The Love of my Life

I think Mike and I are going through some 18 year later honeymoon now. Seems like we are in the groove and outdoing each other in the love giving and serving areas. Wow wouldn’t it be nice if life were always like this!
I got to thinking sweet thoughts about him and began thinking about my childhood. Because I have always wondered: If we had met when we were kids, would we have liked each other? So today I thought, you know I think I did!
I am quite the romantic, always have been. So just sit back and indulge me.

It so happens that I went to the same school pretty much all my life, Saint Paul’s School, a private English, and Anglican run school in Vina del Mar, Chile. I started in 1st Grade and graduated with most of the same kids 12 years later in 1986. There was one boy in my class. He was a dream. I liked and loved him off and on all of my childhood. He was beautiful, funny, popular, athletic, a good friend, and… out of my league. He was my friend, yet nothing ever came of the two of us, a very hard lesson in life, but one worth going through. I always felt like there was something wrong with me, something I must change, I must not be lovable or worth loving.

At the same time, there was a part of me that had formed an image of some sort of the boy that I liked and that liked me too. He eluded me, but I would catch a glimpse of him, it would be in the face of the boy that I saw on the bus, the boy walking down the street, at the beach three towels down, or it would be one boy on the opposing boys hockey team. He was not that good looking, just a common guy, living a common life, no girls falling all over him, that had a twinkle in his eye and maybe looked my way even for just a second. This was “a boy” that I was comfortable with, a boy that liked me the way I was, and loved being with me. This boy didn’t need me to change; he didn’t want me to change. He just made me laugh and I would feel safe and well with him. He would feel safe and appreciated by me.

Boys came in and out of my life for years, loves and heartbreaks, till the day I met Mike. I think that is why I loved him so easy, so soon. Somewhere in my heart I must have been screaming “is it you? Is it really you? Have you come to know me and take me away?” I was convinced that Mike was the boy that I saw in all of those faces. It had to be him, because I never felt like I was less than I was, never felt like I had to be someone else. We were good friends for a good while. (Really, I was smitten) and it took me a year to convince him that he was in love with me. So stubborn, his baggage was heavy and he needed help letting go of it. But when it was all said and done…. A match made in heaven.

Just because we are getting along so well lately, and I am inspired and filled with love, and in the spirit of the season I just want to say how thankful I am for a dedicated mother that prayed for Mike every day of my life and for a dedicated mother-in-law that prayed for me every day of Mike’s life. Without them we would be a failure.

I used to think that this other classmate of mine was the love of my life, but it just wasn’t meant to be and that Mike had come to fill a big hole, which he was very capable of filling because until him, I really didn’t know what love was, he taught me what love was in so many ways. But I have now come to see it clearly. That little romantic girl deep in her heart had loved Mike the whole time. HE was the true love of my life and still is. When I look at pictures of him in his childhood, those years when my heart first started to seek him, I think, YES, that is who it was, that is him! The LOVE OF MY LIFE.