Once Upon a Time....

Once upon a time I met a boy.  I met a boy and he stole my heart.  This was somewhat of a problem since I had recently decided, with all of my eighteen year old wisdom, that I didn’t need to get married.  I would be content to wander this world solo.  But I met this boy and I knew almost immediately that I to be fully happy, I would need him with me.

That was almost thirteen years ago. 

Sean and I have grown up together.  We have had fun, we’ve argued, we have made plans that were great and others that we laugh at now; we’ve laughed, hard, to the point where we can barely breathe.  And so when he asked me to marry him, at only twenty-three, though no one we knew was getting engaged or really knew what they wanted in life, there was no hesitation. 

That day we were two kids that put on some nice clothes and stood in front of everyone we knew and made promises that, at the time we didn’t realize how deeply we meant them.  I loved him more that day than I thought my heart could hold.  It was a day where the last drop of cynicism melted away; it was like I was in a real life fairy tale.

But you see, in fairy tales, it generally ends at the fantastical wedding.  We are only left to wonder what came next.  Well I will tell you.  There is an adorable apartment, a few months renting my new in-law’s house, there was house hunting and house buying.  And my God, the happiness that was thrown in between those bits would probably be nauseating to read about, but it's there.  Real honest to God happiness.

And then she came.  Kennedy was born and she just fit so perfectly into the life we were carving out.  And I feel deeper in love with him.  The new role of “Daddy” fit him so perfectly.  Watching him come home after work and living for his little naps with her on the couch or chair; it was like pure magic.  I’m smiling now just thinking about it and mentally going through the hundreds of pictures I know I took of them.  And so if you think you love a man before a kid is in the picture, you probably haven’t even scratched the surface.

This boy I fell in love with took such good care of his girls.  He was ever- surrounded by pink, and princesses, wearing crowns if asked, eating play food that was cooked, holding dolls if handed to him; he took it in stride like he was made to do it.  Friends and co-workers would constantly ask me if I knew how lucky I was, how amazing Sean was.  I did, though I downplayed, never wanting to seem obnoxious.  Truthfully, I hadn’t even seen yet just how amazing he really was.

Unfortunately, the way in which I learned that was heart-wrenching.  We learned we were having a baby boy.  And though, for many people, it could seem like the worst thing in the world, when we learned Jack would have Down Syndrome Sean never cried.  He wanted to know everything about it.  He wanted to be ready.  And I loved him even more.  I kept wondering how much love my heart could hold before it reached it’s threshold.

Even in our darkest hour, saying goodbye to our precious boy, I could still see my love for this boy I fallen in love with so many years before.  I wasn’t strong enough to give our boy back, and so this beautiful man did it for me.  And though my heart broke into a million pieces, each piece retained that love.  He put up and loved me through the worst of it; the days I could do nothing more than sit up in bed, he took over my role too.  I could never have made it through this past year without him.  And to look back and remember how I feared our relationship could not withstand something like that, that statistics showed many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, it seems silly because I only love him more.

We play, we joke around and give each other a hard time, we dance,  we argue and God do we still laugh.  I laugh as he runs up and down our narrow hallway, chasing the little girl that has him wrapped around her finger.  I laugh as he argues and jokes with my siblings as if they were really his own.  Six years (or thirteen if you choose to count it all) and I love this boy in a way I can’t really understand.  It is not perfect, nothing ever is, but it’s damn close.  And so when my friends say, “Sean is so amazing, you don’t know how lucky you are,” the thing is, I do.  I really, truly do.

One of my favorite songs by Lady Antebellum has a line in it that goes:

“For me you’ll always be eighteen,

And beautiful, and dancing away

With my heart.”

It is so fitting it is as if I spoke the words myself.  And so, this fairy tale, the story keeps going, the love just keeps coming; it’s imperfect, sometimes sad, sometimes messy,  but that love….

It is a love I wish for my daughter with all of my heart. It is a love I sometimes feel like I haven’t done enough good in this life to deserve.

Happy Anniversary, Sean Patrick.  You are my fairy tale, my happily ever after and, for me, will always be eighteen, and beautiful, and dancing away with my heart.