He held my face in his hands and kissed me gently before he left this morning, and a tingle went down my spine. It reminded me that I hadn’t come back to deliver that promised “next post”.
So here it is.
About 6 months or so had passed after J’s surgery. It had been an incredibly difficult winter where we’d gotten behind on bills, thanks in a huge part to a single customer who refused to pay the last two draws for the garage he’d hired DH’s company to build. We kept believing he’d eventually pay, paid the guys out of our own pocket, and didn’t realize how short (in reality) the time limit is for placing a lien on someone’s property. We closed the business. Our credit has some nasty dings, but for the most part, our finances have remained intact and while we are still dealing with a lot of that stuff, we’ll survive.
Our son was recuperating from major heart surgery, our 2 year old was fully embracing the “terrible twos” and the baby of the family I was struggling so hard to nurse, despite a milk supply that just WOULD NOT keep up with her demand. I finally realized it was over when she was 10 months old. I was so very disappointed.
And then, there was this day. This one day that I looked at my husband and knew that despite the pain he’d inflicted, despite our struggles, here we were. Still standing here, trying to make up for the things we couldn’t undo, trying to do the best we could for our kids and hoping to figure out what was best for us at the same time, too. I loved him. I’d always loved him. He. Was. THE ONE. And for once I saw through the wall in my own heart and realized that while he didn’t always show me love in the way that I needed it, he did love me. That even while he tries to protect himself in his messed up little ways, I still have the power, more than anyone else in the world, to hurt him. And maybe, just maybe… I might have the power to heal his wounds. With time. With lots and lots of time.
My heart softened. We put the kids all to bed that night and sank down on the couch. I wanted to cry. I wanted relief from our trials. I wanted recognition of the strength it was taking to just keep plugging along. I wanted paybacks for the homeowner that screwed us over. I wanted to not be so poor I had to eat potatoes and oatmeal AGAIN.
And then I looked over at him and he looked just as beat down, just as tired, just as discouraged as me. And in the same heartbeat I knew it wasn’t about what I wanted right then and I knew what I wanted was him. I wanted to smooth away the furrows in his brow and run my fingers through his hair. I wanted to see the skin of his back and run my hands down his arms. I wanted to feel his hands around my waist.
I couldn’t bring myself to take him into our bedroom – it had become a place where we lay coldly beside each other, hardly touching at all, a place where we propped up on our elbows and argued late into the night. Instead a I grabbed a few blankets and spread them out on the couch. I turned on some music, then sat down beside him and reached up to put my hands on his face. Our eyes met, and in a matter of moments we went through the whole rainbow of emotions together, from sadness to strength, from pain to forgiveness to desire and longing and a great need to remember the oneness we had begun our life with.
Somewhere on that couch that night we found moments of time that had escaped from our grasp many years ago. At times we were young, unmarried, kissing on Dad’s couch and trying to hold back despite wanting with every fiber to give in and become each others first and only, only to be brought back to reality and discover we could give in to every desire. His touch felt like it was burning through my skin, his lips tasted so familiar but felt like lips I’d only looked at and never felt. How could we have missed this moment in our 6 years of making love together?
It was, somewhere in an unexplained place with a key and lock only God himself must own, our first time.
There IS no way to explain it. There was no logical sense to make of how it felt that night to become my husband’s wife all over again, for the first time, for the thousandth time. There was no innocence lost, but there was wisdom gained. It was the knowledge that forgiveness intensifies intimacy, that one layer of intimacy is not the entire picture, that there will always be more circles to complete and more fullness of time for us through every trial we overcome. There is a bigger and better picture that we have yet to see or maybe simply cannot comprehend yet, that waits for us in the years ahead.
For the girl whose real “first time” (aka Wedding Night) left me wondering why God makes such steep demands of us to be pure and wait, it felt so very redemptive. I will forever be grateful for the REAL first time He gave us 6+ years later, sated as it was with love and desire borne of meaning and depth and more wisdom than it ever could have been on the day we got married, or before that for that matter, in those moments we wanted to throw caution to the wind and be damned for it if necessary.
And the morning after? A new world. No guilt, no shame, no wondering where we might stand. I woke up to my husband loving me.