Love Armadillo

Last week after a lunch out with my husband, he bought me a hat.  I loved this hat before it was mine, in a "stuff-kind-of-love" way.  We walked on the sunny side of the street to keep warm after our meal.  We went into the hat shop, just to try on hats.  I like hats because they suit me.  

My husband loves me because I suit him.  He saw me hovering over this hat, and before we left, told me he was going to buy it.  It was "stupid" expensive.  It was in a tourist shop, so I knew I could get it somewhere else for a reasonable price, so I said no.  He said yes.  I said no.  He said yes.  I said, 'Okay'.

My husband made me feel worth full price and beautiful.  It made me feel like we were newly in love, like back in the early 90's (remember those?).  

I put the hat on, and wore it the rest of the day/week/month.  In the car on the way home from school, full of love in my heart, feeling as beautiful and cared for as a girl can feel just from getting a hat, my kids commented on my new fashion.

My son said I look good in hats.  My daughter said I looked like I had an armadillo on my head.  

http://stevecreek.com/

I didn't know how to feel about her statement.  It seemed true, but I didn't roll up into a little ball with my hard shell to the world.  

Later, wearing the hat, my friend, without provocation or talking to my daughter, told me I looked like I had the cutest armadillo on my head he had ever seen.  

It must be true, it looks like an armadillo.  When I look at it, I see I am worth loving for years, even decades.  

good husband/bad man Part II

Last week Silas had an endoscopy.  The doctor and nurses sedated him to see why his stomach has been giving him trouble.  I was his ride home, so after the procedure I found him in the recovery room.  He was behind a curtain with a young nurse (younger than me) on a cot, laying on his side.  The pretty nurse told me he was very sleepy, and very chatty, then she smiled at me, sweetly sideways.  This is the part of the story where my concern for his condition turned to curiosity.

The nurse told me every time they tried to wake him, he would groggily look at them and say, "You're not pretty enough to be my wife!".  He would fall back into his dopey sleep, and they would try to wake him again, and he would say the same thing.  Had he thought that it was going to be me waking him up each time?  The nurses giggled, and were not offended.

I shook him awake, and he looked at me and smiled.  He was dopey!  He was telling the nurse how he might invent a program for her computer to make it work better, just before she stepped out of the curtain.  I told him what he had said to the nurses, and he was embarrassed a bit, so he said loudly, through the curtain, "you are pretty enough to be my wife".  I could hear her giggling behind the curtain.

I learned two things about what my husband is actually thinking, without his filter.  The first is that he is a pretty big nerd.  He holds back a lot of technical details and geeky computer inventions (my 5th grade son also has this trait).  I'm grateful for his nerd-i-ness, as it puts food on the table, and he is well rounded and social.  I'm also grateful I'm not responsible for all those details in his head.

The second thing I learned, was really just a reminder.  Silas thinks I am the most beautiful person he knows.  Compared to the other women in the doctor's office, if I were comparing objectively, which is a terrible thing to do,  there was no winner.  I might be the winner, in that I was not in hospital scrubs, but my 'mom uniform', which might be a 6 out of 10 rather than a 5.

How Silas views Tyson

What I actually look like.

Every girl wants her husband to think she is the prettiest girl in the room, and mine does.  The flip side, which is the 'bad man' part, is it could mean that he thinks you aren't as pretty as I am.  I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.   I think the real danger is if I thought I was prettier than you, and I don't.  I don't even care what you look like, I like you anyway.  I think Silas doesn't actually care what I look like either, because I can be an ugly person, he loves me despite myself.  Our time together has helped him love me: body, mind and spirit, and I reciprocate.