Where There Are Purple Flowers

My husband and I met at a college where finding a chivalrous man was like finding a piece of hay in a haystack.  Everyone was overflowing with the quality.  A man would hold a door open for a woman and wind up stuck there while fifteen or twenty women also passed through the open door, and he would never once utter a complaint or shut the door in someone's face.  It was truly a blessing to be a woman on that campus.  Everyday you felt like royalty.  Chivalry was most certainly not dead.

My husband was no exception.  In fact, to me he seemed to outshine them all in that department.  He would hold open doors, get my food in the cafeteria, offer backrubs on stressful days, and buy me beautiful roses and candies just because.  He made me feel like a queen day in and day out.

After leaving the college, getting married, and having two children, the little things can start to give way to a busy schedule, a child always attached at the hip, and the sheer exhaustion that comes from parenting.  Neither person is at fault.  We find ways to keep our marriage strong, whether through tiny gestures or rushed intimacies, but as a woman who loves to feel like a queen, chivalry can start to seem like it is dying, or at least being hospitalized indefinitely.  He can no longer open my car door because he is buckling a kid in the backseat.  He can no longer buy me roses for no reason because we keep ourselves to a fairly strict budget with no secrets.  And backrubs are few and far between because he is too tired to give them, and I can't stay awake long enough to receive them.

After a while, it starts to feel like parenting killed chivalrousness.  Until your child reaches that special age.  That precious age when he excitedly runs up to you with a tiny purple flower plucked, with Daddy's help, from the yard.  When he hands you that simple little flower, you realize that chivalry was only hospitalized to give birth to an amazing miracle that holds more wonders and more surprises than anything you have ever known before.  This is when you pause for a moment and ask God to help you nurture that amazing seedling of chivalry planted in your child so he can grow into a man who continues to keep this treasured attribute alive.

As long as God nourishes tiny purple flowers, He will continue to give us the knowledge and strength to nourish chivalrous little boys.