You and me, baby, we're stuck like glue. We learned from the best: now married 40 years, held in better times and worse, through fat years and lean ones, in illness and health, pledged as long as they both shall live. And walking down the aisle at their baby's wedding? That same open smile between your mom's dimples, and the same look of contentment on your dad. Can we make do that? 'Til death do us part?
You're as loyal a person as I've ever met. You stick things through - and not with resignation, as if bearing me up is a task, but with ethic and love. The extra housework, the extra time spent alone with your kids, the conversations and companionship of many hours over these many months. You do not waver and you do not avoid. Every heartache of mine is one of yours, and for that I'm sorry. Sorry is a good friend of mine.
Sometimes I doubt myself. I doubt I can live up to you. I doubt that I won't ever hurt you again. My commitment always seems smaller, slower, less than yours. You are a 100% kind of guy: you love it or despise it, you trust or distrust it with no in-between. You give your all to everyone - at work, at home, with me. This rests over all those doubts like a light blanket in summer, shivering under the breeze through the window. Small reassurance, but better than none.
Oh, that I might love you as you love me! To be able to dive into each challenge and disappointment without hesitating! To love loving, to never feel used, to give it all each and every day. I hope I'm learning these things from you. I hope, if you keep me safe long enough, I learn to trust the world again.
Liebe dich,
deine Fraü
When the money’s spent and all my friends have vanished
And I can’t seem to find no help or love for free
I know there’s no need for me to panic
Cause I’ll find him, I’ll find him next to me
When the skies are grey and all the doors are closing
And the rising pressure makes it hard to breathe
When all I need's a hand to stop the tears from falling
My husband, wonderful husband, has given me a break. Time to breathe. To rediscover. To push tentacles into the Solid Rock. Would you be in prayer for me, my friends? That I would find that spirit of peace HE promises, that I would be impenetrable to the lies of the evil one, that I would heal and grow and come back home more whole?
Today I am in North Dakota with one of the wisest and sweetest 20 year olds I've known. I've cared for her since her infancy, and now she shrouds me with her grace, her embrace, her understanding. Tomorrow, another day here in the drifts. Next week, peace at her mother's farm. I leave house and hearth and husband and children to seek that peace the Savior offers. To refuse other gods, those gods of anxiety and pain and wishing for an end to suffering and an end to hurting those I love. Pray, oh, pray. I am in desperate need of that Grace I whispered "yes" to at 4 years old, the undeserved favor, the sweetness of the all-forgiving Christ love.
Pray it would surround me, bathe me, heal those ancient wounds with the washing of the Living Water and the blood shed for me.
Humbly I come before the Throne, and humbly I come to you, broken, asking that I might see and believe and take hold to Redemption.
You curl around my back like my parentheses. Surrounding my body, my whirling thoughts, my discontent with a bracket as if this period of my life is just a passing thing, something added to the sentence for emphasis only.
You have looked into my wounded eyes and seen clear down to my soul and as you reached down there with your passionate gaze, deep, you dropped a handful of comfort into the empty places. You love me no matter what, in spite of, at all times. I cannot understand it.
You weep sometimes because I am weeping. Other times you implore me to see the beauty that you see and to turn away from brokenness. Both I love. You I love.
It's been a long season of me in hiding, me in transition, me in the metamorphosis of suffering. Sometimes I wonder if you will like who I am after this transformation. There is a magnet in the yellow kitchen that says, "I am on the second leg of a return trip to being ME." You met me before I embarked on the journey. Fell in love with me with so many unknowns. As the shroud lifts from my past and I let you into the darkness there, you show no judgment, you don't despise, you look around those rooms and you cry for what is missing and what exists - the emptiness and the pain.
You hold my hand like I am a little child and lead me through memories like an instructor, teaching me to know myself when I would rather turn away. That is brave. You, my prince, knight in shining armor. Foreshadowing of Christ the Bridegroom.
I am stronger because of you. More poetic. I dance because of you, and sing, too. I gather up life, all of it, like a heap of golden leaves in autumn, overflowing armfuls. You hunt joy with me and you hand me these gifts of moments all wrapped up and ready to open like presents. Present. You help me see the presents in the present.
What would I do without you?
