I Almost Missed It

I grew up watching the Huxtables.

If you know, you know. The Cosby Show was everything to me. Every Thursday night I was planted in front of that television watching Cliff and Clair move through their marriage with this effortless, beautiful, laughing kind of love. They would put on a song out of nowhere and just dance in the living room. They disagreed but never truly broke. They were warm and funny and they chose each other over and over in ways that looked so natural you almost forgot it was a choice at all.

I was a little Black girl born in 1982, and I built my entire idea of what marriage was supposed to look like around a television show.

Nobody told me it wasn't real.

And nobody told me that even if it had been real, real people come into love already carrying things.

Real people come with wounds that shape everything about how they give love and how they receive it.

Nobody told me that two people can love each other deeply and still spend years hurting each other in ways neither of them fully understands. Nobody told me that becoming one is not a wedding day moment. It is a daily, sometimes painful, always sacred process of learning to let someone all the way in.

I wish somebody had told me that. So I am telling you now.

I have always known I was meant to be a wife. Since I was a little girl, literally. At recess I was the one pairing up my classmates, making matches, performing fake wedding ceremonies on the playground. It felt like something I was born for.

But here is what you have to understand about that little girl, she had never actually seen love done right. My biological mother allowed me to be trafficked and abused before I was old enough to understand what was happening. My first foster parents were a pastor and first lady in public and something very different behind closed doors. When I was adopted, my parents were good, stable people. My mother had quiet strength, kept the home, kept us together. But nobody sat us down and talked about the hard parts of love. There were no slow dances in the kitchen. Not once did anyone look me in the face and say:

You deserve to be loved. You deserve a really good man.

So I learned what love was supposed to look like from the Huxtables. And I learned what love actually felt like from survival.

In third grade, a boy named Bobby Beverly met me outside of school on Valentine's Day with a dozen roses and asked me to be his Valentine. I floated home. Roses in my arms. Heart completely full. You could not have told me one thing.

My mother met me at the door and said: "Turn around. Go back to Bobby's house. Give those roses back. You are too young for that."

I cried the whole way there. I knocked on his door. I held out the roses. And I walked home empty-handed.

I never wanted roses from a man again. I told myself I didn't need them. I built a whole identity around not needing them. I am strong. I am fine. I can handle it myself.

What I did not understand was that I wasn't strong. I was defended. And there is a real difference between those two things.

Being strong means you have done the work, faced the fear, and come out the other side with something solid to stand on. Being defended means you built walls so high and so early that you stopped feeling the pain and called that healing. You stopped needing things from people and called that independence. You stopped letting anyone get close enough to hurt you and called that wisdom. But really, you were just protecting a wound you had never let anyone touch. I know because that is exactly what I was doing.

Fast forward past years of survival, past relationships that took more of me than they gave, past becoming a young single mother, past the night I lay on my cousin's couch with bandaged hands and a face swollen from crying. That night I prayed the most honest prayer I had ever prayed (before Ciara mind you). No church words. No performance. Just this:

"I'm tired, God. Can you just send me a man that will love me and treat me with respect?"

The next morning, my cousin Delita dragged me to church.

Walking up the path to the entrance I saw him. Tall. Dark-skinned. On his phone. Sitting on the railing like he had all the peace in the world. And before I could form a thought, I heard a still, small voice say:

That is your husband.

I turned to Delita and said it out loud. She told me to get my life together. I didn't care. I spent the entire service watching him play the drums and heard not one word of that message.

His name was Josh. His father was the Pastor. And I thought God had to be mistaken, because there was no way He would be writing this story for someone like me. Someone sitting in that sanctuary with bandages underneath on her hands and bloody cuts underneath them

But I got his number anyway. I called him that same day. We talked for hours. He took me on a date that Friday. And sitting across from him, this man who was kind and funny and looked at me like I was worth something, I did what broken women do when someone real finally shows up.

I pushed him away before he could get close.

I looked him dead in his eyes and said: "I don't need a man to open doors for me, pull out my chair, spend his money on me, buy me roses, or buy me gifts."

He said: "Well, what do you need a man for?"

We both laughed. But even laughing, I knew. That was not confidence. That was a little girl who had given back roses and decided she would never need them again.

