Bonus episode: #CovidCut // Monday, July 27

BONUS: #CovidCut

Rerelease for episodes 39: In this together & 54: Mullethawk



Shelter in Place is taking a break from making new episodes so that we can make this work sustainable and bring you season 2. If you’d like to help us with that, you can join our community for as little as $5/month at shelterinplacepodcast.info. You can also sign up for our newsletter, so you’re the first to hear news about season 2 and get a behind the scenes look at our show.

During the break, we’re rereleasing episodes from season 1 that we want to make sure you don’t miss. Some of them are episodes we particularly enjoyed putting together, episodes we heard that our listeners loved, too. Others are one that feel particularly relevant to the moment we’re in now.

Today’s bonus episode is a combination of two episodes that were some of my favorites. They give you a little window into what things have been like here at the Shelter in Place headquarters. 

Some couples fight about money. Or parenting. Or the right way to load the dishwasher or where to clip your toenails. My husband Nate and I fight about those things sometimes, too.

But one of our most contentious points of conflict is one you won’t find in marriage books or talk about with your therapist--although maybe we should have. The recurring fight that defined our marriage for at least a decade was hair.

Let me give that some context. When I met Nate back in 2001, I was a senior in college at the University of Wisconsin. I’d just gotten my heart broken by the guy who lived across the hall from me. Every time I entered or exited our apartment, I had to see him palling around with his new girlfriend, who he’d found about two seconds after we broke up. I was feeling pretty cynical about love.

And then one night my friend Nora called me up and invited me to take a spur-of-the-moment trip with her to Boston. She was dealing with her own relationship troubles, and wanted to get out of Dodge. Neither of us had ever been to Boston, and we were college kids with no money. But my brother was going to school there, so we had a place to stay. This was back in the early days of Priceline, when you could find flights for cheap if you timed it right. She’d found a round trip from Chicago to Boston for just eighty bucks, but we had to decide fast. This was a Wednesday. The flight was for Thursday, the very next day. 

I felt giddy as I drove from Madison to Chicago to meet up with Nora. It was the most impulsive thing I’d ever done. When that plane took off from Chicago, we both laughed, still not quite believing this last minute thing we were doing. It was exhilarating.

And then, all at once, everything changed. The overhead lights flickered, the plane dropped in the sky, and all around us people screamed. This wasn’t turbulence. Something was very wrong. The flight attendants started running up and down the aisles, urging people to stay in their seats. Nora and I grabbed each other’s hands and whispered prayers. 

The seatbelt sign went back on and we heard the captain’s voice. One of our engines had blown out, he told us, and we’d need to make an immediate emergency landing in Detroit. Even with his practiced calm, you could hear the tension in his voice. 

The rest of the flight had the eerie quiet of a room full of people too nervous to talk. We landed safely in Detroit, a little rattled and weary, but okay. We spent several hours waiting in lines to see if we could get on another flight to Boston, but they were all full. Around ten o’clock at night the airline finally announced that they’d put us up in a hotel for the night and we could take a six a.m. flight the next morning. 

We’d been checking in with my brother with each update, feeding quarters into the payphone. This was 2001, back before normal people had cell phones. 

“That’s great you can get here tomorrow,” he said, “but there’s one problem. I won’t have any way to get you into my apartment. I’ve got a 24-hour shift in the hospital and won’t be out until Saturday.”

We took in this information and tried not to panic. We didn’t think we knew anyone else in Boston. But then Nora remembered that a guy she’d dated briefly was from Boston. She thought he might even be living there now. His parents and her parents had gone to college together, so she was able to track down his number. And he said sure, no problem. He lived with his friend Jill and Jill’s sister. We’d be welcome to stay with them for a night.

That guy was Jake Armerding, the fabulous folk and bluegrass musician, and Nate’s childhood best friend. Jake’s roommate wasn’t Jill, but “Chill,” the nickname assigned to--you guessed it--my now-husband Nate. 

This detail alone had me intrigued. Who was this guy who everyone called “Chill?” I wasn’t sure if it was cool or weird that he was still going by his childhood nickname.

The next day Jake picked us up from the airport and we spent the day driving the windy roads of New England’s north shore, listening to Bela Fleck and Tony Rice and snoozing while we drove. Jake and Chill had grown up there, and though I was exhausted from not sleeping much the night before, it was a comfort to be taken care of by a stranger, to feel even in this new place, strangely at home.

