Labor of Love

Today is my wedding anniversary! I wish I had some cute photos of Darren and me that I could post to show our 'awesome' couple-ness, but I don't. We were somehow married before your wedding photos were handed to you on a disk. All my wedding photos are in frames or in an album, as are the photos from our newlywed days- how old fashion, huh? I think getting a digital camera coincided with the birth of our first child, though I know that her birth photos were still on rolled film. After that, well, I don't even think I need one hand to count the number of photos that we've taken that have just been the two of us. What you will find are a ton of photos of our kids or Darren with the kids and then a few of me with the kids and the occasional photo of us altogether.
I don't think that it's popular, and I'm certain that the 'experts' would strongly caution against it, but I would have to say that Darren & I live our marriage as it consists of us with our children. We don't do date nights. We don't do weekend trips or send the kids to stay with their grandparents so we can have the house to ourselves. Those days will come I'm sure, but right now 'us' means all of us, and I don't really feel like that makes us weaker (tired, yes, irritable, sometimes).
Our date nights happen on those magical evenings when the kids are playing quietly in some other part of the house, and Darren stands in the kitchen while I clean up after dinner. We steal moments trying to watch a TV show or a movie in between frequent demands for snacks, drinks and playing referee. Before we moved into our house, we spent a weekend's worth of time just the two of us together, from morning to night, painting every wall in the place. You couldn't call it a vacation, but you most definitely can call it life.
I've been thinking about that old Sunday school song taken from the parable about the two men building their houses. The first one builds his house on the sand and it gets washed away, but the second builds his house on the rock and it stands firm. When I think about this song, I think about my marriage.
Firstly, I would love to have a house on the beach. I would love to live like I was on vacation, every day near the ocean and walking barefoot in the soft sand. Alas, I don't! And I don't have a honeymoon marriage either. Now I'm not saying that because things are bad or difficult, I'm saying it because a honeymoon is a vacation. It is room service and sleeping in and quiet, candlelit dinners where someone else does the cooking, maybe a spa treatment or two. A honeymoon is the beach, and that is not where we built our marriage.
Our marriage has been built on rock. Rock fits Darren and me. Goodness knows that we are both stubborn as stone. We have some sharp edges and can be unyielding in our stances. But we are both strong, and even stronger together. Two rocks that time and circumstance have pushed together like plates on the earth's crust until we fit just so, though some earthquakes are possible. Yes, we have our faults. This foundation that we have hewn from the stones of ourselves standing together is where we have built the home for our marriage. This is where we reside with our children in sun and storm.
Now, I like flowers and jewelry and poetry and sophisticated meals prepared by a chef. But I love my husband. I love our shared toils and falling asleep together, exhausted at the end of a day. I love standing side-by-side to discipline our children and shaking our heads in near unison at how much like us they truly are. I love our plans and how we mostly agree, but can never seem to say it in quite the same way. I love the chaos of our family trying to eat out at a restaurant, but even more I love the walk from the car to the restaurant and how complete I feel we are in that moment: walking close together each with a child tucked into our arms. I also love how things never seem to work out quite the way we planned, but can still seem perfect in the end just the way we say they always will, but never quite believe.
I love my life because of what my life is with Darren, this life that we have created together. A forever home built on a strong foundation, the strength of ourselves made stronger because of our love.
(Almost) every year since we were married on October 6, 2002, I have written a love letter to my husband for our anniversary. Well, maybe part love letter and part state of the union. This is my love letter: October 6, 2010. Print this and tuck it away with the others (I know you've kept them). Happy Anniversary, Darren! I love you!