What a Man Ought to Give to a Woman

Marie and I are having a tough week. The strain of separation is really taking a toll these last few days. We had several dates last week but this week work and distance and time and money and family tensions have thrown up all kinds of emotional road hazards. Add to that the multinational cellular telephone company that starts with T and ends with Mobile is dropping all of our calls. Here we are trying to have vital, tender, difficult conversations, critical ones, really, and over and over the signal is lost or the network fails or the screen reads "emergency calls only." I highly recommend all of the other cell phone companies. But getting out of a cell phone contract is harder than losing the last ten pounds. (I was doing really great today until I got to the Wheeler Ranch. and Alyssa had made chicken and mashed potatoes, with homemade cookies for dessert, the white, soft kind with lots of buttery goodness. Even though I'd had chicken teriyaki after my workout I had to have some. It would have been impolite to refuse.)

For today I made another list that I wrote for Marie on my trip to Selah to see the grandbabies and my smart, funny, beautiful daughter and become a 4-time gold medal winner in the Backyard Olympics. I'd pulled over in The Dalles about 7 on Friday night, too tired to drive any further. Blogging was an exhilarating adventure in its early days, the night of June 12th, and I slept for a while and woke up around midnight to write half the night, charged with enormous energy and cockeyed optimism, thinking I was certain to be discovered by the blogosphere within a few days and become as famous as The Christian Comedy Lady or the Youtube girl catching a flyball. It could happen. But I'm not quitting my day job, just showing up late once in a while. I did have perfect attendance in May though. Won a free lunch, which they're serving on Friday from the Airport Cafe. I chose the fajita sandwich.

The list that follows is a love letter to Marie, but by this point she is probably so frustrated with me it might not matter. There's a phone message I haven't listened to from last night, and I don't think it's going to be a good one. But this is what I wrote for her, from the delicious quiet at the table of The Motel 6 in The Dalles, on the night of June 12th:

What I want to give to you:

1. I want to give you security, comfort and devotion.

2. I want to give you strength, affection, and tenderness.

3. I want you to know you are loved, adored, and desired. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate your wisdom, courage, heart, spirit and strength. I want to demonstrate to you that you are my heart's desire, my soul mate, and my precious treasure, The Girl of My Dreams, the One Great Love of My Life For All Time and Forever, Amen.

4. I want to gather you in my arms, early, late and often, and tell you how much you mean to me, how beautiful you are, and how greatly and completely I love, desire and respect you.

5. I want to help you and fulfill your needs, to serve you and reward you and express kindness to you, to do practical things that ease your burdens and lighten your heart and take the stresses and irritations of life away. I want my voice to be be a bubble bath for your spirit, a sound that soothes you comforts you and makes you feel safe and renewed.

6. I want to be your refuge, your sounding board, your helpmate. I want to lift you up and provide for you and enrich your life, to give you a fine home and material comforts and adventures and activities that fill you with light and possibility.

7. I want to relieve your anxieties, relieve your fears, comfort and restore you, and inspire your soul to trust and believe in the God that is greater than all things, that God that sustains us and covers us with his mercy and grace.

8 (intimate and personal) I want to make love to you, to embrace you and please you and l**k you, early late and enthusiastically and often. I want you to know I want you and you alone.

9 (intimate and personal) I want to fulfill all your deepest desires and needs: sexually, spiritually and emotionally. I want you to guide me and push me down to the place where you hunger and need to be satisfied and satisfy and pleasure you to your very soul. I need you to know your are my deepest desire and I am eager to woo you and date you, to open doors for you and rise to me feet when you enter the room. I will dress up in my best clothes for our dates. I will take you dancing and hold you close to me, keep my eyes on you, letting the world know by my conduct that you are my celebrity, my star, my constant and unyielding desire.

10. I want to give you my partnership and devotion, to offer you trust, hope, safety, constancy, tenderness, devotion, faith, hope and love. I want my life to be a gift to God and to you, and our lives to be a light to other people.

11. I want to lather rinse and repeat, and to allow you to choose the numbers you want lathered, rinsed and repeated, because you are my one and only and my deepest desire.

12. I want you to have time time with your friends, and for you to have good, positive friends that renew you and restore your spirit, that make you laugh and cry and relieve the cares of your day. I understand the company of women with other women is a sacred thing, a powerful bonding that restores and enlivens and underpins the whole human community. Women united are the fabric of life and the strength of our village, and we are lost without this. Our world needs the powerful wisdom of women united, offering their strong voices to embolden and refocus and revitalize our communities and churches and neighborhoods in a powerful and profound way. The audacity of action begins with the wisdom of women bonding together and uniting their spirits, giving one another bread for the journey. I want you to go and be a part of that, because you have a powerful gift of encouragement and a light within you, a hunger for God that needs to be nurtured and shared. You belong to this family of women and you need time to be with that family, your sister, your daughters, your friends. Don't live a day without this. Don't ever ignore its importance.

13. I want to understand you and to listen, to create time to give you my complete attention and total support.

14. I will forgive and believe in you. I will encourage you always and take good care of you.

15. I will need you and love you with all my heart. I will give you my devotion and tenderness and humor and playfulness. But I will never let you beat me in Scrabble, because I am king.

16. I will know you love me, now and always, and I accept your love and treat it as a great and priceless treasure, always and wherever I go.

17. The exact number of things on this list does not matter, and the length of my list to yours does not matter. The important thing is that we give to one another as completely as we can, and accept all the ways we are still learning and fall backward, the times our patience fails or we grow too tired. You are my beloved and I am yours. We need to make a home again and soon. I can't find my clean socks. I don't remember where I set the paper with the employee stock purchase plan info on it. I love you so much.

--for Marie, from room 212 of The Motel 6 in The Dalles, Oregon, on the way to see my daughter and grandbabies, completed at 5:47 a.m. on Saturday June 14.


Readers, it's your turn. Women, are you getting want you really want from your partners? Men, do you think about your wive's real needs, and what do you do to meet them?

Marie, I am sorry for the ways I've fallen short of this list. You are the true desire of my heart, and I want to bring the best to you, always. Somehow we've got to put together some money and end this hard and discouraging time, and find a way to make our love work day to day in the real world. I love you so much. Now I've got to hustle because I'm going to be late again.