Vacations With Husband Quotes

So unfair, she thought. Her baby was going to grow up, and her husband wasn't.

The cop’s suspended with pay. With pay, Mama! My husband is dead, and his killer gets a paid vacation? What kind of justice is that?

Here’s what I need to do to stay centered: sleep eight hours, exercise for forty-five minutes, and have both breakfast and dinner with my family. If I skip one or two of those things for a day or two, it’s OK. But that’s the routine. Also, every so often I need to read a novel (ideally one a week), go away for a romantic weekend with my husband (ideally four times a year), and take a two-week vacation with siblings and parents (once a year). If I can manage to do those things, I can usually stay centered no matter what storms are raging around me.

The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins,' a phrasing I have never heard a local use and a place, as far as I can tell, that I have never encountered despite my years in the city. The seemingly average, white, middle-class Americans whooped it up on Bourbon Street without any thought of the third-world lives of so many of the city's citizens that existed under their noses. The husband and wife, clad in khaki shorts, feather boa, and Mardi Gras beads well out of season, beheld a child tap-dancing on the street for money and clapped along to his beat without considering the obvious fact that this was an early school-day afternoon and that the child should be learning to read, not dancing for money. Somehow they did not see their own child beneath the dancer's black visage. Nor, perhaps, did they see the crumbling buildings where the city's poor live as they traveled by cab from the French Quarter to Commander's Palace. They were on vacation and this was not their problem.

I knew wives then who couldn’t use the bathroom without first asking their husband’s permission. My marriage with Ali was never one of those, but just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting. Ali’s vacations were vacations for me too.

On problems finding female ancestors,of any background, remember "I cannot put gas in my car without a note from my husband. The Car, the house, and everything else I think that I own is in his name. When I die, I cannot decide who will receive my personal effects. If he dies first I may be allowed to stay in my own home, or may be given a certain number of days to vacate the premises. Any real estate I inherit from my husband is not mine to sell of devise in a will. All the money I earn belongs to my husband. I cannot operate or engage in business in my own name. If my ancestor is enslaved, I cannot marry, may not be allowed to raise my own children, join a church, travel freely, own property or testify against those who harm me.

Mmph,” the officer glanced up from their South African passports, green mambas, her best friend Keletso called them, because they’d bite you with visa fees for all the countries you’re not allowed to sommer just go to. “And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?” “Yes, that’s where we live,” proud of the hard fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were practically part of the academic calendar along with prom and football season, away from the slow gutting of democracy, trigger-happy cops, and the terror of raising a black son in America. But how can you live there, people would ask her (and Devon, her American husband, especially), meaning Johannesburg. Isn’t it dangerous? And she wanted to reply, how can you live here?

Church is important to most folks in the South. So the most important thing going is basically ruled by men as decreed by the Big Man himself. Not only that, but the church puts pressures on women that it does not put on men. Young women are expected to be chaste, moral, and pure, whereas young men are given way more leeway, ’cause, ya know, boys will be boys. Girls are expected to marry young and have kids, be a helpmate to their husbands (who are basically like having another child), and, of course, raise perfect little Christian babies to make this world a better place. So while it’s the preacher man who controls the church, it’s the women—those helpmates—who keep that shit going. They keep the pews tidy and wash the windows; type up the bulletins; volunteer for Sunday school, the nursery, youth group, and Vacation Bible School; fry the chicken for the postchurch dinners; organize the monthly potluck dinners, the spaghetti supper to raise money for a new roof, and the church fund drive; plant flowers in the front of the church, make food for sick parishioners, serve food after funerals, put together the Christmas pageant, get Easter lilies for Easter, wash the choir robes, organize the church trip, bake cookies for the bake sale to fund the church trip, pray unceasingly for their husband and their pastor and their kids and never complain, and then make sure their skirts are ironed for Sunday mornin’ service. All this while in most churches not being allowed to speak with any authority on the direction or doctrine of the church. No, no, ladies, the heavy lifting—thinkin’ up shit to say, standing up at the lectern telling people what to do, counting the money—that ain’t for yuns. So sorry.