I hear this song, and sometimes it is about you, and sometimes it is about God. And isn't that Ephesians 5:25-27, for you are to me as Christ is to church, and to see you similar - two Bridegrooms, one earthy, tangible, and One who waits quietly.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
I can see the pain behind your eyes
It's been there for quite a while
I just wanna be the one to remind you what it is to smile
I would like to show you what true love can really do
We've walked the rocky shore, my hand in yours, and yours is steady and steadies mine. In your embrace, I climb up from the dark abyss to reality, rappelling up on your love and your brokenness over my despair. You've been my strong fortress in times of war, my adviser in times of conflict, my voice of reason in times of foggy confusion. You are my peace, my warrior, my prince, my passion, my pride, my constant source of those glittering glimpses of joy on a joyless landscape.
It's the 11th Valentine's Day, and we've already given each other our gifts. Utilitarian givers we are, you give me wool and I give you a beard trimmer and we smile like kids in a candy store. There is no fading of this love, only a deepening saturation of trust and truth and triumph over trouble. The naysayers are long gone and have forgotten our 17 day engagement. When you know, you know - and neither of us were wrong about each other. At least I hope you would say the same, after cancer, career changes, church pain, depression, and all those days spent at our daughter's hospital bedside praying fervently for healing.
Are you a saint? Can an ordinary man be a minister unfailing to his broken other half? You hold out Words from Scripture like pearls in a black velvet box. You are my record-keeper, remembering all the good times when I am drowning in a sea of amnesia. You draw me back to shore, the shore where every stone is balanced perfectly on it's neighbor, like the memories balanced between good and bad. We lie down together in the curve of the agate earth, listen to the waves crash in toward us in the dark. We are safe on shore, our stories tangled up in each other like your legs and mine nesting against the beach. You've reeled me in again from disaster, and I lean hard on your warm shoulder.
My haven, my heaven on earth, my husband.
I don't like walking around this old and empty house
So hold my hand, I'll walk with you, my dear
The stairs creak as you sleep, it's keeping me awake
It's the house telling you to close your eyes
Some days I can't even trust myself
It's killing me to see you this way
'Cause though the truth may vary
This ship will carry our bodies safe to shore
There's an old voice in my head that's holding me back
Well tell her that I miss our little talks
Soon it will be over and buried with our past
We used to play outside when we were young
And full of life and full of love.
Some days I don't know if I am wrong or right
Your mind is playing tricks on you, my dear
Don't listen to a word I say
The screams all sound the same
You're gone, gone, gone away
I watched you disappear
All that's left is the ghost of you.
Now we're torn, torn, torn apart,
There's nothing we can do
Just let me go we'll meet again soon
Now wait, wait, wait for me
Please hang around
I'll see you when I fall asleep
~Of Monsters and Men, Little Talks~
As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me! My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come..." (excerpted from Song of Solomon 2:3-12 ESV)
Some memories come fast and others slow. I remember times in prisons, times in chains, times of evil. You reel me in with your long, strong arms, and in the slow melting of two souls together that is our embrace, the good unravels inside me and coils there warm while you rock me just as you did when I bore our babies into this beautiful broken world. I remember this dance, strung on the guitar strings of sorrow, the first notes of a symphony of bittersweet joy.
Worry frays the day like fingers picking at the string on a sweater, and some days you come to end with a ball of yarn in your hands and shivering bare shoulders. Others are more successful, days when you can concentrate on something other than the fraying and keep fingers busy away from the string that unravels.
You were there for my reconstruction, a woman coming of age in her early 20s. You watched sunlight make it's tentative way across my features in the dawn of those first weeks of marriage. You've been pulling me toward the light ever since. Slowly, a slow dance towards an understanding of grace. A waltz towards forgiveness - you forgiving me, loving me, as Christ loved us - and I following quietly the dance steps toward self-forgiveness.
Now here we are with me deconstructed again. A jumbled pile of beams of the spirit - the things that hold us up: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithtossed in with the evil, wrong, wasted, wanting. I huddle close to the pile, afraid to look at these parts of me laid out in the broad daylight. You know each plank, each weathered board, each scar, each scratch in the paint. You're not afraid. You pull out a piece of lumber, hand it to me, and ask me to name it. It's Unconditional Love. It's from you, and from God. And it belongs right in the center of this new house we're building for my soul.
I think of the end of days, when my pile of moments will be lit on fire to refine for beauty. I know this house we're building means hard work, but if even one ruby falls from the ashes at the end of my life - oh, how I will thank you for that proof of your love holding up my shack when the wind blew hard.
It's been a long time coming since I've seen your face
I've been everywhere and back trying to replace
Everything that I had 'til my feet went numb
Praying like a fool that's been on the run
Heart's still beating but it's not working
It's like a million dollar phone that you just can't ring
I know why the eyes are the windows of the soul. It's because all I love flows through these eyes. Images collected throughout the day are what make up the threads of the rope I'm hanging on to at the end.
Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. His back arches heavy over children late into the evening, after hours of wearing his lead apron at work. Love bending close to the ears of the son. His heart pushes away the frustration of living with someone like me, and instead he makes a funnel for love to pour forth.
As Christ loves the church. The egotistical, stubborn, idolatrous, broken church. As Christ loves that church. And he does, this husband. He holds onto the Word like rescue while I tread water looking for my threads, the threads of that passage that I am to be living. Ah, submit and respect. Those are my threads. For a moment, through the camera lens, I am in obedience. Every time he makes dinner while I battle demons, I obey this command - respect. Oh, how deep is this love, the circle of family, the threads of he and I and Christ surrounded now by the layers of each of our children.
The evening of our 10th anniversary, we talk about how things have changed and how they've stayed the same. How it seems like our wedding was yesterday and forever ago. How you could see me the day we said "I do" and how now I can see me, too. How I could see you, and how you still can't see yourself clearly. What opened my eyes to self? Cancer, emotional pain endured, reprocessing of the things that shaped and harmed me? Life hasn't been graceful to me, wrinkles and gray hairs sprouting; you either, face ruggedly handsome now, man of hard labor, man of sorrow, dear husband mine.
Ten years ago today it was the first morning we woke up together. I remember it felt scandalous, waking up in your arms. Almost impossible that there was a stamp of approval on this bliss from parents, God, society. That it didn't need to be a secret that I was in your naked embrace. And then we went off on an adventure, this time of the day we were half-way through North Dakota, playing travel Scrabble across the plains on our way to Seattle and the Sound and paddling and sleeping under the stars.
Today, ten years later, a different big water, a different adventure. You are off at the hardware store for split rings to mount 3 pound spoons on my grandpa's deep water fishing rod, dreaming of lake trout. I have a whole sketchbook of white pages for writing and sketching and I'm looking forward to sitting next to you on the cold rock curled up with the dog while you fish. Watching you. I will never tire of watching you, love. And then perhaps we'll find a café for lunch and maybe a hippie store because I need a new purse. And agates on the beach. Then a indie-folk concert tonight at a brewery.
But for all that we've endured, and for all that life has washed away from us, by grace we are still elementally the same people. Music, bread, cheese, beer, words, outdoors, water, the unexpected, and the flesh and minds of each other. These we still love together, after ten whole years.
I found you on the stairwell after I got done printing materials for my first day of work, waiting for me silently there, to make sure I came to bed so you could hold me and dry my fear tears. I heard you, 20 minutes before my alarm went off, up making coffee and warming the waffle iron. I saw you, packing my most comfortable shoes into my work bag for the drive home and putting a charger cord for my cell phone in the extra pocket, checking to make sure I had my office keys. I took the warm travel mug of coffee straight from your hands as we walked out the door, leaving for work at the same time. And when I walked out the door at the end of the day, there you were, after finishing work at the same time, waiting for me at the closest door so I wouldn't have to walk one extra step to putting my feet up in the air-conditioned car.
I heard you loving on the kids as you short-order-cooked left-overs for dinner while I rested for 20 minutes in bed. I heard the sounds of you washing their feet in the bathtub, and rummaging through drawers for their pajamas, and keeping them out of my office while I finished grading, assuring them I wouldn't forget to come hug and kiss and sing them off to slumberland.
And when I walked down the stairs, bone weary, there I found you, icing the cake for our daughter's long-awaited and belated 9th birthday party tomorrow. I saw the bag you'd packed with paper plates and candles and special silverware and the big 9 wax candle that has to go on the baseball cake. There by my work bag was the gift wrap for the t-shirt I'll buy tomorrow on the way to the party while you work until the last minute wearing 30 extra pounds of lead shield to do your job in radiology without ever complaining about how your back hurts at the end of the day.
And tomorrow? You'll have breakfast made for me when I walk out of the bathroom make-up on and earrings in, and hot coffee in a mug with just the right amount of cream, and the first thing you'll ask when I cry about how long the day will be, and how hard, will be, "Is there anything I can do to make it better?" Even thought I always nod no through my tears, you will keep asking, a thousand upon thousand times, until death do us part.
helpmate (or) help-meet[ˈhɛlpˌmeɪt] noun companion and helper, especially a wife
It says, in Genesis 2:18, right at the beginning of the Bible we both hold dear, the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”He was talking about me. The Lord God made me to help you. But so many days, it is you helping me. Feeding me, clothing me, making sure I take my pills, get my feet up, go to sleep at night, take care of myself even though the children clamor for more, more, more, the world is out there calling for just a little bit here or there, or someone needs a helping hand or hospitality or a shoulder to cry on. You are more than my protector, my brother in Christ, my supporter, my bread-winner, our household decision maker, my leader, my courage under fire, the one who catches me when I fall or when I faint or when I collapse in tears.
