Just as I was resigning myself to my apparent fate, I was granted a gift. Among my colleagues was a very unusual man. He was artistic, sensitive, funny, adorable, and wickedly intelligent.
I always felt complete in his presence; not completed by him, but complete within myself. He celebrated my intelligence, openly expressed his respect for my work and, unlike Joey and the men who followed, he made me feel his desire to be with me had everything to do with me. This man became my husband.
It is a remarkable thing to live with someone who fully and openly supports your growth. With Scott’s encouragement I discovered a myriad of previously dormant talents. I took up photography, gourmet cooking, and perennial gardening. We enrolled in classes in massage, wine tasting, and Latin ballroom dance. We took midnight walks in the woods after snowfalls and picked wild black raspberries in the summer from which I made preserves.
He read to me by the fire while I stitched Christmas stockings. Really. When we purchased our first home he taught me how to use the necessary tools as we remodeled each room. He gave me full reign to paint and stucco and pursue any artistic direction I wanted.
When I thought I had reached my creative limit, he’d urge me to go one step further. It wasn’t that he gave me permission; he simply assumed I could do anything I wanted. When I surprised myself with an accomplishment, like biking 60 miles, being invited to do a staged reading of a play, or opening my own business and becoming my own web designer, he would just laugh, shrug and say, “Of course you could do that. I already knew you could.”
While this marriage provided the most fertile of soils for me to discover and develop myself, finding an ideal partner will never make anyone a Superhero. No, the road to claiming my super powers was a journey I had to take on my own.
The fairy tale union with my husband had a hitch. Although we wanted children, we faced an insurmountable combination of fertility issues. For years, I dealt with uterine fibroids, which increasingly compromised my health and ultimately necessitated a hysterectomy at age 38.
Next up: Slaying the Ghost of Three Dragons Past
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