Killing Me Softly All These Years

A Love Note To The Guy Who's Still The One

It's the 1988-89 school year at Stanford. I’m a senior. Every Sunday night, when Dan and I walk back to my dorm after whatever movie is showing at Flicks, we stop at the pay phone next to Hoover Tower and order a medium pepperoni from Dominoes. When the delivery guy gets to the door, one of us writes a check for eight bucks ($7.25 for the pizza and a $.75 tip), then we go up the stairs to my room, where we dim the lights, lay on our sides on the carpeted floor across from each other, the pizza box between us, our heads propped up with the palm of a hand.

Already imagining a life together.

A year earlier, when I was a junior and he was a freshman, he'd painted me a dozen roses for Valentine's Day. You read that right. We'd been in serious like-mode for all of five weeks, so I found the gesture sweet if a bit much. But by April we had hooked up, and in May for the end-of-year dorm talent show I sang him an a cappella rendition of Killing Me Softly by Roberta Flack.

In June, we drove across America together where task one would be to meet each others’ parents. Somewhere near the Texas and Oklahoma border, Dan said, prophetically, “If I ever have kids I want to be home with them.” (A profoundly feminist statement to come out of the mouth of a cis-het guy in 1988.) Yet, all I could hear was that he hadn’t used the pronoun “we.” So I instigated a fight, one hand on the wheel, one hand enhancing the argument my voice was making. Dan looked out the passenger window then looked back over at me and said, “I guess I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that this could conceivably last forever.” And I melted. In the motel that night, both pizza and makeup sex were on order.

_____

It's 2022. We have two amazing children. A son and a daughter who themselves are older than we'd been when we were eating Dominoes in the dorm back in the day, in a relationship that wasn’t supposed to be, wasn’t supposed to last, but did last, unbroken from 1988 on.

This June, one of our kids, Avery, the little one, now twenty-one, said to us, “Guys, I want to throw you a party for your 30th” which was a few weeks ago. And she did.

As the evening was poised to commence, I was upstairs in our bathroom putting the finishing touches on my face when I overheard Avery in the backyard announcing to her assembled crew of caterer, bartender, and live band, “Ok folks, we’re ready to go. If you need anything, let me know.”

When Avery was just one, and her big brother Sawyer three, I’d thrown us an anniversary party in this very backyard for our tenth wedding anniversary. It, too, was catered, but it was a dinner party, a much smaller crowd of twelve, a more modest affair. It was 2002 and Avery and Sawyer were squirreled away upstairs with a babysitter, steps away from where I now stand doing my makeup for our thirtieth.

Our tenth year of marriage had been a tough year, with a toddler, an infant, and a newly re-built house into which we’d moved with my mother who was paying for half of it. Long gone were the days of just us, of privacy, of togetherness, and we were now negotiating everything with a third adult whose help was immeasurable but three adults in a marriage, in a single-family house, with tiny children, is challenging even for the most evolved of humans. Add to that the needs of kids and the demands of jobs and our relationship was getting zero attention. The photos of us in those years look strained.

At our tenth anniversary dinner in this very yard I'd stood to toast Dan but found myself admitting aloud to him and our guests, “There were times over this past year when I wondered, if, when we got to this point, we’d even have anything to celebrate.” Our guests dropped their eyes down to their plates. But Dan, not missing a beat, smiled at me, rose, smoothed his linen jacket, hoisted a glass in one hand and put his other hand over his heart, cocked his head, and said gently, “I’ll wait for you if you’ll wait for me?"

Y’all. This is what love looks like.

That night on our tenth anniversary, tears began to spill down my cheeks, and my hand flew up to the base of my neck where I clutched the diamond that hung from a necklace Dan had given me three-and-a-half years earlier when we’d found out that we were finally pregnant with Sawyer after years of trying. We were at a fancy restaurant, and when I sat in stunned disbelief at this gift we could not then afford, he’d prophetically said, “This is for us to remember what we had before we had kids.” At our tenth anniversary party, I stared at him, willing his words to be both roadmap and rest stop. Willed myself to believe him.

In those tough years, which would continue for awhile, because little kids and challenging jobs and life can take a toll on your primary relationship, the memories of the before years were all that I had, when the present was entirely too much and also never enough.

Now twenty years later, it’s our thirtieth anniversary, and our amazing children who have made our family complete, who teach us how to be better humans with every passing day, whom we feel lucky to call ours, are helping us celebrate.

I’m in my bathroom putting a final smear of purple on my lips and tears spring to my eyes as I hear through the window our amazing Avery, the artist with a talent for back-stage management, too, magnificently and confidently orchestrating the elements of this party she is throwing for us. I hear Sawyer greeting people at the door.

Fifty guests come to celebrate not just us, but the waning of a pandemic that had kept us from each other. One was in that dorm in 1988. Others were at the wedding in '92. Others were at the tenth anniversary in '02. Others we'd met in the twenty years since.

We revel in the accomplishment of togetherness. We drink. We eat. We dance, even me who hates to dance. When the time comes, I sing Killing Me Softly once again, this time backed by a live band.

The song

Dan presents me with another dozen roses, this time five feet tall and forged of rusted steel, and once again I have the feeling that to be loved by an artist is to be intentionally chosen.

The flowers

As Dan and I dance to The Love Theme From St. Elmo's Fire (the wedding song that was never actually played at our wedding because the band had learned the wrong song) I look over and see our children watching. See them not disgusted by their parents’ love, but admiring it, we can tell from the way they hold their gaze, which, let me tell you is #parentinggoals.

The dance

In a lifetime that has offered far more joy than pain, Dan remains the best thing that has ever happened to me. There came a point when I stopped wearing the famous clutched diamond necklace because I no longer needed to. Because what we had was better than it had ever been before.

Here’s to 30 years more years, my love. May we make it to the ripe ages of eighty-four and eighty-five, very much devoted, lustful, and alive. The way will be ever-lit with memories of what we’ve done to work at staying in love over time.

He made this, too

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