present over perfect...

there's a writer, shauna niequist, whose books i really love. she's the kind of person i want to sit with over bread, cheese and wine and talk about the ins and outs of life with as there's a tone to her words that echos within my own life and marriage along with an ever-present reminder to slow down.

she recently wrote a blog post in which she speaks of her husband and their life together and it really resonated with me as there’s definite truth in the trust and safety that two healthy people can bring to a marriage. alas, this is less often the case with most. last night, a group of women in my church got together to plan the beginning stages of our upcoming christmas dinner and part of that meeting was hearing an excerpt from the chapter of her book, bread & wine, entitled “present over perfect”. i’m sure i don’t need to tell you how much the title alone echoed within the hearts of everyone there (hello mary and martha…).

i was married to my first husband for 10 years before he passed away and while we loved each other and were, i believe for the most part, present, neither one of us was emotionally available – especially for the hard and imperfect parts of not only our marriage but also of ourselves. looking back i put this down to the actual fear of those imperfections not being received by the other.

now, after 9 years of marriage to michael, we're in a completely different place. as most of you know, this wasn’t always the case; to say that we’ve been through a lot is a massive understatement; we almost didn’t make it. is it health that we experience now? to a degree, certainly. maturity, wisdom, grace? perhaps various forms of all three separately and together. i think a lot of it stems from our commitment to be present which has definitely become more important than being perfect. we looked for perfect back then. God…tried so hard to find it. but you know…we didn’t get healthy until we stopped looking for it and what a miracle that has been in and of itself.

there’s so much freedom to be found in letting go of what “A” HAS to be or look like in order for “B” to work. today, i'm grateful for the reminder.

you make excellent coffee...

Dear Karen,

If you're reading this, it means I actually worked up the courage to mail it, so good for me. You don't know me very well but if you get me started, I have a tendency to go on and on about how hard the writing is for me. This, this is the hardest thing I've ever had to write. There's no easy way to say this so I'll just say it. I met someone. It was an accident, I wasn't looking for it, I wasn't on the make. It was a perfect storm. She said one thing, I said another. Next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation. Now there's this feeling in my gut: she might be The One. She's completely nuts in a way that makes me smile, highly neurotic, a great deal of maintenance required. She is you, Karen. That's the good news. The bad is that I don't know how to be with you right now. And it scares the shit out of me. Because if I'm not with you right now, I have this feeling we'll get lost out there. It's a big, bad world full of twists and turns and people have a way of blinking and missing the moment, the moment that could have changed everything. I don't know what's going on with us, and I can't tell you why you should waste a leap of faith on the likes of me. But damn you smell good. Like home. And you make excellent coffee -- that's got to count for something, right? Call me.

Unfaithfully yours, Hank Moody