I saw a television sketch that, with some variations, might seem familiar in many households. A husband is watching television and his wife if trying to engage him in conversation: Wife: Dear, the plumber didn’t come to fix the leak behind the water heater today. Husband: Uh-huh. Wife: The pipe burst today and flooded the basement. Husband: Quiet. It’s third down and goal to go. Wife: Some of the wiring got wet and almost electrocuted Fluffy. Husband: Darn it! Touchdown. Wife: The vet says he’ll be better in a week. Husband: Can you get me a Coke? Wife: The plumber told me that he was happy that our pipe broke because now he can afford to go on vacation. Husband: Aren’t you listening? I said I could use a Coke! Wife: And Stanley, I’m leaving you. The plumber and I are flying to Acapulco in the morning. Husband: Can’t you please stop all that yakking and get me a Coke? The trouble around here is that nobody ever listens to me. 5.

The idea is to intentionally design a relaxing environment that is off-limits to many of the stresses and distractions that define your waking hours. Begin with aesthetics, making an effort to keep your bedroom neat and attractive. In other words, aim for Southern Living in your private quarters even if the rest of your house looks like Mechanics Weekly. Then begin to work on behaviors, keeping your bedroom off-limits to activities other than sleeping, relaxing, or making love. Nix the stacks of unpaid bills, piles of dirty laundry, collections of unread newspapers, and file folders from the office. By fostering this kind of space, seemingly untouched by the nitty gritty of daily life, you will have created a quiet haven where-by simply stepping inside and closing the door behind you-you can take a mini-vacation from stress. This time can then be used to pray, to relax, or to lavish your undivided romantic attentions on your husband.

Sometimes a woman would tell me that the feeling gets so strong she runs out of the house and walks through the streets. Or she stays inside her house and cries. Or her children tell her a joke, and she doesn’t laugh because she doesn’t hear it. I talked to women who had spent years on the analyst’s couch, working out their “adjustment to the feminine role,” their blocks to “fulfillment as a wife and mother.” But the desperate tone in these women’s voices, and the look in their eyes, was the same as the tone and the look of other women, who were sure they had no problem, even though they did have a strange feeling of desperation. A mother of four who left college at nineteen to get married told me: I’ve tried everything women are supposed to do—hobbies, gardening, pick-ling, canning, being very social with my neighbors, joining committees, run-ning PTA teas. I can do it all, and I like it, but it doesn’t leave you anything to think about—any feeling of who you are. I never had any career ambitions. All I wanted was to get married and have four children. I love the kids and Bob and my home. There’s no problem you can even put a name to. But I’m desperate. I begin to feel I have no personality. I’m a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bedmaker, somebody who can be called on when you want something. But who am I? A twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans said: I ask myself why I’m so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electron-ics engineer. He doesn’t have any of these feelings. He says maybe I need a vacation, let’s go to New York for a weekend. But that isn’t it. I always had this idea we should do everything together. I can’t sit down and read a book alone. If the children are napping and I have one hour to myself I just walk through the house waiting for them to wake up. I don’t make a move until I know where the rest of the crowd is going. It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.

She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was silly. Or had she? Had she knocked on the door of her home to see a younger version of herself answer; had there been a mutual shock of recognition (as the younger Rebecca realized that, yes, her husband's work was due to be a success, that he was not wasting his time chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills); had she slipped her arm into that of her past self (feeling a slight electric tingle as skin touched skin and a taste in her mouth as if she'd touched a nine-volt battery to her tongue) and said, We need to to talk? Had she sat in a coffee shop, conversing with a woman who everyone assumed was related to her in some way—Oh my god you two are so cute, you're mother and daughter but you look like sisters? Had she made some kind of idle remark overheard by a man on his way to spend two weeks' vacation in North Dakota; had that comment convinced that man to settle there permanently instead, and to contact those who had political sympathies similar to his own? Had that unknown man begun the slow process of taking over the state by placing his allies in the local governments if he could? Had that strategy failed, leaving brute force as a regrettable last resort?

