My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me

by Jason B. Rosenthal

  I signed up for classes in the studio of an accomplished professional painter. It was me and three or four other students, depending on the week, all women of retirement age; and it was, in a word, fabulous. I learned the color wheel. I learned to love mixing colors, making beautiful grays from various combinations of blue and orange and differing amounts of white. I learned how to put together an abstract acrylic painting. I learned that I love the hypnotic act of painting, and the solitude and focus of it. I learned that I love to create.

  I’ve never been sure if my paintings are any good. All I was sure of, all that mattered, was that Amy was a huge, enthusiastic fan. In fact, a part of her wanted me to paint on a more regular basis, maybe tip the scale more toward my artwork and away from my nine-to-five job as a lawyer. Again, I never could bring myself to pull that trigger; but just knowing she believed in me that much has kept me painting to this very day.

  We also became regular practitioners of ashtanga yoga, a very intense form of practice. For a while we had an instructor, Lisa, come to our house to help me get familiar with the intricacies of the practice. Even after more than a decade, I never gained much flexibility in my stiff hips, while Amy was Gumby-like from the very beginning. I did have the distinction, though, of being Lisa’s only student who practiced to the music of Nine Inch Nails. Yoga grew to be a huge part of our lives, and when time and life allowed, we traveled the world together, seeking out yoga destinations. (Subgoal no. 4 of Never stop learning!: travel.)

  Many years later we started frequenting a historic place called the Green Mill on Broadway in uptown Chicago. It’s the oldest jazz club in the United States, and apparently it was a favorite haunt of Al Capone’s. Of infinitely more interest to us was the fact that Thursday nights at the Green Mill showcased the most exquisite professional and amateur dancers of all ages. There they’d be, effortless and intoxicating, swing dancing on a tiny dance floor in front of a big band, surrounded by tables of patrons sipping martinis.

  It didn’t take long for us to decide that as much fun as it was to watch, it would probably be even more fun to do. We managed to track down a teacher who’d taught many of those Green Mill dancers and hired her to give us private swing/big band dance lessons. We were so excited.

  Unfortunately, as life would have it, we had to quit after just one class.

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  Looking back on that list, so many of the things on it would later define our marriage. Even something as simple as my skills in the kitchen. The seeds of the strength of our marriage were in that list. So much of what we were and what we became was possible because of that list.

  We were doing pretty well so far with our marriage goals and ideas, but there was one item we couldn’t possibly accomplish on our own—and we were determined to do something about it.

  After all, how were we supposed to record our kids’ voices every year if we didn’t have kids?

  3

  Fun, Whimsical, and Creative Parenting

  Between the artwork plastering the walls, and the magnet that read “Our house is clean enough to be healthy and messy enough to be happy,” there was an element of contentedness in your household that made it happy and secure.

  —Nadia Razaq Sutton, a former babysitter

  Raising a family with Amy was the greatest adventure of my life. Boy, is that a huge understatement.

  I’ve never had any complaints about my childhood, but I suppose on paper it might qualify as a bit dysfunctional—my parents divorced when I was two. My mother exhibited masterful parenting skills while raising my sister and me as a single parent. During this time, my dad, too, was single and had lots of girlfriends. It was either because of that, or in spite of it, that by the time I was grown-up (relatively speaking) and married to Amy, family had become incredibly important to me. In fact, one of the thousands of reasons Amy’s dad became one of my heroes is that he was the patriarch of his family, which eventually grew to twenty-three of us; and he never, ever passed up an opportunity, in conversations or behavior in general, to make it clear that family always came first for him and my mother-in-law.

  So when, on our second wedding anniversary, we brought home our firstborn son, I was the happiest man on earth.

  Justin was a chubby, blue-eyed beauty who entered the world with the personality he still maintains today. We were in awe of him, and not long after he was born, rather than be held down by his arrival, we simply made him our companion everywhere we went. We took him to restaurants, plopping him down in his car seat on a chair next to us and praying that he’d stay asleep while we ate. We took him on countless trips to spend time with the family, so he’d know from the time he was a baby that there was this whole group of people named Krouse and Rosenthal he was connected to, people who adored him and would always take care of him. They all marveled at this fascinating new little person, an extension of us and all of them; and without even trying he’d instantly transform them from perfectly articulate adults to a bunch of softies whose conversation was limited to gushing and baby noises.

  Justin is brilliant. He always has been. From the moment he began to formulate and articulate thoughts, he blew us away with some of his perfunctory pronouncements, many of which Amy documented.

  Justin, age eight: “When I graduate college, I’m getting in my car and going straight to see all the R-rated movies.” And when Amy said to him, “You were my little baby, and now look at you. How did you get so big?” he replied, without missing a beat, “Mom, it’s called life.”

  Sometimes he showed a poignancy and a depth way beyond his years. Justin, age nine: “Mom, if you were God, and someone killed someone, but spent the rest of their life rescuing people, taking in stray animals, picking up litter, and doing mitzvahs, would you put them in heaven or hell?”

  I mean, seriously, with a mind like that, is it any wonder he was extremely comfortable in the company of adults from the moment he was born?

