To my husband the day after his 39th birthday:
I met my husband in a political propaganda class three months before college graduation. I can write a couple of pages about our meeting, but simply put. Three months until we were out in the world. My husband will tell you he didn’t want to get involved, seeing as how he was graduating, I will tell you, he never had a chance!
17 years later, the reasons I fell in love with him then still hold true. He is the most caring individual I have ever met.
Now for my story.
3 months before graduation I had been dating a bona-fide rock star – at least he thought he was. Two months before that, he had taken off for Costa Rica and not even cared enough to tell me. What can I say, I was young. Rock band. Drama. Boy friend took off to Costa Rica. Makes for a great song…don’t it?
About the time I met my future husband, the old rock star resurfaced. Apparently, after soul-searching on a tropical coast for a few months, he had realized I may have been worth fighting for. I now had two love interests.
I’ll tell you how I picked the “right guy” for me. Around this same time, I was getting my wisdom teeth out. You know, I had to take advantage of my wonderful healthcare package before I graduated and became unemployed (pre-Obama Care where you really couldn’t afford a health plan out of college!)
I went home for a few days to recover. Mr. Rock Star lived by my hometown. He stopped by to tell me how much I looked like a swollen chipmunk. From what I recall, that was about what I took with me from that conversation; a swollen chipmunk. I went back to college and hung out with my roommate pretty much waiting for the swelling to go down, when this guy I barely knew stopped by my room. He came by to load my dorm fridge. He had yogurt, ice pops and what ever else he could come up with to make me feel better.
From that moment on, I knew the answer. This was someone who cared for people. Who cared about people. This person was special.
This rest is history. Something in my innate animal brain told me to go after him. To change his mind. To make him realize that even if he was graduating in three months, that was ok, I could go with.
Somehow amongst all the youth drama I did it. I got him to marry me. I thank my soul for making the right decision.
This silly little painting depicts are life after that. We backpacked Europe, got engaged on the Charles Bridge in Prague over pizza, we’ve owned two homes, two cats and had two babies. We have supported each other in one of the most important aspects of our lives – making sure we both do what we love for a living. Watching my husbands computer business grow has been like watching our first baby grow. It’s now a beautiful child with a life of its own.
My husband has always liked fish motifs. They are all over the house. At this point, we all give him things that have fish on them because they remind us of him. He may not even like fish motifs anymore for all we know, but it must be nice to know everyone thinks of you when they associate you with that thing. So I added the fish motif!
I had no idea what to write in the bubbles above the fish. It was close to midnight last night when I created this and with what little creative juice I had left, I came up with this:
“Want to get together for eternity?” is a statement. Being with my husband for 17 years is the longest I have ever done anything. I have had no job, no car, no dwelling, no locale, no diet, no sweater…nothing that has lasted longer than 17 years. For a person with a very short attention span, that’s a big deal. Gosh if we’ve done almost twenty, could we do a lifetime? It just seems crazy. Crazy cool.
“See you at the finish line” is what I started saying after we had kids. For the past decade it’s like these wild electrons keep spinning around our nucleus. Often now, there are days where I feel like I am waving from across the room but never quite make it over to say hi. On really crazy days when we have more to do than we can handle I yell over to him “see you at the finish line” meaning we may not be able to be together at this moment, but if we have a common place to meet up later, we’ll meet up then. The joke is that this might be retirement, old age, death or even another lifetime! That’s how it feels some days. It’s the best way I can come up with to say “Keep running the marathon and if we both keep running the race, if we both support each other, we just might meet up at the end.”
So that’s my sappy story.
I often think my husband must have been a real wicked SOB in his past life to be paying his penance with a lifetime of me. I’m the lucky one in this scenario and I’m eternally grateful for it.
Happy Birthday Big Lug. Yesterday was a small marathon in itself. There was no surprise party, parade or bandstand. Instead there was grandparents, children and more theatre performances. Amongst the chaos, there was a quite sweet man turning 39 surrounded by the electrons he calls his family.
I hope to meet him at the finish line.
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Be Creative Mary 
What a wonderful ode to your husband and to you! Perfect!