You are my helper, my cheerleader, my best friend, my lover, my checks and balances, my reminder, my beloved, my believer, my companion, the one who quietly, steadily and sweetly takes care of many tasks that should be in my realm. Often, the dishes, laundry, dinner and childcare are kept from falling completely off the radar only by your perseverance, endurance, and love.
And after all that, you have time to frost a cake. Love to frost a cake. Capacity left to do it creatively and beautifully. Character to do so without a complaint (and even a smile on your face). There is not a grudge, a sour word, or an angry expression.
Sometimes I fall even shorter than just letting things fall on your shoulders instead of picking up my own slack: sometimes I pile guilt on my shoulders because you are so good to me. Sometimes I don't let myself be loved. Sometimes I just let myself believe I am an utter failure because I am not a helpmate most days; I let myself be blind to the fact that instead, I am treasured, cherished, and kept.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church... (Ephesian 5:25-29)
You are so wonderful
Being near you is all
That I'm living for
You've shown me more kindness
In little ways
Then I've ever known
In all my days
Tell me we'll stay together
Let me love your forever
'Cause you're a wonderful one
You're a wonderful one
In you, there is a rare quality
Your love baby
It means the world to me
For me, you're always concerned
And you ask nothing in return
You're really more than I deserve
From my heart I mean these words
You're a wonderful one
You're a wonderful one
Sometimes I'm up
Oh, sometimes I'm down
But your love
You're always around
Words of confidence
You speak to me
Baby, then you place a tender kiss
on my cheek
It makes my burden
A little bit lighter
It makes my life
A little bit brighter
'Cause you're a wonderful one
You're a wonderful one
From Amber & Seth Haine's old meme that I apparently can't get enough of!
This day, 10 years ago, I was working my last 12 hour night shift before my wedding. In 2 days, we'll have been married 10 years. How much we've weathered in 10 years. And how much sweeter love tastes, 10 years later! I never would have dreamed it possible... How big is our God, and how amazing the man He gave me!
I'm in the land of dreams, that sunset-gold bright hazy world where light floats on the breeze like cotton in the spring and there's magic layered on magic. I'm talking to a friend about to be married, explaining the difference between how you fall in love with a man and how you fall in love with a baby.
You fall in love with a man tentative, even though it feels like a brick wall falling, love booming miraculous and echoing loud through the halls of your heart that have been aching to hear those sounds since the beginning of time. You don't know anything about him, this alien life form all hairy and full of new smells and sounds and coming into your shared space one morning with his raggedy t-shirts from old concerts and jeans stained and smelling of gasoline, a bunch of tools you don't know the names for, shampoo you'd never buy from the dollar section, and socks on your floor, boxers in the bathroom, and hair. Everywhere. (Don't cry to me about clogged drains with long hair, boys. It's payback for the million times we've swept around the tub surround, believe you me.)
My very first non-date with my future husband
But a baby is a whole different experience. They explode out of your body in this other-worldly, out-of-body don't-care-if-you-refuse-drugs you may as well have taken heroin before hand sort of experience, and there they are on your belly that you'll never recognize again anyway, slippery, slimy, blue and squealing like a piglet, and something shatters inside you in a silent and irreversible process that you can't orchestrate or prevent, and you are in love. Now, having a baby is different for every mom. But for me, there was nothing alien about my babies. Not their smell, not their sounds, not their bodies, not their schedules, not the way they latched on to my breasts, which I thought would be the weirdest part of it all (how I thought that would trump, *ahem*, the way they entered this world, I don't know, but I thought it would).
