Free Love + Family: The Birthday by Ashley Barron Page B

emotional storms in our marriage with grace, calm, and
united goals.
     
    There will always be laughter in our
home. We had made a choice to put those words in our ceremony,
and we renewed our vow to honor them.
     
    Most of the time, it was easy. Inspiration
was all around us.
     
    Watching the kids learn to crawl and walk and
feed themselves was pure comedy.
     
    Bandaging up my husband after his attempts at
home improvement projects wasn’t funny, but his excuses for why
things went wrong certainly were.
     
    And we would hoot for days over the
expression on our pizza delivery guy’s face when thick smoke from
my latest culinary disaster would greet him at the door.
     
    I often think of sunlight as laughter. It
streams in through the windows, tickling me, following me from room
to room as the day grows. But I can’t hold sunshine in my hands,
can I? I can’t bottle it up for when the rain comes.
     
    How I wish I could.
     
    In every soul—mine, my husband’s—there exists
those deepest, darkest, most stubborn days when a light simply will
not shine.
     
    We have seasonal strategies for those bleak
days, my husband and I. On quiet summer nights, for example, we’ll
sneak out into the backyard after the kids are asleep and wedge
ourselves into a single lawn chair. In between kisses, we’ll try to
outdo one another with tall tales of child rearing.
     
    Blame it on the giddy combination of
moonlight, and surviving another day of parenting, but once I
laughed so hard I popped a button right off my blouse. It flung
itself up in the air and twirled around before landing in the
pocket of my husband’s shirt.
     
    To this day, he keeps that button in a metal
dish his Grandpa gave to him when he was a kid. That old tarnished
bowl sits on his bedside table. Every night, he takes off his watch
and his wedding ring and puts them inside for safe keeping.
     
    My husband tells me that when he reaches into
it in the mornings, his fingers always seem to find the button
first, beginning his day with thoughts of me, and of moonlight and
laughter and kisses.

     
    He thinks there is magic in his Grandpa’s
dish.
     
    I think there is magic in us.
     
    Love notwithstanding, sometimes the stress in
our lives piles up in thick, iron-heavy heaps of trouble. During
those times when we aren’t able to find the patience to speak
civilly to one another, or to listen without criticism, we try to
stay in separate corners until the heat of the moment burns itself
out.

    We don’t argue often; it’s not our style.
Sure, we engage in spirited debates—we’re parents, after all—but we
don’t argue. I won’t let us.
     
    It is never the verbal contest of wills, the
actual process of shouting arbitrary, needless threats at one
another that I worry will jeopardize our love.
     
    No, it’s the aftermath. It’s the time spent
wondering if the words we hurled at each other with increasing
speed, and deadly aim, were enough to kill our relationship,
permanently.
     
    The silence, the separation, the hurt and
anger poisoning the air makes those the worst, the hardest, the
most terrible days in our marriage.
     
    Somewhere along the way, we learned how to
get through the argument, how to reach for the center, the middle
ground, and trust that the other will be there take hold of the
pain and sooth it away.
     
    To forgive.
     
    For us, this middle ground is music. There
are certain songs we’ve both fallen in love with over the years,
special songs we reserve for those times when we—and our
marriage—need them. Hearing those first notes begin to play answers
the question ripping its way through the soft flesh of my heart:
“Is this the end?”
     
    Suddenly, it no longer matters who started
the fight, or who fueled it, or who will be the first to say “I’m
sorry.” Yes, sometimes it takes more than one song, more than one
day, to bend the anger enough to reach out and take a hold of each
other, to feel heartbeats and warm skin and