That evening we went to Jake’s concert, and at last I met this “Chill.” I don’t know what I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised. Chill was a cute, clean cut guy with short, dark hair, more thoughtfully dressed than most of the guys I knew. With Jake on stage, Chill took over the role of host. He seemed genuinely interested as he asked Nora and me about our lives. I decided that the nickname was cool. Chill. It seemed right for him.

That night Jake and Chill slept on the couch and gave us their bunk beds. The next morning Jake made us pancakes and we all sat around an old blue door they’d fashioned into a makeshift dining room table, and talked for hours like old friends. I began that trip feeling cynical about love, but I left Boston feeling hopeful. Not because I thought Chill and I would end up together--that would come later--but because it had been a gift to be treated so well by strangers, to be reminded that there were still good guys out there.

A couple of months later I returned to Boston, this time to run the Boston Marathon. Then Chill came to see me in Madison, another cheap, last-minute Priceline trip. By the summer we were together, planning a future together even though I was getting ready to leave for a year of volunteering with at-risk youth in Australia. 

That year, we fell in love even though we were on opposite sides of the globe. The only computer I had access to was one shared by a team of eleven, so my emails were frantic and unchecked, typed out as fast as I could manage during my daily fifteen-minute slot. This was before Skype, back when long distance calls from the payphone down the street were expensive and required a calling card that would always run out too quickly. Mostly we got to know each other through letters, which we’d promised to write every week--more if we could manage it. 

In one letter he told me a funny story about how he grew his hair out in college, and it looked so bad that one of his friends started a campus-wide cut or curl campaign to raise money for their music fraternity. People could put money in one jar or another based on whether or not they wanted Nate to perm his long locks or shave his head. People were into it, and they raised a ton of money. For the grand reveal, Nate came out on stage with a paper bag over his head. He pulled it off and the audience gasped in horror at his head of crazy curls--until he pulled off the wig to reveal his clean-shaven cue-ball of a head. Everyone cheered like wild. It was a story I probably should have paid a bit more attention to.

I wasn’t supposed to get to come home that Christmas, but my grandma was sick, and so the organization I was working for made an exception. The day after I landed in Minneapolis I went back to the airport to pick up Chill, who was flying in to spend Christmas with my family and me. I’ll never forget both my delight and then subsequent discomfort when I finally saw him come through the security gates. 

He put his arms around me and we shared the kind of airport kiss you find in romantic comedies--but I was distracted by his hair. It looked like he hadn’t had a haircut since I’d seen him five months earlier. Nate is part-Chinese, and he has great hair: thick and glossy, and lots of it. He’s a good-looking guy. But the long hair made him look a little goofy. His hair was so thick that it poofed up into a bouffant, a little like a shaggy Elvis minus the rock star sideburns. I teased him about it on the drive back to my parents’ house, but he didn’t respond. When I pressed a little further, asking him when he was going to get a haircut, he got prickly. 

Most of my family was meeting him for the first time, and they tried to be nice, but I could see them trying to figure out what they should think of this guy. One of the gift millennials have given our world is that it is now totally fine to sport a mullet or a mohawk or even a mullethawk. But back then, hairstyles for men were much more uniform. The bouffant made Nate seem eccentric, over the top. Maybe sensing my family’s hesitance, Nate acted aloof, which only reinforced their perception of him as an East Coast elitist. 

My family had scheduled someone to take family photos that Christmas, and since Nate was there, he was going to be in them. I begged him to get his hair cut first, and eventually he did--but not before we had our first real fight. It was a fight we would have again and again, not just in the next year and a half before we got married, but dozens of times over the next decade.

We’d have it when he grew the mullet, when he had the top knot, when he shaved his head with a bic razor. We’d have it when he dyed the tips of his hair a coppery orange, when for a while his hair looked like a deer pelt. We’d have it when his hair was down to his shoulders and he tried to grow a mustache, a scraggly line above his upper lip since even as an adult he has almost no facial hair. Nate has been cutting his own hair for most of the time I’ve known him, so often these “styles” were awkward and amplified.

To Nate, the fight was a dumb one. He didn’t care what I did with my hair. Why did I care so much about what he did to his?

About what other people thought of him? For him, my irritation over his hair was representative of my need for approval from others. Why couldn’t I just accept him for him, no matter what his hair looked like? 

I would argue back that it wasn’t just about hair. It was about honoring me. I got dressed up for him all the time. Couldn’t he do the same for me? Didn’t he want me to be physically attracted to him? And anyway, first impressions did sometimes matter. We were young and starting out in our careers. What if he got turned away from jobs because his appearance made him seem like a slob? My family adores Nate today, but it took them a while to get over the impression the bouffant left with them.

