Lucky Thirteen

Warning, mushy post ahead!

The Guy I Fell in Love With, Circa 1997, with Fizgig

For me, this is a sweet day...Brian and I are celebrating our 13th anniversary.  And for the first time in all those thirteen years, he actually lined up a babysitter himself and planned to take me out to dinner without my knowing about it!  My grin was a mile wide...even after all this time, it's nice to know he can still surprise me.  Not that he needs to most of the time.  The man puts up with my weird hours, handles living with me when I'm a watery mess, and pushes me to follow my own dreams while I move around the country to enable him to follow his.  We've shared a lot of joy, much of it from the three beautiful kids we've made together, and weathered our share of sorrow and difficulty too.

I was little more than a kid when I met him...eighteen and just starting to figure myself out, much less other people.  Mr. Confident scared the hell out of me in some ways...I knew it was going to be serious from the get-go, and I was a master of the unserious.  But hell if I could figure out how to let him go.  He's tricky like that:-)  I married him a week after he graduated from the Naval Academy, a month shy of my 21st birthday.  We were young and stupid, but because of it I think we rolled with the punches more easily than we might have had we met even a few years later.  In a lot of ways, we've grown up together.  And because of good fortune or just simple compatibility, neither of us fell out of love with the people we've grown into. 

Neither of us is perfect: he's got a temper, I've got a mouth, he's into structure and I seem to roll with a certain amount of chaos whether I mean to or not.  He is not a romantic, and I...well, take a look at what I write.  But my husband is honest, true, unfailingly loyal, and deeply good-hearted.  He's the sort of man who rescues small creatures from the road, meticulously paints teddy bears or clouds on nursery walls, and sends the kids into shrieking gales of laughter by being a big kid himself.  Oh, and he still looks damn fine in a uniform.  In short, I got a good one, and I'm glad he's mine.  Happy Anniversary, babe.  Thanks for loving me.