My Husband’s Acceptance of Me

from Danielle:

One thing that sticks in my mind is my husband’s acceptance of me – my failures and my flaws. We’ve been married 20 years, we have 4 children. I remember early on, he used to tell me all the time “I’m not the enemy!” Once I realized that there’s differences in personality and it’s good, I understood that he accepted me for who I was and I came to accept him for who he is as well. I remember our Church in Atlanta had a Wednesday night supper, and we would go most weeks. Often my husband would go there directly from work and I’d drive over separately from the house with the kids. Well, this particular Wednesday there was this torrential rain, and apparently the Church had done some landscaping but they didn’t put up any cones or anything, so when I backed into a parking space, trying to park, I ended up going into this load of newly dug up earth – which now was all mud. I tried to drive forward to pull out of the mud, but the more I tried to get out, the further into it I went. My husband walks up with the umbrella, and he sees me in the car with our 2 boys, the car is down to the axle in the mud. My husband tells me to go on and go inside, get out of the rain, and he calls AAA. He’s standing out there, waiting, and he sees people coming in for the supper and they’re looking at him, rolling their eyes at his predicament, thinking “What a dumb thing to do.” He said that the worst part was when the AAA guy came, and he got out of the truck, and he looked at my husband like “I don’t believe you did this” and he said everything in him wanted to say “It wasn’t me! It was my wife” but he didn’t. He didn’t say anything. He was bearing my shame for me. He said to me “That’s fine, I just took it in.” And he really meant it. So I really appreciate that. And I’ve seen that throughout the years - he’s not gonna go around and tell everybody what I do wrong, or bad-mouth me to anybody. It’s been a blessing.