Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

I grew up a very romantic little girl. I dreamed of knights and castles and eternal love proclaimed by jousting tournaments and royal decrees. My heroes were Lancelot and Rhett Butler and Captain Von Trapp as portrayed by Christopher Plummer. Love, to me, was Marion the Librarian singing “’Til There Was You”, Prince Charming carrying a slipper made of glass around an entire kingdom or Johnny Castle taking Baby out of her corner and teaching her to do the Lift.
I had little experience with love’s realities. Even my biggest high school romance had something of the cinematic surrounding it. I was young. I was dramatic. And really? I knew nothing much at all.

It’s been over twenty years and quite a few transformations since then and those who love me most are STILL telling me that I have much to learn.

They have questions.
They are worried.
They do not, they tell me, understand.
How, they ask from all corners of this country, could I be here in this town, living this life, with this man?

See, they remember. They remember when my idea of love was someone so valiant that it seemed I was looking for a demi god. They remember the books I was always reading, the poems I was always writing and the dreams I had for my future.

It didn’t quite work out like I planned. I’m not beautiful or glamorous. I don’t have epic adventures. I’m not admired by all and sundry and, as it turns out, I’ll never be a mother.

And my friends worry.
In their concern, they ask me questions.

How?
Why?
Do you really think you’re ever going to be happy this way?

They question my relationships, my choices. They tell me something’s not right.

And more than once, someone has told me that God wants me to be happy.

I’ve tried.

Believe me. I’ve lined up every little tool I have in my bag of Church Kid tricks and I’ve tried to believe that this is true. I’ve tried to justify the things I think I want by telling myself that the One who Created me is Kind and Loving and Cares about my bliss.

But…

I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.

Don’t get me wrong. The God in which I believe doesn’t want me to be miserable. I’m not saying that life is made for drudgery and merely getting by.
I’m just saying that what we think of as happiness probably isn’t really the point of it all.

For example, I am sometimes tempted to ask my friends what would happen if my happiness derived from the cooking and eating of one of them. Would God then provide me with a big pot as well as all the seasonings and salts my taste buds required? Of course not. Some things are just wrong and we can’t expect God to just hand us over to them, even if they do provide us enjoyment.

My friends aren’t idiots. They know this.

It’s just that my friends can be very much like I am. We want concrete answers. We want resolved plots. We want neatly wrapped up chapters and it hurts when one of us is going through some kind of ambiguous limbo that seems to have no easy resolution.

Right now, of course, I’m the one dealing with the confusion. I’m the one experiencing the uncertainty. And in the absence of physical comfort, my friends offer me their words.
The problem, however, is that no amount of advice, however well meant, can really touch the core of this undertaking. Life in this little town, the manner in which I conduct my part of my marriage, the manifestation of my particular broken heart…all of these cannot be lived or honestly felt by anyone else but me.

I try. I do try to explain WHY I’m making the choices that I make and WHY I’m doing the things that I do, but I don’t think my words amount to anything more than noise most of the time.

See, my Kenny is many things, but romantic is not one of them. He isn’t anything like a knight, he’ll never feel for me the way Rhett did for his Scarlett and should he ever try to dance with me at a dinner, I would probably fall over on the spot.

It’s okay. I knew that he didn’t subscribe to such theatrical concepts when I married him. What I DIDN’T know was just how wide the gap between my dreaminess and his practicality would grow.

Because it has. Grown, I mean.

Over the years, my Mister has gotten more curt, more brusque. He has less time for anything not having to do with work or taxes or what must be done over the next time our office is open. Unfortunately, that “anything” often includes me.

I’m not the only one, I know. Kenny tells me stories of his aunts. Strong women they were. Independent too. Though married, they often lived and worked in different cities than their spouses, only living as a couple on the weekends.

Me? As you may have guessed by now, I’m NOT strong. I’m NOT independent. I can do wonderful things in my “me time”, but I will never truly be a Sims, sending my life’s partner off on a train, knowing I wouldn’t see him again for a work week or more.