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

It’s not like I wasn’t busy. I was an officer in good standing of my kids’ PTA. I owned a car that put my comfort ahead of the health and future of the planet. I had an IRA and a 401(k) and I went on vacations and swam with dolphins and taught my kids to ski. I contributed to the school’s annual fund. I flossed twice a day; I saw a dentist twice a year. I got Pap smears and had my moles checked. I read books about oppressed minorities with my book club. I did physical therapy for an old knee injury, forgoing the other things I’d like to do to ensure I didn’t end up with a repeat injury. I made breakfast. I went on endless moms’ nights out, where I put on tight jeans and trendy blouses and high heels like it mattered and went to the restaurant that was right next to the restaurant we went to with our families. (There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.) I took polls on whether the Y or the JCC had better swimming lessons. I signed up for soccer leagues in time for the season cutoff, which was months before you’d even think of enrolling a child in soccer, and then organized their attendant carpools. I planned playdates and barbecues and pediatric dental checkups and adult dental checkups and plain old internists and plain old pediatricians and hair salon treatments and educational testing and cleats-buying and art class attendance and pediatric ophthalmologist and adult ophthalmologist and now, suddenly, mammograms. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner. I made breakfast. I made lunch. I made dinner.

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women. In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals. This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine. Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.

on one of my first real adult vacations, my husband and I went to Carlsbad Caverns. That place captured my imagination like few places on this earth ever have. It just transported me to the early days of the cavern. I could imagine the first people who found it, explored it. It is endless

The word love is used to mean many different things. We say that we “love” the house that we have just bought or that we “love” a particular vacation spot or that we “love” a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We also “love” a certain television program, and we “love” our husband or wife. Hopefully we don’t love our spouse the same way we love a peanut butter and jelly sandwich! The greatest love of all, however, is God’s love for us—a love that showed itself in action.

Everyone is winning at the game of life, and I’m always left holding the crappiest hand. It’s not fair . . . I’m so sick of hearing about everybody else’s fast metabolism, relaxing vacations, fancy home renovations, and amazing dogs who don’t chew the couch . . . I wanted ALL that. Oh! Here she is again with her “I’ve lost the weight and I’ve got it all” posts . . . If I had a trainer, I’d look like that too . . . If he says “It’s so easy for me” one more time . . . I had the idea to start Uber 10 YEARS ago. I was getting around to it . . . It’s so much easier when you don’t have kids . . . If only my husband understood me . . . I’ve had a much harder life, and I don’t go flaunting it . . . Anyone can use a social media filter, try showing up IRL looking that good . . . Everyone is outdoing me and there’s no room for me to shine. It’s all over for me. I realize, now, that I wanted their success to be MY success. But they’ve grabbed

Srivastava first found the fraud committed by Shumana Sen by illegally granting a reimbursement of Rs.1.46 crores ($325,000[11]) to NDTV by fudging the accounts and Tax Returns of NDTV. He then found a series of favors she received from NDTV for hushing up fudging in accounts by the TV channel, which employed her husband at an exorbitant salary of more than Rs.15 lakhs per annum in 2005, while most of the prominent journalists were getting around half of that. Many favors were granted to Shumana Sen including all expenses paid foreign vacations with entire family [affidavit of Ms. Shumana Sen and her partner-in-fraud Ashima Neb before Delhi High Court, Writ Petition (C) No.1373 of 2011 titled as “Shumana Sen and Anr. Vs. S K Srivastava and Ors.”, para 3.43]. Srivastava also found that Ashima Neb was part of this racket and had actively colluded and conspired with Shumana Sen and Abhisar Sharma in facilitating NDTV frauds and had shared the spoils of the grand fraudulent exercise for laundering the illegal black money of NDTV through evasion of Income Tax.

Maybe there was a reason her husband didn’t visit; he was having a vacation.

She also asked the children what they would remember the most from their childhoods and had their folks predict what the kids would say. Parents almost always guessed the five-star big event or vacation that took meticulous planning and buckets of cash. But Galinsky says that instead, kids specified the small, everyday rituals and traditions that said, “We’re a family.” One girl mentioned that every morning when she left for school, her father would say, “You go, tiger—you go get them.

You worry too much,” he says, flipping a page, his fingers already stained with newsprint. “Says every husband whose wife has children,” I say.

The idea behind "let you go" is pleasant; there's even something reassuring about it. It's a fiction that I, too, would like to believe in. Absorbed in my translation, I wonder if that expression, so difficult to translate into French, testifies to the fact that English-speakers love differently than us. Do they make more effort? For them, is it possible to make love last? To reignite a desire that's been extinguished? How do they do it? What tender song, new outfit, irresistible perfume, or vacation to the other ends of the earth allows them to hold on to someone on the verge of leaving?

