Thirteen Years of Choices

Love is a funny thing.

We celebrate it when it begins.  We write books and screenplays about when it starts.

When it’s new and exciting, we write songs.  We have butterflies in our stomach and everything is that much gentler.  We slow dance in the rain and make grand gestures, we are mostly blind to everything and helpless in our infatuation.

It`s terrifying and beautiful and wonderful.

And it doesn`t last.

Because we stop celebrating love when it`s comfortable.

Songs aren`t composed about the 2nd decade of marriage.  There`s no ballad of the dirty hair and sweatpants Saturday, mowing the lawn and washing the toilets.  

No one is making a movie where the climax is finding the Lego piece that was absolutely irreplaceable amongst all the dried food and dog hair in the vacuum bag.  There`s no short story about  the time when you realize the fight you had in the morning isn`t even worth making up over because you both forgot you were mad at each other by bedtime.

But the truth is, anyone can fall in love.

There’s no sacrifice in falling in love.  You aren’t giving anything to your lover by becoming infatuated with them.  When two people fall in love with each other, it is inherently selfish.

You need them, and you want to spend time with them.

For the most part, falling in love is not a choice and it is almost entirely about you.

 I can still remember the 18 year old kids, music blasting out of our car, dancing in the parking lot of a park at midnight.  He’s already been gone for 3 months at Basic Training and he’s leaving again the next morning for another few months. 

He needs me to wait.
I need him to come home to me.

So he proposes and I readily agree.

That was not sacrificial.

That was a desperate love that filled our own needs in each other.
Because that’s what falling in love looks like.

But staying in love, that’s different.

When the wedding was over and I left school and got to a new city and couldn’t find a job and he was never home and for months I didn’t even want to get out of bed and sometimes when he came home from being away for weeks I hadn’t washed a single dish since he left because I stopped caring.
That was different.

When he got home from Kandahar the first time and his nightmares would wake me up and I’d hide in the guestroom for the night,
That was different.

When the pregnancy test said #3 and I cried for weeks and then threw up in the garbage can at the mall while we hurriedly replaced baby supplies before he left again,
That was different.

Every slammed door, every word spoken in frustrated anger.

Every time I think he’s being an ass and every spiteful action that reflects it.

When you reach that point in childbirth where you no longer care if you poop on the delivery table in front of him.

When your kid throws up and he puts out his hand to catch it at the restaurant and you laugh so hard you don’t even move to help.

When you get to the point when you can fight until you storm off in the night because you know, 100% without a doubt, that in the end neither of you are going anywhere.  Ever.

 For thirteen years of marriage, Dh and I have chosen to love each other.

In those moments when we plan date night before he leaves and I wear the pretty shoes and we go on the town and watch movies and window shop and order desert when he says he doesn’t want any and then eats half of mine anyways. And then after we get home to bed, it’s still hours before we are sleeping.

And those moments when it’s been such a long week we forgot he ‘s leaving in the morning and I say I want us to go out at 10pm and he throws on a hoodie and I put my hair back and we go to the pub down the street where I have some wine and am mostly asleep before we even get home. When I wake in the night I melt back into him and he sleepily covers my head with his hands and I drift back off.

I remember once when the phone rang in the middle of the night.  When I answered the familiar crackle of the satellite phone responded.  After a few minutes, I told you it had been our 1st Anniversary several days earlier. 
The silence was longer than the phone delay, I wondered if we had been cut off.

Then he said
“I’m sorry.”
and I said
“You never promised me you would always be able to call on anniversaries.  I don’t need that.”
And he said,
“Just know it’s hot and I’m dirty and I’ve been gone for months and I don’t kow when we’re coming back and I still love you more at this exact moment than I did even on our wedding day.”

Since then, he’s only been home less than a handful of Anniversaries, he won’t be home today.

But my choice overrides the space between us.

He doesn’t have to be home to remind me that on this, our 13th year, and for every year that will come next no matter where it find us, I will make the conscious and real choice to love him.

It won’t look like a romantic song.

It will look a lot more like real life.

And I think I like the choice more than the falling after all. 

Happy 13th Anniversary, Dh.
Thanks for always choosing me, even when I make the choice harder.

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