THE BLOG

It was a classic situation of boy + girl. Boy meets girl and they fall in love. Girls thinks boy is perfect, her dream man, and there is no flaw in him. Then somewhere along the way boy and girl have their first fight. It’s just how it goes. In every relationship. I’m proud to say that Adam and I don’t fight often and, in my opinion, when we do fight, we fight well (i.e., no name calling, bashing, or dragging up unnecessary stuff from the past). Unfortunately this last Sunday morning, our fighting wasn’t quite as refined.

We were on our way to church, from where we would immediately head out to spend a day out in the woods, camping with friends. The plan was that on the way to church we would swing by my parents to grab some stuff we needed to take camping with us. Ok, not some stuff but all the stuff we needed. They had the tent, bikes, propane stove, tarp, rope, and fire-sitting chairs. It was a few items. And, to Adam, a few more than we needed for 24 hours of camping. The deal was that we had 15 minutes to swing by and I’d run in to get the stuff from inside the house while he loaded up the stuff that was already in a pile on the back porch. I went in to do my thing and when I came out he said there was no room left in the truck. None. It was packed to the max. And only one bike was in there and he didn’t see the cooler on the back porch. Both of which we needed. I opened the truck hatch just to confirm why he was saying, only to see that everything was piled in the back of the truck with nothing pushed at all toward the front. And, to me, there was plenty of room. Had *I* packed the truck, we could have fit all the stuff, and two elephants back there…and still had room. So I got aggravated. We then proceeded to pull stuff out to rearrange but we were now going to be late for church which is a major pet peeve of mine. And because we didn’t have time to repack it all, we stuck the cooler in the front seat, my seat, of his truck and I had to ride to church laying across the back of his mini cab which is about 48×18 inches. Somehow, as my Italian temper would have it, in a matter of 5 minutes I went from slightly annoyed with how he packed the truck to full-on fuming. Inside, mostly, cause I don’t like stooping as low as name calling. In my mind, I was listing off every transgression in the world of boyfriend-om, all while very uncomfortably laying on top of a bunch of stuff in this mini cab of his truck. It didn’t help that I hadn’t had breakfast yet that morning and planned on stopping at Starbucks for a Caramel Brûlée Steamer and a piece of coffee cake…but now, because we were late, I had to go to church hungry. And then he started taking, what seemed to me, every turn on two wheels. At which point my face would smash up against the back of his headrest and send me further into my little episode that I was having. We bickered most of the way to church, about a situation that spiraled out of control way too quickly. Something to do with his way of packing a truck vs. my way of packing a truck. We successfully dragged that argument out the full 20 minutes it took us to get to church. But the tipping point? The tipping point was when this thing kept piercing my back so I finally tried to sit up to see what it was.

A spice rack.

He had a spice rack in the back of his truck. With the sweetest tone possible a very obviously annoyed tone to my voice I asked him WHYYYYY he had the SPICE RACK (!!!!!!) in the back of his TRUCK. His response: “Because I didn’t want it cluttering up my kitchen counter”. Right. So he put it in the back of his truck. Makes perfect sense. So I rode the rest of the way to church with this spice rack putting bruises in my back because, otherwise, it would be cluttering up a kitchen counter top.

We pulled off the exit and as we were rounding the corner for church I told him I wasn’t going in. That I needed to go for a walk to cool off and then come back and repack the truck, because I refused to walk into church with a huge smile on my face, acting like I was totally fine (which I, inevitably, would’ve done). I’ve seen a lot of that throughout my life – the car fights that stop upon entering church and then resume the second everyone is back in the car – and I just refused to let that be part of my life. Well, he wasn’t about to walk into church without me. So we sat in the parking lot and kept fighting. It seriously was, like, the longest stupid fight in the history of our relationship. Finally I threw my hands in the air and said “Fine. I’ll go into church while you stay here and you repack the truck”. Lucky for me, since we were so late, church had already started and I could still walk in with my pouty face on, slip in the back, and nobody would notice me. I sat there and cried. For no reason, really, except that girls like to cry things out. I listened to a great sermon. I realized that I had let things get way out of control in our argument and, in the process, made Adam feel bad about himself. I walked back out to the parking lot 1 hour later and apologized for all of the above. We prayed together, kissed and made up. He managed to repack the truck so that while driving to the campground, I could sit in a normal seat. For this, I was thankful. Somewhere along the road I gasped out loud and exclaimed “OH. MY. GOSH. You won’t believe this. I totally forgot to bring any spices for the home fries tomorrow morning!”. And then it happened. I turned to look at him when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the rack of spices in the backseat of his truck.

And, once and for all, I realized that our differences may be many but at the end of the day, Adam has all [the spice] I’ll ever need, and more.