The Luckiest

it became our wedding song, for obvious reasons

How it started Vs How it's going

I chopped off an entire foot of hair in November 2004, right around the time a red-bearded boy had a crush on me. I wasn’t sure if the way I looked and acted was good enough to get his attention, and wondered if edgy hair would help. The boy’s name was Michael and he dented the side of his Jeep by kicking it to summon up the courage to ask me to be his girlfriend a few short weeks after I destroyed my hair. By the time we had been dating for three months, he graduated from saying “I luv you” on AOL Instant Messenger to “I love you” in real life when he hugged me goodbye after youth group on Sunday nights where he spent most of the night in the sound booth. I had no idea how to be in love. What even is love, I often thought, trying to make sense of the deluge of emotions and hormones that flooded my system every time I saw this blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy.

Going into my first Valentine's Day with my boyfriend in 2005, I had no idea what to expect. 

After we ate the white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake that I made him as a gift at his parent’s dining room table, he called me downstairs and told me to wait on the worn brown-plaid couch in his family room. I picked at my fingers and begged my mind to stop trying to guess what he got me. He walked into the room with an acoustic guitar and sheet music. With shaking hands, he set the papers on the coffee table and held up his guitar pick. My nervous system began to scream, what is happening right now…am I in a movie!?

Sitting stiffly and wide-eyed in front of Michael and his guitar, my youth group soundman boyfriend who preferred the background over the stage, I realized I had his attention.

My face flushed with embarrassment for him, or for me, or for us both. I closed my eyes and readied my ears to receive his song.

With a single strum of the guitar and his voice just above a whisper, he began singing a partially in-key rendition of “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds:

I don't get many things right the first time…

Now I know all the wrong turns…

Brought me here

At this point I began nervously laughing. I was unable to discern if it was out of joy, fear, confusion, or hilarity. I willed myself to hold in my laughter and look at him, almost squinting, with a rigid, quivering smile on my face as he continued: 

And in a white sea of eyes

I see one pair that I recognize

And I know

That I am…

The luckiest

After the last line, I stared at him and started cracking up. Tears streamed down my face as I forced out a “Thank you, thank you, thank you, that was so sweet,” but I was almost unable to compose myself. This guy laid his heart out in front of me in the most vulnerable way and I could not receive it. 

***

Over the course of the first decade of our marriage, Michael made it his goal to learn how to braid my hair. Out of nowhere I would be sitting on the couch reading or at the table eating, and he would walk up to me and start playing with my hair, long and grown out by this time, never to be cut short again because of his preference. What would start out as a loving caress would turn into an oddly weighted braid on one side of my head with varying degrees of consistency. At one point he even started watching You-Tube tutorials and trying different types of braids. The most difficult job he had though, was pinning me down long enough to sit and let him practice. 

***

Something pulled me out of a vivid dream, and I startled awake. I rolled over to stare at the two gray rectangles of light on the baby monitor and searched both boys' rooms for a sign of movement, assuming it was my six month old, Lewis, crying out to be fed. My brow furrowed as the fog in my brain cleared, and I realized it was my toddler son, Pascal who was awake. I saw the blankets around him move and a boulder of conviction rolled onto my chest as I saw my nearly six ft tall husband curled up next to him in his tiny bed, a large plastic bowl nestled between them. He was slowly stroking Pascal’s silky blonde hair as I heard the hum of the washing machine down the hall. He already stripped the bed and started the wash cycle, and I didn’t hear a single sound, I marveled. 

After giving birth to my second son, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid disease called Hashimotos. By the time I was diagnosed, I found it almost impossible to wake up in the morning, my hair was starting to fall out, and I had to stop breastfeeding because my milk dried up. It can be regulated by taking a pill daily, but due to the unpredictable nature of autoimmune diseases, dosing has to be constantly adjusted. On this particular day, I was in between dosage changes and waking up and living my life every day was incredibly tiring.

When the sun began to blush the morning sky, I snuck into Pascal’s room to take over. I roused Michael enough to send him walking back to our bedroom and set up a corner of the couch for Pascal complete with crackers, Pedialyte, and towels. After a few hours of Puffin Rock episodes, Michael walked back into the living room and sat next to me on the couch, unceremoniously pulled my hair out of its tangled bun to let it cascade down my back, and rested his head on my shoulder. “Why did you let me sleep through all that last night?” I ask. 

“I know you have been struggling to get enough sleep and have energy to get through the day lately, and that I could go take a nap whenever I needed to.” “Thank you for thinking of me,” I said, “What do you want for breakfast?” 

***

My hair began to fall out in fistfuls last year after a long season of my thyroid medication not being optimized. At first I just scoffed at the clogged tub after my showers, blaming it on the fact that my tangly curly hair always needed to be teased apart when combing, resulting in hair breakage. 

Eventually my reflection in the mirror revealed a more somber reality: thinning spots around my hairline and a ponytail barely half as thick as it used to be. One morning I came out of the bathroom crying over my sudden lack of hair. Michael pulled me into an embrace and held me until my sobs subsided. He went and got a comb and motioned me to sit on the ground in front of him on the couch. “If you stop putting it into a messy bun, we can protect your hair more. I’ll braid it every night before bed.” He meticulously separated my hair into two parts and formed two perfect french braided pigtails. 

I knew that part of his motivation for offering to braid my hair daily was that he loved my hair down and hated it in a bun. At that moment though, it felt to me like he had been preparing for this very day all along. This was his time to shine. For weeks he would call me over to take a seat in front of him before bed, comb and rubber bands resting on the arms of his chair, old episodes of New Girl queued up on Netflix, attention set on me to save my hair and help me heal.

Some days I would avoid him before bed, wanting to take the lazy road and throw my hair into a bun to get to sleep faster. He would heckle me until I acquiesced. “I could help you if only you would let me!” he would plead, tugging at my hair over and over again like an obnoxious school boy learning how to flirt. I would relent by simply sitting up in bed, giving him the worst angle to work with, and laughing out of annoyance at his persistence. 

My hair began to grow back slowly once my medication was regulated. Tiny baby hairs stuck out of my braids in every direction. My crown of frizz, a reminder of the man who chose to move toward my brokenness and serve me again and again. When I look in the mirror, unravel each threefold cord and tousle out my hair into thousands of tiny preserved waves, my mind wanders back to the Ben Fold lyrics that marked our young love, and I know that I am the luckiest. 

Soli Deo gloria,

Sara

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Ours".