Ah, my wife. She bravely wades into the Shallows with me each day.

I say “bravely” because she’s the one who tends to keep a level head when I’m panicking—which is not constantly, but may be more often than frequent. I tend to be a worst-case-scenario sort of envisioner, mentally turning our kids’ slight bumps on the head into concussions and the like. She typically either holds it together or acts like she’s holding it together long enough for me to stop hyperventilating, and then we proceed with life.

She also puts up with me, which is no small task. I sometimes mumble gibberish just to see what she hears, what words she invents to make sense of the sounds coming out of my mouth, and she—well, I said it already. She puts up with me. More than puts up with me, in fact.

Most importantly, I love her, and she loves me. We went into marriage about nine years ago (as of this posting, anyway) reminding each other that the romance would be great, but not always there, and that love would sometimes take the shape of pushing together through rough times. I’ve told her that I’m glad she’s the one I fight with, and I mean it. I don’t tell her enough that she’s the one I’m amazed by, too, and despite my full-time editing job and her part-time early intervention work and our shared more-than-full-time parenting of three children—plus all the other stuff that comes from living—we still do manage to find the romance. Unfortunately, that’s less often than frequent, but I’m working on it. We’re working on it.

She’s smart, beautiful, crafty (in many senses of the word), funnier than she realizes, incredibly sexy (which might not come across in the sketch above), and my best friend. She was fairly geeky when I met her, but her geekiness has thankfully increased throughout our relationship. She’s also a total mystery to me at times, at least when it comes to how she processes the world. Our lives together are never boring—even when we wish they would be, just for a breather.