Green is definately his colour

This weekend, on May 19th, is mine and DH’s 11th Wedding Anniversary.

And I’m going to let you in on  a little known fact.


It’s actually not.

It’s true, even ask my husband who had his security clearance papers returned because he used this date as his wedding date.

If you look at our Marriage Certificate, our actual anniversary is in March.

Why, you ask?

Because we were 19.  We were broke.  We couldn’t even afford an apartment and if we were going to be married and actually live together, we needed to live in military housing.  Military housing required a marriage certificate to place us on the waiting list for a house. The waiting list was one month long.

Before we were married, I lived with my parents in a city about 3 hours away from him.  He lived in the single quarters on base.  It was not an option for either of us to move in with the other, so had we waited until our wedding to put in our names for a house, we would have had to wait a month in order to live together.  A month still being apart after our wedding.

We were unwilling to do that.

So we went to the office of our Pastor with 2 of our friends and signed papers.  In our jeans a t-shirts.  With no one there but the required witnesses.  We didn’t invite our parents. I think we might have gone out for lunch with a friend after.

And that was that.

When I walked down the aisle at that fancy dream wedding I mentioned here, I wasn’t scared he’d run. Technically, he was already my husband.

The army, it forced our hand and made us change our plans before we were even married. And conveniently, it’s been doing that ever since.

Like the 1st birthday party for our first child that we planned and planned and had 40 people invited over for when the call came and he left on 2 hours notice to fight forest fires.  The day before the birthday. And I hosted our first big event without him.

The 10th anniversary he was almost home for before he got called to help with floods in another province.

The birthdays, father’s days and anniversaries that we celebrate weeks before or after or not at all in order to accommodate an ever changing schedule.

Or these past couple months.

These past couple of months when I received his posting message the day after he left on training exercise.  When I met with a Realtor and then listed and sold our house alone.

When I arranged financing for our house hunting using a power of attorney, attended more meetings than I can even remember, made more decisions I ever care to make and spent more time at DH’s work sending envelopes back and forth to him in the field than I ever have before.

Conveniently, now that the house is sold, financing is ready, the house hunting trip is booked and every single meeting has been attended and decisions made…. Dh will come home this week.  And then we will leave together the next day to go house hunting.

Last week he sent me this picture.

It’s a good thing that man is sexy.

This was going to be an anniversary post.  I was struggling what to write, you can only write so many posts about how wonderful your husband is before he starts to get a big head people get bored.

Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about something else. Taking on all this when I agreed to be his wife, it has had some seriously crappy moments.

But I needed them.

While it’s true that I met (and even dated a little) DH when we were 13, we went to different high schools and we didn’t really connect together until around graduation. DH and I had taken very different paths. The Internet, well, it’s forever.  And I’m not willing to share my whole path on it. But I will share this.

At 18, I already needed a second chance.

Hell, I needed a few.

And in strolled this 17 year old I had known since we were kids, and one night after being out with some friends he grabs hold of my face and he asks me if I’m done.  He looks me in the eyes and he tells me that if I’ll let him, he wants to take care of me.  He tells me he will marry me one day.

I think I might have laughed in his face.

He spend the next better part of a year proving he meant it.

I treated him terribly. I told him things just to hurt him.  I did things just to see if he would care.  I strung him along and I cut him down and refused to see what was staring me in the face.

He loved me.

And he knew, he trusted, that I could do what I needed to do to see the other side of whatever was holding me back.

I pray every day my kids find love like that.

He told me, beside the car as he left for basic training, as I stared wide eyed at him actually leaving, that if he for one moment thought I couldn’t do what I needed to do on my own, he would be home, in a second.  But he knew I could.

And I did.

Last week, I had a little overblown no-hold barred hissyfit moment of indecision.

And in one of the precious few phone calls DH and I have been able to have since he left for training, I told him there was no way I could finish this. I had to keep our house in listing condition with 3 kids at home.  I had to fill out paperwork, attend meetings, make travel arrangements. It started to overwhelm me. I got a little weepy and I told him I didn’t understand how he thought I would get all this accomplished.

And he told me, in the middle of a pretend firefight in some field in rural Alberta, as I sniffled on the phone, that if he for one second thought that I couldn’t do what I needed to do on my own, he would come home.  But he knew I could.

And the truth is, PMS aside, I knew I could too.

11 years marriage has taught me a lot about relationships and love and all those things you would expect.

But it’s taught me something else, too, that it wouldn’t have if I wasn’t married to a man who does what DH does.

It has taught me that I can do a whole lot more that I thought I could. It has taught me to rely more on God that anyone else around me. It has taught me to be me.

It has also taught be how easy it is to sell a house and take out an exorbitantly large amount of credit on my husband’s account.

Like I said.

It’s a good thing that man is sexy.

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