Pilly

I write all these posts about my kids and Alison is a bit character in them all. It's not that she's not important, I just figure people probably don't want to read all of my sonnets about her as I'm not Shakespeare, and I don't want to spread the schmaltz too much.

I knew I was going to marry her around two months after we met, and I didn't have any doubt that she'd say yes. It didn't take long for either of us to know that it was just easy to be around each other. When you first meet someone that you like, you find yourself often thinking about them, maybe wondering when they're going to call, or wondering maybe if they really like you. I never did that with her because in a weird way I just sort of felt like I'd known her all my life.

Around a month after we started dating she invited me to meet her parents in Maryland, and I told her I'd have to think about it. I didn't really need to think, but I played it cool. When I said I'd come she was obviously happy about it. She was, and is, always happy to see me for some reason, and at first it caught me off guard because I couldn't really remember any other woman who was just simply happy to see me and be with me, but that's her - simple and real.

On the way there, I asked myself what the hell I was doing, and then I just accepted that this was serious. We had a great time in Maryland, and sitting on a dock in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore I just couldn't think of anything more romantic or anyone I wanted to be there with. My first morning home I said to myself that I was going to marry her. I wrote a letter to her dad, then called and asked him for her hand and by the beginning of October, four months after we met, I proposed to her on the Promenade in Brooklyn. I held her hand as we fell asleep in a twin bed in my friend's apartment in Williamsburg thinking that from now on everything was our story, that my singular one was over. There's no person I would rather write that story with.

I call her Pilly, and I'll digress quickly saying that I at first said something stupid like Alison is my Palison, then just Palison, then Pilison for some dumb twitterpated reason, to just Pilly. It's what I call her pretty much all the time, and it's the name I see on my phone when she calls or texts.

Back to our story, I think it's been a good one. There's our great wedding, Birdie Drive Farm, her unwavering support of me in my time in the wilderness before I found my current job, running to the car together through the waterfall off our roof on the way to have Ellie, and holding hands listening to Ellie scream for us when we were leaving to have Sam, laughing at the terrible Maroon 5 song playing while they were yanking him out during the C-section. There's tag teaming the vomit, the cleaning, the cooking and the dishes, and when I do watch The Bachelor (I haven't in a few years) with her she allows me to make fun of it, even laughing at my jokes. She's the one I look to for laughter any time I make a joke, whether it's just us two or in a group of people.

Occasionally I dream she's left me. I don't know why. I've never believed for a second in the daylight that could happen. The feeling in the dreams is heartbreak, of course, but being dumbfounded because I just have no doubt of the depth of her love for me. I can't explain why, and neither could you if you lived with me for a week, but one time when I asked her why she loved me, she said, "I just do, and that's how it is." I've never forgotten that.

I could go into so many more reasons, but I'll keep those between the two of us for now. I'm so glad she was born on this day and I wanted to share with my small world how I'm the luckiest man because I married her and have her in my life.