I know. I know. Compared to military wives or women married to men who run companies and help rule the world, I do not have it hard at all. I’m not a woman in an impoverished region with a husband who was killed for being the wrong race or religion and children taken away to be turned into soldiers hardened much too young.

Believe me. I know I have it easy. I’m in the United States. I have the freedom to worship where I wish, or not to worship at all if that was what I choose. I have a computer that, while acting like a cranky, complaining old woman, still allows me to talk to the people I love who are scattered all over the world. I take shameless advantage of the fact that my boss is also my husband and I can do or not do many things according to my whims.

I’m blessed. I know this. This richness begins to slip through my fingers like an overabundance of coins every time someone raises the possibility of my pursuing someone else or chasing something new.

It’s not as if I haven’t thought of it myself. Believe me; in my daydreams I lead a hundred different lives a minute. It’s just…
What my friends don’t seem to understand is that leaving this man isn’t just leaving this man. It’s leaving a world, a life, an entire existence.

They tell me I’ll be better off.

They tell me that I’ll finally have a chance to be loved the way I need to be.

They tell me that with someone else, I could have what I want most, a child of my very own.

They grow impatient with me when I cannot intelligently reply. Logic, coherence, the simple stringing of words together…these have never been my strong suit.
If I could, I’d tell them of my guilt. I’d tell them of the girl that I was raised to be, the one who doesn’t leave, ever. Even with a broken heart. They know, of course. They blame it on a religion, a denomination, an upbringing. They even blame it on the interpretation of the Scriptures which I have been taught since infancy.

They tell me to think for myself. They tell me to form my own opinions. Their concern makes them more harsh, perhaps, than they mean to be, yet I still question it. If I were to leave this life just because I am being urged to, would that not make me be doing the same thing that they are accusing me of doing now? Blindly obeying someone without independent thought? I want to say this sometimes, but I don’t. I know how frustrating my Laura Petrie, fifties housewife demeanor can be to those raised in the post seventies demands for authority and equality. I know I’m an anomaly amongst my group. Even WERE I to begin some kind of breakaway journey, I still would not be understood. So I thank them for their advice. And I try to remember that their lives, their choices are not mine.

They can never, for example, call themselves princesses without meaning it sardonically. They do not understand the extent of the protective bubble that has been wrapped around me. They know I do not drive. What they do not know is how afraid I am to attempt most ANYTHING that is out of my ken. I can help breakdown something by Frost or Browning for you more easily than I can cook you a dinner. I am not helpless (as is pointed out to me with increasing frequency), but age does not equal experience, at least in my case.

See, were I to go, there would be much about me akin to a baby bird falling out of a nest. I am not someone to whom calm is an emotion easily achieved and panic would be my ruler for a very long time.

As I said, leaving this man means leaving a life. An existence. An entire ecosystem, if you will.

Our lives are twined together fairly well by now. To separate would mean losing my friends, my church, my job, my society. And forgive my skepticism, but much of me does not believe that the proffered help would actually appear.

And I do not care to be stranded.

You can GET another job, I have been told.
You can get another love.
You can get an apartment, a car, new friends.
You can even find a church, if that is what you care to do.

Really? Are you sure? Is what I want to reply. And yet I don’t. My friends are well aware of my fears. They know that telling me that someone, somewhere, even now is longing to love me, build a life with me and give me children is just going to provoke blank stares and disbelieving shakes of my head.

It’s true, my friends insist. There will be a job you love. There will be a car you can drive. And there will be a family. A real family, to give you the love you need.

See, that is a big word in our conversations. -Need-, I mean. It’s a word that cuts and hurts.

Because, you see, just as guilt is one of my struggles, just as trying to divide what is merely tradition and words of man from what is true and what I actually believe is something I’m currently burdened with, so to is the concept of want vs need.

