Wednesday, March 06, 2013

She Laughs

My wife is so beautiful when she laughs. That’s why I married her. She laughs so easily. After all these years, I can still make her laugh.

We’ve been together for a long time. And we still make each other laugh every day. Even on our most difficult days, she always finds a reason to laugh.

She is a sweet spirit.

Susan almost never cries. The past seven years of our marriage have been the most taxing and the times she cries have almost always been my fault. But when circumstances are tough, she doesn’t cry. She rolls up her sleeves and gets to work. And she still finds a reason to laugh.

She's tough and she's clever and she never, ever backs down. Susan keeps me alive and gives me a reason to work hard. I live to make her happy. When I can't make her happy, my world is totally off balance.

Susan and I are working our way through our new lives as the parents of a special needs child. Allie is our biological granddaughter, born perfectly normal and healthy. At 10 months old, her father shook her and squeezed her. She stopped breathing. She was resuscitated by emergency responders but remained in a coma for ten days. She emerged from the coma slowly and painfully with severe brain damage and disabilities.

susanSFO

Parenting a special needs child has tested our marriage beyond what we thought it could bear. At times, both of us wanted to walk away. At least I did. But this came as no surprise. We know each other. That is the most valuable commodity in a marriage. I know Susan and she knows me.

We went into this this with a strong marriage and our marriage continues to strengthen. Here’s the reason why: we can talk about anything. I can trust my wife with anything. There is no place that I can be more vulnerable, more real, or more spiritual than with Susan. She has my back.

Our defense together was strong as we began our twenty-first year of marriage as new parents. I couldn't imagine going into this with a weaker marriage or with a different woman. We've bonded through some tough times in the first twenty years we'd been together. We would need all the strength and familiarity we’ve built with one another.

The test our marriage went through did not reveal anything about the other that we didn't already know. It would only bring out of each of us at a steady and regular flow the junk that didn't usually come out very often. I give her no less than one hundred percent of myself. She doesn’t deserve a slacker. She likes to be challenged and she challenges me to be the best man I can be.

That’s why I try so hard to make her laugh.

2 comments:

Mike West said...

Great post. Laughter is the best medicine.

Anonymous said...

Beautiful :)