Lunch dates

Adam and I have lunch together every week.  The day that works best for Adam is also the day that we usually hear from Braeden.  Coincidentally this week, I couldn't go to lunch on our regular day, Monday, and Braeden didn't email on his regular day either.

So we were a day late, but we both heard from Braeden and had our lunch date yesterday.

We spend the first part of each lunch reading aloud to each other Braeden's emails.  I always cry.  A side effect of portioning part of my heart away to Virginia is that I cry at the drop of a hat.  It won't even be anything that significant in Braeden's emails and my eyes will start filling with tears.  (The trials of the emotionally unbalanced!)  Adam patiently waits for me to regain composure.

"Don't worry," he said yesterday when the inevitable tears surfaced, "we won't come back here for twelve weeks."

We've created sort of a rotation of restaurants and the good news is that they won't see the same crying woman from week to week.  Maybe they'll forget about me in the interim?

After we finish reading Braeden's emails to each other, we discuss.  We decide that he's doing OK.  We marvel at how much harder it is to have him gone than we even thought it would be.  We talk about how glad we are he is having this experience.

There is nothing quite so wonderful as being thoroughly understood by someone who is experiencing the same thing you are experiencing.

Then we move on to other topics.  We talk about our other children.  We talk about upcoming plans.  We talk about the food and decor of the restaurant and whether it's a keeper for the rotation.  We talk about current events, politics, religion, history.  We talk.

Yesterday at one point, sitting across the table from Adam and listening to him, I thought, Wow, he is so smart!  That was followed by the thought, and he's mine.

I don't know how I got so lucky.