The best day of my life

This year marks 24 years since Mike and I met at school.  He was 15 and I was 13.  It was love at first sight for both of us and we spent the best part of the following year flirting with each other before he finally built up the courage to call my house and ask me out.  We were 14 and 16.  It was a Sunday when he called.

It was the best day of my life.

Our first date was a few days later on a sunny July afternoon in 1989.  I remember waiting at my brother’s window which was at the front of the house and I still remember seeing Mike walk up the road as he arrived to pick me up.  We both remember the shirt he was wearing that day.  In fact, we both remember the day as if it were only last week.  We remember talking awkwardly at the bus stop until the bus came and sitting at the front of the top deck.  I remember doing that moving-hands-around-when-you-talk-wavy thing until… oops-did-our-hands-brush-and-now-we’re-holding-each-others thing happened.

It was the best day of my life.

I remember our first kiss.  It was two days after our first date on the way back to my house after visiting his friend.

It was the best day of my life.

I remember the first I love you’s.

It was the best day of my life.

I remember the hours and hours of talking about everything and anything, the laughing and even sometimes the crying.

I remember breaking up and believing what we once had, had gone forever but with one phone call and within an hour we were back together again.

It was the best day of my life.

I remember our Wedding day thirteen years after that first date.  It was a real shoestring wedding.  My only regrets being that it wasn’t in a Church and that we didn’t get proper photographs of the day.  We hired a hall, did the food and decorations ourselves and spent as little as we possibly could.

It was the best day of my life.

I’m sitting here now thinking back to all of these things.  How we went from being children and how we’ve grown up together and how we’re growing older together and my life has been blessed with all of these “best days”.  For their own reasons and in their own ways they were all the best days of my life and there have been hundreds of thousands more.  Sometimes I didn’t even realise they were best days until later.  Some days were not easy.  And some days were downright horrid.  But we’re still here.

We still flirt outrageously like we did when we were 13 and 15.  We still make each other laugh.  We still talk for hours and hours about anything and everything.  We still say the I love you’s dozens of times a day.  We’re still creating the best days of our lives every, single, day and we’re doing that together and we still don’t always realise it.

I used to take things for granted but I don’t any more.   I know what we have is so special and really quite rare.  My wish for my children is for them to find their true love, like I found mine.  The man who still tells his wife he loves her several times a day, 23 years after first saying it has got to mean it!  When he says it in Bananagram letters you know it’s got to be true!

Today is Mike’s birthday and we’ve been taking a lot of trips down memory lane.  When there is so much history together there are a lot of “do you remember’s” and a lot of stories to re-tell.  So not only will I be wishing my husband a Happy Birthday but I’ll be telling him how much he means to me, how happy he’s made me and how much I love him.

If I had a crystal ball and told the 13 year old me where Mike and I would be in 2012, 13 year old me would have never believed it.  I do know one thing though – if I did that, it would easily have been the best day of my life.