The man I married, I am told, the man who is supposed to love me above all else, is not meeting my needs.
And yet. I am fed. I am employed. I have a roof over my head. I have more clothes than some people will see in a lifetime. There are days when I have ice cream running out of my nose and chocolate running out of my ears.

But, they ask me, don’t you want a real home? Don’t you want a place of safety, free from the ambiguity of your current arguments? Don’t you want a baby?
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Of course.

But there is that word again.

Want.

Just as what makes me happy changes from day to day (and sometimes minute to minute), so too does what I want. I can’t even decide what to watch on TV without flipping from show to show most nights. How then could I decide on a whole new life?

And whomever said that a baby was a NEED anyway?

There is fear, of course. Fear that no one will ever love me. Fear that my friends are wrong and that the man I am with is the only man who could exist with my moods and my variances and the sins that my mind constantly whispers that I commit over and over.

There is fear that the words are right and I AM a person incapable of the kind of love which I have begun to desire. There is fear that I will never be wrapped in someone’s arms as if I were the most precious thing in the world and that time will never be allowed to slip away as if there were no meetings to be attended, no ringing phone to answer.

There is fear that what he said standing in the kitchen is correct and that I AM too selfish, too given to my own whims and vagaries, too familiar with the emotions that drive me to my bed to ever lovingly raise a child. There is fear that I have become so driven by ego, so unaware of the thoughts and feelings of others that any mothering I attempted would be haphazard and neglectful at best and harsh and abusive at worst.

Besides, love, at least the kind of love which is often held out to me as being something which I could attain, is only a want. Do I not already have everything I truly need? And more?

It is not as if I have not been dissatisfied before. It is not as if my heart has not previously been broken. It has. And yet. Am I not still here? Will I not still be here should I make decisions that contradict my friends worried, yet well meaning advice?

They love me.
And I love them.

And yet.

They cannot hold my heart.
They cannot look at me as if I were the most precious woman in the world.
They cannot hold my hand and lead me to a new job, a new love, a new universe. They cannot even assure me that there IS a new job, a new love, a new universe.

Stop wanting guarantees, they tell me. Stop wanting to know where the road ends before you take the first step. Just…walk.
And yet.

I try. I love them.
They love me.
And I try to listen. I try to take their words to heart.
They see me hurting.
They see me feeling unwanted, undesirable, unloved.
And they want to help.
So they put on their thinking caps. They give me their best advice.
And they do not understand why I don’t take it.

They cannot understand. This is not their man. This is not their world.
I do not see myself as they see me.

They are not reminded, for example, that no matter how great the hurt between us, this is still my man. This will always be the man that God put in front of me that day in 1992 to be my husband. Kenny was in that place, at that time, to marry me.
No matter what happens, I will always believe that.

I am not saying, my friends tell me, that he doesn’t love you. I am not saying that he is not heaven sent. He just is unwilling or unable to love you THE WAY YOU NEED TO BE LOVED.

That phrase. That word.
Need.
Need. Need.
None of us, right now, are able to properly define it.
Even after endless nights
Of endless discussions
We still cannot tell you what it means.

He loves me.
He was sent to me.
We know that for right now, that is not enough.
We know that soon,
Decisions must be made.
But we cannot tell you what must happen.
We cannot tell you exactly
How to ease the sadness
How to dry the tears
How to let love in

Someone loves you, they tell me.
And yet, they don’t know that anymore than I do.
And they are not the ones living this life.

They can hold my hand.
They can lose sleep.
They can cry and pray and urge

But it’s not their bodies
Not their words
Not their man.

I’m hurting them.
I don’t mean to.
I’m hurting him.
I don’t mean to do that either.
It’s killing me in fact.

I do wish…with all my heart…
That I could see things his way.

That I could be all about the things that he is.

That I didn’t need to be taken in someone’s arms and rocked
Until I felt safe.
That I didn’t have so many fears that I literally pull the covers over my head
And weep
Until the storm passes.