I think of how my husband and I plan a new vacation to take our kids on. My husband and I have it all planned out. We know the way, the cost, the activities and the outcome. But our children know none of this. They must trust us that we know what we are doing. As the parents we know the roads we will take to get there, we know where we are taking them and yet our children must trust we will bring them home safely and with good memories. Think of this autism journey in the same way. Our heavenly Father knows the way, the cost, the activities and the outcome. He even knows that we will get through this journey safely and with some happy memories!

And then we went on vacation. Not just any vacation, but a monthlong, four-thousand-mile family road trip. We spent twenty-nine days touring the country — seeing some incredible sites and visiting with friends and family all along the way. It was the trip of a lifetime, one my husband and I had dreamed about taking for years. We created countless memories that I will cherish forever.

Earth is not heaven. It was never meant to be. No new car, new house, new living room furniture, new kitchen appliances, new clothes, new hair, new baby, new vacation, new job, new income, new husband, or new anything will ever satisfy us, because we were not made for the things of this world.

The little black dress of her dreams. A vintage Versace she’d found at a yard sale one afternoon in Nashville after a wife unexpectedly showed up from a vacation in Saint-Tropez, found her husband’s mistress living in their home, and held an impromptu sale to get rid of the younger woman’s possessions. The kicker? She’d bought it for a nickel.

One of my favorite examples of how souls retain their personality quirks and charms happened when I did a group reading for a bunch of sisters and their mom after their father had died. His soul came through and said that when Mom goes on her cruise, he’ll be with her. He described how amazing it would be--the whole family would be on a large boat, and because it was a Disney cruise, Mickey Mouse and Cinderella would be there too. The woman was very confused, since she hadn’t planned a vacation for herself recently, much less such an indulgent one. “I don’t know what my husband’s talking about,” she said. “I can’t afford to go on a trip like that.” But her husband’s soul kept at it. He was insistent! After lots of sideways glances, the kids burst out laughing. “Okay, Dad, we’ll tell her!” they said. The girls had planned a surprise birthday cruise for the family for their mom’s seventieth birthday. “This is so typical,” the mom said. “He could never keep anything to himself!” Clearly, he’s still into blowing secrets from the Other Side.

It was another beautiful crisp, clear day, in what has always been considered picturesque Überlingen. The village was internationally known for its traditional beauty and was a popular vacation destination long before the war. As usual, there was just a hint of a breeze off the brilliantly blue lake and I could understand why so many Germans would come here for their urlaub or vacation. Having a little money left over from the last check sent by Mina, I found a nice room for the three of us, overlooking the lake at a classy resort hotel. For the next two days we lived quite comfortably in our new surroundings. In fact we even enjoyed a real hot bath, something that I had almost forgotten. As I soaked in the warm, sudsy water I could hear my children laughing and giggling in the next room, and longed for a time when the world would be at peace again. During the day we walked along the shore of the beautiful Bodensee, but in the back of my mind, I knew that this was nothing more than a horrible illusion and couldn’t last; besides I had to find work. In reality, the children and I would have to settle in somewhere so that we could find some sort of stability. It was also important that they enroll in a school again. That “somewhere” turned out to be a room in a house owned by two old ladies who took in boarders. The old house faced the railroad station and was quaint in the old world style. It fit right into the picture postcard appearance of romantic Überlingen. Erika, the younger of the two ladies, was very kind and helpful to me. There were also two other tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Koestoll. He was German and she seemed to be what could be considered a typical French housewife, who devoted her life to her German husband. Herr Koestoll, was old and feeble and they sustained themselves on a very small pension. In fact it was so bad that he couldn’t even afford shoes. However their happiness didn’t seem to depend on money. I grew very fond of them for the short time that we knew each other.

I decided to approach our vacation as an experiment with two objectives. The first was to stop making things less enjoyable, and the second was to actually make things more fun for her.

