"Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.” --H.H. Dalai Lama
This weekend I celebrated my 42nd birthday. I have essentially, if I maintain good health, have lived half my possible life already. It has been filled with so many events both sorrowful and joyful. In the last 4 years I have been lucky enough to have Michael in my life helping me grow as a human, as a woman, and as a mother.
We have birthdays one day apart so we usually go away together to a cabin and celebrate life while also mourning the loss of his mother who took her own life on his birthday. It has been my mission since I met him to help him find some sense of peace and happiness on his birthday again. My life would be so much less without him. This year was the first year his sorrow did not outweigh the grace of his birthday.
On these special weekends we have time to really talk uninterrupted, laugh, cry, make fools of ourselves without worry, and rejoice in the beauty of the lives we have created around us. I find these trips vital to our friendship and our relationship. He has said to me on many occasions that relationships are work and if they fall apart then not enough effort was put into it. Each of us brings challenges to the table and both of us have had to find some zen in our hearts to bear the other on occasion, but never has it seemed like too much work. Our relationship is always worth the effort.
My birthday consisted of torrential downpour from the time we woke up until the time we went to bed. We were essentially cabin bound and the plans for hiking the woods thwarted, but we made the best of it. Later in the evening he began to tell me that he felt our relationship was special because until he met me he felt as if he had never been truly loved by anyone. I stood there in the kitchen with my heart breaking at this thought. He is so talented and charming and funny. He is a man of morals and a great thinker. It was probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. It was the best birthday present I have ever gotten.
To know you have made someone feel loved, loved so much they have to love you back in the same way is the most wonderful thing imaginable. I am a lucky woman. We are lucky in love. I thank my stars for that every day.
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