Happy Anniversary

Man, I wish I had written that.

Here I stand at the counter, bread rising beside me, eyes welling up and sniffling at a really great blog post that my wife sent me. It took me three runs at it to keep from completely going to pieces and distracting my eight-year-old from his Wii time. It would have been nice to be the one to find and send it, but am glad she did – it feels right, like this is what real people our age do instead of exchanging anniversary cards (Monday, 18 years).

I wish I had written it. It was perfect. The writer waxed pithy, witty and wise about the doldrums of love – the iron age of romance, these monotonous Middle Years. That seemingly endless phase of the partnership where everyday inchworm victories trump mad acts of passion… that is, assuming we’re not too-sleep deprived to notice that we won something. Clearly, I can relate. So maybe I could have written it.

Except that – conversely of the author – I am the writer, the child-wrangler, the stay-at-home, the apron-wearer. And at this moment – of all the many of late– I feel more like a Mom than ever. The perspective was obviously female, a juxtaposition of her everyman husband/father/partner through the Rom-Com lens we have all come to believe is the end-all/be-all of love and romance. Yet standing here at my bread-baking counter, smack dab at the half-life crossroads, all eyebrows, graying chest hair and swelling prostate, I could really relate… but then again, I’ve always been one to cry at movies.

Still, the thoughts popping in my head over the last few months truly have started to sound like script lines in the teleplay , the stuff that the TV hausfrau says during the throes of a mid-life come-apart. I have to step back and ask myself “Did I really just say that?!” And the answer is yes. So I might have written it.

So it is what it is. I am too old, tired and pre-occupied to try to reverse a seemingly natural order of things. Especially not when this life – finally, at long last, through these debts and doubts and worries – seems to be falling into place. That nagging feeling of “What if?” is losing ground to a charging notion of “What might?” It is a time of hope and possibility – especially sweet, since it has not always seemed so.

I think could have written that. 27 years after that first date, we are still together, closer than ever, settling comfortably into the reality of us. She has, after all, been with me through two-thirds of my years on the planet. A long time, and some long years in the mix, to be sure. But even when the distant spaces come more often, seem wider and longer, echo more loudly, the light of our love is always visible to me across the canyon, even when things feel dark.

I wished that I had written that, but wrote this instead, and I am glad.

~ by The Bedtime Sets on July 31, 2013.