  Less than two years later, our son Miles arrived. Sweet and thoughtful, he was a natural addition to the growing Rosenthal clan. Justin was instantly fascinated with his little brother, and in no time at all, the two of them became inseparable. They were more like big cat cubs, and they literally would have preferred to be. They were rough and funny and loud, with a few inevitable injuries here and there, but from the very beginning they were so close that this union of “the boys,” as they became known, was solidified.

  Miles has always been a combination of jock and philosopher. He stormed out of the womb a lithe, athletic boy, constantly running, jumping, and climbing the walls. He spent much of his childhood as Spider-Man, clinging to the highest point of every doorframe in the house. At the same time, he was a deep thinker who later became an avid reader. He was nine years old when he said, “I’m always thinking about something. And if I’m not thinking, then I’m writing words in my mind in cursive. Like I just wrote the word ‘door.’”

  He was also a talker, with a wild imagination. Want to hear what he dreamed last night? Get yourself some coffee and strap in—this is going to take a while. Miles was as endlessly entertaining as his brother, and Amy and I loved nothing more in this world than the daily wonder of getting to know our two precious sons.

  When Amy got pregnant with our third child, we knew it would be another boy. I mean, we obviously made boys, so what else could it possibly be? The answer, of course, to our surprise and joy: a gorgeous blue-eyed baby girl, who emerged from the womb with a full head of dark hair. For reasons you already know from reading about the night I proposed to Amy, we named her Paris.

  Paris had an immediate, profound connection to her mom, almost as if they’d known each other in a past life and were just thrilled to be reunited in this one. She was still very little when she told Amy one day, “I always get confused in the morning because you’re always in my dreams, so I think you already know them.”

  As a tiny person, she was empathetic, which is a quality that has never lef
t her. She was four years old when the horrifying tragedy of September 11, 2001, stunned us all. Paris took it upon herself to color American flags to sell so that she could donate the money to the victims’ families. She was born with a soul-deep sense of family that’s still reflected in the life she lives today, and she inherited her mother’s uncanny flair for translating a list-making compulsion into a solid career as an author. (Her first lists, from the moment she was able to write, were simply the names of all our family members, including a whole lot of cousins, to whom our three kids have always been close.)

  Of course, with three kids you would think that the entry from our marriage goals list that read Record our kids’ voices every year would have been no sweat. Full disclosure: we failed miserably. I did manage to capture Justin’s tiny voice as he navigated a golf cart on one of our family vacations. I recorded Miles, age four, reciting a story he’d somehow memorized from the tapes we played on trips in our minivan. And seven-year-old Paris was preserved by Amy in a home movie, giggling and being super silly after drawing eyes on her chin so that she still had a right-side-up face when she was upside down. But “every year” slipped through the cracks. I wish it hadn’t.

  There were other failures on that list as well. When it came to Annual Portraits—“unadorned face” . . . what a fabulous idea. You should do it! (Never happened.) In our defense, we did take “couch pictures” almost every year, kind of a spontaneous, come-as-you-are impulse. We’d plop down on the family room couch and take a picture in whatever we were wearing, funky hair and all, from the time the kids were tiny blobs until they’d sprouted up to be quite a bit taller than their mommy. Not exactly the annual portraits we might have had in mind on our honeymoon when we made the original list of goals, but definitely the style of the family we’d become.

  I’m proud to say, though, that there were several other entries on that list at which we absolutely excelled, which became both more challenging and more important after kids.

  Take, for example, Get dressed up and go on dates. Yes! Even when the kids were very little, Saturday night was date night for Amy and me. If I had it to do over, I’m not sure I’d still leave a thirteen-year-old girl in charge of three small children; but she was reliable, the kids liked her, and she seemed to enjoy it.

  We’d begin with a yoga session in Amy’s home office. Then we’d get showered and nicely dressed and leave instructions for the babysitter: “We picked out a VHS from Blockbuster. Here you go. Pizza’s in the freezer. We won’t be late.”

  It never really mattered where we went or what we did. Dinner and a martini at a local joint, typically sitting at the bar. Out with friends. Music. Lots of live music. The point was being together, making time for each other, seeing to it that the noise of life, kids, work, whatever, didn’t drown out the amazing “us” at the core of it all. Our weekly dates were the equivalent of recharging an electric vehicle, sitting for a good meditation, or taking a short vacation. They never became stale. In fact, somehow they always seemed to infuse new life into a relationship that was already thriving.

  One of the spots we loved to return to on these dates was Millennium Park. Their programming was filled with contemporary music and world music on some nights and classical on others. We developed a routine of taking the CTA train to the park. But sometimes, since the park was close to my office, I would meet Amy there after work; she would walk the entire way from our house, an approximately two-hour journey. I think she could have kept going all the way to Indiana. I usually packed a picnic for us. Cheese, lots of cheese, an AKR favorite. A charcuterie assortment, fruit, and either a roadie martini or red wine. We also had an entire assembly of blankets, Crazy Creek chairs, and a snazzy backpack with plates and cups. This type of evening was so beautiful, taking in the Chicago skyline and the warm summer nights. It became “our spot” and the setting for many future Amy events.

