Twenty-Six years ago today was our wedding day...I was 28, he 32. Hard to believe 26 years have gone by. Our magic is that we didn't always agree or see life from the same view, but we always respected each other...even when mad...or more importantly when we disagreed. We had to work into our life our differences.
The greatest thing I learned from my husband is how to be your self.
How to stand up for what you feel and to be stubborn about it. The things that used to really upset me, are the same things I admire. He was un-bendable....and still is...about who he is.
Once I stopped trying to change him or wish he was different... we got along much better...or I got along much better...I lovingly accepted.
I learned to respect his uniqueness and his unabashedly being himself, regardless of fashion, political correctness, other's wishes etc, he just lived life guided by his own inner sense of being.
What I can always count on is him being himself...peacefully so. Honestly. He doesn't expect others to think, feel or care like he does. He just does himself, by himself, outstandingly...with reckless abandon. A man with his own mind and sense of personal morals and values.
Perhaps the only time he questions himself, is as a father. A role that no man can know, but only can learn by doing, without knowing. And can know better in hindsight. And yet, the greatest gift a father can give his children is to model being a strong individual, to love yourself by being yourself...and to love and respect their mother. He has.
He has taught me love by being himself...and by respecting who I am. We both are allowed to be different...without consequences. We respectfully go our own ways.
Our love is unbound, free and strong...due to our personal freedom.
We don't complete each other, we are complete standing alone.
In the midst of my greatest breakdown, when I didn't know who I was or if our marriage would survive, I told him we will put our marriage on the floor, that we will work on each of us finding our center; on being who we are...and if in the end, we ended up with two people who no longer cared to be together, one of us would be strong enough to let the other go. That we both had to be strong and authentically our self...and not stay for the sake of the other's happiness, but we were free to stay or to go, if need be. We ended up with "I love you today..." for we didn't know in the midst of so many changes, how this story would end.
And we still don't know.
What I do know, Is...I love you today!
