To paraphrase my favourite ever TV show, she wasn’t my first, but she is my last, and she is the right one.

I’ve written about Becca many many times, all in my journal; from the early days when we first met and it struck me what a beautiful person she is, through the beginnings of our deeper feelings for each other, and on to today where I continue to write and reflect upon our relationship, my place in it, and the respect and admiration of her as a person.

I remain in awe of how she has handled so many challenging times and yet remains such a gentle and beautiful soul. She is a force of nature, a will that is hard to defy, and she uses all that strength to do nothing but lift up others. She sacrifices her own time for others without pause, she is constantly thinking about how to be the best mother and give our son the best start in life in every imaginable way possible (and many I hadn’t even considered), and she is my rock who sees me and nags me when I need it. She thinks about others often and is quick to offer gentle help with compassion and love. Just don’t mess with her values and ideals. Her integrity is so solid it has its own gravitational pull.

She is also more than a bit silly, knows herself better than anyone I’ve ever met, and knows me better than I do.

She does have flaws but it would be churlish of me to mention her habit of leaving tea bags in the sink to clog up the plug hole…

Sidebar: I have deliberately made some grammatical errors in this post to give her something to comment on because the content itself will be brushed off with her usual modesty.

I am a better human being for having met her, a better man for being with her, and strive to be the best father I can because of her example.

She recently celebrated 5 years sober.

Except she didn’t. No real fanfare, just an Instagram post then back to the day to day. This is in part her nature, and part the joys of parenting an active, inquisitive, and cheeky 3 year old boy, you don’t get the time to stop very often. But she’s not ever been one for receiving praise, in that respect we are very alike.

Hence why I wrote this post, to congratulate her, to put it further out into the world (for all 3 of you that will read this) and just to say how proud I am of her and how lucky I am to be part of her life.

My beautiful partner, my amazing wife, the devoted mother of our child.

You’ll do.