Monday Musings

I'm a bit more like this... 

than this...

Happy Valentines Day!  I'm not sure if I should make it Valentine's Day or Valentines Day.  You see it both ways...  But anyway, hope you can share it with those you love.  On days like today, I wish I was more about romance.  Sweetness.  Lovely things.  But the most appealing thing to me is ordinary and natural and consistency.  This weekend, the Chairman and a couple of the many young people here came home with big smiles and a beautiful bouquet.  I love it because it is from them... my loved ones.  But the highlight of the weekend was spent taking a huge hike with the Chairman and the many young people.  Then they broke off and the Chairman and I were alone in the woods with the dog tromping through deep snow.  Listening to woodpeckers.  Sharing thoughts without interruption.  That to me is true romance.  It beats candles and chocolates and potpourri any day.  But if you are the chantilly lace, dark chocolate, and silky things kind of person, well power to you!

Love is a mysterious thing really.  As most of you know I wasn't hit with the love bug until later by many people's standards.  I was lying in a lumpy bed in Venezuela when the tears came one night.  I had been out of contact with the Chairman for a week at this point.  We had been dating for a year.  And I realized for the first time, 'I love him'.  And he was thousands of miles away.  I still had a week to go down in South America, but yet I felt resigned.  Relaxed.  And finally able to admit that I actually loved someone beyond my family at that level.  It was yet another year before he proposed.  But I'm thankful for that.  We had time to think about our lives.  Our future.  And work out those little kinks that people have even before we stood before the judge and friends/family saying we would be together until death do we part.

Love grows even deeper and richer as you share life's journey.  I'm thankful now that the Chairman and I have shared experiences together that no one else entered into.  We spent several hospital stays alone in rooms because of infertility and loss.  We were alone with our baby girl when she died.  We were handed our gift from China and went to our hotel room - just us.  We had a blessed week alone with our new daughter without others.  We experienced the joy of another adoption with most of the contact, decisions, and conversation going on between us and birth parents without involvement of others.  And then we had the birth of our third child... just us alone experiencing the joy of new life.  

I don't know what the future holds.  None of us do.  I'm confident we are going to have wonderful, joyous days yet.  And I'm sure we will also have some very sad ones coming.  But I have the Chairman.  And he's not about chocolates and superfluous things.  He's about stability and surety and constancy and love.  And that is priceless.