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Fair warning: this post is about my wife and I’m fixing to get sappy. As always, continue reading at your own risk. 😂

Anyone who knew my folks well was aware that their relationship was a fractious one. They got divorced when I was two, then remarried a year later and had my brother. I don’t think either of them ever fully forgave the other for sins of the past, although I know they did try. Mom’s temper was intense. Dad’s control issues are well documented. It was a very oil&water situation for most of my life.

Both of my parents told me, separately and on different occasions, that where they were at in their relationship in its adulthood was so good that it made the first twenty years of strife worth it. To twenty-year-old Sarah, that just didn’t seem plausible. I mean… Twenty years is a long time. Who wants to fight with someone for two whole decades before it gets better? I was happy for them, sure. Of course I wanted them to be happily married. The problem in my mind was that those twenty tumultuous years also happened to be the entirety of my life. Sometimes it felt like my brother and I were just acceptable collateral damage.

My relationship with Melissa did not make sense on paper, not at first. She lived in California and I lived in Idaho. Neither of our families were okay with their daughters being gay. (There’s a lot more I’m not writing here about all that… Just trust me that Sarah: The Jerry Springer Years is quite a page turner.) Being together meant fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously. Plus, we were two really different people with very different methods of conflict resolution.

I knew all of that going in. I had no plan – I was 25! I just knew I’d met the first person who truly made my soul feel safe. Meeting Melissa was like lightning. I had never known that love could feel this way. I was not about to let her go, no matter the cost. She was it. She was home. It was like that scene in Wizard of Oz where the color floods in. Nobody goes back to black and white voluntarily.

We have our twentieth anniversary this fall. We’ve lived in four states, had a jillion life changes, been through some serious stuff together. We are both dramatically different people than we were when we met. We slogged our way through the emotional swamp, worked out our traumas and grew the hell up. I am fiercely proud of us and would choose no life other than this, even on the shitshow days. Life is always gonna storm around us, but the storm is a lot easier to weather when you’re sharing an umbrella with the one you love. She is still my home.

I guess I get what my parents meant now. Because the good is so very, very good that it’s worth the work to get here. I love you, babe. Thank you for continuing to choose me. Thank you for all you do and all you are. You will always be my home.