I can’t remember the last time I wrote about John. Just him, as my husband, as a man. Keeping our parenthood seperate from our spouseness is something we haven’t totally gotten a handle on. Hank, until a bigger apartment comes along, lives in our bedroom for the moment. She sleeps in her own crib, but it is four feet from the bed on my side. Her changing table is wedged between the window and John’s nightstand. Her clothes are in our closet. She goes to bed before seven each night and we are forced to spend our time in the living room. All of this makes it difficult to be together. As spouses. As people.
We have absolutely no privacy. We have no space of our own in which to just lay around with lights dim, curled and cuddled together while watching bad t.v. We have nowhere to rest and read by lamplight instead of on the iPhone. There is nowhere to laugh ourselves to sleep or talk above a whisper. Nowhere to marvel over how lovely a life we live. We’re displaced.
Two weeks ago (was it a month ago?), we went on our first date in a year (maybe longer?). We went to a movie and out to a really nice dinner and just talked and felt like grown-ups for a few hours. I looked at my husband across the table while he ate his dinner and talked about the tragectory of his career and I thought: how the fuck did I get this lucky?! My husband, my man, JOHN, is beautiful and brilliant and patient and kind. He is loving and supportive and funny and dear. He is generous and open-hearted and stalwart and soft. What John is, surpasses any notion of absolutely right I’d ever had in my life.
I know that for him, from me, it is the same. Each morning I see him off to work with the comfortable certainty that there is no one on this planet who is better suited to be with either of us. I say this knowing full well that we are each, in our own spectacular way, a challenge and a handful. But knowing too, that we have each of us, in our own way, thrived and capitalized on those idiosyncrasies. We are just absolutely right together. Period.
And so I miss him. I miss getting into bed early in the evening and just being there together. I miss the wind down at the end of the day that is playful and silly and essential to our couplehood. I miss our terrible jokes and sweet murmurings as we drift off. I miss my marriage. I want to go out on a date, have some wine, come home and get busy. (P.S.: we got home from our date and cuddled with Hank.)
This October we will celebrate five years of sharing our lives. Nearly five years ago, a girl met a boy and they made one another laugh. They fell in love and decided to live together within five months of that meeting. Together they raised an amazing daughter and in turn each grew into the man and woman he and she were supposed to be. John and I found one another just when we’d given up looking. Which is terribly cliche, but truthful. We found each other and we grew together. We have changed behaviors for one another and sometimes hated the process, but have always loved and been in love.
I look at John each day and feel a clenching in my core. I look at John with wonderment. With absolute amazement that he isn’t a dream. That he’s still there each morning and that each night he’s back again. I view my husband as a precious fantasy come real. Like a beloved and cherished gift. I look at John and I am in love. Still. I look at John, at our life, at our girls and my brain clouds at trying to understand how so much fabulousness could exist in one place.
Last night, in the dark silence of Hank’s bedroom, John turned to me and whispered: this whole being married for the rest of our lives thing is pretty awesome.
Indeed.




















