The Simple Showing Up

I am an outside girl.
I love crisp breezes, the beach at sunset, and watching as the stars get caressed by campfire smoke.
As I’ve grown older, I feel like open space has become more of a need than just a want.
I need the TV turned down more often.
I crave being surrounded by bird song.

My husband Justin and I have been working on our back yard recently, and we decided we wished we had a nice place outside where we could sit at the end of the day and enjoy all our hard work.
We didn’t really know where to start with it, though, so one day a couple of weeks ago I did what often comes first in my mind: I called my dad, who can pretty much do it all.
If anything needs to be built, hauled, designed, or dreamed, he is the man for the job.
All I said was I’d been wanting to have a deck.
I simply asked his advice on making one.

Days later, he called out of the blue asking if I was home.
He said he “had some materials he wanted to drop off for starting that deck we had talked about.”
I pictured a stack of boards, but when he arrived he had three trucks and four strapping construction workers with him.

My 75-year-old dad has spent the last three days here building a free-standing, beautiful floating deck for us.
The craftsmanship is exquisite.
I didn’t know wood planks could make a person feel so loved.
All he asked for in return was a can of Coke, which he finished in his signature 10 seconds,
and then he disappeared again, without a word, after a single nod.

Growing up I didn’t always appreciate the way that my dad showed love.
As a teenager I wanted the same things I saw given to other girls.
My friend Cathy had a rotating closet set up in her house, and a huge TV just for her Nintendo.
A used Atari bought from an ad in the paper was the gaming system I got.
When other girls were getting designer, I got homemade.
I wanted more, I thought.
As I’ve aged, though, I see things differently.
I see how much he has done in the quiet acts of love,
in the building with his hands,
in the simple showing up.

One thing I could count on was that he would come when I called.
He might be dirty from ranch work.
He might be quieter than I wished he was.
I was a yell, and he was a whisper, but there is a time and place for every voice, and I see that now.

When I had my oldest daughter, Alena, I was raising her as a single mom.
I’ll never forget the time I knew my then boyfriend, now husband, Justin, was someone special – It was Alena’s fifth birthday, and I had planned a princess party for her.
For months, as we had been dating, every night when he was over and it was time to put her to bed, we had a routine where she would pretend to be a princess, and he the fearsome dragon.
I was supposed to swoop in and save her just in time from him, safely tucking her in with giggles and kisses from us both afterwards.
She went from questioning his presence to a sparkle in her eyes.
He was her “Dragon.”
She was “Princess” to him.

On the day of her princess party he was late to arrive.
Looking back, I think our future began the moment he showed up to that party wearing a full dragon costume he had rented as a surprise.
Truthfully, it looked more like a giant lizard, but the sight of this man going out of his way to delight my daughter, to show her he was invested in her happiness by his own choice…
That was the moment I knew.
Sometimes a knight in shining armor looks like a guy wearing a felted dragon costume for hours in 100 degree heat;
Not the guy with the most money, or the fanciest car.
Sometimes there’s a prince under felted pointy teeth.

I tried to break up with him not long after that party, holding onto some things I was sure I wanted that he wasn’t giving me,
but something inside stopped me from doing it.
Something said, “Just wait and see.”

A year later, after we said our vows in a tiny white church out in the country,
that dragon knelt and said vows to Alena, too;
Not because he had to be responsible for her,
Not tied to her biologically, but there, kneeling on a knotted wood floor in his best suit,
simply because he wanted to.
There was not a single dry eye in that awe-struck room.

As I sit here now, years, many experiences, and multiple different types of relationships with all kinds of men later, I see how often so many of them haven’t been as I expected;
How sometimes I have thought I wanted one thing,
but they have shown up looking differently.
But, the power of any person is never in who we imagine them to be.
The power is in how they show up.
I realize it now:
Showing up has been an ultimate form of love to me.
Not the rotating closets.
Not the giant TVs.

When I sit on my brand new back deck now I will look out across my yard and it will mean something.
I will see the trellis for Alena’s own wedding that my dad built from fallen Eucalyptus wood out by the beach.
I will see the fence he built so I could bottle raise the calf,
and the barn he built for hay.
He knows designer stopped being a need.
He knows my family and love of animals is now the language I speak.

I will look out across the garden cultivated by Justin, who stood up from where he knelt at that altar that day, and then learned to nurture all kinds of things.
I will see the snowball bush he planted for me just because he knew I love them,
and the heart-shaped stone he bought as a headstone when my beloved cat Cosmo was killed tragically, and I could hardly function, or speak.
I will see the yard littered with all the signs of the life we have made.

I will see in this view the men who showed up for me and my girls,
who have given me a place to rest,
and I will remember all the quiet ways \
that they have loved me.

Mom Outnumbered

Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.