Despite the early hour U.S. Attorney Joan Thurston looked resplendent in a charcoal gray business suit that seemed to have been tailored by the gods. Thurston was mid-forties and, in Loren’s view, excessively attractive. She had auburn hair, broad shoulders, tapered waist. She had two sons in their early teens. Her husband worked at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan. They lived in ritzy Short Hills with a vacation home on Long Beach Island. In short: Joan Thurston was what Loren wanted to be when she grew up.

THEY KIDNAP AND MURDER MY HUSBAND ON OUR HONEYMOON My new husband and I are vacationing in Buenos Aires.

I’m going to guess that in our seventeen years together, Joe and I have eaten an average of at least one meal out a week—plus at least one or two weeks a year when we are on vacation and we get to enjoy twenty-one restaurant meals. Using this rough calculation, I have heard my husband utter that exact line approximately one thousand four hundred times. If I didn’t madly love the man, or I had years of bitter resentment born of unmet needs and unheard desires festering in me, I can see where this might make me want to stick something sharp into his eye socket and twist it around a few dozen times for good measure. But I do and I don’t, respectively, so his attempted joke is actually endearing. It’s one of his things that I’d miss tragically if it went away. It would be that “Yeah, I hated it” line—not his dashing good looks or prowess with power tools or skills on the basketball court or anything else the rest of the world can plainly see—that I’d get most choked up on if I were delivering his eulogy today. There was a breakthrough, pivotal scene in the epically good movie Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams plays a therapist reminiscing about his dead wife with his patient (Matt Damon). “She used to fart in her sleep,” Williams tells the clueless Damon character during an otherwise unproductive therapy session. “One night it was so loud it woke the dog up . . . She’s been dead two years, and that’s the shit I remember . . . little things like that, those are the things I miss the most. Those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew about; that’s what made her my wife. People call these things imperfections, but they’re not. No, that’s the good stuff.” That.

Separate vacations have become more popular among married couples. We don’t think this is a good idea. Over time, doing your own thing will cause you to lead separate lives. We are not talking about a three-day trip to Florida with your sister or best friend—if you want to take small trips like this, feel free to. But if you want to take a major vacation—say, to spend two weeks in Europe—your husband should be your travel companion. But suppose your idea of a fun vacation is going to Europe or lying on the beach in the Caribbean, while your husband loves tours of historic sites and museums. Our advice is to figure out a way to do a little of both. One year, you can go to the beach, the next year you can do a tourist package together, or go on a trip with a beach near some sites of cultural interest. Once you start planning separate vacations, you become like roommates, not lovers.

the luxury vacations had come as a personal affront to a woman who had survived the Great Depression, a world war, the death of a husband, the loss of two children, and countless other hardships. Claire

So, what are you up to, where are you going on your vacation, that's a cute dress--no one knows what to talk about with an unmarried girl. Whereas a husband, children, an apartment, a washing machine--endless topics of conversation.

But then my husband made me try one while we were on vacation in the Philippines and I almost had an orgasm over how good it tasted. Think of how many mangoes I missed out on by not eating them for fifty years!

started blogging about this fear as a means of trying to gain perspective, and it was then she realized she was on track to become her grandmother, who refused to fly and missed out on a lot because of it. So MacGray started listing everything she wanted to do in her life that would be worth flying for. Though she hasn’t totally conquered her fear, she did manage to take a bucket-list vacation to Italy with her husband. Writing by itself doesn’t solve all of our problems, but it can help us gain critical perspective we can use to find solutions.

My dear," he admonished her when she brought up the fact that she might, in the future, go back to work as a lawyer, "how do you expect to do two jobs?"... "You already have a job," he explained. "From now on, your life with your husband is your job." He corrected himself. "It's more than a job. It's a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it's going to take effort. You'll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You'll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You'll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You'll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you'll have your hair colored twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You'll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you'll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you'll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You'll need to have your hair and makeup done. You'll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organize, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So," Billy concluded, "let's get busy.

I was having a good time—it was work, but I enjoyed it. And he was home doing my work. To be fair, I treated it that way, too. I had internalized that. He was “covering for me,” as if I were a coworker who’d gone on vacation and left my cubicle-neighbor with all my tasks while I was away. I should be thankful—and I was thankful! I should feel bad—and I did feel bad! I felt bad because I saw other women with spouses and kids, and their husbands picked up the phone with a warm “Hi, how’s it going?” They asked about their wives’ panel discussions, readings, signings. They put the children on the phone, then asked for the phone back to say “I love you!” before they hung up. Some of the husbands even came along. I envied that. I wanted what they had.

