Some of you know this story, most  of you don’t. It’s one of those weirdo stories I don’t usually tell people because 99% of the time the person I tell it to looks at me like, “Umm… okay… sure… whatever you say.”

But here is the cliff-notes version for reference you’ll need for the rest of this post:

My mother died when I was 23. She died in October, and that first Christmas was terrible. I was scraping together every memory, every tradition, like a junkie scrapes together cash. One night, I was at my dad’s house looking everywhere for one specific recipe book. The one that would tell me how to make my mom’s fudge, my mom’s pumpkin bread. The stuff she made every single Christmas season. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Tore through the house, looking through bookshelves, cabinets, junk piles, anything.

Nearly in tears.

Then suddenly, I hear this weirdly familiar tune start up. I look over to the massive cabinet in the kitchen and here it is, this music box adorned with two birds, turning on its own, playing a song I haven’t heard in probably a decade. Somehow I knew it had been a wedding present for my parents. I even knew who it was from, though I couldn’t remember how I knew.

Anyway, the music box was playing and I was crying and I scrambled over to it and right beside it, somehow missed in all my scrambling, is the recipe book full of my mom’s handwritten recipes.

Do with that what you will.

Fast forward to tonight, when my loving husband is installing a new air-conditioner in our bedroom and shifting around furniture and accidentally knocks said music box off my nightstand and it shatters into too many pieces to be repaired.

Now, listen to me. Shit happens. I know this. Shit that makes you cry. Makes you weak. But good stuff happens too. And I’m here to tell you that it isn’t the breaking of stuff that defines a person, it’s what happens after the breaking.

After I told my husband, more than once, not to worry about breaking the music box (even though I was kind of dying inside) he left to go get glue. And even though there’s no way to piece this thing back together, he’s been trying to anyway, for the last hour. And that, my dear readers, is what makes the breaking okay. Seeing how far he’d go to fix it, even when it’s beyond repair.

So for all of you looking for that perfect person who will never break anything that matters to you, I’m here to tell you to stop searching. You’ll never be happy. Look for the one who will believe they can fix everything for you even after you tell them not to worry about it.