I wish I could be as sure as my husband.
I wish I could be as wise as my friends.
But I’m not.

I’m full of doubt
And fear
And uncertainty
And a history
Of changing my mind.

So I don’t know much
Of what it is I want.

I do know that:
More than a baby,
I want love.
More than being a mother,
I want to be safe.
More than a family
I want to be someone’s only

I just don’t know why I can’t see it when he tells me I’m loved
I just don’t know why I can’t believe it.
It makes me feel awful.
Like maybe my fears are right and I don’t deserve happiness
Like maybe I’ve been so self centered over my lifetime
That I can have no more

So they give their advice
They tell me time is running out
They ask me why I’m not moving on

Toward love
Toward happiness
Toward a baby
And I cannot explain
I can tell them I’m afraid
Yet they do not understand why
I tell them I’m unsure
They ask me to take a leap of faith
I want to ask if it doesn’t take just as much faith to wait…to listen
But my friends are all about action
They want me to just do something

Well
I don’t know what I’m going to do any more than they
I may go crazy and refuse to speak anymore
I may dress in white and hand out flowers promoting peace
I may give myself to every man I see
I may become so immersed in prayer that I become no good for anything on earth at all
I may actually follow through with what I’m always saying and go around hitting people over the head
I just do not know

I know that I want love
I know that I want TO love
And I think that sometimes that love is not a Want, but is a Need
But I cannot tell you where to find it
I cannot tell you where I’ll look for it

My friends wonder, I know
I wonder too
And worry
And weep
And grieve

And yet I know that I love him
I just wish
I just wish
I just wish
The heart holding that love
Was able
To love him enough

This One. This Man. This Love of Mine.

I was fourteen the first time I fell in love. Ninth grade was a very heady time for me. We were reading –Romeo and Juliet- in English class. We were working on –West Side Story- in Musical Theatre. And I was chasing after someone who was chasing after my best friend. Soapy? Yes. Dramatic? Yes. But it fed right into my boy crazy, drama queen tendencies and helped pave the way for the rest of my overly emotional, “…but…but you just HAVE to love me forever and ever” adolescence and young adulthood. I came out of that year the star (at least in my mind) of my own little reality show. In truth, I was no more special or unique than any girl going through poutings and pangs, but I loved him. As much as a fourteen year old can love anyone, I loved him. And though it was one sided and I acted in ways that now cause my older, more experienced self much grief and embarrassment, we are currently friends of a sort. And every now and then I flash back to our lunch breaks and the way my classmates and I would giggle, believing that we knew, really knew about love.

The second time I fell that deeply came when I was seventeen and a senior. It, too, was (in its way) a heady, romantic year. In class, we were reading –The Once and Future King-. We were putting out a school newspaper. And, once again, I was chasing a boy, believing I knew everything there was to know about love. I didn’t, of course. I knew something of heartache, something of loss, something of packing up a life and moving from one country to another and back again. I knew something of the pressure a girl can put on herself when she is being schooled with bright, driven young men and women all looking beyond their own campus to future opportunities that would take them around the country and even, in some cases, around the world.

On the back side of Christmas Break, I learned something of what it meant when the boy you had been dreaming of, chasing after and journaling about looks at you one night and decides to kiss you. But still, though I was sure that the most romantic year I’d ever known just HAD to be a sign of something predestined, I knew nothing of love.

And now? Well, to be honest, I’m not so sure.

Indulge me for a minute, will you? Travel back in time with me to a place called 1992.

If you have read my previous entries, you will recognize that date.

