This is an awesome story! I love it. I think the main thing is to tighten it up a bit and remove the parentheses. (Yeah, I kind of have a thing about that.) :)

Written stories do best with a main point, all side bits get removed or tie back into the main point in some way.

I see the essense of this story being the tall tale telling of your husband, maybe not so surprising in courtship, along with how long he kept to the story.

you have four key bits, the true story, the tall tale, when you learned the truth, and how this became useful family legend. In each part remove anything that doesn't activity move the story along and point towards the deception.