One Whole Heart

I read this quote recently, and it struck me as quite beautiful, speaking to both my pragmatic and romantic sides at once:

A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home. 
~ Rumi

It reminds me of the way we felt we were grieving after Linc’s diagnosis, grieving for the child we thought we were having, that perfect image that would have slowly been chipped away by life but seemed to have been ripped painfully from us at the moment of his diagnosis.  A thousand images of what he could have been – president, fighter pilot, surgeon – had to be let go one by one so that we could with whole hearts accept the child that we were given.  Once we let go of the half-loves, the dreamed up images that were never really real to begin with, we found such an amazing prize in the whole hearted love of the child we got to bring home and hold in our arms.

In a lot of ways, I think marriage is the same way.  You are as much saying no to all the other possibilities as you are saying yes to the one person standing before you.  You have to say no to all the others to be open to receive the whole heart of one person, and to give yours in return.

Today is the birthday of the man whose whole heart I am lucky enough to have taken home.  And while I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the other half-loves I have forsaken to have him, I am sometimes guilty of what if-ing myself into a corner when his habits start to irritate me.  Like many married couples, we each have our own way of doing things, and his way continues to be infuriatingly not my way.  Despite the fact that I share with him what my way is on a regular basis and make quite a case for how much better my way is than his way, he just seems to steadfastly adhere to his way day in and day out.

And just when I start to get all worked up about his (clearly inferior) way of doing things, I am reminded of how grateful I am that Sam is comfortable going his own way because his current existence would be rather bizarre to pretty much any other man we know.  He wakes after I have left for the day to the sound of the 7:00am alarm, gets two boys out of bed and dressed, feeds Linc and packs his backpack, and gets Linc to class by 7:40am.  He comes home to feed Nico breakfast and spends the next few hours building lego fantasy worlds or light saber fighting or assisting in some series of paper and pipe cleaner related crafts.  He squeezes in a few items from the honey-do list I’ve left him, and then preps lunch.

He picks Linc up from school, changes his diaper, makes a semi-gourmet lunch to make up for the lackluster dinner he knows I’ll feed the boys when I get home, and does the dishes while the boys play outside in the yard.  Then, he puts both boys down, praying they’ll nap because he’s promised me he will mow the yard, and proceeds to spend the next couple hours gathering up the three dozen yard toys scattered approximately every two feet across the length of the yard,  wrestling with the lawnmower, and resetting the lawn furniture back in its original spot.  After a quick shower, he cracks open a book he’s been dying to finish, but as if the sound of paper rustling had been a screaming siren, the very act of settling in to relax causes one or both of the boys to wake and demand attention.

Many days, the second I get home, he has to leave for work himself.  Forget the image of the exhausted housewife waiting for the husband to come home from work and give her a break.  Forget the exhausted husband coming home at the end of the day too tired to give his kids the attention they deserve. Sam’s role is all house-husband during the day and all working stiff in the evenings.  By the time he comes home after his shift, we are all asleep, and the house is dark and lonely.  And though he’d love to stay up all night watching the history channel like he used to be able to do, he knows that if he doesn’t get to bed pretty soon, he won’t be able to make the 7:00am wakeup call the next morning.

I will tell you this, on the anniversary of the day that Sam came into the world: to have the whole heart of a man like that is worth all the thousands of half-loves you could ever throw at me.  It may irritate the fire out of me that he refuses to put the hand towel back in its holder, but then I stop and think that the reason he had the towel out in the first place was to dry the hands used to make roasted pork and asparagus for our boys, the same hands used to clean the pan he roasted the stuff in, dab the never-ending fountain of snot coming out of one kid’s nose, and dig the dirt out from under another kid’s fingernails.  We are so incredibly lucky to be stuck with such a stubborn, do it his own way kind of man. 

I love you with my whole heart and always will.