We’d go back and forth over the years. Sometimes I would browbeat him into a haircut. Sometimes I’d throw up my hands and give up. It was a touchy subject between us for at least the first ten years of our marriage. 

I can’t pinpoint the exact point when we stopped having that fight. There was no grand revelation, no moment when we finally saw eye to eye. But we don’t have that fight anymore. Maybe it was just the slow evolution of our relationship, of realizing over time that we were better off as allies than adversaries. Maybe it was realizing over time that no matter how much work we put into our marriage, there would always be things that annoyed us about each other. There would always be things about each of us that didn’t make sense, that were a little ridiculous. 

Can Nate explain why it drives him absolutely crazy when the shower curtain is left open instead of pulled closed? I’m sure he can, though I can’t tell you what that explanation is. But I bet he has one. 

Can I tell you why it matters so much to me that the bowls in our dishwasher go on the bottom rack and not the middle one? Of course I can. It’s because they take up less room there and they get cleaner. 

But that’s not the point. The point is that it doesn’t really matter that much where those bowls go. Or whether or not the shower curtain is always closed. Or whether Nate’s hair is growing over his ears, or closely cropped, or a fauxhawk mullet. Sometimes we just need to let the people we love do the crazy things that make them feel a little more in control. 

Whether you’re living with someone who is driving you nuts today, or just trying to forgive your own eccentricities, my daily gift of sanity to you is this: No matter how much work we do on ourselves, or try to do on others, there are going to be things about us that are more rigid than we’d like them to be. That we feel attached to even though it doesn’t totally make sense. But what if the next time we felt annoyed at that rigidity, we saw it as an invitation to extend grace--maybe to someone else, maybe to ourselves? Maybe it could even be the thing that makes us laugh.

When Nate turned forty a few years ago, I put together a book of photos of him. On the front page was a collage of all of his hairdos. There were many, all of them ridiculous looking. We had a good laugh.

Last night I had a dream that Nate cut his hair, that I woke up this morning to the way I like it best--not too long, not too short. The haircut he had when I met him. The one that makes me think of Chill. 

It was just a dream. He’s currently sporting a mullethawk. He keeps bragging to me everytime someone compliments him on it on Zoom. And yes, I know that hairstyles have changed, and maybe he’s even on trend. But it still looks ridiculous to me. And also, it’s fine. 

I’ll be back with more right after this short break. 

{Delta Wine Ad}

Nate and I got married when we were in our mid-twenties, so in a lot of ways we’ve grown up together. We’re coming up on seventeen years. We’ve had a lot of fun together over the years, but we also know what it’s like to bring our marriage to the brink of disaster and then fly over the edge into new territory. We’ve had some big crashes. We’ve done a lot of counseling, which taught us that good marriages take work. Or at least ours does. 

Having kids has been one of the best things for our relationship, but it’s also been one of the worst. What I mean by that is that we are crazy in love with our kids. We have no regrets about having them. And maybe 70% of the time when I see Nate with our kids, I think, oh yeah, I married a really good guy. He’s a great dad, and our kids worship him.

The other 30% of the time, when the kids are being punks or whining or fighting or putting a metal spoon in the microwave even though we’ve just told them that they’re going to set the microwave on fire--Nate and I look a lot more like disgruntled coworkers than we do like lovers. We spend so much of our time and energy just trying not to blow up at the kids. Often we fail. Even if we manage to keep our cool with the kids, it’s easy to take out our frustration on each other, to forget we’re on the same team. This has never been more true than in a pandemic.

Since he lost his job, Nate has taken the brunt of this. While I’m working on the daily podcast, he’s inside dealing with one kid who leaves a sticky trail of breadcrumbs that would put Hansel and Gretel to shame, and has mastered the art of dumping the contents of what she calls her “tiny potty” everywhere but the toilet. Another one of our children bursts into tears anytime someone is laughing, sure that they’re laughing at her. And the third is on a quest to see if it’s possible to annoy all four of his family members at the same time, either by poking us in the armpit as he walks by, or rolling his eyes and pretending he can’t hear us when we ask him to do something. 

A friend of mine who’s a former teacher reminded me recently that all of this is actually pretty age-appropriate behavior for kids who’ve been cooped up inside their house for the past six weeks with no end in sight. Which, fair. 