1992:
The year I graduated high school and moved to yet another state…this time to Kentucky, where I still remain
The year both of my mother’s parents died, plunging my family into deep grief and an inability to help each other that lasted well beyond the twelve months of that particular calendar
The year I began college, introducing me to people who are now dear and trusted friends for whom I will be forever grateful
The year that someone decided to put his hands on me, causing a deep seated belief that I had literally lost my mind and could never trust my own instinct or judgment again

And, of course:
The year that seventeen year old Stephanie met a twenty eight year old man who is now her husband

It was not, in case you were wondering, love at first sight. I was still coming out of my Year of Beau, still dreaming of a combination Lancelot, Rhett Butler and Heathcliff. I was about to enter over a decade of believing myself hopeless, helpless and insane. He was in his third year of professoring and thought of me as “The New Minister at Church’s Little Daughter”.

Two years later, after Kenny had moved away to graduate school and I had begun a life of college during the week and my parents’ hometown on the off days, we were a couple. Some months after that, I was beginning another romantic senior year. This time, however, instead of being kissed and sent away by the boy I was chasing after, I was wearing an engagement ring and dreaming of dresses, flowers, vows and cake.

The problem, however, was that I still knew nothing of love. Because of this, I began a new life that was troubled almost from the moment Kenny and I began envisioning it.

See, here is something that most people do not know-or have forgotten: Kenny married for love. I did not.

Are you shocked? Do you think me some kind of manipulative user? Do you want to stand up for my man and call me a liar and a deceiver? It’s okay. That’s what I was…to a point.

Manipulative? Yes.

User? Yes.

Lover? Well, to answer that one, you’ll have to define “love” for me.

Did I love him? Yes. Yes, of course I did. Even as young as I was then, I knew that there-right there standing in front of me-was the man that God had put down into my world, my own personal little world, to marry. I knew him to be smart, and kind, and faithful and hard working and protective. And I knew that he loved me.

I, however? I was, in my own way, using the man.

See, with the grief over losing our loved ones and the confusion over moving from country to country only to discover that finding a place where we landed was not going to be very easy, came anger. My people are not quiet, like Kenny’s side is. We have feelings and we express them somewhat freely. We are tightly knit. We are bound together. But we are not afraid to emote. And we do a lot of it.

A year out of college, five years after my brain rolled out of my head and about twenty months into being engaged, I couldn’t take it anymore. I loved my family, but I couldn’t live in that world. Our hurts and hearts were colliding and no one was being healed. Enter my Mister.

I had had other options. My best friend’s cousin, for example, offered to set me up in a trailer, hunt me squirrels and give me many many babies. As my best friend’s cousin was barely of age and had never worked a day in his life-and I kinda wanted more than he was offering…oh, who am I kidding, I wanted a LOT more than he was offering- I hastily declined. (He was in prison and in between wives the last I heard, if any of my single friends want to follow up on THAT lead.)
Kenny, though? Kenny wanted to marry me. Kenny wanted to MARRY ME. Kenny STILL wanted to marry me after our wedding day talk in which I told him I didn’t and couldn’t love him and he replied that he was okay with that, that he had enough love for the both of us.

It was the perfect line. It could have been scripted, it was that romantic. And suddenly, there he was, my man, the spouter of perfect lines.

And we got married. And we had a blissful almost month long honeymoon in which the real world only intruded during infrequent phone calls “back home”. I was a princess. I was a Southern Belle. I was beautiful and charming and very very young.

And still, I knew nothing of love.

DID I love him, I can hear you asking. DO I love him now?

Well yes, yes, I do. And no, no, not in the way you mean.

I was nineteen when Kenny and I first began to be seen together. He taught me everything he could think of. He stood me over the sink and handed me peanut M and Ms one by one until I could swallow them whole. This was his way of combating my lifelong conviction that I just couldn’t and wouldn’t swallow pills. He had me practice pouring catsup until I could start my own portion and didn’t need to ask anyone else to do it for me.
I was in awe. He was smart. He was confident. He was capable. And I was very much in hero worship mode. True, he didn’t fill my car with roses like my brother did for HIS girlfriend. He didn’t plan scavenger hunts that ended in surprise picnics. But he loved me. He was the strength I ran to when my family was fighting again. He was the calming influence who almost singlehandedly planned and orchestrated our wedding because I was a blubbering mess through both the rehearsal and the ceremony. He introduced me to people like Styx and let me dance around his living room singing “Crystal Ba-a-a-ll”, not even minding that I was badly out of tune.

