My Funny Valentines

Today is a day you shouldn't be afraid to wear your heart on your sleeve, right? In that spirit, I want to shout from the rooftops my love for my husband and my son:

I sit at this computer stumped on how to begin this post about the two guys in my life, Jerry and Wilder.

Not stumped because I don't have the words to describe how much I love them and how lucky I feel to have them both. Stumped because words don't seem adequate to express how much light and love and wonder and laughter and joy they bring to my daily existence.

On the one hand, you've got Jerry. I have to start by saying his mama raised him right. She is a continual inspiration to me in trying to raise Wilder to be a nice boy who treats people well, who does nice things for people, who realizes that we all need to be treated with gentleness and tenderness, no matter how hard of a front we sometimes put on.

Jerry is kind. There is no better word to describe him. He's not "nice." He doesn't put on an act. He's a genuinely good-hearted man. "I'm full-grown," he sometimes says, and it's true. He's taken what life has given him, which hasn't always been lollipops and moonbeams, and spun it into gold. His heart is pure gold. If everyone approached life like him, the world, I believe, would be an incredibly better place.

I am one lucky as hell woman to be spending my life with him.

And then there's Wilder. Wow. Wilder. My funny, crazy, rowdy, hilarious little Wild Child. Giver of great loud kisses than end in "MWAH!!" An increasingly wonderful little hugger. The boy who pats my back when I pat his. One who's not yet too cool or too timid to look at me with unabashed love in his eyes. The little guy I made together with the love of my life.

It's a funny world — full of so much hate and violence and corruption and bad, bad stuff. It's heartbreaking. But I can be sitting there wondering, quite literally, when the world's seams are going to bust apart, and Wilder walks into my view. And all my doom, gloom and worry melts away. In short, he's always there to mend my broken heart.

How I feel about Wilder reminds me of a Big Bend trip that Jerry and I took nearly three years ago. We'd driven into the park on a particularly funky day. Jerry was sick. I was hyper-emotional and sad and, for no particular reason, missing my mom greatly. I'd been crying on and off, and Jerry suggested a walk and fresh air in Texas' beautiful national park. We got out of the car, walked around, checked out the desert landscape and, out of nowhere, ran across this one beautiful flower growing in this dry, cracked, chapped expanse of land. Now I love the desert — it's beautiful in ways that lush country isn't; beautiful in a haunting, striving kind of way. But most people see ugliness in the desert. And there was this flower that you had to give some credit. It gave a little burst of color, a little ray of sunshine, a little reason to have hope amongst great adversity.

And those things are the same thing my second little Valentine, Wilder, gives to me every second of every day. He's MY little ray of sunshine, and he's given me a reason to be happy — and hopeful — in the face of great heartache in this world.

So Happy Valentine's Day to you, Jerry and Wilder. You've both made my life magical.