It's possible

Yesterday was my husband’s birthday.

To me, birthdays mean a lot more than a celebration and cake and presents. To me, birthdays mean that I got to spend another year with this person I love. When you only get one, single solitary birthday, ever, with someone you love things like birthdays change in your heart.

If you’ve read much of what I write here, you know that my husband is the rock of this family. You know that he held us together through the aftermath of Damon’s death, holds us together still as the waves swallow me and regularly render me helpless. You know that he held us together when our Rainbow was born premature and he had to leave his wife alone in a hospital bed and follow an ambulance carrying his infant son. You know he woke with me every three hours for months to help me as I struggled to feed our baby from my body, desperate to provide whatever protection I could. You know I adore him and that he deserves it.

What I want you to also know is that it’s real. The crazy, obnoxious, over-the-top adoration I blubber on about here is real. It isn’t a “public face” fabrication or my way of trying to convince myself we are ok.

The reason it matters to me that you know it is real is this:

IT IS POSSIBLE.

It’s possible to be wildly, passionately, soothingly, simply in love.

It’s possible to feel magic in someone’s touch.

It’s possible for that magic to get stronger the longer you’re together.

It’s possible to be someone’s perfect match and for someone to be yours.

It’s possible to fight for your relationship and to win.

It’s possible to forgive, really truly forgive, even really big stuff.

It’s possible to want nothing more in all the world than to be blessedly alone, and to still be wildly in love.

It’s possible to have great sex, often, and for it to feed your soul, not just your body.

It’s possible for true love to start in a bar or a church or a school… and it’s possible for it to start of rocky, really rocky and still be real.

It’s possible to be impossibly irrevocably broken and still in love, still worthy of love, still able to give love.

I really don’t think until my husband and I had been married a good 4 – 5 years that I finally started to settle in and believe this lovely madness wasn’t going anywhere. I finally started to trust that we were going to make it, not just make it, but want to make it, together.

No one ever told me this kind of love was possible, or even real. I didn’t think it was. I didn’t know to look for it, to hold out for the one person that could calm my ever-rolling internal chaos. The one person who is home.

It is possible.

It is possible.

Happy Birthday to the one, murmur.