We’re The Lucky Ones

I was conflicted about what to write on Friday.

It didn’t seem right to write a Fashion Friday on Good Friday.

It seemed more appropriate to write about faith on a sober reflection day.  But I’d been short of words and had little fresh to offer.

Then I had this wonderful Thursday night out with my husband and decided I would wait to write until today and write about love.

Last week, a couple invited Bray and I to one of our favorite little spots in all of Houston.  It’s basically a bar where singers/songwriters come to croon on a tiny stage in a small room filled with tables crushed in together.

It’s the place Bray and I met over 12 years ago.  This singer/songwriter, a new one to me, sang with all her heart in her black leather pants and her side of lemon water.  I glanced over to the corner where, in early December 2003, I met Bray wearing my own black leather pants. I can still see us exactly – him walking over from the bar in his blue jeans and button down shirt and a much younger me wearing a long gray sweater and high heeled boots with those pants.

This talented musician crooned about broken hearts and blood moons and Hallelujahs and her grandmother.  She even had us turn and sing to each other how I want to be with you.

You see, it was an ordinary Thursday night.  Bray had been out of town and I’d been running from a work appointment to the dentist to the house to relieve our nanny.  He’d had to coach kindergarten softball, which apparently did not go well, and we were both frayed and torn as we dodged rush hour traffic to make the early concert on a back street in the center of the city.

But as she sang about being the lucky ones, we knew it and believed it and leaned into, and onto, each other.  We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer and watched a precious married couple near the front kiss during each song as they celebrated the wife’s birthday with tenderness and obvious adoration.

There’s this idealized romanticized notion of love and marriage with the roses and the silky lingerie that still fits after 10 years and sunset walks on the beach. But you see, I don’t like roses and my honeymoon lingerie doesn’t fit my post-triplet body and we don’t live near a beach.

I wouldn’t trade all that in for my real life lessons on love and marriage. Where we go on dates and I have peanut butter on my hair and he pretends not to notice and we still hold hands and we kiss hello and goodbye and he wakes up at 5 am to hide Easter eggs so we can enjoy one more year of the kids believing and hunting eggs in pajamas at daybreak. We mess it up and hurt each other’s feelings and struggle to compromise, but we can still sit in a little hole in the wall on a back street in the center of the city and be oh-so-grateful to have found each other in the exact same spot on that late night all those years ago.