  Another favorite was a neighborhood joint called Katerina’s. Katerina was a lovely woman who opened a coffee shop near our house. Amy spent many days there working on her writing and encountered quite a cast of characters over the years. Katerina always wanted to open a jazz club and have a liquor license. Eventually she managed to navigate the bureaucracy, obtain the appropriate licensing, and open a bar and jazz music venue. Amy and I spent frequent date nights enjoying Katerina’s hospitality. We would sit at the bar and order a martini. Typically, as was not uncommon for Amy’s thirst for all things, she would order one martini, quickly down it, and order another. One hundred percent of the time, she took a sip or two of the second and reached her limit. In all of our years together, in fact, I never saw her have more than two drinks. Katerina’s was filled with good traditional Greek food and inspiring live music. It was a perfect date for us, combining many of our favorite things.

  Keep our cupboards & fridge continually stocked with good, healthy food. Absolutely. With the exception of Amy’s propensity toward mayonnaise and her infatuation with chips, we insisted on and modeled healthy eating for our kids. Believe me, we knew how fortunate we were to be able to provide those healthy options, too. Living in our divided city of Chicago, I’ve been exposed to all types of people; and I’m well aware that many families don’t understand what healthy eating even means—parents were either never exposed to it in their lives or lived below the poverty line and thought they couldn’t afford it. I’ve seen more than my share of kids walking to school drinking grape soda and reaching into bags of flamin’ hot chips with their orange-stained fingers. That Amy and I had the backgrounds and education to raise our children knowing the importance of good nutrition and fill our cupboards and fridge accordingly, and that the message has stayed with them as they’ve begun to navigate the world as young adults, are things I’ve never taken for granted.

  Dinner time = time2B2gether. Music in the background is fine, TV is not. Amy and I followed that rule religiously when it was just the two of us. It became even more ingrained in our family when it was the five of us. Throughout my professional life, I was able to work hard six days a week and still manage to be home every night for dinner. It was an invaluable daily chance for us to check in and stay current with each other, as individuals and as a family. It’s amazing how freely information can flow when there’s no agenda, nothing specific to talk about or serve as a “teaching moment.” Sometimes the conversations would be intense. Sometimes they’d be trivial, just typical observations and events in the lives of working parents and the progressions of their children from grade school through high school. “Trivial” never meant “unimportant,” though, so no one ever left the dinner feeling as if what they had to say didn’t matter.

  Mostly, though, our nightly dinners included a lot of laughter. Sometimes we were funny or silly together. And okay, we weren’t above involuntarily laughing when someone let loose with an inappropriate bodily sound or decided to try out cursing as a possible new means of communication. The kids enjoyed those family dinners together as much as Amy and I did.

  From time to time, as a reflection of the joyful, innately fun tone Amy set for her life and ours, we’d celebrate Backwards Night. The evening would start with bedtime stories, affectionately known as “yellows” in our house because some of the stories came from a yellow-covered book. This would transition into bath time, invariably a raucous exercise in silliness that included lions and tigers, Pokémon, and artwork on the chalkboard-painted wall around the tub. Next up was dessert, followed by our usual family dinner. This whimsical tradition is just one example of how parenting with Amy was such a joy.

  Before the kids entered preschool, Amy and I agreed that infusing their lives with Jewish culture was important to us. I’d attended a Jewish day school in Chicago. Amy? She and her dad would leave the house every week so that he could take her to Sunday school. More times than not he’d end up taking her out to eat instead. But despite our detachment from organized religion, we had great mutual respect for our cultural traditions and values and wanted them for our fam
ily. So we sent the children to a Jewish preschool, and then day school, where they learned some of those traditions and brought them home.

  One that stuck, and became meaningful in so many ways, was our Friday-night Shabbat dinners. They were a time to enjoy not only each other but our extended family and our wider community as well. Many of the dinners were just us five “Rosies,” as we were affectionately known. Sometimes family joined in. Other times, family friends and their kids came over, or we would go to their homes instead. Whatever the details, Shabbat dinners meant slowing down from a hectic week. They meant being together for traditional prayers, including a prayer Amy always recited specifically for the children. Candles were lit, wine was poured, and bread was broken. Simple. Quietly reverent. And always, always full of gratitude.

  Before long we added a personal tradition to our Shabbat dinners that became a family favorite. Amy and I had a green letter R made of metal we’d acquired over the years, and we began passing the R among everyone who’d joined us at the table. Whoever ended up holding the R had to share a story from the previous week, some moment or event that had an emotional impact on them, good or bad. It was a little nerve-racking at first for those who were shy about opening up to a room full of people, but before long, because there was plenty of support and no judgment at that table, they began looking forward to passing the R at the Rosenthal Shabbat dinners. Many of our kids’ friends, who are now young adults, still look back fondly on those wonderful Friday evenings. So do our kids. So do I. As much as I treasured them, I never stop appreciating how much richer they were because Justin, Miles, and Paris were part of them.