A Spring of Joy

My Brian.

Noble. Strength.

And a ruthless trust that has led me through the darkest days of my life.

I stood with a friend last week in my kitchen. She was catching up on life with me and she reached out, touched my arm, her cheeks dimpling as she smiled, “Aren’t you so thankful you have your Brian?”

My eyes filled up with tears, “I can’t even begin to describe it. 20 months of this, and I can’t remember ONE time that he has complained. He has hated it, he has suffered, but he has never complained. He has only loved.”

That, my friends, is noble strength.

In her book, Cold Tangerines, Shauna Niequist writes:

I had thought that we became a family the day we were married. What I have found, though, is that the web starts as just one fine filament on that day, and spins and spins around us as life presents itself to us day by day. And on some days, the strands spin around us double-time, spinning us like a top and binding us like rubber cement…

That’s how family gets made. Not by ceremonies or certificates, and not by parties and celebrations. Family gets made when you decide to hold hands and sit shoulder to shoulder when it seems like the sky is falling. Family gets made when the world becomes strange and disorienting, and the only face you recognize is his. Family gets made when the future obscures itself like a solar eclipse, and in the intervening darkness, you decide that no matter what happens in the night, you’ll face it as one.

Quietness and trust.

Noble strength.

Words that epitomize my husband. The face that I recognized in the darkness. The arms that held me during the eclipse. The man that I will call my family forever.