When You Think Your Love Story Is Boring
"My love life will never be satisfactory until someone
runs through an airport to stop me from getting on a flight." --
Teenager Post #14029 featured here.
He drove us all home 18 hours over two days.
Three kids and hundreds of miles and potty breaks and princess
pull-ups, the car covered in the markers I'd bought for window art.
Turns out the soft beige ceiling of a mini van makes a perfect canvas.
Rainbow swirls color the door panels and there are goldfish crackers
crushed so deep into the seats that they will likely be there come next
summer and this same road trip all the way to Northern Michigan and the
lake that his family have been coming to for decades.
He's never run through an airport for me.
Three times he's held my hands, my shaking legs, my head, my heart as
I've bared down and groaned a baby into being. He has run for ice chips
and doctors and night shifts and laid himself low to help me hold on
through the hard rock and roll and push and pull of labor and I've never
drowned holding onto his hand.
There is a rumor, an urban myth, a fiction, a fantasy, a
black-and-white screen cliché that love looks like the mad, romantic
dash through airports for a last chance at a flailing kiss.
And then the credits roll.
And the lights come on.
And we must go back to our real lives where we forget that love really lives.
I threw up so hard and fast and often one night in a farmhouse in
Pennsylvania that I couldn't stand come morning. He moved over and out
and gave me the bed. He went out for crackers and soda and mind numbing
games to keep the three kids occupied and away from mom.
I looked in the mirror and there was nothing romantic looking back at
me, but around the wrinkles in my eyes, the parched, white cheeks,
there was the deep romance of being loved beyond how I looked.
He's never run through an airport for me.
He's gone out for milk at 10 p.m., he's held our children through
bouts of stomach viruses and told me there is nothing about his kids
that disgusts him. He's carried us on his shoulders when we were too
tired or too sad or too done to keep doing the every day ins and outs
that make up a life.
He's unloaded a hundred loads of laundry and put the dishes away.
He lays down his life and
it looks like so many ordinary moments stitched together into the
testimony of a good man who comes home to his family in the old minivan,
the one with the broken air conditioning.
It undoes me every time to look around and find him there, having my
back in the day to day and the late night into late night and then next
year again.
He's run a thousand times around the sun with me and we hold hands
and touch feet at night between the covers even when we're wretched and
fighting we're always fighting our way back to each other.
He's never run through an airport for me.
He runs on snatched sleep and kids tucked into his shoulder on both sides of the bed.
He is
patient and kind.
He
always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And we come running to him. When the battered white minivan pulls
into the driveway his children trip over themselves, their abandoned
Crocs and the pool bag to be the first to open the door and spill out
their day into the hands of the man who can catch them.
He's never run through an airport for me.
This ordinary unremarkable love walks slowly every day alongside. One step, one day, one T-ball practice at a time.
One permission slip signed, one Lunchable, one school play, one art
project, one Lego box, one more night time cup of water delivered at a
time.
This ordinary love that wakes up with bad breath and crease marks on its cheeks and is the daily bread that sustains
across time zones and countries and cultures and the exhaustion of
trying to figure out how to be a parent and a grown up and somebody's
forever.
And this is a love life -- to live life each small, sometimes unbearably tedious moment -- together.
To trip over old jokes and misunderstandings. To catch our runaway
tongues and tempers and gift them into the hands of the person who was
gifted to us.
He lets me warm my ice cold feet between his legs and the covers at night.
He has never run through an airport for me.
This is love with the lights on and eyes wide open. This is the brave
love, the scared love, the sacred boring, the holy ordinary over sinks
of dirty dishes and that one cupboard in the kitchen with the broken
hinge.
This post originally appeared on LisaJoBaker.com
