Today's the Day (or "Real love advice")

My love will be arriving from Israel in 8 hours. After a month of waiting for news, he sent me a one-line email a few days ago with the flight time, air port, and date.

My heart is in my throat, and my baby girl keeps saying “I want S_______!” If he’s not serious about us I’m going to have to break both his knees. I tell her, “when you wake up tomorrow, S____ will be sleeping on the sofa!” But I’m not really sure he will be. He might have already left for Hoshana Rabbah services.

Well, she HAS been waking up at 5am every day for weeks now. And I’ll be out the door to work before he gets back. When I return we’ll have an hour to be alone together, we three, before we rush off to services and dinner in a sukkah. I’m deliriously thankful for this whirlwind, for the inconvenience that comes with an observant life.

I must admit that I’ve not got the best track record with relationships. Let's face it: I'm an idiot, and I can use all the help I can get. I used to freak out at the idea of being tied down. Not being able to up and move to Barcelona tomorrow if I wanted, for example. In the first month of this relationship, I seriously thought of breaking it off because of his incorrect use of a punctuation mark (it wouldn't have been so bad if he'd not kept bringing it to my attention). Of course, the baby and the job have done much to settle me down.

And I swore to myself and my child not to get seriously involved in anyone unless it was with the intention of forever.

My love and I have never been together for longer than a Shabbat (with his family). And now he’s moved here. I hope to g-d he’ll think it’s worth it. I guess it’ll be worth it if we make it worth it.

Today I’m simultaneously planning a week’s worth of classes, searching for a youtube video of Sarah Palin meeting Tina Fey on SNL last night, cleaning the apartment and cooking for the final days of chag. And I'm racking my brains to remember all the good advice I ever heard or witnessed about how to keep love and have it grow. Feel free to chime in, dear readers, with your advice!

Babysitter is running errands with my sensitive, teething child on her back. And I can't think.

Of course, the second I washed all the sheets and towels last night, using the last $4.75 in quarters I had plus a French coin the shape of a quarter, my child got sick on my sheets and then on her sheets. So hand-washing it was. I was also baking a cake for the nanny share’s mother’s birthday (my nanny share mama just gave birth this past week), a quiche and soup, and also changing my hair color. I felt like I was in an I Love Lucy sitcom episode.

I don’t know how long he’ll stay, how long it will take him to find a job and an apartment (or to propose), so I cleaned out a closet, a chest of drawers and a bookshelf for him. To think that two years ago all this space in my 600 square foot apartment was nine. A year and a half ago I gave half my space to my baby. Now I’ll give another portion of it to my love.

The more compact my material life gets, the bigger the emotional life. Not a bad trade-off. Though it would be great to have a garden one day (like I had when I was a graduate student in Austin!)