or, we finally are enlightened enough to actually see those colors- and we must separate ourselves from these unhealthy persons.) But the relationships we know to be important to us; where there is a mutual commitment, an investment of time, where both trust and a degree of personal feeling of some strength is present -we must find a way to survive. Together.

Taking proverbial hammer in hand and whacking those around us into metaphorical holes that are not their "shape", due to the fact that that's just the "role" we ' know' and unconsciously operate by, and want them to operate by  -is counter-productive.

My wife does what she's good at, I do what I'm good at. She changes diapers, I explain things to our boys about why their private parts "do funny things". Best "man" (and by the word "man", here, I mean that in a gender-neutral way) for the job does the job, and the other backs him or her up.

The next time you're at a stalemate, and its time to divvy up assignments - remember this scenario --- We (my wife and I) were installing the HD-TV/Surround Sound/Blu-Ray "Trifecta of Awesome" in our first "real" apartment. My wife had her head buried within a cabinet of cables and wires while I was flipping through the instruction manual -which, true to our abnormal roles, she of course completely ignored. I finally, feeling useless and frustrated just asked her "What can I do?"

"Make some coffee?"

**Grrrrooowl.**