Welcome back! I promised to not make every post sad, to not make you cry every single time. So I decided to share the stories of how we became “Mister and Ousseau”, how we found our names for each other.
Every time I start to write I’m struck by “oh, first I have to tell them this story or that story.” There’s so many stories intertwined over so many years that sometimes it seems impossible to sort it all out so that nothing is left out and for it all to make sense. I’ve finally come to realize that I could write forever and never tell the whole story and that some of it will never make sense. So here are the two completely separate stories of how we became Mister and Ousseau.
Before Mister and I were married we were together for somewhere around 10 years. I say “together” but it was really on and off again, and again, and again. You get the idea. It was somewhere in these early years that I became Ousseau.
We were at my house watching a movie that I have no doubt was a Netflix DVD so that should date the story by itself. It was “A Good Year” with Russell Crowe. It’s about an investment banker in London who inherits his uncle’s vineyard in Provence. Of course there is the beautiful feisty French woman that he falls in love with but there is also the whole element of him falling in love with the vineyard, the making of the wine, and the whole drastically different lifestyle. It’s the whole idea of turning your life into something amazing yet not at all like you’d ever pictured it.
To say that my husband was a hopeless romantic may surprise you but I’m here to tell you that it’s true. He loved love. He loved being in love, seeing other people in love, and to watch sappy movies about people in love.
This movie was no Oscar winner but it’s sweet and charming. I forced myself to watch it again just the other night. I thought it would be painful. I also was afraid it would be terrible and that I was only remembering it with rose colored glasses. But it was neither. It was just as I’d remembered and I found it comforting, not the knife through the chest that I thought it might be.
At the very end, the closing scene is of the couple in the vineyard garden. She’s making him practice his French by pointing at various things and he responds with the French word. Wine, butterfly, tree, bird. As Russell Crowe is responding with the French word for bird, oiseau, Mister looked at me and asked “do you know why the word oiseau is the perfect French word? Say it” So I did and just as the word came out of my mouth he kissed me and then said “because your lips are in the perfect position for me to kiss you when you say it.” And that was it guys, I would forever be his oiseau. The first time he ever wrote my new name he spelled it wrong, Ousseau and it just stuck like that. I would forever be his Ousseau.
To start the story of Mister we have to go back to talking about the on again, off again part of our story, which all came to a head in the fall of 2008. We were never perfect people. We didn’t have perfect lives. What we did have was an incredible love. But what Mister also had was an intense fear of getting remarried. I can only speak to his feeling by what he shared with me about his feeling about his first marriage. And what he shared was that he was terrified things would turn out the way things did the first time. No one goes into a marriage thinking that they will end up divorced and yet it happens over and over, every day. He saw our relationship as fine the way it was and didn’t want to risk changing that.
I knew that we had something better than that. Imperfect people with imperfect lives that shared one perfect thing, our love. So we fought about it, broke up over it more than once. The last breakup was that fall of 2008. I knew in my heart that this was our last breakup. Things felt different. This was the final stand. But, as every time before, we just couldn’t stay apart. So we saw each other over the holidays, tearfully exchanging gifts and pretending to ourselves that we could be just friends. We were both heartbroken, not our best selves without the other.
Sometime after, maybe late winter or early spring he came to me and just said “fine, let’s do this.” This is the day that he would come to refer to as “the day he finally did something smart.” But he still struggled with it. He couldn’t bring himself to use words like marriage or to say that we were getting married. He would make a joke out of it, act like the words were stuck in his throat as he tried to force them out. One day while attempting to talk about our upcoming nuptials it actually came out as “the marination.” That one stuck and it stuck forever. We would both always refer to our wedding ceremony as the Marination Day. For you all who know our love of food and cooking it will be easy to understand our love of that word that became so special to us as a descriptor of our marriage.
And as for Mister, his name came about in a similar way around the same time. In the weeks leading up to the marination ceremony I would say “let’s practice” meaning let’s practice our new titles for these terrifying new roles as husband and wife, Mr and Mrs. I would say “You’re Mr and I’m..?”, waiting for him to say Mrs. But all he would ever say was Ousseau. “You’re Mister and I’m Ousseau” “I’m Mister and you’re Ousseau.” And that was it, we were Mister and Ousseau forever. I really thinks that who we had been all along. It just took us years and years of stumbling around in all of our imperfection to realize it.
So on June 21, 2009 the marination ceremony of Mister and Ousseau happened on Chipmunk Lane, officiated by a friend and attended only by our children and my two closest friends. We chose that day because it was the summer solstice that year. We wanted the longest possible day to forever celebrate. It was a perfect day in the midst of all of our imperfections. It was also the beginning of the world’s greatest pirate ship, but that is a story for another day.
This one was really tough for me. I guess maybe they all will be. I write, rewrite, and rewrite again. It never seems to be quite right. But, I guess this is a process and that’s going to be part of it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy our sappy story. My goal right now is to have a new post once a week. That seems like an attainable goal for me right now. Maybe as this evolves and I get some of this out the process may become easier for me so the posts can be more frequent. We’ll have to wait and see, wait and see what the universe brings me here in the after. Thanks for reading