Sniffing Caleb at 8 weeks, 2 weeks before I was diagnosed with cancer
I spent 24 hours a day either smelling or nursing my babies. I rarely washed them because they seemed perfectly perfect the way they were. (Okay, I'll admit it. About day three, they started to smell like goat cheese, and so did I, and so I showered with them in this incredible - albeit crazy, hippie, and potentially creepy - experience of a co-shower. I didn't bathe them in an actual bathtub unless we were at Grandma's where this weirdness would be, well - weird. Or until they were six months old and I'd come out of my baby-having induced coma and become a baby-escaping psycho instead.) Incredibly, I can't find many pictures of me smelling them. Kind of like I have about 4 photos of me kissing my husband even though I kiss him all the time. Curse of the photographer - you're always on the other side of the lens. And there's no way I'm posting pictures of me nursing them on my blog. Although I did make my husband take photos of me nursing them so someday I can look at them and remember. I doubt I'll ever show them to anyone else, unless maybe the girls want to see them if they go crazy, gung-ho hippie when they have their own kids in similar fashion to their own mother who made the switch from conservative, short-cropped hair SUV driving snowboarder to baby-wearing, co-sleeping, baby-sniffing, coo-coo for CoCo Puffs baby lover in less than 5 minutes postpartum.
Sniffing Caleb when my hair started to grow back 4 years into my cancer battle in early 2012.
The thing about love is, it doesn't matter how it forms in your heart, how it grows once there, or whether it's the curious, still-getting-to-know-you kind of love I have for my husband of ten years or the ferocious, lioness, kill-you-if-you-look-cross-eyed-at-my-cubs kind of love I have for my four kids of 8 years. And the kind of panic that love can bring out in you - that's exactly the same, no matter what kind of love you're talking about. Panic is all around these days. Panic that I'm failing - again - as a wife and mother. Pain in my heart and pain in my body have got me cocooned in my bed again, slipping down the slippery depression slope faster than I can pull myself back up it with meds and coping skills and therapy appointments. How can you hold a heart together when it is breaking? I still don't have an answer for that one. Panic that we are not ready - our family is so unready - to face another season of storming. If Amelia does have cancer - something that the doctors seem to talk about more matter of factly with every passing doctor's visit and I'm trying to get to a place of mixed denial-acceptance (?) about - how are we going to shore up for this one? Where is Jesus on this stormy sea? Will He come and stall the storm or is He going to have us ride it out until we think we're dying like the disciples? Katy is head over heels for sports, and needs time outside every day with Aaron or I, feeding her dreams, fueling her body. Rosy is at some 7 year old angst-ridden cross-roads, trying to find her identity, wanting to be herself in our family, pushing for some freedom to follow her own dreams. We need to find ways to make it happen for her - an instrument, a sport, some art lessons - something that is just hers, something to captivate her heart and make those eyes glow again and her little soul sing. Amy's too tired to want much of anything. We're focusing mostly on building her up physically for the physical battle to come - focusing on immune health and trying to put a little meat on her bones in case chemo is in the works for her. Caleb is his usual fitful, boundary pushing self. He needs more to do, no doubt about it. More structure, more boundaries, more to engage his mind and his body. And here's where you can queue the "Mom's failing" music again. So many things to do, and I feel like I can't even get meals on the table or my house cleaned! How can I meet the needs of their souls? And how do I decide what to put first? How can I meet soul needs in a house full of chaos but how can I put off soul needs until I quell the chaos who knows when?
When did love get so complicated?
There is panic about my marriage. It is so easy, in times of stress, to slip into old habits of survival. He goes to sleep early, and I stay up late, dogged by nightmares and insomnia, and we are two ships passing the night and intimacy is a rare thing. We've learned how to be comfortable together in these seasons, but fear is an old enemy that launches into my soul, and I worry that I'm abandoning him out of selfishness and that he won't want me the way I am now and he will find comfort somewhere else more attractive, less real, less raw. We cry together, and he holds me in my dark moments, and I hold him in his. We both have faith that there will be better days again, nights in the darkness when we are safe in each others arms and the bedrock of marriage that God guards and planted and protects will still be there.
In the cracks and crevices, in between the chaos and the sticky floors, the dishes piled high and the surviving of the busy schedules crammed with doctors appointments and kids ball games and trying to find time to have fun as a family, there is always joy. Twenty minutes on our bed looking through old photos with the kids remembering days before cancer when we were two kids in love with babies to sniff and toddlers running around buck naked and a clean house with just a smattering of toys and dinner always on the table at six and long kisses after his work day. He puts on the telephoto lens and captures a gold finch flitting in the afternoon sun and we look at those images together and my heart melts right into his, and we are one, two made one, two pieces of one whole, two halves that found each other in a big wide world of strangers. We struggle to keep our eyes open in the cold dark night at the drive-in movie theater while the kids sleep in the back of the suburban and his big brown hand finds mine and he anchors me, in the silence we remember that we love this, we love the same things, and when life is over and done it will be reduced to moments like these when we loved each other and loved the same fleeting beauties on a sea of changing circumstances and through every hardship and difficulty. Two cardinals fly by the porch while we perch in sorrow, a male and a female, and suddenly it is my grandpa and grandma, three years now gone to heaven together, and we remember their love story of loss and brokenness, and the tears dry and we are laughing at this little wink from heaven that life goes on and life is soon over, and remember that, though time is short and times are tough, we are a cord of three strands not quickly broken.
