Learning to be a lady…
I grew up believing that love had to be dramatic to be important. Flooded by movies with tearful reunions at airport gates, stadium proposals, and boomboxes outside windows, I unwittingly began to associate these things with the sort of love I craved for myself. Grand gestures became synonymous with depth of feeling.
I wasn’t far into adulthood when I shrugged the conscious belief that these things mattered, but it was quite a while longer before my subconscious self was able to outgrow the idea as well. I’m happy to say that I don’t need twelve dozen roses to feel like the luckiest woman in the world. I find great joy in the little details. The things that might go unnoticed by an onlooker, but that together create something much greater than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s the comfortable silences. It’s the picture he leaves in his absence to make me smile. It’s the morning message left to remind me that, even though we’re apart, he is thinking of me. It’s the “please, Daddy,” that trails behind a request to demonstrate respect.
The seemingly insignificant acts are bricks in the structure of our relationship. When I spend the extra minute to clean the drain, and dry the sink, after finishing the dishes, it’s an act of service. I do so, not because I think the drain needs to be cleaned every day, but because when I do something for him I want it to done to the best of my ability. I keep all of our toys charged, even the ones we seldom use, because a small amount of effort is worth saving him a moment of disappointment. It’s these little efforts, stacked one upon another, that give height to our relationship.
There are ways I serve him he will never see, just at there are efforts on his part I will never be privy to. These unnoticed acts are the mortar that hold our wall together. Tiny, and lost to those who stand too far from the structure. But, without these little details what we’ve built is compromised. Sometimes our efforts are packed away, squashed between two bricks, a layer of mortar unseen, but never insignificant.
