My Meddling Mom

Last week, sort of out of the blue, my husband turned to me and said, “I love you. I want you to know that I really appreciate you and I know I’m lucky to have you. It makes it a lot easier to sit through all these pre-deployment briefings knowing that I won’t have to worry about anything here at home.”

That’s quite a mouthful for a quiet guy like him.

He is a very low-key kind of guy. There are probably guys in his office reading this and laughing. My sense is that he’s not so quiet and low-key at work. But here at home he is the perfect compliment to me.

I appreciate that I have a husband who can say those sorts of things. I appreciate very much that he is able to balance his work and family life in a way that very few people can. I am very lucky to have him. Where did I find a guy like him, anyway?

That’s right. I found him at Purity Supreme.

I met my husband when I was fifteen and started working at the local grocery store. My mom and my brother both worked there too.

I remember sort of liking him right off the bat, but he had a mullet. He flirted with our middle-aged female bosses. They were probably younger then than I am now, but they were still middle-aged in my mind. I considered him just an acquaintance.

Then in 1989 when I was sixteen-years-old and being courted by a very inappropriate older boy, my mother must have decided to take action.

One night at work she grabbed my still mullet-headed future husband and told him that she had planned to drive me home from work but was going to leave early. She asked him to drive me home.

And the rest is history. Our first date to watch Rainman at his mom’s house was on Friday, October 13, 1989. We ate Oreo’s and played ping-pong. In the year’s that followed I would throw up on him at the movies, fight with him at our wedding, and yell at him while I was baring his children.

But he’s stuck around all these eighteen years. It’s almost impossible to imagine that the grocery bagging kids we were back then would grow into the adults we are today, setting off on another adventure with words of love and commitment, all thanks to my meddling mom.