Your daughters and your son, they bring me flowers every day in the spring. Whatever weeds are blooming in the ditches, they find their way into the vases on the counter. They always ask me the name of the flower, and I always ask them to ask grandma. She knows. I don't.
I've never been much of a labeler of delights. Their simple existence in the same space as me has been enough for most of my life. Flowers without names, loves without reasons, smiles without an explanation. I've known all along you're more structured, but the similar chaos of our apartments before the wedding convinced me that we'd fit together anyway. That you couldn't disappoint me, and I wouldn't you.
Some days our house is full of light and laughter, and we laugh together over the children's antics, and the afternoon sun bounces off the clean wood of the front room floor while I make dinner. As much as I have tried to believe that being a writer, a scholar, a breadwinner will bring me joy, it is in the organic delight of an afternoon housewifing that I come alive, and you breath. It seems impossible to me that I am writing those words. Admitting to the world a sacred but jagged edged truth about what makes men and women - or at least you and I - tick. As if the way to a man's heart is still really through his stomach.
Other days are dark and different. My heart quits ticking right, or post-cancer rises up to swallow me whole in a night full of sweats and night terrors, and I am nailed to the bed by exhaustion. You come home and sigh, get to work on the dishes, and make us dinner. You say you aren't disappointed in me, but regardless my fear swallows joy faster than the world spins, and I shrink away from you because I know, deeper than deep, in that moment I am not worthy.
But real love that stands the tests of time isn't about who is worthy. It's rooted in that holy love of Christ, the love that keeps pouring out into our broken and empty places. You've loved me through darker trials than we imagined, even with our jaded eyes that had seen babies shrivel and die. The sorrow that emptied me of hope was bigger even than cancer. You've held my hand when I didn't care to hold yours. You've held my body as it's shifted and changed from bearing babies and weathering cancer's storms. You kissed my gray hairs as if they are a crown to be treasured, my bald head bruised and bleeding, as if you really wanted to. You've loved me as our house descended into a mess beyond messy, when the bitter taste of tears was all I could offer in return.
I know things have to change. I know the house needs to be cleaned. I know I have to find strength to be a better wife and a better mother. Words like "remission" and "graduation" give me hope. That I won't be stretched this thin forever. That you won't have to fill in as a cook and a housekeeper for much longer. That I'll be a better lover again like I have been in the past.
But life could throw us another curveball. It isn't the hope of an easier tomorrow that makes me smile even as I write about all this pain, the pain the world doesn't see every day. You see it: you see the ugliness and the failure and the work we have to do, and you love me in spite of, no matter what, when the landscape shifts out of focus. Together, however broken, we've found our true north. You are mine, and I am yours, the best gift we've ever gotten. A gift to each other from the generations of family that built us, that loved and lost and struggled and broke. A gift from the only One who can give the things that really matter. And I cradle it like a precious and fragile jewel in the palms of my hands: this love for you that grows without sunshine or rain, that grows in the night and grows when it's ugly and grows when my heart is breaking. You are the most precious thing. My most precious thing. Years from now, when the children are grown, and the house is clean all the time, you'll still be my most precious thing. I can't name this love. It defies logic. It floats when we're sinking. It shines in the dark. Lit with the everburning candle of Christ's love.
I love you. Today. Yesterday. Forever. In spite of. I am blessed beyond words to live in the same space and time as you. Even when you are broken, angry, frustrated. With the grace of God, this one thing will never change.
A great idea of Amber and Seth Haines. Shared with Joy and Scott Bennett.
Forgive me - I had something specific on my mind this week - so I wrote before the prompt.
I grew up on the prairie, ten years of my childhood.
It is a long way from characterless; "overpowering" would be a better word. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. Across the immense sky move navies of cumuli, fair-weather clouds, their bottoms as even as if they had scraped themselves against the earth. These prairies are quiescent, close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the observer's mind. - Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow
Every year, on the prairie, the Pasque flowers were the harbinger of spring. A promise of growth, blossom and beauty. Rest for the weary eye after the stark, bleak prairie winter.
