Love is in the Air

A long, looooong time ago, I thought the man who would become my husband was going to propose to me on Valentine's Day. But he didn't. 

This is a super romantic story if you can get over the part about me being kind of a brat about it. 

We'd been talking about getting married for months. I had it on the DL that he'd told my roommate he was going to propose. Soon. And Valentine's Day, let's be honest, is the ONLY day a man can do something like that. He had planned a special dinner at a posh restaurant and then had gotten us theater tickets. And the whole time we were out my brain was on which engagement ring he'd chosen and if our wedding should be in the summer or the winter. I don't even remember the name of the restaurant or the title of the play because all I could think about was perfecting my surprised look when he popped the question. And then the play came to an end, and he drove me home. 

HE DROVE ME HOME. INSTEAD OF PROPOSING TO ME. I WAS WEARING THE DRESS I WAS GOING TO BE PROPOSED TO IN. AND HE DIDN'T PROPOSE. THE WORLD FELT VERY DARK AND WRONG. 

As you can tell, I handled it in a super mature and undramatic fashion.

The next weekend I semi-reluctantly joined him for a weekend in a city three hours away. We were visiting his family and I was not at all holding a grudge for not proposing to me the weekend before. Actually, that's not true, and as the weekend wore on, he seemed more and more distant and I became more and more frustrated. By Saturday night we were barely speaking. I was pretty relieved to go to bed and get a break -- unsure if we were on the verge of marriage or a break up. 

At 4 a.m. his sister woke me up and put a blindfold on me. "What in the world is going on?" Then I heard my future husband playing the guitar. He hadn't ever played the guitar before to my knowledge, but he had learned the chords to one of our favorite songs, "So Simple" by Wide Awake. When he finished playing the song, he asked me to be his wife. He has not, to my knowledge, ever picked up a guitar again, but he did an amazing job that night! I said yes, and we married six months later. 

Photo by Mountain Pearl Photography

Let YOU shine. Part I

I spent the past week in Las Vegas.

If that sounds thrilling to you, you should know, I am not Vegas material. I don't gamble. I'm not much of a drinker. I wasn't even there to see Britney. Okay, so I own some of her CDs. Okay, a lot of them. Okay, yes, I may have watched a lot of her music videos and tried to replicate her dance moves. But a lot of the allure wore off somewhere around the time she started shaving her head and appearing on the cover of every celebrity news magazine for her smashing umbrellas into minivans. Ohhhh, Britney. We'll always have high school.

I was in Las Vegas for WPPI, the world's largest wedding and portrait photographer convention. I heard tell there were about 100,000 of us there. Maybe that was a Vegas embellishment though. There's no way to know what's real and what's fake in a place where women who wear sequin bras and bird plumage on their heads is normal weekday attire. 

It was an intense week with sessions about shooting and lighting and editing and marketing and branding and search engine optimization jammed in with product demonstrations and gallery trials and print competitions and enough information to make a photographer entrepreneur's head spin. (More on that in another post.)

Yesterday afternoon, as my time in Vegas came to a close, I began to yearn for my family. I could feel the tender pull of the familiar grip me harder and harder as my flight was delayed at the first airport, and then the next, and then I couldn't find my suitcase on the baggage carousel for 30 minutes, and then I got pulled over by a cop on my drive from the airport home. (Got off with a warning though!) It was the Murphey's Law of homecomings.

I finally arrived at my dark home 2 a.m., and made a beeline for my kids’ bedroom. I leaned down over my son’s bed, kissed him on the forehead and breathed in his skin. 

He reached up to wrap his arms around my neck. “You’re so beautiful,” he murmured, still asleep.

By all conventional measures, I wasn’t beautiful. I looked — and probably smelled — like I’d been on an airplane recycling the air and dead skin cells of strangers for four hours. My eye makeup was crusty. My hair a frizzy mess. I was wearing basically glorified pajamas, comfortable and unstylish. My chosen travel attire. 

But he wasn’t talking about my fashion. He was talking about the beautiful connection we shared. He was talking about the warmth of our arms around each other. 

I moved to my daughter’s bed, wrapped my arms around her, felt her start to rouse. her  hair smelled like strawberries. She must have had a bath recently. Or maybe it was her fruity smelling detangler. Either way, good job, husband!

“Mom? You’re home?” Her words blurred together. Still, she was articulate for a half-asleep two-year-old. “I love you. You’re so beautiful.”

There, in the dark, my eyes brimmed.

What if we could measure our warmth instead of our jean size? What would our beauty look like then? What if our connection to the world around us could be calibrated instead of our body fat percentage? Would we worry about our scars or freckles or the space between our eyes or the width of our nose or our wrinkles or our hair cut if instead we focused on the kindness and compassion in our spirit?

I wish we could see ourselves the way our kids see us. In the dark, with their eyes closed, they feel our beauty shining through our earthly bodies and our clothes.

We should too. 

Many thanks to the talented Jen Fredette of Mountain Pearl Photography for capturing this image of me shining with Cora when she was a baby. It's one of my most cherished possessions.