Beach Day!

Today is my husband's birthday and we are going to the beach. He loves snorkeling and I don't. I love playing in the water and sitting on the beach enjoying the sun and reading a good book. No matter how many times my husband tells me how beautiful things are under the water, I really don't want to see all those things that are under the water. I don't want to see the pretty fish that might nibble my toes or the coral that I might step on and hurt my feet. I really don't like putting my face in the water. I'll float on top of the water. I'll jump in the waves. But I'll keep my face above water and view his underwater world through the pictures he takes. A great compromise for each of us, both enjoying our beach day in our own way.

After almost 26 years of marriage, we have learned that we are each individuals who may enjoy different things and look at life in our own way but that we enjoy being together. It's a matter of compromise. Learning to live together. Being friends as well as husband and wife. Learning the difference between enduring love and being in love. Knowing that we can be mad as hell at each other and argue and disagree but that we will stay together anyway.

An Enduring Love - A True Story

Picture of my mother and father on their wedding day - 1937

Lately I have been thinking more and more about my dear mother. Is this because she will be 93 years old in August, if she lives that long, and is most likely reaching the end of her days here on earth? Or could it could be because I am getting older myself and find that I am wondering what my mother was like before she was just "mother" in my mind?

What was her life like besides her life as my mother? it is hard for me to think of my mother as being young. Was it love at first sight when she met the young man who would become my father? Did she experience the passions and desires of a young woman in love with her man? Did her heart go pitter-patter and tingles run up and down her spine when she kissed him? Did she long to make love with him and couldn't wait for their wedding night to "become a woman"?

Did she regret marrying him when he decided to answer the call of God and become a preacher? She certainly hadn't signed on for being a preacher man's wife when they married and it changed the entire course of her life. Even if she didn't want to be the wife of a preacher man, divorce wasn't an option to her. People of my mother's generation didn't "do divorce." You made your bed and you lay in it, for better or worse.

My mother and father married in 1937. They had 6 children, one a little daughter who died when she was 2 years old. They lived, they loved, and they grew old together. They may not have had a bed of roses (who ever promised us a rose garden?) but they stayed together until "death do us part" when my father died in 1996. At the time of his passing, my mother and father had been married for 59 years. My father has been gone for 13 years and my mother still considers him as her husband and she is still his wife.

An enduring love story if I ever heard one.