Some days I'm surprised he still loves me. I'm cranky and crazy.I throw temper tantrums and rarely cook anything that passes for dinner. I spend money on books and tank tops I'll never wear. I never wear sexy underwear. But here we are. Married. Still. After all this time.
He still looks at me the same way you know. The way he looked at me all those drunken nights in college. When we were way past pleasantries. When the booze continued to flow well into the night. It surprises me that he still looks my way when I undress. My body settling now. Jiggling in places it shouldn't. My belly still soft and squishy as if I have a baby in the house. Knowing all too well that that baby is five. But still he looks and cheers, as if he's won a prize. Still After all this time.
We fight. Just as passionately as we always have. We argue about the mundane. We debate over the obvious. Sometimes we disagree for fun, for sport. But we bring something out in each other. That love. That fight. That passion. To use words. To use our brains. To talk about something other than dinner and laundry, Dora or Adventure Time. We still fight. And make up and fight again. Still. After all this time.
We've come a long way since the early years. The years of going back and forth. Testing the waters. Somehow I always knew, and he did too, we just had to work on it. And we still are working. Our hardest job, besides parenting. We work every day to make it right. Make it work. And most days it does. We find comfort in the monotony. Comfort in the chaos. Comfort in each other. Because despite what I say or do, he is still my favorite. Still. After all this time.
He still take chances on me. He support decisions that I make, even when they aren't solid. Even when they are selfish. He take chances when I come up with big ideas, that almost always putter out in due time. He does it because he believes in me, in my voice, in my experience. Even when it does't seem that way in the beginning. He will fight it and debate it and then let me do it anyway and when it goes bust, he begs me not to cry, because my tears still kill him. My tears still do him in. Still. After all this time.
Some days I'm still surprised that we are married, because it was all I wanted when I was twenty two. At twenty two I wanted to be his wife so badly. To be in love, and here we are, still in love. That overwhelming sense of contentment washing over me. That sense of accomplishment when I see our children laughing and playing. Like our first day at Disneyland when I teared up almost immediately, because there we were, living out a real life dream. Family vacations, baby's first steps, our first dance, were all simple dreams of mine as a sorority girl hopelessly in love. He thinks I've forgotten. He thinks I'm complacent, but I'm content. No matter the fight, we still wake up under the same roof. No matter the debate, we still put the kids in the bath. No matter the issue, we still find ourselves in bed, mid afternoon, on a Sunday, hiding from the kids, eating ice cream, and watching movies that use the "F" word. Because it's my favorite thing to do. Here with him, is my favorite place to be.
Still. After all this time.
