You always go that extra mile to make sure I’m comfortable. It’s farther than anyone else has ever gone for me, that much is sure. But what’s most astonishing to me is that you go even farther than I go for myself.
I wrote about it a while back. About how my coffee grinder broke, and you were hunting for a replacement. I would have been okay with a cheap one, anything to break up the beans and make the juice caffeinated. I don’t have the expectation that I need to drink world-class coffee at home. Anything that makes the brain go brrrrr is adequate for me. In the past, I’ve been known to drink awful coffee when it’s all I had.
Look, I’ve even choked down instant. (At certain places I lived, when I was really broke and existing basically via the kindness of others, that’s all I had available to me.)
I’m not choosy. I’ll get by.
But you insist on helping me get the best-quality coffee. You insist on helping me have the best-quality life. You seem to care more that I have good things for myself than I do.
And I’m never quite sure what to do about that. Never quite sure what to do with the fact that you seem to care more about me than I care about myself.
Sometimes I’ll find myself wondering: How could I even get there? How do I care about myself the way you care about me?
Should I even try to get there?
Or maybe it’s a lot like how I care for you — how it drives me nuts when you face the smallest inconvenience. How I have a hard time when you’re having a bad day (but don’t seem to mind my own, which I view as inevitable and not a big deal).
Maybe it’s okay that we love each other differently than we love ourselves. Maybe that’s the whole point.