He saw right through it. He stayed anyway.

Let me tell you who we were when we started, because it matters.

Josh was the youngest of his father's three sons. Laid back. Loud. A true comedian, the kind of man strangers love immediately, that walks into a room and the whole room lifts. His whole family was deep in the church, ministry in his bloodline. From the outside, he looked like a man who had always been okay.

But Josh had his own wounds he carried quietly. He lost his mother to breast cancer when he was sixteen years old. From that point on, he and his brothers largely raised themselves. He knew grief. He knew loss. He knew what it was to have the ground shift beneath you before you were ready. He just carried it differently than I did. Where I wore my pain loudly, in walls and words and defense mechanisms you could see from across the room, Josh tucked his away. He stayed funny. He kept the light on. And for a long time, I mistook that lightness for never having been hurt.

Two wounded people. Just wounded differently. Neither one of us fully knowing what we were walking into. And neither one of us about to dance in the living room like the Huxtables.

Because here is what I did not know how to do..... receive love. So I made myself necessary instead. I was the breadwinner. I cooked and cleaned. I made sure there was nothing he had to figure out on his own. Being needed was the only way I knew how to feel safe. If he needed me, he could not leave.

I called it partnership. And parts of it were exactly that. But the deeper truth, the one I would not find until years later in a therapist's chair, was this:

I was loving him in a way that left almost no room for him to love me back.

I was so busy being indispensable that I never learned how to be vulnerable. I was his supporter, his backbone, his biggest cheerleader. But I was not open. And a marriage where one person will not open is not really a marriage. It is a very convincing performance.

It was around year six that God stopped me mid-prayer and said something that rearranged me.

Every man has both a king and a fool in him. Whichever one is spoken to the most is the one he will become. For years you have been speaking to him like he was a fool. But I made him a king.

I had been using my tongue as a weapon against my husband. Not always in the big explosive moments. Often in the small daily ones. The dismissals. The corrections. The way I talked over his ideas. The "I need you to grow up, I need you to act like a man, lead like a man." I had walked into this marriage still in full defense mode and I had been aiming it at the safest person in my life.

So I changed. I started praying over him while he slept. I started speaking to the king in him. I became his biggest cheerleader. But I could speak life into my husband and still be holding him at a distance emotionally. I could cheer for him in public and shut him out at home. Cheering for someone is not the same as being open to them. And I had not yet learned the difference.

I need to tell you about the seasons that nearly broke us. Because if I skip them I am lying to you and continuing to paint the picture we see most on social media....the perfect one.

We had a pregnancy we lost. A medical condition that put my life at risk. A choice no couple should have to face. Josh said without hesitating:

"I'm choosing my wife."

He made the call I could not make for myself. But afterward, he did not know how to grieve with me. He moved forward the way he knew how. And I fell into a depression entirely alone. We were in the same bed, the same house, and I was grieving by myself in the dark. Something hardened in me during that season that I would not be able to name for years.

Then came our sons car accident. And not long after, our daughter fighting for her life in a way no parent should ever witness. Two crises back to back. Two seasons that each asked more of us than we had left to give. We were reaching for each other across a distance that grief had carved between us and some days we simply could not find each other.

Through all of it I was in therapy, doing the work, growing. And Josh was not.

I want to stay here for a moment because I know some of you are living in exactly this place right now. You are the one who made the appointment. You are the one who read the book, showed up to the session, did the hard internal work. And you are watching your spouse stand completely still. Maybe they don't believe in therapy. Maybe they won't talk about it. Maybe you have asked and suggested and nothing has moved. There is a specific feeling that comes with that. It is the feeling of being the only one awake in your marriage. Of lying next to someone you love and feeling completely alone. Of doing everything right and wondering why it still feels so wrong.

That feeling has a name. It is called carrying what was meant to be shared. And it is one of the loneliest places a person can stand.

I see you. Keep doing your work. Not because it guarantees they will change, but because you deserve to be free regardless. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for your marriage is to keep healing yourself even when no one else is watching.

I kept going. And I am grateful I did. Because what came next required every bit of the work I had been doing.

