WHERE THE HEART IS

There is a hellish brand of torture waiting for me on the job each day. Pressure, expectations, backstabbing, bloodletting, hypocrisy, injustice and inequity await me at every corner of the day. But I am strong. I am confident. Because when the world turns sour and my best efforts result in failure...when it looks as if I am too weak to compete, too unprepared to succeed and too dumb to know the difference, I know where to find someone who still believes in me.

She shows me every day in the thousand ways she cares for me. I am the focus of her life and living up to her expectations is what drives me through the storm of discontent the world washes me with each time I leave the house.

Home. It is where I mean something no matter how miserably inconsequential I may be in any other environment. Home is where I'm not afraid to be the child I must conceal everywhere else I go. My mother knew. She filled me up each day with the belief that I was worthy -- that I was special, and no task required of her to lead me to that notion was beneath her.

Men do not outgrow their need for another human being who believes in them simply because they must now shave their face each morning. They only grow wise enough to discern the difference between "lip service" and service of the heart.

When a man looks into the eyes of a REAL WIFE it is as if he has looked into a mirror reflecting the best that he can be. And when his clumsy hands smudge her toes with nail polish they will both laugh, because he's no better equipped to paint her nails than she is to draw his bath. When he strains his imagination to find the special gift no other husband will give his wife on a random Valentines Day and what he chooses makes no sense at all, she smiles, because shopping is no more his strength than doing laundry is hers. He may be counted out on the curb where he fell, because he was not able to protect her when he wanted to most, but she was no better suited to the task of making his morning breakfast than he was to protecting her honor. And in the end, he may fall in battle because he was no more in control of his destiny than she was in control of that errant lock of hair that clouded her forehead the day he kissed her goodbye. But it will have been a life worth living and a life worth giving for all he gave to her and for all she gave back. There is no sweeter love, no greater cause for the celebration of life, nor the goodness that can come of it.

Home...where the heart resides...because she is there.