Category: I Love my Husband Because . . .

First Love

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., Life, Love, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

He was the the first boy to touch his lips to mine.
I was the the first girl to write him a love letter.
He was the first boy to ask if he could read my poetry.
I was the first girl to give him my heart.
And he was the first boy to return it in pieces.

And it’s not that we were so great at it.
We weren’t.
It’s not that our love was all flowers and birds singing
It wasn’t.
Our love was clumsy and awkward and
we didn’t understand it
or each other.
Our love was impatient and selfish and proud but
it was first for us both.
And it was honest in a way it can only be
before you’ve learned how it can hurt.

When I saw him again after three years,
just the two of us
sitting on a picnic table
talking toward our flip flops
I remembered it–
that genuine, one-time
innocence of heart we lost together.

It draws us close,
despite everything,
Binding us together through the years
more than the shoe box of photos and letters,
more than the necklace, the hair clips, or the books
ever could have.

Love Stuff

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., Life, Love, Poetry, Thoughts, WritingLeave a comment

It’s a quiet, snowy Sunday before Valentine’s Day and I’m diving into some of my older poetry about Carl and I. We’ve been together for seventeen years now and somewhere in there, I came to understand what people mean when they say it takes more than love to make a relationship work. I write a lot of “Marry the One Who . . .” posts, but those are all little things. Don’t get me wrong, they’re lovely little things; they’re important little things that add up to a beautiful day to day life that I do not take for granted.

But they’re still little.

The big things are how you handle it when one of you royally screws up, what you do when you can’t do life fifty/fifty or even sixty/forty because both of you are running on ten percent, when life changes and you change and your needs change. Whoever you are when you choose each other, you’re both going to change again and again and again and it can be so hard to keep up. Love won’t make your relationship last, but it can sometimes hold you together long enough for you to figure out the rest.

So today, I’m combing through roughly seventeen years worth of love poems and sharing a few on my Black Ink Birds Facebook page, in my blackinkbirds Instagram stories and here on the blog. Some of them are awkward and clumsy, some of them painful and sad, and some of them are beautiful and sweet; that’s how it is when you’re looking at love as a whole.

It Isn’t Love

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., LifeLeave a comment

Love may have pulled us together with want and adventure. Love may crackle between us–beautiful, fun, exciting, and powerful. But we both know that you can love someone and not have or give what you need because that’s how we loved each other as teenagers. And that kind of love doesn’t last. Thankfully, we made better use of our second chance than our first and the longer our love goes on, the more I realize all that it isn’t.

It isn’t love that deepens, that’s respect.

It isn’t love that gets stronger, that’s trust.

It isn’t love that brings an end to insecurity, that’s intimacy.

It isn’t love that apologizes, that’s humility.

And it isn’t love that forgives mistakes, that’s grace.

Sixteen years and my love for you is still burning as bright and hot as when it first began but so much stronger and steadier now because of all those other things.

It’s those things that have sustained us through our life’s lowest lows and brought us up to our highest highs. And it’s not just that I can rely on you for them, but also that you’re a man I want to give them to, that keeps your ring on my finger and my heart in your hands. Of course, I love you, darlin’, but that’s not nearly all. : )

In the Garden (a mushy repost from 2013)

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., Life, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment

I have been aching to write and working on new things when I can, but while I do that, I’m going to go ahead and repost a few favorite oldies.  This one was written in the spring of 2013 when Carl and I had been married three years and were reviving his hop tower for its second season.  It feels like the perfect time to share it again.  Partly because this summer we’ll have been married ten years.  Partly because we’re almost ready to transplant our seed starts to the garden box outside.  And mostly because I still feel just this way about my man.  : )

Redneck Hop Farming

 

In the Garden

I am watching our hands in the garden
yours with the snips cutting away,
mine pulling last year’s dried vines
from the soft green shoots trying to come up

I am watching our hands in the garden
yours are big and calloused
but I find only gentleness and comfort in them.
While mine seem so small by comparison
but I don’t have to prove their strength
or worth to you.

I am watching our hands in the garden
and I love the way they work
together, yet apart
different tasks but a common goal . . .

