Sometimes you feel like a wife...

I was catching up with a friend over lunch the other day and she asked me if I feel any different now that I'm married. My answer: yes, being married feels different, and it's got to be one of the best feelings in the world. I love being a wife. Specifically, I love being Travis' wife.

In my one and a half months of marriage so far, I've discovered that certain activities make me feel particularly wifely. This morning the feeling hit when I dropped off his clothes at the dry cleaners. The other day it washed over me as I enjoyed breakfast in bed with my husband. And I get a flash of it most weeknights when Travis arrives home from work and the first thing he does is wrap me up in a big hug.

And then there are other activities that make me feel not specifically wifely, per se, but very homemakerish. (Yes, in this blog post I am making up words. Deal with it.) For example, this evening I'm headed over to a friend's house to use her sewing machine to make a curtain for the window in my walk-in pantry, which happens to be one of my absolute favorite features of our apartment. The pantry, not the window. The window is a little weird, in fact, because it looks out on the atrium. (Though this is by no means the weirdest thing about our apartment.) For the six months that the window has been curtainless since I moved in, the contents of my pantry have been on display to anyone walking through the atrium of our building. Granted, regular traffic through there does not constitute more than a few neighbors, but said neighbors could learn quite a lot about my cooking, eating, and organizational habits if they so chose to snoop. (And with such fascinating and classified information they could...um...know that if they ever need a cup of sugar, I could help them out.) Honestly, though, it's not so much that I want to keep inquiring eyes from seeing the package of marshmallows I purchased recently (for toasting in the fireplace one of these nights), but more that I desire to spare my neighbors from shocking sights (and keep ourselves from committing indecent exposure), should I ever again forget to make coffee (which requires a visit to the pantry) only AFTER getting dressed, or should Travis decide to do another round of household chores (which call for the step stool, stored in the pantry) in his underwear.

So, anyway, sometimes you feel like a wife. And sometimes you feel like an eighth grader in home ec class. And sometimes you feel like an idiot for forgetting that the pantry window does not yet have a curtain, nor do you have clothes on.

(I would like to acknowledge that the above statements would be more appropriately stated in first rather than second person. But I've had the Almond Joy/Mounds jingle in my head since I started thinking about this post, and I couldn't bring myself to abandon the motif.)