What Is a Household? Perhaps you are unsure of what model has been missing, and so I must first help to explain what a household is.1 It is not merely two married people and any children they may have living under one roof. A household is a micro-nation. A household, like individual men and individual women, has a distinct telos. It exists for a purpose, to pursue a particular goal. Unlike the nuclear-family arrangement of the postwar era, it does not exist merely to perpetuate existence. Producing and raising up future generations is one function of the household, but it is not the only function of it. Our first parents were told to fill the earth and subdue it. The household is the basic unit of conquest. But of those today who actually do get married, the purpose of their union rarely is so purposeful. It is often an instrument of greater consumption for consumption’s sake. Even children are treated as consumer goods, a mere lifestyle choice, rather than the very purpose that God created marriage for. Within such an arrangement, you do not have husbands and wives nor fathers and mothers; you have instead income earner one and income earner two. The purpose is to pool two incomes together to have access to greater and nicer products to consume. A palatial house. A sexier car. Exotic vacations. More stuff for the 1.72 cute, little human pets you have chosen to keep. These are not households in the sense that anyone who has ever lived until the twentieth century would understand them. They are not households. They are economic co-prosperity zones.

Camille Salem. Yes, that was a good one. A bubbly woman whose biggest regret was that she didn’t start eating mangoes until she was fifty. “I ate one once when I was a kid, and couldn’t stand the slimy texture,” she’d told me forlornly from her hospital bed. The chemotherapy had vanquished her eyelashes, but her eyes were still a bright, sparkling green. “But then my husband made me try one while we were on vacation in the Philippines and I almost had an orgasm over how good it tasted. Think of how many mangoes I missed out on by not eating them for fifty years!

Sally Jackson and son Percy are still missing one week after their mysterious disappearance. The family’s badly burned ’78 Camaro was discovered last Saturday on a north Long Island road with the roof ripped off and the front axle broken. The car had flipped and skidded for several hundred feet before exploding. Mother and son had gone for a weekend vacation to Montauk, but left hastily, under mysterious circumstances. Small traces of blood were found in the car and near the scene of the wreck, but there were no other signs of the missing Jacksons. Residents in the rural area reported seeing nothing unusual around the time of the accident. Ms. Jackson’s husband, Gabe Ugliano, claims that his stepson, Percy Jackson, is a troubled child who has been kicked out of numerous boarding schools and has expressed violent tendencies in the past. Police would not say whether son Percy is a suspect in his mother’s disappearance, but they have not ruled out foul play. Below are recent pictures of Sally Jackson and Percy. Police urge anyone with information to call the following toll-free crime-stoppers hotline.

Feeling obscurely reassured, she turned over and fell asleep. Chapter 6 The next morning Maura was awakened by the tapping of rain against the glass sliding doors. It came as a surprise, but Maura realized it shouldn’t have: it must rain all the time in Ireland, to keep all those fields so green. Still, she was glad she’d had a day of sunshine first. If it had stayed cold and grey, like the day she’d arrived, she might have turned tail and run. She lay listening to the sounds: the rain, of course, but also the clinking of pans and plates in the kitchen above, and the young voices as the Keohane children pounded down the hall and out the door. She thought she heard the rumble of a male voice as well—Ellen’s husband? She didn’t want to move, but she knew Ellen would probably be waiting breakfast on her, and surely her landlady had other things to do today. She checked the clock: 8:00. That meant she’d had no more than six hours of sleep, after a long day yesterday. The night before, Jimmy and Mick had offered her a job at the pub. And by the light of day she still thought she wanted it. She could stay longer. It wouldn’t be much of a vacation, working all the time, but she’d never had any vacations anyway, so nothing new there. She wouldn’t be seeing much of Ireland, but she’d never been a fan of touristy things back home in Boston, and she didn’t plan to join groups of gawping tourists here. And she’d get to know some real people. But there were a lot of things that were murky, starting with how long Jimmy