Within a few years, Josh lost both of his brothers and I lost my grandmother. I will not put all of that grief on this page. But losing the people who grew up beside you does something to a man that is hard to describe from the outside. And then, about three years ago, came the news that stopped us both cold. Josh was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

I want you to sit with that for a moment. Because in a season that had already asked so much of us, here came something that required us to look at each other and decide, all the way down, are we in this or are we not? It was terrifying. For him far more than for me, because it was happening to his body, his future, his sense of what life would look like going forward. Between the MS, his diabetes, the deaths of his brothers, it felt like life was just pressing down on him from every direction at once. And I watched the man who had always been the light in every room start to go quiet in a way I had never seen before.

One day I walked in to our bedroom and he was just lying in the bed. Far away. Not the Josh I knew. I tried to talk, tried to lighten the mood. And he just did not come back. The light did not come up in his eyes.

And I understood something in that moment that landed in my chest like a stone. The loud, bright, irrepressible Josh had been slowly going quiet for years. Life had been pressing down on him from the outside. But I also knew, sitting in that room, that I had been part of the weight on the inside.

Because sucking the life out of your husband does not happen all at once. It looks like telling him he is too loud every time he is fully himself. It looks like "people don't get your jokes" until he stops joking. It looks like him learning over years to make himself smaller so you are more comfortable. It looks like the man who once filled every room with light deciding, quietly, to dim himself down.

The world already takes enough from our men. Home is supposed to be the place where they get to breathe. I had let my unhealed wounds turn ours into one more place where he had to be careful.

I had to sit with that. Not spiral into shame, but let it actually change me.

There was one more layer I had to face. For years I had been searching for my biological father. I just knew that if I could find him, I would finally have the love I had been reaching for my whole life. The love only a father gives.

When I finally found the paternal side of my biological family, I found out that my father had already passed away.

I would never know him. Never sit across from him. Never hear him say my name.

And it was in grieving that loss that I finally saw clearly what I had been doing to my husband for years.

I had been placing on Josh an expectation that was never his to carry. I had been waiting for him to love me the way I wished my father would have. And that is an impossible weight to put on any human being.

There was even a season in our marriage where Josh looked at me and said he did not know if he could ever be the man I needed him to be. Not because he did not love me. But because what I needed went so far beneath the surface that no husband, no matter how good, could reach it. That kind of need can only be met by God.

When I finally placed those expectations where they actually belonged, with my Heavenly Father, something in me began to soften. I began to release Josh from a debt he never owed me. I began to see him not as someone who kept failing me, but as a man doing his best to love someone who did not yet fully know how to be loved.

That softening mattered more than I knew at the time.

Because there is something I have never forgotten, something that has anchored me in every hard season of this marriage.

Our first Christmas together as girlfriend and boyfriend, Josh took me to meet his grandmother, the woman who raised him and his siblings after his mother passed. I was nervous. I had a history I had not fully shared and the quiet fear that she would look at me and see all of it.

She opened the door, looked at my face, and after Josh introduced me, she said, "Sana. I know you."

Josh started shaking his head. She went to the back of the house. She came back holding a wallet-sized photograph and turned it toward us.

A little girl. Five years old. Three ponytails. Blue barrettes. Wide smile.

It was me.

The picture of me that Nana had.

It turned out that Josh's grandmother and her late husband had shared a church building years before with my very first foster parents, back when I was a child just out of a crack house, learning what church was for the first time. She had been given my photo. She had kept it for over twenty years. Before Josh and I ever laid eyes on each other. Before either of us had any say in the matter. God had already written this.

That is not a coincidence. That is a covenant. And on the days when marriage is hard, that photograph is what I go back to. Not the feeling. Not the romance. The covenant. The evidence that God was in this before we were.

And so when the MS diagnosis came, as terrifying as it was, something else came with it that I did not expect. Underneath the fear, I felt a quiet and overwhelming sense of honor. Because if God knew, before either of us were formed, that this would be our story, then He also chose me specifically to walk through it with Josh. To stand beside him. To shoulder it with him. To love him even more deeply in the season when life is asking the most of him.

That is not a burden. That is a calling.