At twenty three and newly married, I was STILL in hero worship mode. The problem was, I was often in hero worship mode alone as Kenny was still working on his doctorate and teaching at two schools, trying to be a new husband AND caring for gravely ill parents. Several years ago, in one of our relatively drama free moments, we decided that if we had it to do over again, we probably (had we been thinking) would have waited AT LEAST until he had gotten his PhD and some of the pressure was not choking the life, and love, our of our brand new togetherness.

For it was. We were under tremendous pressure. I was isolated much of the time in a town where, though I had lived here for college, I really knew no one who had not graduated and moved on. Kenny was on the road in a ninety mile triangle trying to attend to teaching, his mother who was, it turned out, not going to live much past our honeymoon, and me. By the time he got to me, I was angry and bored. It was not an auspicious start.

Still, we thought, five years later after having attended funerals for at least ten close relatives and friends, including both of Kenny’s parents…still, we love each other. We have a new house to fill with memories. Surely we are past the worst of it.

And we were right. In a way, we were. What we didn’t count on was that little girls grow from twenty three to thirty in ways that men aging from thirty three to forty do not. Suddenly, the hero worship goggles began to chafe. Kenny and I began to fight over things we never thought we would…and believe me, our first five years were doozies. He had an office to escape to when things got bad. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do except pace the hallways growing madder and madder.

I loved him…at least, I thought I loved him. I couldn’t understand why things were getting so much harder. I was hurting. I was dying for some kind of change, but honestly? I didn’t see a way out.

The way out came, as ways out often do, in a most unexpected place. A tiny little town named LaFollette, Tennessee came calling at just the right time. Kenny had a friend who wanted to buy a small print shop and needed someone to partner with him. He thought that Kenny might be the right person for the job. He was right. Kenny IS the right person for the job. What none of us foresaw, however, was that in getting Kenny, the shop got me too. Suddenly, we had a common goal. We had something to strive for. We had a reason to work together. We were happier. We fought less. I had a reason to test out my latently developed grown up skills and Kenny was able to stretch and expand his abilities and creativity in ways he had not been doing as a man teaching about computers.
Still, even then, though I had learned more of love and the twists that lead off in unexpected ways, I did not fully know it.
I still do not know it.

Kenny and I, as you may have observed, are stretching once again. Once I hit thirty, once I was able to find counselors and companions whom I could fully trust, I slowly, very slowly, began to grow away from my husband. Some of this amuses him. Some of this, however, leads to conflict the likes of which I had thought we put away years ago
.
If you ask me, I’ll tell you that we fight over typical things:
He cannot, for example, seem to put his things away and implores me not to touch his office, for, though it is a junkpile to me, it is a finely organized mess to my husband and he has everything just where he wants it.

Or, take for example the way we communicate:
I like stories. I have a co worker with whom I frequently converse. It has literally taken three days before to reach a conclusion of one of my tales as I tend to meander off into stray paragraphs here or lost sentences there. Kenny? He believes in the fewer words, the better. Perhaps it is because he expends so much of his energy on his students, but, by the time he returns home to me, he doesn’t want to hear my chatter. I have literally had to tell him…please be quiet. You are NOT going to be interested in this, but you are the only person I have to talk to right now, so I’m telling it. I will let you know when I have made my point and you can talk again.

This is typical. There are often messy vs neat and quiet vs rambling people in relationships all around the world.

Some of what we fight over, is less typical but not unheard of. I was, as I have said, raised in a somewhat freer emotional state than my husband. We talk over each other. We cry. We tease. We laugh. We love. We hug. We like our puns and our inside jokes and we have been known to say “It’s a Hall thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Somewhere along the line, however, I absorbed into myself a need to be loved on. It wasn’t as if the people around me DIDN”T love me, it was just that I needed to be TOLD and SHOWN such.

