There’s nothing better than a really good mother/daughter conversation, especially now that those twins of mine are all grown-up. A while back, one of the twins and I had an amazing conversation. We talked about everything from how to style a messy bun to painting our toenails to world peace.
No phones.
No electronic devices.
No distractions.
Just a lot of heart sharing between a mother and a daughter.
I was in the middle of telling her about my first dorm room in college and how I bought a moped and drove it around with long-parrot earrings flying in the wind….
….when suddenly she stopped me with a question.
“How did you know you were in love with Dad?” she said.
“I just knew,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said. “But how did you know? What made you sure?”
I paused, smiled, and said, “It was the brownie fudge sundae.”
I had dated my future husband (who was still my boyfriend at the time of this story) for nine amazing months when one day he told me he was coming over to my house to tell me something. I ratted up my hair and put on a prairie skirt and a concho belt and super thick pancake make-up to hide the tons and tons of wrinkles I had at nineteen.
Then?
Thirty minutes later, he stopped by with flowers and an announcement….
…he had joined the Navy.
I stared at him in disbelief.
The Navy?
What?
I wasn’t ready for something like that.
I wasn’t prepared.
I already had my life planned out. I was graduating from college and getting a job doing something super important and going to work every day in an office, wearing super cute suits like the ones they wore on Melrose Place.
And nowhere on my bingo card was the word NAVY.
So I told him I was out.
I told him I was done.
I told him I was breaking up with him when he left for boot camp.
And four months later, when he headed out for Orlando, Florida, at 6;30 am on a drizzly Tuesday morning, I hugged his neck and wished him well and watched him walk away with his sea bag over his shoulder. Then I went back to my house and sat on the floor of my room and stared at his picture and cried until his face was too blurry to see.
“You’re better off without him,” I told myself. “You have big plans and big dreams and a Melrose suit with your name on it.”
Two days later, I left for college.
Back at Baylor, I couldn’t shake the sadness.
I wore my melancholy like a prairie skirt.
It was pitiful.
I’d spend hours curled up in my room, eating brownie fudge sundaes, wearing pajamas, and searching for inspiration in the most brilliant font of knowledge I knew…
….daytime television talk shows.
I’d watch people throw chairs at each other and fight and yell, and people break up, and people discover their long-lost families, and people find their one true love.
I couldn’t look away.
It was terrifying and compelling all at the same time.
And then one day–as I wiped off a drip of chocolate from my pajama pants and took another bite of the brownie fudge sundae–I came to a revelation.
An incredible revelation right there and then in the middle of my sugar haze.
I was in love.
That drummer boy who kissed me and left to fight for his country? I loved him more than I could ever have imagined.
I laughed out loud with the joy of it–with the discovery that I loved him with everything I had. I loved him more than suits and plans and daytime television and brownie fudge sundaes.
Except.
Except I couldn’t tell him.
He was half a country away at boot camp.
There was no internet.
There were no cell phones.
There was no e-mail.
I didn’t have texting. I didn’t have a single way of letting him know that I was in love.
And then four weeks later, the phone rang in my room on Valentine’s Day.
It was him.
He’d waited an hour in line for the pay phone to talk to me.
He said, “Hello,” and I screamed, “I LOVE YOU.”
My boot camp sailor laughed out loud and told me he’d known all along.
He was just waiting for me to figure it out.
And all it took was perspective gained from hours of daytime television, a drip of chocolate…
….and a brownie fudge sundae. 🙂
PS: He sent me plane tickets to boot camp graduation.
Of course, he did. But even he couldn’t imagine the rest of the story. 🙂