Months beforehand I started focusing my Manhattanite efficiency on getting registered in Italy, Andrea leading me by the hand through the wilderness of Old World red tape. The first step was “getting my documents together,” an Italian ritual repeated before every encounter with officialdom. Sticking to a list kindly provided by the Italian Consulate, I collected my birth certificate, passport, high school diploma, college diploma, college transcript, medical school diploma, medical school transcript, certificates of internship and residency, National Board Examination certificates, American Board of Internal Medicine test results, and specialization diploma. Then I got them transfigured into Italian by the one person in New York authorized by the Italian Consulate to crown his translation with an imprimatur. We judiciously gave him a set of our own translations as crib notes, tailored by my husband to match the Rome medical school curriculum. I wrote a cover letter from Andrea’s dictation. It had to be in my own hand, on a folded sheet of double-sized pale yellow ruled Italian paper embossed with a State seal, and had to be addressed “To the Magnificent Rector of the University of Rome.” You have to live in Italy a while to appreciate the theatrical elegance of making every fiddler a Maestro and every teacher a Professoressa; even the most corrupt member of the Italian parliament is by definition Honorable, and every client of a parking lot is by default, for lack of any higher title, a Doctor (“Back up, Dotto’, turn the wheel hard to the left, Dotto’”). There came the proud day in June when I got to deposit the stack of documents in front of a smiling consular official in red nail polish and Armani. After expressing puzzlement that an American doctor would want to move to her country (“You medical people have it so good here”), she Xeroxed my certificates, transcripts, and diplomas, made squiggles on the back to certify the Xeroxes were “authentic copies,” gave me back the originals, and assured me that she’d get things processed zip zip in Italy so that by the time I left for Rome three months later I’d have my Italian license and be ready to get a job. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. When we were about to fly in September and I still hadn’t heard from her, I went to check. Found the Xeroxes piled up on Signora X’s desk right where I’d left them, and the Signora gone for a month’s vacation. Slightly put out, I snatched up the stack to hand-carry over (re-inventing a common expatriate method for avoiding challenges to the efficiency of the Italian mails), prepared to do battle with the system on its own territory.

She had much to think over just now, so that to be deprived of a separate bedroom was a real hardship. The reason she had had to vacate her own was the unfortunate coincidence of Harriet’s arrival with that of Alice’s married sister and her husband. Elizabeth Hoppner had married an impecunious young artist of twenty-two, four years younger than herself; they had been living with Patrick’s brother Lewis in a small villa at Streatham; but, the lease having now expired, circumstances combined to make them feel that living in the country would be in every way better

He was completely wrong. There had been plenty of signs throughout Yellowstone warning visitors that the wildlife was dangerous. By the roadside, the driver of the RV was now arguing with Morton’s children, most likely about who was at fault in the accident. Just as Morton’s daughter leaned in to let the driver have it, the family car burst into flames. Morton screamed again. So did his wife. She seemed to forget that her husband was wounded and raced toward the flaming car. “Our clothes!” she shouted to her children. “Get our clothes!” Mom sighed heavily. “I think we’re going to have to take this guy to the hospital.” I wasn’t happy about that. And I could see that Dad and Summer were disappointed too. But we couldn’t leave Morton wounded in the middle of the wilderness. “Darn right I need to go to the hospital,” Morton said. “Lousy, no-good deer! This is the last time I ever go on vacation in a national park!” “I’m sure the park service will be happy to hear that,” Summer informed him. Morton ignored her and kept on ranting. “We should have gone on a cruise. They don’t have any homicidal deer on cruise ships.” Dad looked to me and rolled his eyes. “Welcome to Yellowstone,” he said. I laughed, figuring this was the strangest thing that would happen to me that day. It wasn’t even close.

How did other women come to terms with losing a husband? Did they pick up the pieces of their shattered selves and glue them back together, sealing the joints with metal to prevent them from falling apart again at the slightest whiff of remembrance, motes of a residual ghost perfume, familiar and overwhelming in a just-vacated elevator, a familiar stretch of shoulder and head in a distance, in a crowd, snatches of a song that had been playing when….

