Embrace the Sentiment

 

My husband quietly beats to his own drum. When we were dating he showed up at my house to pick me up for a date and had on a pair of jeans that he had worn so much that the thick hem of the jean had come undone and was hanging off the end of his pant about 5 inches. I instinctively did what my Mom would have done for me or one of my brothers if she saw us come downstairs with something hanging off of our clothes. I grabbed a pair of scissors and said, “Here let me get this for you.”

That was a bad idea. I then learned that these were his favorite pair of pants and that he had worked a long time to get them broken in to such a level. So we left for our date with the 5 inches of jean hem hanging from his pants and a learned the first valuable lesson about our relationship. He wears what he wants and I wear what I want. What I didn’t know then but would learn to find extremely endearing was the strong sentimentality in my husband’s heart.

For example, he began sneaking a radio into his bedroom to listen to Florida State Games when he was 12 years old. His Grandma found out that he like the team and began saving the sports pages in her paper for him to read at her house. Sentiment established.

 He continued to be a Florida State University fan all throughout his growing up years. His friends knew this, his family knew this, and he just held on to the idea of the team being his team to root for. Winning, loosing, changes in coaching staff, players came and went but the idea of his team being Florida State remained AND only became more important to him.

As his birthday came around every year he would always find a small something to buy to represent his love for Florida State. Over the years he has obtained an FSU bill fold, a lucky pair of FSU gym shorts to be worn during all FSU football games, FSU hats, and several shirts. He applied to the FSU masters degree program, got accepted and graduated in 2010 so that he could be alumni.

When it was time to go to the hospital to deliver our first baby he changed into his favorite FSU shirt to wear to the hospital. He has made sure that he wears that same shirt every time we go to the hospital to have a baby. We began to notice that in every Christmas card family picture we took he had an FSU shirt on. In years recent he has settled on the same shirt for every picture.

What I appreciate about this is that the importance of sentiments do not apply to only him. He has supported me in my sentiments as well. Drastic hairstyle changes & styles, crazy eye shadow, deciding I wanted to learn to make hummus and naan and making it every week for a couple of months, having a dream of only wearing shirts I made myself (many of which were not very flattering), painting murals on the walls of our home, hanging random homemade chandeliers from our ceiling, he bought me a couple of pairs of cowboy boots after my Dad died in 2005 to help me entertain my idea of wearing them everyday to be like my Dad, painting our kitchen cabinets taxi cab yellow and then a few years later powder blue, getting an arm chair at a garage sale and going through the many steps of completing reupholstering it all in our front living room for a few weeks, etc. And I knew that because it was important to me and it made me happy he would support me in it.

That is what I hope that our kids see and realize about their Dad’s sentiments about Florida State that it is important to him and it makes him happy and it for a very long time. It doesn’t bother him when people razz him about it for the randomness of his choice being from a small town in Arizona, it changes nothing about how he feels about it. Just like he is not shocked or upset when I go from brunette, to blonde, and back again or plaster our walls with seemingly chaotic color because he loves me no matter what my sentiments are.