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It was last Friday morning, and I’d just dropped the boys off at school. I was on FaceTime with The Sis as I pulled up to the house–funny, because I had just spoken to her over the phone about four years ago right before The Husband upended my plans then, too. This time, I descended the steps toward our front door, listening to TS and glancing around at the red flower petals scattered across our lawn. “Is that someone’s trash?” I thought, because this is usually what I see first: detritus, not gift.

I looked ahead through the front door and saw a sign–10 Years was the headline on a framed newspaper-style print–and I began to stammer. We had said we weren’t getting presents for each other, that the house was the present. Sure, I had found a shitty little cross-stitch world map to document our travels that I had almost finished yesterday before breaking the needle, but I began to suspect that I was about to be outdone. I told TS I’d have to call her back, and I stepped nervously inside.

For the next hour, I was repeatedly bowled over by The Husband’s thoughtfulness, which I will not go into full obnoxious detail to cover here except to say that it involved a pretend trip to the site of our honeymoon, a slide show of memories, and a day planned in advance with the help of friends that culminated in an overnight getaway.

It was slightly better than the cross-stitch map.

I don’t remember the last time I felt so loved. I mean, Mother’s Day–when I received candles from the boys, along with mugs that said “Best Boss Ever” and “Tired as a Mother”–was a close second. But this…this was premeditated. It reflected my being known. It was a walk from the beginnings of our togetherness to right now, and I glowed. It was almost as bad as the time he practically forced me to move to this country I now love, a place that has become home.

How dare he.

This pattern of love intervening in my life–it’s so disruptive. My plans are shifted, if not entirely tossed, and I head toward new ones–thought out just for me, for what I never would have been brave or imaginative enough to plan for myself. There was the way I remained single in the South for so long that it was getting awkward, and how my lack of fitting in there forced me to flee for New York, where, among other gifts, I met TH.

There was motherhood, which knocked me around so much I didn’t know who I was anymore (besides postpartum-ly depressed), until I emerged an advocate, a storyteller, a warrior, a writer with more to say than I’d ever had to say before, a person with a deeper well of love and pain than I’d ever thought possible.

There was that extended singleness that led to this particular marriage, which–well, we’ve covered that, I think. Knowing and being known, and loved anyway.

There was, as also previously mentioned, our exile across the world, to this place where my children thrive and so do I, our days filled with salt water and ocean views and dear friends and lots of FaceTime.

How could love do this to me? Disregard my plans so flippantly, interrupt my schedule, relocate me…to save me?