A Good Man Is Hard to Find

   A good man is hard to find...I totally concur, with apologies to a favorite author of mine, Flannery O'Connor. 'Tis true, however. You meet a man, you date, you fall in love, you marry, but sometime after the honeymoon, you wake up and find to your surprise that the man that you thought you knew and married, has turned out to be someone else entirely. You even wonder at times, who has "taken over" his body. But love in a marriage is a funny thing; it somehow miraculously adapts. It shifts. It moves to accommodate and embrace the ever-changing and newly revealed facets of the person you have married and are just beginning to discover. The Husband and I will have been married thirty-seven years this summer. I guess that makes us marriage dinosaurs.
  The funny thing is that just when I thought that I could write the book on The Husband, he up and surprises me. This man, who was a very good father to our four children when they were growing up has turned out to be a wonderful father to our adult children, and an even MORE AMAZING grandfather to our two granddaughters.
   It makes my heart so very glad. Watching him with the grandchildren, I think I could almost fall in love with him all over again (even if I did not love him already). It gives me joy to see him making silly noises and equally silly faces at Little Two or playing peek-a-boo behind whatever is at hand until she shakes with glee. I also love watching him teaching Little One some dance moves to his favorite Jack Johnson songs and then pretending like he is asleep and snoring on the floor while she uses him as a jungle gym. He also has a standing date with Little One every Friday morning. He stops by her house on his way to work and the two of them wrestle and run through the house playing horse or whatever strikes his fancy.
   He is silly. He is funny. He is fun. He is not afraid to let go with these two little girls who have stolen our hearts from day one of their lives. I think it must be because we took ourselves much too seriously when we were raising our own children. We worried about lots of things. We worried about everything from table manners to the fight against cavities to teaching right from wrong. We wanted to get it all right. It took us a lot of years and a lot of children to figure out that we would never ever get it all right. In fact, I am the first to admit that we ended up majoring on a lot of the minors. But I think we are getting it right now. We are enjoying our family, probably more than we ever have before. I am also enjoying life with The Husband. So much so that I think I might keep him around for the next thirty-seven years, or whatever the good Lord gives us. By then we would both qualify as pre-historic if we haven't already.

Please note the goofy expression and the hair bow, courtesy of  Little Two

 

So here's a Happy Father's Day to a good man, a very good man. I am glad we were introduced to one another on that beach in Florida thirty-nine years ago. Little did I know what a good day, a very good day that would turn out to be.