#gratitudeNow: Being there for her

I frequently say that my wife Missy is the yin to my yang, the jelly to my peanut butter. We go together like peas and carrots.

This manifests in a number of ways. She’s my adventure buddy. We travel interesting places, dig into nerdy interests together, and love long car trips.

And she’s a constant cheerleader for me, in the many things I do.

All of that is wonderful.

But there’s another aspect to this that’s super important too. I get to be there for her. I’m one of the two people she trusts the most in the world. Today she had some surgery (she’s fine, don’t worry!) and I’ve spent the day doing that husbandly support crew thing for her.

I bundled her into the car, and drove her over. I sat with her sister (that would be the other person she trusts most in the world) in the waiting room. After she got into recovery we went back to see her.

When we first walked back into the recovery room and she saw us, she smiled widely. I knew her surgery was going to go well, her doctor is great, the statistics on this sort of stuff are known. Didn’t matter. That smile warmed me head to toe like a hot cocoa after hours of shoveling snow.

I’m still with her now, in her hospital room, doing the many and varied little comfort chores that are making her stay a bit more human. We took a walk around the unit a bit ago. She’s tapping away on her cell phone as I sit and write this. And there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, and nothing else I’d rather be doing. Seeing her safe and cared for, helping to make it so, is so joyful to me.

I’m grateful I get to be there as her adventure buddy even for the tough adventures.

#gratitudeNow: Face time together

That’s my brother Spacey.
I love him.

We aren’t biologically brothers. We are family by choice. And have been for decades.

We talk every week, often by phone, many times by video call. We see each other in person as often as we can, which is never enough for either of us.

We are just there for each other in our lives. Our relationship is one of the most enduring and important ones in my life.

We celebrate each other’s victories, help one another plan and sound out things, act as willing and enthusiastic navigators for each other, and soothe each other’s pains.

One of the amazing things about our long relationship is that we have developed patterns, rituals, and a sort of private history.

In this artsy filtered picture of my brother you can see one of them. He loves to FaceTime with me while he holds his phone and walks around his house. He’ll do these conversational laps as we dig into something. Or I’ll just be present with him as he moves about his day, cooking a meal, doing a chore, or even going to the bathroom.

Yes, we listen to each other pee.

And that’s super intimate. But maybe not in the way you’re thinking. We just open to one another, and lay bare the contents of our innermost thoughts and feelings. We don’t have secrets or shame.

Compared to that, the sound of some urine hitting water is no big deal.

I’m grateful for my brother every single day. He’s a remarkable person, and my life is an order of magnitude better for his having been and continuing to be in it.

#gratitudeNow: Peanut Rescue

So Missy and I had a plan to go see Kevin and Kacie and their kiddos for Valentine’s Day. However, a nefarious circumstance put the trip in jeopardy. Kevin came down with the flu! (Boo.)

But Peanut and Chris who live not too far away, stepped up and came to the rescue, offering to host us for the weekend. (Yay!)

This is wonderful, because the whole lot of them are among our most favorite people, and we haven’t seen them in ages.

I’m so grateful for the chance to reconnect and spend time with people I care for so much. I just wish Kevin felt better. It’s frustrating knowing he’s so close by but sadly out of reach. :-( I guess that just means we have to come back more.

#gratitudeNow: Good, clean service

So one of the bigger revelations to me about living a service based lifestyle is how, for the most part, it’s not a big, ongoing sex scene. It’s just a different mode of living, altogether.

I’ll give you an example. On Friday I was working from home. About two thirds of the way through my workday, I started thinking about what I would cook for us for dinner. I ended up settling on a recipe I found for apple-mustard chicken tenderloins.

Yes, they really did look like that. They turned out wonderfully.

After work, I rushed out to the store to pick the stuff up, came home and changed into my training pants and pajamas, and quite carefully set an alarm to remind myself to get cooking about an hour before Missy got home, and then… got caught up first playing video games and then chatting with an old friend.

Oops!

When Missy got home, hungry, and dinner wasn’t ready, she was a bit cross with me, and scolded me. But I promised her I could get dinner together quickly, and did so. And as I said, it turned out to be quite good.

After dinner, she decided she wanted to take a bath, and headed upstairs to do so.

Then she had a wonderful idea. She called me to follow her upstairs, and after the bath was ready, had me use a soapy bath brush (the same one she spanks me with, incidentally) on her back and her feet. This was magical. She felt so good, and I felt so good making her feel that way. I got very little, and the littler version of me felt quite proud to have an actual job to do for mama, and one which we turned out to be quite good at.

She decided there was no sense in my pajamas or training pants getting wet, so she had me strip out of everything before I began.

Afterwards, she decided I needed to be in the bathtub too. She had me come in and lay down where she had just been, and then she bathed me, and rewarded me for my good service, in an appropriately ahem, fulfilling way.

Feel free to use your imagination there.

Afterward, she diapered me for bed, and we drifted off to sleep together, cuddling, wrapped in the warm embrace of our love for one another, and this dynamic that we share.

#gratitudeNow: A Bare-Bottom Reboot (audio blog)