Today my parents were married 43 years.

This morning I was not sure my own marriage would make it to bronze.  All I said to my husband was, “Why do you have to polish shoes now when this is my ONE day to work and we’re trying to get the kids out the door so you can take them to the aquarium?!?”

He threw down his shoe brush and lost it on me. I folded my arms and told him he was a TERRIBLE man! He retorted that I was a this and a that.

I left it to my six-year-old daughter, while my husband was buying bagels and I locked the door on him, to tell him (if I decided to let him back in) that if he was going to blow up at simple things then you and Mommy won’t stay together, don’t you know that, Daddy?!? “Just say that,” I told her.

Yet, when he came back, he miraculously apologized, and the door was already unlocked again, because our son wanted to ride his scooter, it turned out. Then our daughter said, “Mommy said we’re not going to the aquarium with you,” but I quickly said that I’d changed my mind, and he said, “See? She changed her mind. We love each other.” I cried a bit, and he rubbed my back, and they left in good time.

That night it was only a bit tense, since neither of us wanted to brush the kids’ teeth, and I refused to feel my husband’s forehead to see whether he had a fever so then I’d have to brush the kids’ teeth–his usual schtick.

But later that night… my husband killed a bat. It was a long ordeal, and I was up against the wall holding a towel up in front of me and mostly watching. But we both moved the furniture, and I got the ladder, but only he was sweating. He killed it and I knew it was hard for him to hear the big thing squeaking like that. We both cringed. But he did it because the Internet told us of their bites and their claws and how they almost always had rabies, and we had our babies upstairs after all.

Then he took it outside, in my towel. He felt so bad, and was wet with sweat. I laughed each time I pictured him waving that broom in the air a half-hour before, periodically saying “I think I hit it!”

Then it lay there outside, and I came out to see it. We stared at it, frowning. A tiny toad hopped past it. We kept repeating how we felt so bad for it, but then there was the whole rabies thing, we recalled.

And I loved my husband. For sweating, and for doing something hard.

For us.