Sometimes Love Shows Up as a Rotisserie Chicken
When things are hard, the simplest of gestures can mean everything.
My dearest and I have been lucky for a long time. And I guess we both knew at some point that luck would run thin. As we have shared life together, we have usually had to deal with only one of us struggling with anything significant one at a time.
He changed jobs after a decade and a half. But during those days, my life was relatively calm so I was able to offer support and had the emotional capacity to hold space for him. When I ended my marriage, he was in a good place and had the bandwidth to hold me through the hard days.
The luxury of our story has been having to tackle only one major crisis at a time. That has worked great as we have bumped through life together with minimal, if any, bruising from one another.
But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and so it has.
Our crisis compartmentalization ruptured somewhat spectacularly as I have faced some of the hardest days I have ever experienced and he has some major things happening in his world, too.
Getting significant time together has been actually impossible. We have stolen away moments every chance we could. We have been diligent in keeping our daily communications as close to normal as possible, but even that has been riddled with challenges.
It has just been a hard season and all kinds of life happenings are keeping us from being able to connect and support one another the way we wish we could. In fact, I am losing count of the meltdowns in the last three weeks that he has witnessed as I come unraveled over almost anything.
In spite of all those circumstances, we still love one another fiercely and fearlessly. We have just had to accept that this is one of those hard seasons. We are holding on to the hope that on the other side, we will use these spaces to learn to love one another better and more completely.
This weekend had some hard spaces and were unable to have the kind of time we both wanted. He simply did not have it to give. And though our love is strong enough that it often feels like a superpower, we still have not been able to figure out how to add hours to our days.
Except that he did.
He showed up at my door with a rotisserie chicken. We only had a few moments together before the busyness of his day swept him away again once more.
My lack of sleep left me grumpy and on the edge of every available emotion. If I am completely honest, I have been on the edge of falling into another deep swirl of a meltdown most of the day. As my afternoon ticked on, I recalled that I was going to fix an easy casserole for dinner when I all I really wanted was a nap.
As I was fighting the urge to sleep by making another to-do list of things that were weighing on me, I remembered the chicken waiting for me in the fridge. That realization gave me back about 45 minutes I would have needed to prep for a healthy dinner. I fell into a long overdue deep sleep almost immediately.
The nap took my roughest edges away and allowed me some much-needed clarity. As I was in the kitchen doing the easier prepping for my dinner, my heart melted with gratitude. Gratefulness for this thoughtfulness and consideration just welled up in me. These are things I have longed for most of my life.
He couldn’t give me his time today, so he gave me back some of mine. He also knows that when I am struggling I often don’t eat the way that I should. After prepping my dinner, there was enough chicken left over to serve as the protein on my salads for the next couple of days.
It is such an incredible thing to me to be known and seen, even when things are hard and I am far from the best version of myself. Yet, he shows up and provides what he can in the midst of his own battles to demonstrate his love and compassion for me without asking for anything in return.
Sometimes love shows up and it looks like a warm rotisserie chicken on an autumn afternoon. In my book, that’s a love worth hanging on to through whatever storms are swirling.
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