Real Grown-Up, Married-People Love

I used to sneak out of my bedroom window on Saturday nights after curfew to make out in his car parked along the gravel road by my house.

Once Matt Baker’s mom caught us as I swung my leg over the window ledge and she hissed from across the street, “Dan Albertson you get on home or I’m gonna call your mom!”

Fast forward 25 years, and this Saturday we managed to get our five kids plus a few teammates and friends to one soccer game and a total of eight basketball games.

All day long we switched kids and shuffled kids and punched addresses into Google maps and dropped off kids and swung through drive throughs until finally at one game, we both pulled into the parking lot at the exact same time.

I noticed the amusement on his face as he watched me awkwardly maneuver our Suburban through the web of cars and narrowly miss side-swiping a chain link fence.

He motioned for me to roll down the window as our cars crossed paths, and I was ready to hear a little lecture about my less-than-stellar driving skills. But instead his eyes danced as he flashed me his wide familiar smile and hollered out, “I JUST LOVE YOU!!!!!”

“I LOVE YOU, TOO!!!!” was my reply.

And I’m beyond grateful.

THIS is real, grown-up, married-people love.

It’s kids and car payments and over-flowing piles of laundry and fifty million places to be on Saturday afternoons.

It’s figuring out what to make our worn-out family for dinner then tucking all those kids we created into bed before flopping, exhausted, onto the couch to binge-watch our current show on Hulu.

It’s doing every single day of this good, hard, ordinary life with the only man I’ve ever loved.

Plus, it's the added bonus that we get to make out whenever we want…

And we don’t have to sneak through a single window.

I’d love to share my book with you! Everything I Wish I Could Tell You About Midlife