Monday, April 15, 2013

Being ourselves

I think that the greatest glue in our marriage is the power of our savior and Lord Jesus. Another pretty good binder is the fact we can be ourselves with each other.
Too much time in one's youth is wasted trying to be someone else.
This weekend the Help once again won the 'only white guy in the room' award at my aunts' alumni fundraiser dance. He is the whitest white guy who was ever white and was so for the whole evening. He did not cease to be him while dancing with one of my aunts, chatting with table mates (though limited by the fact the DJ was trying to make us go deaf), and attempting to do the dance of my people, the Electric Slide. He decided to sit out the "booty call" and other line dances. He did not try to discover some blackness in him or blend in.
When he attends mass with me, he is comfortable being Mr. Presbyterian in the pews. He's decided his job is to hold the missle so he sits and stands and does the low impact excerises short of receiving the host, kneeling, and genuflecting. He sits. He stands. He holds a book and turns the pages. I love him for that.
And I can be me. I can do interpretive dance in his presence. Seriously, serious, non-parody dancing. I do parodies too. I can also sing freely. Private comedy shows with a lot of inside jokes. I can choose to give up on make up and other beauty "musts" the modern world insists on, and he can make me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world.
He can be weird. The kind of of weird that I know he is, because I'm somewhat used to it after a decade of friendship. I also tell him that he's weird and he says, "I know."
In all this we are being ourselves and I love it.
I can only hope others can find the same love being simiply who they are.

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