Mother's Day Poems from a Husband

The flowers arrived on time. The card used my best handwriting. We laughed through dinner, washed the good plates side by side. After midnight, the holiday left. You stood in the kitchen barefoot, tired, entirely yourself. That is when I wanted to say it: not because the calendar asked, but because the quiet did— thank you for staying human inside the word mother.

I didn't marry the woman I fell in love with. I married the one who showed up after— after the butterflies had found somewhere else to live, after the version of us that only existed in restaurants and careful outfits gave way to the version that argues about groceries and sleeps with the window open in November because you run warm and I have learned that some battles are not worth the covers. I married you on a Tuesday in my mind long before the Saturday in the church. It was the morning you were sick— really sick, not cute sick— and I held your hair and thought: yes. This too. All of this. You are not what I imagined when I was twenty and thought I knew what love looked like. You are better. You are the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking. You manage the logistics of our life with a competence that I have failed to properly acknowledge. The appointments. The birthdays. The knowing when we're almost out of things we're always almost out of. So here: Thank you for making our life possible. Thank you for choosing this— the ordinary us, the real us, the version of us that will never be in a movie but is better than any movie because it's ours and it's still going and I would choose it again. Every day. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.

Other men describe their wives like cars they've owned too long— familiar, reliable, the excitement worn to a pleasant hum. I refuse. You are not a pleasant hum. You are the song that starts quiet and gets louder every year. I watch you across the kitchen and I still— still, after all this time— lose my train of thought when you do that thing with your hair that you don't know you're doing. You are stronger than you think. I know this because I've seen the weight you carry and I've seen the face you wear while carrying it and they don't match and that gap is where your courage lives. I married a woman who makes the hard things look effortless and the effortless things look like love. The bills get paid. The kids get fed. The house holds together. And you stand in the center of it like a person who built a world and forgot to put herself in it. So here: I'm putting you in. Right here. In this poem that is about you and only you and has no point except to say: I see you. I see the work. I see the tired. I see the woman behind the wife behind the mother behind the answer to everyone else's question. And she is the most remarkable person I know. I just wanted to make sure she knew.