I wanted to take a moment to have an about your blogger post. I never really wrote an introduction for myself here at the marriage blog and after three and half months here, I’m fairly sure you have a good idea of who I am. But this last week my husband and I celebrated ten years together. So on that note, I wanted to share with you my remember when.
The Laughter
In the decade that my husband and I have been together, I have laughed more than in the twenty-four years previous to that time. It’s telling on a relationship when he can make me smile and snicker even when I’m furious. Together we’ve had some eye-popping arguments over the years and yet at the same time – he’s made my sides hurt with his social commentary and wit.
The Family
In the last decade, my family has quadrupled in size – if you can imagine. My single mom and widowed grandmother raised me. I was very close to my grandmother, but the rest of our family was in Great Britain or New Zealand. I never knew my father. My brother, four years my senior, and I have not been close since we were children. When I met Scott, I didn’t just get him and the laughter and the idiosyncrasies – I got the rare pleasure of the rest of his family. His mother, his stepmother, his two sisters, his brother, his grandfather, his grandmother, his aunts and uncles and cousins… the whole wonderful lot of them overwhelmed me. His family is huge. They are crazy and they are wonderful in their own right. I always found their embracing me so readily a strange thing, but now I know they are my family too.
The Support
When I got pregnant, it scared Scott – the idea of fatherhood, the idea that he might fail and the continual worry when I had health problems associated with the pregnancy. But throughout it, he was a champion. He found ways to distract me. He found ways to make me laugh. When the night came that the doctor wanted to induce, we were driving through the cold dreary rain and he kept quoting Bill Cosby’s fatherhood at me. It was both hilarious and comforting.
During the delivery itself, from the long boring parts to the excruciating three and a half hour marathon and violent back spasms – he was right there. He worried throughout the pregnancy that he’d never make it in the delivery room and not once did he abandon me. He held my hand, he soothed and he snapped me out of my pain hazes to focus on the tasks at hand.
The Love
I’ll never forget the look on his face as he saw our daughter for the first time. It was a mixture of exhaustion, awe and yes, even a touch of fear. But when he looked up from her to meet my eyes – I saw Disney World, the Grand Canyon and the first time I ever saw Star Wars all rolled into his eyes. We did that. Our daughter is the absolute best of us – she is so much like my husband and he will tell you she is so much like me.
The last ten years have been an adventure. They haven’t been perfect and they haven’t always been delirious – but they have never been boring. There were some really tough times in these ten years and there were times when I wondered if we would even make it – I’d never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months before I met him and I wasn’t good at long term friendships either – still – here we are, ten years later and no matter how many times I’ve been frustrated or thought – that’s it – I can’t take anymore of that – I have never stopped loving him and I have never not felt loved.
I made a wish when I was a very little, silly and quite naïve girl. I wished that I would find someone that would fight with me every bit as hard as he would laugh with me and love with me and live with me.
You know – sometimes dreams do come true.
Here’s to the last ten years and to the next ten!