First Comes Love....

A marital moment, on this 20th anniversary

Our kitchen calendar, by Anna Cote at Modern Printed Matter.

Twenty years ago today, I was married on what would have been my mother’s 67^th birthday. Three months from now, that is how old I will be.

These two facts of my life fill me with gratitude on this anniversary morning.

I chose April 10 for my wedding day because I wanted to purge the date of its sadness. I seldom think of my mother on the anniversary of her death, but five years after she had died, I was convinced the date of her birth would never arrive without my stewing about how much she loved birthdays, and how much I missed her. She would never have wanted that, and I could hear her plea: Make this a happy day again.  

Mom relished celebrating the birthdays of people she loved, and she was the most gracious of recipients when it was her turn. She was a firm believer in meeting generosity with gratitude, and she wanted her four children to navigate the world with similar grace. Throughout our childhood, and long into our adulthood, she would issue a reprimand whenever she heard one of us poo-poo a compliment.

“Don’t make a person feel stupid for having seen the best in you,” she’d say. It wasn’t just rude, she insisted. It was unkind.

She was the woman who greeted every birthday present—from top-shelf perfume to mechanical, wind-up pigs with wings—as the very thing she had always wanted.

“How did you know?” she always squealed, including the time when she held up a shell-and-macrame wall-hanging of Jesus. I can still see her jingling the bells dangling from the fringe as she looked at me and mouthed, “Close your jaw.”

My mother would have loved this man I married.

I was 45 when I met Sherrod Brown. He was 50. We had both been single parents for many years, and neither of us thought we’d ever marry again. Eleven months after our first date, we were engaged. Five months later we married in front of 130 friends and family members at a wedding we had originally planned as a small gathering. Thirty people, we’d thought.

I was a newspaper columnist. Sherrod was a member of Congress. Even now, every time I say this out loud, I think of the dreaded moment when I had to walk into our newspaper editor’s office to let him know I was dating Sherrod.

“Sherrod Brown?” he said. He stood up. “Sherrod Brown,” he said, again, his voice rising. “Sherrod Brown—the congressman?”

He was furious, and I was so nervous I was on the verge of making a very inappropriate joke. “Oh, no, no,” I wanted to say. “Sherrod Brown the trapeze artist, and boy is he limber.” I didn’t say that, of course, but all these years later I still can’t see how it could have made the situation any worse.

Thus began Part Two of my columnist career, in which I spent far too much time and energy convincing fellow journalists, mostly men, that I could be married to a member of Congress and still retain both my ethics and the ability to think for myself. Fortunately, those days are long behind me, as are the careers of most of those men.

As soon as Sherrod’s congressional colleague and beloved friend, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, found out that we were engaged, she walked over to him on the House floor, pulled out her Blackberry and said, “When’s the wedding, baby?”

Minutes later, Sherrod called and said, “I can’t invite just one of them.” Immediately, our wedding list grew to include Ohio’s entire Democratic delegation, which was larger back then. Within a day, we had added several political advisers and our favorite congressional couple from Maine.

I’d watched enough C-SPAN to know how that was going to go, and I was not about to allow our wedding reception to devolve into a series of floor speeches about the wonders of my husband and lucky me. I insisted on inviting friends from the newsroom. And we would outnumber them, too. Take that, speechmakers!

Hilarious plan, in retrospect. Journalists don’t give speeches, they cover them. But I could tell from my friends’ shy, smiling faces during the long line of congressional tributes that they were very happy for us, and that was enough for me.

The merry band of Plain Dealer friends, full of opinions except when holding a microphone. I love them.

My goodness, here I am, 20 years later and still returning their smiles. Love is fierce that way.

Sherrod and I are apart today, but that’s okay. This has been our arrangement from the very beginning. On most weeks, he’s in Washington for a few days and I’m in Ohio. We’ve never stopped missing each other, and the separations are harder now. A fine development, we agree.

He has his ways of letting me know I’m on his mind and in his heart. He sends a steady stream of texts and emails, and I have a large box full of the notes he writes on recycled paper. He leaves them on my pillow, next to my laptop, behind my steering wheel.

Sometimes he tapes a note to my bathroom mirror. This amuses our granddaughter Jackie, who once giggled as she pointed to a note on the mirror that featured a drawing of a bullseye above the words, “You are the center of my universe.”

“Grandpa’s pretty silly about you,” she said. “I like that in a man.”

She was eight.

I am often asked about how Sherrod and I met, and why I was willing to trust marriage again. So often, these questions come from someone who is divorced. I can see the hurt in their eyes and hear the uncertainty in their voices. Another mirror, from long ago.

I get it, I tell them. For years, I thought I would never fall in love again, and as it turns out, I was right to have my doubts. It was that word “again” that tripped me up, as if I had ever known the grace and mutual sacrifice of real love. My first marriage did not begin there, and we spent too little time trying to find it. I blame both of us for that.

I had to learn the hard way that the most important thing I could do for myself, and for my children, was to figure out how to be happy on my own, without a man in my life. I was scared to make the leap, but I was more afraid of who I’d become if I didn’t try.

I didn’t know it then, but I was creating an opening—a wide-open clearing--for this new thing trying to be born in my life. For me, that grew into the kind of marriage I’d never known could exist until it happened to me.

On our fourth wedding anniversary, I asked Sherrod during a Scrabble game if he’d still love me when I’m old.

He didn’t even look up from the board. “You’re already old,” he said, “and I still love you.”

God, we laughed. It’s one of my favorite memories, probably because his joke turned out to be true.

Happy birthday, Mom. You would have loved him.

This is us, an hour before the eclipse over Cleveland.