Our wedding rings gleam in the fading sunlight
as our fingers dance in the dirt
we are building more than a hop garden–
we are tending our dreams.

The Gold Dress

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., Life1 Comment

I bought a gold, sequined dress and sky high heels for our anniversary three years ago.  We went to Vegas, had a fabulous time, and took one of my favorite photos of us–tipsy and happy in our beautiful hotel room after one of the best nights out we’d ever had.  Six months later and three months pregnant, I packed that dress away feeling fairly sure I would never wear it again, but still loving it too much to let it go.

Carl graduated, we sold my truck, I had a baby, and our next anniversary we spent apart while he started a new job in a new world.

We moved across the country, bought a house and an SUV, and spent our next anniversary together but pretty low-key as we were still learning the area and I was still afraid to try on most of my pre-baby clothes.

We built stalls and fencing and moved our horses. Our pipes to the barn froze and we spent a whole winter hauling buckets of water from the house, and when spring came, we started major renovations on our home. Then it was our anniversary again, and wouldn’t you know it?  That gold dress and those sky high heels fit like a dream.  : )

We didn’t go to Vegas, but fireflies and stars will always hold more glitter and shine for me than any city lights.  There was no expensive hotel room, but I sang my daughter to sleep while she ran her finger over my red lipstick and tried to put it on her own lips.  And when she was out, I turned on the monitor, slipped back outside, and danced by the fire, whiskey in hand, with my man thinking to myself that I’ve never had so much to celebrate.

I love you, Lew.  Thank you for everything.  : )

Gold dress

I Love my Husband Because . . .

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., Life, Mac n' Cheese Manor, The Barn1 Comment

this was the lower-level, back, right section of our barn two and a half months ago:

And this is that same section of our barn now:

That first set of pictures is not how the barn looked when we bought this place.  Back then it had a sloped cement floor, but Carl busted it all up with a jack hammer and piled it outside the barn so he could make the stalls big enough.  He has spent every spare moment since mid-September putting this together so my horses could safely ride out the harsh, New England winter.

Did Carl always dream of a farm life, you ask? . . . No.  Has Carl ever built anything bigger than a cabinet before? . . . No.  Did Carl always want to renovate a 1930’s dairy barn to safely and happily accommodate three horses? . . . shockingly . . . No.

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s more than true love.  That is dedication, discipline, research, sleep deprivation, hours and hours of hard work in the freezing cold after already working a full day in the office . . . AND true love.

I’m a lucky girl and I know it.  : )

 

I Love my Husband Because . . .

On By JesseIn I Love my Husband Because . . ., LifeLeave a comment

When we got married, I was twenty five and he was twenty seven.  We had been dating for five years, three of which from different states and we’d been through a lot.  Looking back, we didn’t know much, but we had at least two things right: 1) We knew we wanted each other for life.  2) We knew that keeping what we had would require humility and unconditional grace.  Two of my favorite photos from our wedding ceremony are the ones of us washing each others’ feet–a symbolic act declaring our intentions to build our marriage on that humility and grace.
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It was my turn to double down on the promises I made on our wedding day when Carl received a job offer in Massachusetts.  I had a job and life I loved in Idaho that I gave up to be home with our daughter across the country so he could have that opportunity.  But today, he finished the process of doubling down on the promises he made to me.  Today we completed the final step to becoming homeowners and not the owners of a home in the suburbs, with a white picket fence, within walking distance of a thriving downtown the way Carl imagined he would be living before we got married.  We are poised to become the owners of MY dream home, which I have lovingly dubbed “Mac n’ Cheese Manor,” an ancient wreck of a farmhouse on nearly nine acres in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
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It has taken him months to find and then negotiate a price we could afford for this beautiful mess and he did it for me, because without a place like this, I wouldn’t be able to bring my horses home, making my family whole again.  And, of course, we need a place like this so I can have the chickens, cat, and pig I’ve always wanted as well.  And the goats.  And . . . well, you get the idea.  ; )

This is love.  Give, take, lead, follow, dream up some dreams, smush those dreams together, then work side by side to make them reality.  And take a lot of pictures along the way!  ; )
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Happy Valentine’s Day!  <3