Laundry Room Romance

It just all piled up. Yes, of course, the laundry, but everything else, too. It seemed like my husband was always gone, the kids were always home and I was just always going. Over the past 6 months, I have tried my best to make things easier (at least at home) for my husband. You see, my husband’s engineering company has gotten caught up in the down-spiraling field that is commercial construction and to mildly put it, things have been hell for him.
 

I’ve done everything I could do on my end to try to help him. I have forbidden family members to talk to him about work, tried to get him out of the house either at the gym or on his motorcycle as much as I can and have tried to relieve any extra stress stemming from our family. And for the most part, he has been doing better. He’s not as focused on sagging figures and depressed about dwindling employees like he was a while back.
 

First and foremost I did all of this to make him happier. Nothing is more heartbreaking than to see the person you love most in the world suffering on a daily basis. So many times I wanted to scream “JUST QUIT!” But we are at the stage in our life where that’s just not possible. Two children, a mortgage and two car payments and loads of other things, make that an irrational choice. But I have to admit, I’ve tried to make life better for him for my own selfish reasons as well. If he’s happy, then we can be happier as a couple. At least that’s what I thought.
 

Fortunately, he did seem to be on the upward swing, but I didn’t feel like he was taking me up with him. While most of me was so happy to hear him talking about other things besides work, a small part of me felt like things were just normal between us and I guess it all just boiled down to me needing more. So it all piled up and I fell beneath its weight yesterday and began to suffocate. My husband tried to talk to me, but I shut him out. I hid in the laundry room amongst more piles of laundry that I could visually sort and then I fell apart.

He actually had the nerve to enter my domain, my laundry room. He refused to leave until I talked to him. And there in the midst of a vigorously shaking washing machine and heat from the dryer, he did the unthinkable. He grabbed my face in his hands and told me how much he loved me and how much it meant to him that I was taking on so much for him.
 

Now, when I daydream about speeches like these from my husband (because they are incredibly rare), they happen on a deserted beach, or in a magnificent hotel room in Maui or just completely alone feeding each other chocolate dipped strawberries from a balcony overlooking the ocean. This was not the place for words like this to depart from his lips. I needed to be showered, have shaved my legs, have make-up on, have finally lost this last 15 pounds and have lingerie on rather than my cotton whities. But he just stopped me, in the middle of my routine, among tears from months of built up stress and the noise from the Disney channel downstairs and told me everything I needed and wanted to hear from him.
 

How good it was today to wake up today knowing I am still the woman of his dreams after all of these years together. To know that I am the person who he lives for makes everything I do worth it. Although we often about getting away together to Hawaii or the Bahamas or something like that, nothing… no vacation, beach, or hotel room could have possibly made what he said to me any more perfect. Because for a few minutes, nothing else in the world mattered, nothing else made a sound. All I heard was his beautiful voice was coming from perfect lips on the man that I love more than anything else in this world. And I was reminded that I am all of that to him as well.

Needless to say, I like my laundry room a little bit more today.