Day 197 - 157.0 Missing my other half

My husband left for Colorado Wednesday for a brother/sister reunion. He is the youngest of four--one brother lives in Hopkinsville, KY, his sister lives here in Evansville, and the other brother lives in the mountains outside of Golden, CO. The CO brother has remodeled his house and is probably going to be selling it soon, so he wanted to have one last hurrah with the siblings before the house is gone. Mark will be home on Sunday afternoon.

This sounds horrible, but usually I welcome a break from my husband. He can wear me out sometimes. I am a tad bit codependent (is it possible to be a little bit codependent?) and so I worry about how he's feeling and if he's happy or not and when he's not, then I feel like it's my responsibility to make him feel better. I'm sure this mostly stems from my childhood with a moody father.

But I miss him this time. Not because I miss his help with the kids (which is why I've missed him in the past), or because I need help with the house or with work. I miss his presence, his friendship, our conversations.

I've taken him for granted for a long time, I think. I get resentful about his messiness, his absent-mindedness, his self-centeredness, and his lateness (he's late for everything, but totally denies it, which drives me crazy). In the worst of times, I've thought I could do just fine on my own, if I had to, because I do everything anyway.

But that is so very wrong. I need him in my life, and not just because he's my kids' father. He's my best friend. I need to start treating him like he is.

We've been together since 1993. We had a rocky start, which I'll have to post about someday--it's quite a story. And we've been married since March of 1995. In a lot of ways we've beaten the odds. I can't imagine ever getting divorced, but there have been times when I thought that's where we were headed. Before we had Sophie, we went to marriage counseling for a year. It was the best thing we could have done at the time; sadly, my being 50 pounds overweight was a huge issue in our marriage. Mark married a skinny girl, and he ended up a few years later with a fat girl. He had a hard time dealing with it, and I of course was resentful and subconsciously (and, let's face it, consciously) didn't want to lose weight just to prove that he had to love me even if I was fat and that it shouldn't matter what I looked like--he married me for better or for worse.

He stuck with me, obviously. And even though we had some horrible years relationshipwise because of my body and his attitude about it, he finally got to the point where he loved me no matter what. I think age and kids mellowed him quite a bit. Plus he went through some heavy duty stuff himself and had significant counseling a few years ago which helped him immensely.

Now that I'm getting closer and closer to the skinny girl he married, he's in awe of me. He told me on Tuesday night after our dance class that he couldn't believe how thin I felt in his arms. He had a look on his face that I remember seeing that first night we met in the summer of '93, when he held me on a dance floor in a bar called Rookies in Henderson, Kentucky.

I was in awe of him back then. I cherished him and loved him with every ounce of my 23 year old body. Maybe when I'm back to my 23 year old weight (12 more pounds to go), the weight will no longer be an issue in my mind, and I will be able to get out of my own way and find the awe in our relationship again.