Several weeks ago there was a photo being shared on Facebook. The caption read, “My husband is my happy place.” I saved the picture and shared it on my timeline. Franklin and I have come a long way in our 15 years together and with the exception of the Truth found in God’s Holy Word, no statement is truer in my life.
Franklin and I met in high school. My family moved to Portales from Clayton when my grandmother, Mary Thompson, passed away. Herschel and I joined the Ram Band and found a group of young musicians who became the core of our Portales friend base. We continue to connect with many of those friends, two of whom we’ve married.
Alison and I were good friends. She was an outstanding oboist, and she and I roomed together on out of town band and competitive speech trips. Alison and my twin, Herschel, began to date the summer after graduation and married five years later. They have four beautiful children and live in Norman, Oklahoma.
Franklin was a good friend of Herschel’s. He was often at our home and often asked me out though I never accepted. I remember thinking he was cute and kind in a brotherly kind of a way, but he was shorter than me, might have weighed 110 pounds soaking wet, had feathered hair and wore a bolo tie. I was much more interested in athletes and gave Franklin little more than a fleeting thought.
Although we didn’t date, we have many memories and pictures together from those couple of years. Pictures from Ram Band banquets, our high school graduations, and my senior year band trip (he “chaperoned” with his parents as a college freshman) to Los Angeles, Harry Connick Jr., and a letter or two are precious mementos of shared time before this thing we now have began.
I married and moved away, but returned to Portales as a single mom to finish my MEd and be close to my family. Franklin and I met again when he accepted a teaching position at the same elementary school I was teaching at. I refused his invitations for anything more than friendship initially, but enjoyed to getting to know him again. Hind sight being what it is, I believe The Holy Spirit softened my heart and I began to see him in a new light.
Franklin and I dated for 7 months before he proposed and we married on the Millennium’s Eve, New Year’s Eve 1999. The small sanctuary of First Spanish Baptist Church was packed with close friends and family, luminaries, white roses, and Jim Brickman set the mood, my father-in-law officiated, Bailey, just 2 weeks shy of 4 carried the rings, my parents gave me away and my siblings stood with me as we entered into a covenant relationship with God, “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until we are parted by death.”
Like all new marriages we had our struggles. We both had selfish tendencies and strongholds to submit, communication strategies to learn, and financial management and budgeting techniques to master. There were our fair share of tears and frustrations but we committed time and again to each other, this is “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until we are parted by death.”
We relied on the experience and wisdom of others. Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Revisited and his class Financial Peace University, Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages, Kevin Leman’s Sheet Music, Mark and Grace Driscoll’s Real Marriage, Laura Schlessinger’s The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, The Love Dare, and numerous Beth Moore Bible studies have been important in my growth as a wife, a mother, and a Christian woman. Weekly praise and worship and Bible study with our local church, our participation in our local Walk to Emmaus community, sermons online, our own daily quiet time, and our morning family time in the Bible continue to strengthen our walk with God and our relationships with each other and those with whom we “do life”.
Another couple of things we’ve realized the past 15 years have rooted our relationship. 1) We’ve consciously worked to enjoy several of the same activities. It’s been important for us to, very simply, spend time together. 2) We exercise (or try to) together several times a week. We’ve alternated between walking, jogging, and riding bikes. In fact, I’m still sore from a huge Pilates circuit workout Thursday night. It doesn’t really matter what the activity is, we’re together and we’re thoughtful about our physical wellness. 3) We schedule a date night once a week (and more often than not, we keep the date). Often, we don’t leave the house or spend a penny, but the kids are at Grandma’s and we focus on and relax with one another. 4) We know how to work together; from the weekly housekeeping to huge projects we’ve tackled (installing a sprinkler system, laying flooring, removing and installing windows, gutting and remodeling bathrooms, landscaping huge lawns, and staining thousands of square feet of concrete). We enjoy working side by side and know we can count on each other to work hard.
Please hear me when I say, we have our tough days. I’ve got a short fuse and a smart, stabbing tongue when I let my guard down. As I get older, the 2-3 days a month when Mama rides an emotional roller-coaster are more like 6-7 days. We are certainly not immune to the stressful seasons of life (the ebb and flow of the school year, allergies and illness, a new career, and a new home) but at the end of the day we find some quiet time to share the ups and downs of the day and we reassure each other that this is “For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until we are parted by death.”
Because we’ve always had a child in our home, we’ve typically been at home in the late evenings. We’ve always had “bedtime” for the kids, and in those quiet moments after the kids are tucked in, we’ve always ended our day together. We do have our own study spaces in the house, and in the mornings we have our alone time, but our evenings have always been shared.
For years, my very favorite time of the day has been those last minutes before I fall asleep when I’m tucked in along Franklin’s side, my head on his shoulder. I’ve called that spot “my happy place” for years. I would take another hour or two there every evening and I can’t image anywhere else that I’d rather be (okay, I know… Heaven, yes… but on Earth, no way!).