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Does the turtledove mate for life?

It's the time of the year where I wonder about such things.
I'm teaching my TK a lot of songs to brighten the darkest month.

Yesterday was my 30th or 29th Anniversary. It has been a bone of contention for at least 25 years which anniversary we are celebrating. Since we lived together for a year I win anyway by falling back and referencing that. I thought this was 30.

We actually were waiting to get married that year until year's end,  so we could marry on Christmas Eve with our families at a Bed and Breakfast in Monterey, terrifically romantic and intimate but Jack's father and Aunt died in that November time and it took our breath away. His father was 51, and both died of heart attacks. With my husband now in his 50's I spend each day in fear and thankfulness- a particularly difficult combination. He does go to a heart doc but I have no idea if this is helping, he doesn't eat red meat and he is seemingly fit. A week ago he came in saying, "I beat the sh*t out of that stress test." Good.

I mated for life.

You don't know. And you can't know about what the other person might be deeply interiorly feeling.
Except I did. Somehow. And in a difficult year of 2015 my rock was Gilbralter. I can't explain better than that, because I can't tell the whole story about why this was the hardest year of my life- except to say that it remained everyday a year where my heart did not beat right-both literally and figuratively and we haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. It beat irregularly and too fast.  Broken.

I wanted to write this yesterday, on the 12th, our day, but I was in Santa Barbara celebrating my anniversary by going to the art museum and shopping for my kids Christmas a tiny bit-eating at a sidewalk cafe, having the first Irish coffee in my life (well known I do not drink-ever) and having a lovely piece of coconut cake at the Lilac Patissere which is a h*ll of a bakery.  It was just a sweet day. The cake tasted like one my Mom made so that brought her care into my day. But I woke up to this, completely unexpected:

 So he got a present. We kind of, I thought, had this tacit agreement to just wait on that.
I've had a wicked cold and been at the end of my rope. As I said-not a good year.
But I opened my gift, Jack was at the gym, I wasn't waiting.
It came with a beautiful card he made in French.
And then I saw this:

Now I have "wanted" and certainly not needed a ring for my right hand for a long time. I wore a tiny, wonderful tiny ruby ring on my "right" hand for twenty years in kidhood until it broke in my twenties. My Aunt Lenore and Uncle Tony gave it to me. I took it to a jeweler to fix and he "lost it." That was a heart break in Morgantown, WV. I should have gone to Yagel's but at the time I didn't think they'd fix a ring that was so child-like and so destroyed. That ring was one of the first solutions I had to a life problem. Lenore suggested it I think. (Or my memory says this.) I could not, and cannot, tell left from right. A certain percentage of people have this orientation issue so each day during flag salute I faced the humiliation of correction at school for the wrong hand on my heart. The ring on the right solved this. A ruby was right.

I don't think I've shared this story. It was a private inadequacy, along with my many others.

So seeing this ring, with it's tiny rubies, that felt so right.


It is a perfect fit too, something he does somehow without measuring or knowing.
It made me think of two turtledoves.
I'm lucky my marriage outlasted my folks marriage by a good bit, and was certainly quite a different thing. But as we sat enjoying our cake, and Jack was telling me that I had actually changed him and actualized my feelings about art and future and children in his work-a touching moment in our very private lives, I thought about Mom's coconut pound cake and how much this gold band symbolized. At 50 something, my age, my father killed my mother mentally, threw kids to the side to go have a child with "his values" married, divorced, married, divorced and is in his 80's living with another that I think is part servant part ridiculous situation of nursemaid bound by his money and her immigration issues.
I thought for a brief second about how in his eyes my brother and I were not "good enough", never the wonderkids he deserved. How  difficult it was to see the parade of wives for me-all of them good, good people caught in the web. All escaping. I thought of the stroke Mom had in her 50's. I thought how close i came to believing his narrative of me, how much his damage affected my life. How much it did do but also how far I came. Thank you father, I did learn from your examples. Actual gratitude.
I saw the pitfalls.
When he divorced her and tried to do as much hurt as he could get away with, I thought about that deeply.

And I blinked and looked at this:




Some birds mate for life.
This one did.