The Anti-Recession Mama

–by Carla

I’m not sure if was the alignment of the moon and the stars or of the tide and the Big Dipper or what, but this past week was about the best week I’ve had in a very long time. My husband and I celebrated 6 years of marriage on August 30th. (For the record, I normally leave “the husband” out of all of this because he thinks I’m a nutbag for writing about this stuff…or he just things I’m a nutbag in general…I’m not sure which) Anyway, six isn’t even that big of a deal, really. Well it IS, but it’s not 10 or 15, you know what I mean? I think the common gift for 6 is iron and candy or something random like that.

 

We each thought the other was going to forget the date, so we hid the cards that our relatives had sent to the house. How very dorky of us. But we didn’t forget. I’d saved up my pennies and bought him a gift certificate for a round of golf since he’s always saying how much he enjoys playing but never gets a chance. I also got him his favorite dark chocolate snacks. See? Iron and candy? But what he did for me was so above and beyond anything I had dreamed up, it really blew me away. He took me to Wolfgang Puck’s “Five Sixty”, high above downtown Dallas.

This tiny little cone (a signature WP dish, I'm told) cost as much as my shoes. This better be tasty!

The swanky, revolving restaurant was so very much out of the norm for our new lifestyle that I was literally giddy with excitement the entire night. He forced me to forget about how much this was costing us, assuring me that he had worked a ton of hours at his part time job to make it happen. 

...see how happy he is about that?

Just kidding, he actually seemed to be having a good time, honest…

"At least I don't have to eat Carla's cooking tonight..cheers!"

To be back in this wonderfully familiar atmosphere for the night, and with our two baby boys safely asleep at home with grandma Nina making sure the house didn’t burn down, we could focus on each other for the first time in a very long time. No worries about money or bills and certainly no worries about tantrums or poopie diapers. See, the layoff was tough on our marriage, I won’t lie, and I’m sure the husband won’t mind me outing us like that. I mean, good grief, I’d just had a baby 5-weeks earlier, we had an older child…a 20-month-old at the time…and those things alone can put a lot of strain on a marriage. Not to mention the fact that news people and cops are pretty stressed out folks at times. But this one night almost seemed to erase all of that.

It’s certainly an anti-RM theme for me to talk about going out for a swanky, super expensive dinner (oh and he bought me a spa treatment at a phenomenal spa that I love), but I think I learned some sort of lesson from it all. 

Honestly, I don’t know exactly what that is, but I think it had to do with letting go, not being so uptight and stepping out of my financial comfort zone if even briefly….and just enjoying life.