The note on my side of the bed

I have started this post four times.

I am going to try to write it plainly, because every time I try to make it nice it comes out false, and this is the least false thing that has happened to me in a long while.

That is Rob's handwriting. He is not a man who writes things down. In twenty-six years I have received birthday cards signed “Love, Rob” and one Christmas card where he wrote “you too” underneath what I had written. So you can probably understand why I sat on the edge of the bed with this for a while before I did anything else that morning.

The note is the end of the story though. The beginning is the part that is actually worth anything to anybody reading this.

Nothing was wrong

That is the part that is hard to explain to people.

Nothing was wrong. Rob is a good man. He is up at five, he has never once in his life made me feel small, he still puts his hand on my back when we walk across a parking lot. Nobody was leaving. There was no crisis to point at and say, there, that is the thing that needs fixing.

We had just gone quiet.

I noticed it in the specifics. We talked about the dishwasher. We talked about whether Gus had been out. We talked about my mother's appointments and whose turn it was to sit on hold with the insurance company. We said goodnight. We had a whole shared language and every single word in it was logistics.

Somewhere in there, and I could not tell you the year it happened, we stopped telling each other things. Not big things. Any things. I could not have told you the last time I said out loud to my husband that I was glad it was him.

I assumed he knew. I think that is the most ordinary thing in the world and I think it is what quietly takes marriages apart. Not fighting. Assuming.

The night I actually noticed it

Emma came home in March and asked us, in the way they ask once they are old enough to be curious about you as a person and not just as a parent, how we met.

I have told that story a hundred times. That night I let Rob tell it.

And he told it with detail I did not know he had kept. The color of the coat I was wearing. What was playing on the radio. That he went back the next day at the same time hoping I would be there, which he had never told me, not once, in twenty-six years. He was lit up telling it. Emma was laughing. And I sat there with my wine feeling something I can only really describe as grief, because all of it was still in there, every bit of it, and we just never took it out and looked at it anymore.

That was the night I decided I was going to say something to him.

I could not say it

I want to be honest about this part, because I suspect it is where most people reading this actually are.

I tried three times.

I bought a card. I got as far as “Rob,” and then I looked at all that blank space and I could not do it. Everything I put down sounded like a greeting card, and he would have read it and said thank you and stood it on the shelf, and that would have been the end of it.

I tried at dinner. I said I had been thinking about how we do not really talk anymore, and it came out as a complaint instead of as the thing I meant, and he got defensive, and we ended up not talking about it. Which, you know. Fitting.

I started a letter and threw it away.

Here is what I think nobody tells you. It is not that you stop feeling it. It is that after twenty-six years the words are worn smooth. I love you does not carry anything anymore, we say it walking out the door with the car keys in our hand. What I needed was to hand him the whole thing at once. The coat, and the radio, and the apartment with the heater that never worked, and the year we nearly lost the house, and Emma. And I did not have any way to do that.

What I ended up doing

I am aware of how this is going to sound.

I found a place online where you write down your story and they turn it into an actual song, words and music, recorded properly. I closed the tab the first time. It sounded like something you would buy in an airport. I came back to it two days later and I am still not entirely sure why.

What changed my mind was the form itself, which sounds like a strange thing to say. It asked me questions I did not want to answer. Not what is his name and what is the occasion. It asked what I would want him to know, and I sat in the car in the Kroger lot for a good while with that one.

I ended up writing far more than they asked for. The coat. The heater. The night in the hospital parking garage in 2011. The way he says Emma's full name when he is proud of her and thinks nobody is listening. Nobody was ever going to read it except a stranger, and I think that is exactly why I could write it, the same way it is easier to tell things to somebody sitting next to you on a plane.

It took a couple of days. When it came back there was a line in the second verse about our wedding that was just wrong, it made it sound like some big church affair, and we got married in his mother's backyard with forty people and a rented tent. I wrote in and asked them to change it and they did, and the second one was right.

Then I had it sitting on my phone for eleven days and did not play it for him. I was frightened of it. Not that he would hate it. That he would be embarrassed, or worse, that he would be kind about it.

I played it on a Tuesday

Not a birthday. Not our anniversary. A Tuesday in May, after dinner, and I said I want you to listen to something and please do not say anything until it is finished.

He sat down in the kitchen chair and he listened to the whole thing.

He did not cry, if that is what you are picturing. That is not who he is. He sat there and about halfway through he put his hand over his mouth and left it there. When it ended he was quiet for what felt like a very long time, and then he said, play it again.

So we played it again. And then he got up and went out to the garage, and I let him go, because I have been married to the man for twenty-six years and I know what that means.

He came back in about twenty minutes later and he said, I did not know you remembered the coat.

We talked until one in the morning. On a Tuesday. About things neither of us had said in fifteen years.

The next morning, after he had left for work, I found that envelope at the top of this post on my side of the bed.

What I actually think happened

I want to be careful not to oversell this, because I have read enough posts like this one to know exactly what it sounds like when somebody is being paid to tell me a thing changed their life.

The song did not fix my marriage. My marriage was not broken. We still argue about the dishwasher. He still falls asleep in that chair at nine o'clock with the television watching him.

What it did was give us a door back in. I could not say it, so I handed it to him in a form he was able to receive without either one of us having to be brave in the moment, which neither of us is any good at. And once it had been said, it stayed said. It has been a month and we are different with each other. He tells me things now. Small things, unprompted, out of nowhere. Last week he told me something about his father that he has never told me in his life.

That is the whole of what I have to say, really. Sharing what you actually feel is not a nice sentiment people put on cushions. It is the mechanism. The feeling is already sitting there in both of you doing absolutely nothing, and it stays that way until one of you finds some way to put it in the other one's hands. The song was just the way I found. If you have got your own way, use yours, and do not wait for a birthday to do it.

If you want the specific thing I used

It was SonglyGift. It came to under forty dollars, which honestly is part of why I was willing to try it at all. The risk was a dinner out.

Two honest things about it. The first is that what you get out is exactly as good as what you put in. If you write “he is a great husband and a wonderful father” you will get a song about a great husband and a wonderful father and it will mean nothing to either of you. I wrote close to a full page and I would tell anybody to do the same. The second is that if the first version is not right, say so. Mine was not, and they had it fixed the next day, and I very nearly did not bother asking, which would have been a real shame.

And do not save it for an occasion. I have thought about this a lot and I am fairly sure the Tuesday is why it landed the way it did.

That is the story. I do not really know who reads this thing anymore, but if you are somewhere in the quiet part of a long marriage and you have been assuming he knows, my honest advice is to stop assuming, and to go and find whatever your version of this is.

He knows now.

Michelle

A note about this post: SonglyGift read an earlier version of this story and asked whether they could support the blog, and I said yes, so this post is paid for in that sense. They did not write any part of it, they did not ask to read it before it went up, and I have left in the parts I did not love. I would have written it either way. The link above is the one I used.