I have a complicated spiritual history. Here's the short version: I was born into a Mass-going Roman Catholic family, but my parents left the church when I was in the fifth grade and joined a Southern Baptist church—yes, in Connecticut. I am an alumnus of Wheaton College—Billy Graham's alma mater in Illinois, not the Seven Sisters school in Massachusetts—and the summer between my junior and senior year of (Christian) high school, I spent a couple of months on a missions trip performing in whiteface as a mime-for-the-Lord on the streets of London's West End. Once I left home for Wheaton, I ended up worshiping variously (and when I could haul my lazy tuckus out of bed) at the nondenominational Bible church next to the college, a Christian hippie commune in inner-city Chicago left over from the Jesus Freak movement of the 1960s, and an artsy-fartsy suburban Episcopal parish that ended up splitting over same-sex issues. My husband of more than a decade likes to describe himself as a “collapsed Catholic,” and for more than twenty-five years, I have been a born-again Christian. Groan, I know. But there's really no better term in the current popular lexicon to describe my seminal spiritual experience. It happened in the summer of 1980 when I was about to turn ten years old. My parents had both had born-again experiences themselves about six months earlier, shortly before our family left the Catholic church—much to the shock and dismay of the rest of our extended Irish and/or Italian Catholic family—and started worshiping in a rented public grade school gymnasium with the Southern Baptists. My mother had told me all about what she'd experienced with God and how I needed to give my heart to Jesus so I could spend eternity with him in heaven and not frying in hell. I was an intellectually stubborn and precocious child, so I didn't just kneel down with her and pray the first time she told me about what was going on with her and Daddy and Jesus. If something similar was going to happen to me, it was going to happen in my own sweet time. A few months into our family's new spiritual adventure, after hearing many lectures from Mom and sitting through any number of sermons at the Baptist church—each ending with an altar call and an invitation to make Jesus the Lord of my life—I got up from bed late one Sunday night and went downstairs to the den where my mother was watching television. I couldn't sleep, which was unusual for me as a child. I was a champion snoozer. In hindsight I realize something must have been troubling my spirit. Mom went into the kitchen for a cup of tea and left me alone with the television, which she had tuned to a church service. I don't remember exactly what the preacher said in his impassioned, sweaty sermon, but I do recall three things crystal clearly: The preacher was Jimmy Swaggart; he gave an altar call, inviting the folks in the congregation in front of him and at home in TV land to pray a simple prayer asking Jesus to come into their hearts; and that I prayed that prayer then and there, alone in the den in front of the idiot box. Seriously. That is precisely how I got “saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that's a whole other book…

In Japan: The shortage of wives for farmers became a rural crisis. In one village in the late 1980s, of unmarried persons between ages 25 and 39, 120 were men and only 31 were women, a ratio of 4:1. Some Japanese villages organized to find wives for their bachelors. One mountain village placed newspaper ads, promising free winter skiing vacations to all young women who visited and agreed to meet its men. Over a fiveyear period, 300 women responded, but none became wives of a village man. In another mountain village of 7,000, there were three bachelors for every unmarried woman, so the local government became a marriage agent. It brought in 22 women from the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries to marry its men, many in their 40s and 50s. Some marriages endured, but others ended in divorce because of the labor demands of farm life, the burden wives bore in caring for their husband’s elderly parents, and cultural differences. Small businesses developed that offered counseling services for bicultural couples and served as marriage brokers to match Japanese men with foreign women. Even today, many Japanese farm men remain bachelors. Farming in Japan is now primarily a part-time occupation—farmers find off-season jobs in construction or other tasks, unable to make an acceptable living even with government subsidies. And farming is now largely performed by older persons. For example, in one important rice-growing area, between 1980 and 2003, the number of people making most of their money from farming fell by 56 percent, and the number of people between ages 15 and 59 fell by 83 percent. There was one increase, though: there were 600 more farmers older than 70 in 2003 than in 1980.

What tender song, new outfit, irresistible perfume, or vacation to the other ends of the earth allows them to hold on to someone on the verge of leaving?

Survival-Me has no time for fun. That’s for those lucky children whose mom cares enough to schedule fun for them between nap time and twenty minutes of daily reading. To smooth over tough days for my family, Survival-Me looks for ways to make my children happy with no regard for myself. Art classes, swim lessons, summer camp, music lessons, family vacations, new toys, free-time activities—Survival-Me filters everything through the lens of what is best for the children.