But with all the bad news last week, we were all wearing really thin. It was taking me twice as long as usual to write each episode just because I was so tired. Nate was trying to be gracious, but he was sick of being on dad duty so much of the time. He missed being able to go to a job. 

On Sunday, we had a zoom call with our friends Paula and Brian. Paula and Brian live in Madison, Wisconsin now, but we know them from the year we lived in the Philippines, which I talked about in episode 22. They met us when our marriage was failing, and they’re a large part of the reason we’re still together today. We often joke that they’re our spiritual godparents. I can’t explain why, but whenever we’re with them, we suddenly feel called to be the best version of ourselves. They make us feel like we are those people. They’re the kind of people we hope we’ll someday become.

We shared honestly with them about how things were going. They’d had a tough week too, and so we all commiserated. Paula suggested that we just take one week at a time, and every week we have a conversation where we give each other permission to say that things need to change.

That night after the kids went to bed, we sat on the back porch together and opened a bottle of wine. It was one of the first truly warm nights, and through the open window behind us we could hear the kids talking loudly in their room. We both let out a big, frustrated sigh. 

I’d been thinking for weeks that I could use Nate’s help with the podcast. I was struggling to figure out how much time I should spend on social media and promotion versus the actual writing and creating. I’ve never been great at the project management side of things. But in the past, our rare attempts to work together had almost always ended in fights. Maybe it’s that we’re both stubborn, or that we get attached to our ideas. Maybe it’s pride, or that we don’t know how to receive criticism because we’re too close to each other. I didn’t want to fight with him about this.

I finally said, “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not excited about. But I think if there’s a way we could do this together, it would be better.

Can you pretend I’m not your wife and help me figure out how to do this well?’

And for the first time, the conversation was different. Maybe we are both finally at a place in our lives where we can admit our weaknesses, the areas where we need each other’s help. Maybe we’ve lost the illusion of control. We started brainstorming ideas. Dreaming not just about future episodes, but about what our life moving forward could look like. The past couple of nights we did it again. Each time I got stuck on an episode, I’d bring it to Nate, and we’d figure it out together. He’s been doing a couple of little projects for friends, and so I helped him dream about those, too. We both had some small breakthroughs. 

From the beginning, we’ve been at our best together when we’re dreaming of the future. When possibility is the thing that defines us. But we’d never figured out a way to bring that dreaming into our daily life until now. 

Last night as we talked, we realized that a major shift in our relationship had occurred. We’d been partners for seventeen years, but now we were co-creators. And it was fun. It made our time together richer in those evening hours, but it also made us kinder to each other the rest of the day. All week we’ve been feeling less resentful and more gracious with each other. 

Nate said to me last night, “I guess it just took a pandemic to bring us back together.”

Of course dreaming together hasn’t magically fixed everything. Nate is still looking for a job and I’m still hustling to see if I can support us with this podcast. We’re still failing at parenting every single day, and snapping at each other when the dishwasher isn’t loaded the way we think it should be, or when we leave our clothes all over the bed. But I have a sense of possibility after this week that I didn’t have before. Even if my big crazy dream fails, Nate and I are learning a new way of being together.

So today, on this last day of the Gratitude and Dreaming Challenge, I want to express my gratitude to my husband Nate Davis, my favorite partner in dreaming. You’ve given me perhaps the greatest gift one person can give another, to be seen and loved even though you know me at my worst. If I have to be stuck in my home for months on end, I’m glad it’s with you. Also, I’m sorry I keep forgetting to close the silverware drawer. And leaving my shoes where you trip on them. I’m glad we’re in this together. 

Before I go, I’d like to thank a few of our supporters.

Lin Chin & Peter Santina, when I think about what it means to be a good neighbor, I think about you. From social distance babysitting offers to CSA boxes to financial support, you have made us feel so supported, encouraged, and loved during this season of life when it’s so easy to feel discouraged and alone. Thank you for not just being great neighbors, but fantastic friends. 

Phyllis Ahrndt, somehow you manage to feel so close no matter how many miles separate us or how many years go by. Thank you for encouraging me during some of my darkest times, for always believing in me, and for always calling me back to the things that matter. I will consider my life well lived if I can become more like you.

Jen Sheedy, you’ve seen all the hairstyles, and we’ve been through all of it. Thank you for being our buddy at the kitchen table, our closest companion on this road of faith and doubt, and showing me unconditional love more times than I thought it was possible. You’re not just a friend. You’re family.