Love, to me.

Part 1 of a series of essays I’m writing on family.

love, to me, is comfort.
it’s steady—the most steady thing in my life.
love is routines, making sure I’m drinking water.
love is tearing up at big moments in movies, and really tiny moments in commercials too.
love sits next to me on the couch at the end of most days.
love has grown with me over the last 14 years.
love is jamie wheeler.

jamie in the world is really really fun.
he’s silly.
he doesn’t care who’s watching.
we fell in love on a dance floor.
we’ve kept falling, I like to think.
no, I know we have.

jamie at home is also fun and silly. but he’s really serious too.
he’s thoughtful. not in an I got you this thing you like kind of way
but in a thinking about things way.
an engineer, I suppose.
he’s thinking. he’s curious.
he’s wondering how things work or why they happened.
he’s reading a poem about parenting and years gone by and he’s thinking so intricately about it
that it brings him to tears before a work call.
and then, he reads it to me, and it happens again.
the tears
and the work call.

where I am fast, he is slow. what I totally lack, he completely makes up for.
when I leave little bites (read: half eaten apples) around the house, he cuts them into neat slices and dips them in peanut butter at pretty much the same time every day.

where I am whimsical, he is calculated.
we’re really different.

I think when we love someone—a romantic partner, a friend—we sort of pretend we’re the same sometimes.
in love, which itself feels like pretending in the beginning, you don’t have to pretend.
you learn about someone so deeply that you realize
how different you are, in some ways.
and surely in some ways I couldn’t feel more different.

when there are multiple ways to solve a problem,
a math problem per se, we’re always choosing different ways.
when I ask jamie a yes or no question, and he gives me a really long answer, I can’t help but chime in at the end of it all and say okay, but that just means the answer was yes (or no) by the way…
every single time.

I fold the corners of the pages in my books,
he definitely does not.
he follows recipes with acute attention to detail,
I certainly do not.
he has taught me the beauty in early rising to get things going…
I’ve encouraged him to enjoy a slow morning every once in a while.

we’re really different.
but there are a few core things that make us similar.

we love to laugh.
we laugh at appropriate times and completely inappropriate times.
we laugh really hard in the middle of the night, which I realize sounds ridiculous.

we love to dance.
in the kitchen, in the, car, in the living room, or the grocery store.
with friends and family and strangers too.
with our daughters.

we’re individualists.
we’re introverted extroverts.
we’re class clowns.
we’re second children.

one of my favorite things we do is encourage the other to do it
wear those funky pants.
rock the ugly shoes.
take the risk, start the thing!
we push each other.

when we go out to dinner we end up talking, deeply, about life.
the past, present, and future.
the lives we want together,
the things we want ourselves.

jamie is my family.
that wasn’t a feeling I had right away—I mean, I have a family.
when we got married I chose to change my name.
I wondered when it would feel like mine.
I’m not sure when it started to.
I think it was slow, and gradual, but it feels like mine now.
he feels like my family.
we’re building a family.
our big families have shifted a bit but they’re still very much ours too of course.

we both love kids.
we love them completely differently now that we have our own
but we’ve always loved kids.
not in a simple aww cute baby kind of way.
in the kind of way where we’ll strike up a conversation at the grocery store with a kid the same way we do with adults
we’re interested in what they have to say.
same for old people
we love old people.

we’re two kids,
who now have two kids.
and I’d like to think we’ll grow old together,
but the reality is we already are,
we already have been. but we’ll continue to…

and love, to me, has totally changed
but also stayed the same.

love, to me, is comfort.
it is steady.
it’s predictable
yet exciting.
it’s an anchor.
it’s safe.

love, to me, is jamie.