Wedding Dresses Color
Despite my feelings for Jane, I sometimes think we’re an unlikely pair to have spent a life together. We’re different in almost every way, and though opposites can and do attract, I’ve always felt that I made the better choice on our wedding day. Jane is, after all, the kind of person I always wished to be. While I tend toward stoicism and logic, Jane is outgoing and kind, with a natural empathy that endears her to others. She laughs easily and has a wide circle of friends. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most of my friends are, in fact, the husbands of my wife’s friends, but I believe this is common for most married couples our age. Yet I’m fortunate in that Jane has always seemed to choose our friends with me in mind, and I’m appreciative that there’s always someone for me to visit with at a dinner party. Had she not come into my life, I sometimes think that I would have led the life of a monk. There’s more, too: I’m charmed by the fact that Jane has always displayed her emotions with childlike ease. When she’s sad she cries; when she’s happy she laughs; and she enjoys nothing more than to be surprised with a wonderful gesture. In those moments, there’s an ageless innocence about her, and though a surprise by definition is unexpected, for Jane, the memories of a surprise can arouse the same excited feelings for years afterward. Sometimes when she’s daydreaming, I’ll ask her what she’s thinking about and she’ll suddenly begin speaking in giddy tones about something I’ve long forgotten. This, I must say, has never ceased to amaze me.
While Jane has been blessed with the most tender of hearts, in many ways she’s stronger than I am. Her values and beliefs, like those of most southern women, are grounded by God and family; she views the world through a prism of black and white, right and wrong. For Jane, hard decisions are reached instinctively—and are almost always correct—while I, on the other hand, find myself weighing endless options and frequently second-guessing myself. And unlike me, my wife is seldom self-conscious. This lack of concern about other people’s perceptions requires a confidence that I’ve always found elusive, and above all else, I envy this about her.
I suppose that some of our differences stem from our respective upbringings. While Jane was raised in a small town with three siblings and parents who adored her, I was raised in a town house in Washington, D.C., as the only child of government lawyers, and my parents were seldom home before seven o’clock in the evening. As a result, I spent much of my free time alone, and to this day,
Wedding Dresses Color I’m most comfortable in the privacy of my den.
As I’ve already mentioned, we have three children, and though I love them dearly, they are for the most part the products of my wife. She bore them and raised them, and they are most comfortable with her. While I sometimes regret that I didn’t spend as much time with them as I should have, I’m comforted by the thought that Jane more than made up for my absences. Our children, it seems, have turned out well despite me. They’re grown now and living on their own, but we consider ourselves fortunate that only one has moved out of state. Our two daughters still visit us frequently, and my wife is careful to have their favorite foods in the refrigerator in case they’re hungry, which they never seem to be. When they come, they talk with Jane for hours. At twenty-seven, Anna is the oldest. With black hair and dark eyes, her looks reflected her saturnine personality growing up. She was a brooder who spent her teenage years locked in her room, listening to gloomy music and writing in
Wedding Dresses On Line a diary. She was a stranger to me back then; days might pass before she would say a single word in my presence, and I was at a loss to understand what I might have done to provoke this. Everything I said seemed to elicit only sighs or shakes of her head, and if I asked if anything was bothering her, she would stare at me as if the question were incomprehensible. My wife seemed to find nothing unusual in this, dismissing it as a phase typical of young girls, but then again, Anna still talked to her. Sometimes I’d pass by Anna’s room and hear Anna and Jane whispering to each other; but if they heard me outside the door, the whispering would stop. Later, when I would ask Jane what they’d been discussing, she’d shrug and wave a hand mysteriously, as if their only goal were to keep me in the dark.
Yet because she was my firstborn, Anna has always been my favorite. This isn’t an admission I would make to anyone, but I think she knows it as well, and lately I’ve come to believe that even in her silent years, she was fonder of me than I realized. I can still remember times when I’d be perusing trusts or wills in my den, and she’d slip through the door. She’d pace around the room, scanning the bookshelves and reaching for various items, but if I addressed her, she’d slip back out as quietly as she’d come in. Over time, I learned not to say anything, and she’d sometimes linger in the office for an hour, watching me as I scribbled on yellow legal tablets. If I glanced toward her, she’d smile complicitly, enjoying this game of ours. I have no more understanding of it now than I did back then, but it’s ingrained in my memory as few images are. Currently, Anna is working for the Raleigh News and Observer, but I think she has dreams of becoming a novelist. In college she majored in creative writing, and the stories she wrote were as dark as her personality. I recall reading one in which a young girl becomes a prostitute to care for her sick father, a man who’d once molested her. When I set the pages down, I wondered what I was supposed to make of such a thing.
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