25 years

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. 

~Mark Twain

i can so vividly remember my parents 25th anniversary.  i was in college and my sisters were in charge of this really amazing project for them.  we collected pictures and video, which we turned into a video homage to their many years together.  i narrated a section since i wasnt there to really help otherwise.  and we showed it at a party with family and friends.  and i can remember thinking - WOW - my parents have been together forever.  and also being super amazed that they were still together.....because, you know, marriage is hard.  and once i left for college, i wasnt sure what was going to keep them together.  they were always united in their job to raise us, but seemed to not have much other than that in common.  and i never quite really got it - the WHY, since they didnt seem all that happy all that often.  silly me.

so here we are, kris and i, at that same crossroad.  with kids at exactly the same points in their own lives.  probably wondering what the hell we are still doing together after all this time.  since, you know, marriage is hard and we may not have much in common anymore since the boys dont require both of us to help them anymore.  and NOW i finally get it.  marriage IS hard.  and full of mistakes, and things that hurt.  its full of compromise and moments where it doesnt FEEL like its going to last. and sometimes it doesnt.  life is funny that way. people change their minds and circumstances change all the time.  and there is no one right way to travel through life.  or marriage.  but i understand more now than i ever have before, that it is those bumps and bruises, the fighting through the challenges, that makes us the unit that we are.  its easy to judge from the outside looking in what a "good" marriage looks like - or doesnt look like.  but you can only really understand it from the inside.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. ~George Levinger

5 years in you are fighting for your life, and still think everything is going to be great at some point. 

you ride the waves of change.  for us it was 3 kids in those 5 years.  exhaustion would be the defining word for probably 90% of that time.  but it took both of us to make it all work.  i appreciated kris as a partner but could never really explain how much more i LOVED him as a dad. kris is the best father i know, next to my own. and at the end of the day is the underlying reason for why we have always worked things out.  just flat out admiration and appreciation of how amazing he is with our boys.  you cant ask for much more than that - at least i cant.

10 years in - lets call those the organized chaos years. school, play groups, part time jobs.  i look back on that time and cant really remember anything but arts and crafts and t-ball.  kris was there (obviously), but i consider those the mom years.  poor kris.  but again, i think that's probably when me being a MOM to HIS kids made all the difference.

When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses. ~Joyce Brothers

15 years in is just organized chaos.  travel sports.  that is all.  it took every single thing we both had, at all times, to get the kids everywhere they needed to be and fed. its amazing how quickly time passes when you want to kill each other and everyone else all the time.  throw in starting a league or 2, going back to work full time and you would have what we probably would consider the "volatile" years.  well, as volatile as you can be when you literally are never in the same space.

but through it all - all of those first 15 years, we had amazing family vacations. and were devoted to the UNIT.  it took both of us, every bit of it, to make it work.  and we were lucky enough to still really like each other, even when we didnt always think we did.  the thing that became really obvious by then is that nothing stays the same.  except for the unit.  the focus on our boys, and what we were united in trying to help them accomplish never waivered.  and in that realization, we always came back to where we started - as a team.  we NEED each other.  because we both value what the other brings to the table.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint Exupéry

now 20 years is when it gets interesting. because all of THOSE things kind of go away, right? 

college and high school age kids do not require nearly the save level of effort. and can you believe we are ALREADY at 20 years?  this is when you realize you GOT OLD.  i mean, what the fuck.  how did we get here?  you finally take a breath and notice that you did it.  you raised your kids.  and yay, they turned out just like you hoped.  all those years of busting your ass actually made a difference. but now what?  thats when you have to look at each other and see if you still know that person who is on this ride with you.  and its different.  and kind of hard.  figuring out what to do NOW - now that all that common energy and focus isnt necessary - is very weird.  and it takes some time.  what do we do with all this free time?  do we like to do the same things?  what now???

if you ask my kids, they will happily tell you that we can be summed up by this.....we are basically a couch potato family.  we bond over movies, youtube videos, twitter and pop culture....and lacrosse.  whenever kris leaves the room, i turn on msnbc.  and whenever i leave the room he turns on storage wars. based on that fact alone, we should never make things work, right? but then you factor in superhero movies and star wars (and even star trek), add in some game of thrones and occasionally beauty and the beast.  and it starts to make sense.  we are a WE.  and the family is US.  and we just make it work.

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret

i dont thing anyone would ever have predicted a pandemic when picturing their future.  but honestly, quarantine reminded me of all the reasons why im lucky.  and it starts and ends with kb.  we just flat out still get along.  we spent 15 weeks at home.  we spray painted a pickle ball court in our driveway and turned our porch into a gym.  we figured out shows to binge watch and managed to feed our family 3 meals a day without anyone being murdered.  and its been so nice.  i hate to say that when other families are suffering.  but it has been a welcome reminder to me about who and what is important. and at the end of the day, my person is still the same one that i met all those years ago in providence.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds — they mature slowly. ~Peter De Vries

25 years.  of memories and shared experience.  of being there thru ups and downs.  its not all sunshine and light.  but its way more sun than rain.  theres nothing that can replace the person who has been there for you, through it all, and kept choosing you - even when sometimes it was probably easier not to.  thats what my parents knew 25 years in, that i couldnt even imagine at 19.  life is full of choices.  choosing to stay, to stick it out may not always be easy - or even possible.  but if you manage it, you get to look back on this amazing, long, SHARED journey - and know that there is someone who understands you.  loves you.  and decided, warts and all, to keep choosing you.

at the end of every day, i get him.  and he gets me.  and we have created 25 years of this life together.  its our story. its not perfect.  and it wasnt easy. but its ours.  we did that.  and that is what i didnt really all those years ago at my parents 25th.  time together IS the gift.  making it this far together matters.  choosing us - our unit - even when it was hard, that is what got us here. and we are lucky, SO lucky, to have made it this far.  this life is a gift. sharing it with someone you love, who you still LIKE after all these years, is really what makes it worth living.

im a lucky girl.  and even tho i dont always say it, or even act like it, i love you to the moon kb. and i appreciate you sticking with me all these years.  cant wait to have you pushing my wheelchair around at our 50th.

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through eternity. 

~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe