Soul Sister

Ok yes, one of my favorite songs… Hey, Soul Sister… can I admit that here?

In the past few weeks in discussions with friends and actually online as well, we have hit on that “right person”. Who is it and how do you know?

I know my right person… my husband. We have this super marriage. A marriage that when others are in groups and venting about their significant other about all I can find to say is, “I got nothing.” (Now if they wanted to switch the topic over to work? I could so bend some ears there.)

I am lucky. Very, very lucky.

My husband supports me in everything I do. He gives me his opinion, even though I may not want it, and then he shuts up when I ask him if I asked for his opinion. We talk all the time. He has heard my stories 6832 times and I have heard his 6833 times. But we still learn from each other. We are a team and ever proud of being a family together. And I pray to God that he never finds a reason or desire to leave me.

We started dating when we were in our senior year in college, just before we each turned 22. Those first two years were rocky. We broke up a number of times. I always swore (before him) that I wouldn’t go back to a failed relationship. But something kept pulling me back each time. Then I decided to go to grad school. He followed me a few states over and by that action, I knew we were in it for the long haul, though we didn't marry for 3 years after that.

I dated a lot (read too much) in high school. I look back now and realize that I wanted someone so badly that I dated anyone who took a second glance at me. I hope I can infuse in my daughter a stronger sense of worth in herself and less of my early dependence on feeling like I was someone because I was with someone. With only a few exceptions I went from dating one person a prior weekend to having a new boyfriend the next. It wasn’t until a particularly stifling year and a half in early college that I decided I needed to be brave. I needed to be by myself for one full year. I needed to figure out who I was.

And I did it. When AB came along that senior year, I was ready.

Is he my soul mate? See I am not sure I believe in a soul mate. The whole one person for each person out there and if brought together, sparks will fly and all will be good in the world, doesn't really jive with me. And AB agrees with me.

I, in no way, believe that if the stars hadn’t aligned bringing AB to Colorado for college (because his dad decided to get his graduate degree at the same university) and then bringing me to the same university because I was dating Mr. Stifler who wanted to switch universities… or say I hadn’t put off PChem Lab that one year, maybe I decided to take it on a whim the semester prior… or say I hadn’t looked over in PChem Lab on that first day and said to myself, “OMG I so cannot be lab partners with Wayne again, I have to pounce on someone else” and AB was standing there… that we wouldn’t have been perfectly happy with someone else.

Who that someone else would have been, I have no idea.

Would I have gone on to grad school by myself and dated one of my fellow grad students? Or would I have moved along single into a job and married one of the many single (probably for a reason) nuclear physicists or engineers I worked with?

There have been other people who have come into my life that I believe, if circumstances were different, that we could have successfully made a go at it and been happy. Does that make me want to jump ship and test it out. No freaking way. I have my small list of guys in the back of my head that on a rare occasion I think back on, “if things would have been different… where would we be now?” And I think it would have been good, but I am in no way kidding myself that that list of guys is also guys that I never actually dated either.

So maybe, just maybe, I did luck out and find my soul mate. I don't know. But I look forward to spending the rest of my life with that fabulous man that is driving our children up the street right now as I sit here typing.