And that diagnosis, paired with all the loss that has surrounded my husband and I have endured in these last few years, has done something unexpected to our marriage. It has pulled us closer. It has made the ordinary things feel sacred. The vacations we kept putting off, we are planning to take them now. The family photo, the slow conversations over dinner, the funny group chat, the simple act of being present with each other and with our children and grandchildren, things we used to let slip past us in the busyness of life, we are not letting them slip anymore. Because we understand now what we did not always understand before.

Time is not guaranteed. And love, real love, is not something you put off until later.

So when 2025 came and Josh started taking therapy really serious, not just showing up but actually doing the real work, I was not surprised that change was possible. I had seen the covenant. I knew what we were made of.

And I have watched him change this past year in ways that are still settling in me. Not dramatic changes. Not movie-moment changes. The small ones. The ones only a wife notices.

A few weeks ago I was exhausted. I had started anxiety medication in December and was still working through the side effects, low energy, not quite myself. I didn't feel like cooking. So I asked Josh if he would make burgers for dinner. He makes the best burgers. He said of course, and he did.

The next day I noticed he had missed a community meeting from our shared calendar. I said, "Babe, you missed that meeting last night."

He said: "I know."

I said: "Why didn't you go?"

He said: "Because you asked me to make burgers. And that was more important to me."

That is not a small thing. That is a man who spent years putting ministry and meetings first making a quiet, private choice to put his wife first. Nobody saw it. He didn't tell me to earn credit. I only found out by accident. That is what real change looks like from the inside.

And then just a few days ago, I had a follow-up mammogram appointment. I don't talk about those things much because I don't want people to worry. I drove myself, got there early, and was sitting in my car eating a sandwich and scrolling my phone.

And then someone tried to get into my car.

I looked up.

It was Josh. He had come to sit with me.

He didn't tell me he was coming. He just looked at the calendar, knew what the appointment was, and decided I should not be at that appointment alone.

I don't have a big theological word for what I felt in that moment. I just know that looking at his face through that window, I felt something I have been waiting for my whole life.

Safe. Not just physically safe. Emotionally safe. The kind that means, I see you. I hear you, even when you are not speaking. I am here. You do not have to hold this by yourself.

That is what I had been waiting for. Not the Huxtables. Not roses or grand gestures or a television version of love. Just a man who looked at the calendar, made me a priority and showed up.

I am in my forties now. So is Josh. And I will be honest with you about something that sits with me sometimes. I think about the years I spent protecting myself instead of living. The years I spent being defended instead of open. The years I spent waiting for love to look like something I saw on television instead of recognizing it in the real ordinary moments right in front of me. And sometimes I feel a quiet grief about that time.

Because I want there to still be enough time. I want enough years left in this lifetime for Josh and me to experience each other the way God always intended. To enjoy our children and our grandchildren. To take the trips. To sit in the quiet. To become, fully and completely, everything He had in mind when He placed my photo on a grandmother's dresser before I even knew Josh's name.

And you know what I am learning, almost nineteen years in? We are becoming one. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But every day I see it more clearly. Two people who came in wounded, who hurt each other in ways neither of us fully understood, who nearly lost each other more than once, slowly, sacredly becoming one. I used to wonder if that was even possible for us. Now I see it happening in real time.

And it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.

That is not luck. That is God finishing what He started.

If you are single and reading this, real love is worth waiting for. Not the fantasy. The real thing. The kind that sees you fully and stays.

If you are in a hard season of your marriage and questioning everything, I understand that. I have been there. But I want you to know what is on the other side of the work. Not perfection. Not the Huxtables.

Something better than that. Something that feels like exhaling after years of holding your breath. Something that feels like finally being known.

Something that feels like the soft life.

Do your healing work. Get into counseling if you can. Release your spouse from the expectations that were never theirs to carry and place them where they belong. Speak to the king in your husband, not the fool. And fight for your marriage, not because it is easy, but because the kind of love that has been through the fire and is still standing is one of the most sacred things on this earth.

You are not too broken to be loved. You are not too far gone. And if you are still waiting for love to find you, I promise you it is not as far away as it feels.

Almost nineteen years in. Grandparents now. Still becoming. Still choosing each other.

And I would do every hard day of it again.