And they said it wouldn’t last

Pregúntale a tu madre, Sophie…….

My daughter feigned annoyance when I said that. Her mother too!

It was a game of course. A game in which we all played our roles to perfection.

They both knew that I was helplessly wrapped around all of their fingers, but they allowed me to pretend I was in charge in some way.

Sophia loved to see her father squirm when she asked for something important. All the while, he was fully aware her mother would ask “What did your father say?”

Thomas is like his father, much more practical, so, he would go straight to his mami, and if she said yes, it would be much more difficult for papá to say no.

I love my family. I love the way talk to each other, play with each other, and everything we do together. But you would never know from the obstacles we faced in the beginning that this, where we are now, would ever happen.

Love was never an issue for my wife and me. But it seemed that everything else was against us.

When we first met, it wasn’t exactly as if the world would be cheering us on. If fact, no one could even imagine us as a couple. We came from different worlds—different cultures, different languages, and there was even a noticeable gap in age. None of it mattered to us. We could “see” us. We could feel us. For her and me, the differences seemed small compared to the love we had for each other. It was so much more than a romantic infatuation that would ebb and wane over time.

This; Us; was what we had been searching for our entire lives……even before we knew we were missing it.  But it was only those differences that matter to everyone else.

With family and friends every meeting was a moment of judgment, we could see in their eyes, how they seemed to search for flaws everywhere. Their comments, mostly meant as jokes, and superficially harmless, chipped away and challenged the confidence and trust we were working so hard to build.

And then there was society in general, coworkers, everyone always watching, always judging. In the beginning we rarely ventured out. The stares in shops, the way waitpersons would fumble over who got the check, assuming we weren’t a couple. The quiet moments where people tried to figure us out without ever saying a word.

And yet, even the naysayers could see the connection we had. Through it all, we clung to us, we found our way. We slowly, unmoved, built a life together, one day at a time. We learned to handle the doubts, the whispers, the sideways glances. We relied on each other when the world became heavy, we supported each other when we had our own doubts, and we took joy in the small victories that came with time.

By the time Sophia was born, we had weathered through enough storms to know we would overcome anything. We knew that love wasn’t the problem—it never had been. The problem was everyone else’s fear of the unknown, their inability to see past their own biases. But Sophia and Thomas? they are proof that love, our love, could win. Our love, so nurtured and protected, created something beautiful.

Looking at them now, I can’t help but smile. They will never fully know the battles we fought to get here, to be us. And honestly? I’m happy for that. Because this—our family, our life—is worth every obstacle we overcame.