My husband is not a shower. My husband is not a teller. He is not my father, bringing flowers and chocolates on both holidays and just because. He is not my brother, coming home to play with the children so that his weary wife could rest. My husband is an “I feed and clothe and shelter you. If I didn’t love you, you’d know it because you’d stop eating” kind of person.

So he loves me, yet we fight.

Again though, this is not unheard of. There is a whole series devoted to finding the way individuals both receive and express their loves to spouses and children and the world around them. Some hug. Some clean out garages. Some bring in just because bracelets and necklaces. My husband feeds me and keeps a roof over my head.

And yet.

And yet.

I am no longer twenty three sitting alone in a trailer on a hot summer day. I am no longer thirty standing at the door of our new shop helping my husband greet customers. I am four decades old. I am still trying to figure out this love thing.

Do I want to scream?

Sometimes.

When I think I’m trying to express why I’m hurting and how what he said made me feel yet he thinks I’m bringing up something from the past to punish him for a slip of the tongue that he can’t even remember?

Yes, I want to scream.

When I start to cry and he asks me what’s wrong only to hear the answer and turn away with a “Haven’t you gotten over that YET?”

I want to scream.

When I approach him for affection only to be told that, “kissing is stupid. Wouldn’t you rather have supper?” and “Of course I love you. What makes you think I don’t love you? I feed you, don’t I?”

I want to scream. And hit things.

When my friends say, “but you jump. You run. You are so friendly with people and like to talk. Your husband, however? He’s so…boring. Aren’t you bored?”
I want to scream at him to do something, not remembering that the twenty hours a day he works-the very things making him so sleepy at home- were part of what I considered pluses when I was younger and knowing deep down that I wanted someone faithful, someone people could trust.

So, do I love him?

Yes. And no.

It’s not a Guinevere kind of love. It’s not a Cinderella kind. It’s not the kind of love that my brother and sister in law have. Kenny and I aren’t romantic. We aren’t domestic. And I’m only a princess in my own mind.

Yet.

For every time he tells me that only stupid people watch the television shows that I do, only to not understand that saying that is to call ME stupid
There is the time that the heater went out during my shower and Kenny boiled water on the stove so that I would not be cold while rinsing the shampoo out of my hair. It was the –Out of Africa- moment I’d dreamed of and one of the sweetest, most perfect things anyone has ever done for me.

For every time I cannot make plans because we don’t know if one of the local funeral homes will need us to print cards or we don’t know if the machine will act up running a new order

There is the time that I stayed home from work in order to meet up with some of the girls and see a movie. When they couldn’t make it, Kenny drove back from Tennessee, took me by the hand and presented me with a date, even though he knew going in that it would be a movie he hated. He was right. It was. He took me anyway.

It’s not unusual, of course. Every couple has a story. Every story includes likes and dislikes, happy surprises and broken promises. Almost every couple goes into their relationship thinking that they know love, only to realize later that they really knew nothing at all.
Not every young bride grows up the way I did. Kenny was my twenties and soon will have been my thirties. Twenty years is a long time for a young woman. Even one who thought she knew of love.

What do I know for sure?

Not much, really.

I don’t know what is going to happen.

I don’t know if I will forever be sad over not having babies.

I don’t know if I will always be looking to my husband for affection he just cannot provide.

I don’t know how badly my heart will continue to break.

I don’t know if my melodrama will influence him any more than I know if his coolness will influence me.

And yet.

This is still the man who held me all those afternoons ago while I was crying.

This is still the man who told me he wanted to marry me no matter what.

This is still the man who said he had love enough for both of us.

This is the man I have used.

This is the man I have idolized.

This is the man I have learned from, the man I followed, the man I chose.

This is the man I have married.

This…this is the man I have loved.

Even though it is something of which I know
Not much.

Not much, it turns out,
At all.