Cleared to Close: Our Cape Escape

My husband and I sat on the coach, sans laptops, iPhones and television last night; a rarity these days. We run multiple businesses, parent a 4 year old, manage employees, our home, our lives. Most nights, we lazily order takeout or throw together a quick dinner and, after our son's in bed, unwind with bad reality TV we both would pretend we were above watching, should our friends ask. 

But last night, we laid our heads back on our couch and shared a bottle of wine and my husband initiated my favorite game we ever play: Getting to know each other better. It's a seemingly impossible task, because Shaun and I have been best friends for far longer than we've been married. We met in 2006, right before I graduated college, on a road trip to Nashville- the place we've called home since the year after, and we've seen each other through relationships, jobs, poverty, success, happiness, depression, anxiety, sickness, babies...everything. We often know one another better than we know ourselves in certain moments. 

We talked about my mom's side of the family- many of whom Shaun, for whatever reason- hasn't met or spent much time with yet, and what their lives were like growing up with my grandma and grandpa. And then Shaun asked me: "When we're 80...and we're on the deck of our house on Cape Cod overlooking the ocean...what do you want our lives to have looked like? What do you hope we did, or didn't do?" And I gave him a very long answer, that I couldn't help but become emotional over. I couldn't recreate it exactly now, but I said something along the lines of:

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