I’d like to spend this morning telling the entire world just how much I truly love my wife. I’ve written about her in passing throughout the rambling musings over the past couple of months, but usually in the role of a supporting character: someone who fits neatly into the narrative of my life. But she is so much more than that, a remarkable human being that has deserves the very best in life, and yet, year after year, chooses to remain with me. She is the mother of two wonderfully impossible children, the loving daughter of two amazing people with whom I hope it will someday be my honor to be acquainted, and at least my equal in this life we’ve built, if not my better (in so many ways). And even in those descriptions, I am still defining her by her relationships to others. She is deserving, at the very least, of an entire column dedicated to all of our relationships to her…

Born on the final day of the year 1967, she was the third of six children, but first in character and strength of will. As a child she frequently spoke her mind, and, protected by the anonymity that only being a middle child can provide, set her own course amongst the countless paths which life could offer. She was a beauty of her generation (and her smile is still easily the most radiant which I have ever seen), and fell in love with a man when she was in her early twenties. Of all the eligible bachelors through the Distrito Federal, she chose this man to spend her life with, but he wasn’t worth her trouble. After giving her a daughter, he turned and ran away, unable to see past her beauty to her core of solid steel.

Flor was determined to provide her baby with all she might desire, and put in the effort of at least three people to try and make it happen. She was mother and father to her little baby girl, and what trivialities her grueling hours at work could not provide, her unconditional love more than made up for. Her daughter was her first priority, and like many single mothers, this often came at an unacknowledged cost to herself. Relationships were put aside, as they took time away from someone who required her, and it was better not to get invested, having been burned so badly once before. Eventually, she came to love another, a man of decent means who would offer to provide for both her and her daughter. But, like the last man she had loved, this man would come to disappoint as well, leaving for Los Estados Unidos in search of a better life with the promise of a place for them as soon as he had settled.

That was the last, of course, she heard of him, and she set her broken heart aside. Her daughter had begun to ask to see her dad, and despite her feelings on the matter, Flor did her best to make it happen. That too, was met with entirely predictable results, and Flor was there to pick up the broken pieces of her daughter’s heart after such a profound rejection. I said that I would try to avoid defining her by who and what she was to others, but from the moment that she had a child, she defined her own life by what she might do for her daughter. And when she came to this country, it was not because she’d bought into the golden street propaganda- she had a decent-paying job, and had built a comfortable life for herself and for her daughter. She came out of a sense of duty, a familial obligation. She wanted nothing to do with anybody here, but was the only one willing to come.

When I met her, she was working two jobs (one of them as my subordinate), and had been recently struck by a careless driver who had enough money to have known better, but not enough to make the lasting pain at all worthwhile. Every discretionary cent was sent back home, dedicated to her parents and her now teenaged daughter, and though she knew it was not the same, she hoped that it would at least make her absence slightly bearable. It was at a wedding of a co-worker that she met someone whom she would wind up loving and for whom she would put her life on hold. He wasn’t the most attractive or the richest man she knew, but he also wasn’t married, and seemed like, from what she had been able to ascertain, a generally decent type of fellow.

She agreed to move in with him, just a few short months later, having spent as much time with her family here as she could bear. The relationship wasn’t everything she’d hoped for, and she was fairly certain that it wouldn’t last, but they signed the lease together, and moved their stuff in, and practiced being tolerant of one another. And then one night, something predictably unexpected happened, and she found that, sixteen years later, she was going to be a mom again. Having the last experience still fresh in her mind, she offered this sweet, but alcoholic guero a way out, should he want to take it. She had done it all alone before, and would rather face this challenge by herself, than to have to try and force him to be something which he wasn’t. Though never quite losing the terrified expression he’d been wearing since she told him, he seemed, finally, to come around, and in the summer of 2007, she gave birth to baby boy.

A couple years later, after having argued more over things both large and small, she gave this man an ultimatum: either he would marry her or they would go their separate ways. They had been together almost three years, and it was time to behave like adults. If he wanted out, she would let him go- no strings attached. She would take her son back to Mexico, and raise him as she’d done with her daughter. I don’t believe she truly thought I’d follow through with it until we said, “I do.” In the nearly six years we’ve been married, she has meant everything to me. She is the one to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, the bringer of order to the chaos which surrounds me, the unyielding champion for both her children, and seemingly capable of ignoring all human limitations to do what must be done.

We argue, sometimes fundamentally opposed, and sometimes just for sport, and after so long, we know just how to devastate one another. But something that we’ve also both gotten really good at is loving one another. She makes me want to be a better person, if only so that I might give her a little competition. I love her with all of my heart. She is the noblest person that I’ve ever personally been acquainted with, and I count every day that she stays with me as a little miracle unto itself.

-Tex