It’s the familiar smell of his skin, the way it stretches across his back, just waiting for my touch;
it’s his arms wrapping all the way around me, even when I’ve been a little crazy and weepy and anxious;
it’s his voice, filling the house with music always.
It’s the way he keeps hope when I can’t seem to find mine
the way he believes in the me I was created to be when I’m acting like a not-so-nice version of the whole
the way he trusts me with something as fragile as his heart.
He’s there beside me, watching “The Walking Dead” when I go to sleep in the evening, and he’s there, breathing his own dreams, when I open my eyes.
This man with curly black hair and six days’ chin-and-cheek stubble and pure and devoted love is mine, a gift of the greatest significance.
I call him husband. Lover. Friend.
///
Eleven years ago we stood in an old historical church, beneath dim lighting that turned eyes to diamonds, and we said those vows we wrote each other, and we meant them with every in-love breath we took before speaking.
I looked like Cinderella, in white with a crown, and we talked about dreams coming true and love that could light a whole world and happily ever after. We walked hand-in-hand to the building next door, on a path where deer watched our every step, as if protecting our way. And then we danced and visited and he ate and I talked, and the time came to drive to a hotel where we shook our way into the married life.
Dawn broke and he could not find the wallet he needed to board the plane for our honeymoon trip to Disney World, and a groomsman waited for a ride to the airport with us, the newlywed, and this just wasn’t at all what I’d expected twelve hours married.
It was the first time I realized that marriage did not start on a mountaintop like I’d thought. It started here at the bottom of a peak, and it was an uphill climb to make those two lives full of 21 years of beliefs and ways of living and separate ideas fit cleanly together.
It was going to take some work.
///
There are days we love well, and there are days we don’t.
Because even after more than a decade, we are still learning pieces of each other we didn’t know before, like how sometimes all he needs is one encouraging word to believe he can conquer the whole world in a day, like how his heart does not beat so much as sing for all the music bound up in every inch of his body, like how he prefers his frozen yogurt with hot fudge and peanut butter cups and butterfinger crumbs and Reese’s pieces poured liberally on top.
Like how he can capture the attention of boys for hours at a time with old when-Daddy-was-a-little-boy stories and how sometimes he puts plates with food scraps in the sink side instead of the disposal side and how he tries hard to hide his anxiety but it’s still there, even though he never shows he worries at all.
There are days we are each other’s best friend, but there are also days we are each other’s worst enemy.
And maybe we don’t always like each other (because what friends always do?) and maybe sometimes what we do annoys the other, and maybe sometimes we wonder what we could possibly have been thinking all those years ago, but there is something that threads through all those bad days and good days alike.
It is love and it is forgiveness and it is belonging.
It is forever.
No matter how many days we have logged forgetting what we knew surely 13 years ago, no matter how many weeks scream exactly the opposite, no matter how many months we ask the hard questions in the hidden parts of our minds, there is a truth we know: we were made for each other.
His positivity made for my negativity. His acceptance made for my perfectionism. His dreaming made for my realism.
His eyes made for my body. My words made for his heart. His soul made for mine.
Even on the worst of days, this truth lights the dark.
///
It didn’t take us long to find our first fight.
He worked as a youth and music minister at a church on weekends and a personal banker on weekdays while I spent my days writing stories at the city’s largest newspaper. There came a day when we planned to take care of some errands, because the church had handed him his monthly check that morning and we needed to deposit it so we could pay some bills. Except when he opened the planner where he thought he’d put it, that check wasn’t there.
Rent was due in two days, and we didn’t have the money in our account to pay it, without that check. And my mind ran fast from no money to no home to trying to keep a marriage together on the streets.
I sprawled on our shared bed like the whole world was ending while he searched the entire house and still didn’t find it, and he didn’t know all the words that swam through my head that day.
He can’t keep track of a check. He can’t take care of us. How will I live with this?
For richer or poorer, is this what those vows meant? Because I didn’t know if I could do it.
///
Those thoughts can feel like a fire, burning love on its altar, because there are expectations we hold like they are life and death.
Of course this shared life will never be perfectly wonderful, because we are two different people with two different backgrounds and two different personalities, and who can ever be fully themselves all the time, every day? Of course they will not be able to measure up to who we thought they’d be. Neither do we. Of course there are days we’ll think it’s just easier to throw in the towel, because we are human and we don’t always love like we should.
If all we ever do is see the ways he does not measure up to our expectations, how this marriage does not measure up to our idea of happy, how these days spent together are not anything like we’d imagined them to be, we will never make it. Maybe it will take a year or five or fifteen, but that crumbling will catch up, and we will be burned in the fire of discontent.
The truth of marriage is that not every day is beautiful and smooth and light-filled. Some days are ugly and thorny and full of a dark where thoughts and attitudes and beliefs will trip us up, and we will wonder if this one is really The One. But there is a part of love that doesn’t make the least bit of sense, and sometimes we just have to keep climbing, arm locked in arm, up the so-hard hill to forever, because the top of the world is still waiting, and it is still for us.
We can’t look down or back. We only look at each other, and when we see those eyes that still, even today, shine like diamonds, we know.
We know that sometimes love is not a victory march or a kiss that takes away the pain of a lifetime or 30 years of adoration and trust and beauty. Sometimes love looks like showing up on a day we don’t really want to, sticking around when it feels too hard, lifting that cold and broken hallelujah for the years logged behind and the ones left ahead.
This is pressing on toward real love.
///
One day he and all our other band mates quit their full-time jobs. Because we were going to travel, we were going to see the world, we were going to share our music with all who would listen.
Except there was a baby already and another on the way. So I held on to what steady income I had, because we needed something, some way to pay bills, and my job was flexible and allowed travel, so it made sense that I’d be the one to stay.
Year after year after year I spent working a job and caring for a baby and then two and three and five, traveling with our music in all the margins, and my dream to write sat stiffening under the weight of impossibility. There was no time to pursue my dream, because we were pursuing his, and someone needed to collect a steady income.
And then one day I sat exploding in a prayer session, because my dream had stayed in its place, under an increasing weight, for too too long, and I felt the cold bitterness that came with knowing it might not ever be my time. The strength of my resentment surprised me.
If this was for better or for worse, what would I choose from here?
///
It was a whole week of arguing, what felt like one big fight that was really lots of little ones, and we were drowning under the overwhelm of brand new twins added to three other littles, and we walked through the house out of sync and exhausted and wound up too tight. And then came the night it was all too much, and I slammed the bedroom door and he walked out the front and I heard the car rev and those tires squeal, and I thought it was the last we’d see of him.
Because it was a night like that when it was the last we saw of my dad.
We come from a long line of divorce, generations of people giving up on each other, people walking out on each other, people choosing others over their beloved, and what makes us any different? Those anniversaries visit me in subtle ways I can hardly name, like shadows I can’t shake, fourteen years for my parents, fewer for his.
What makes us any different?
I cried into my pillow that too-much-fighting night, and it felt like hours but was really only minutes before he came back and wrapped me in his arms and said the words it always comes back to. I love you. I sat up in our bed and I faced him and my fears, and I told him what I think about when those years of our parents come and go, and he looked at me and pressed my hand and said, We are not them. Their story is not our story.
We come from these backgrounds, and we carry around these cracked hearts, and we feel those pasts like they somehow tell our futures, but the truth is we make our own stories. We are not what has come before. We are not even what comes after, at least not right now. We are who we are in this moment right here, this moment where we choose love and forgiveness and reconciliation or we choose to turn our backs and let marriage fold in on itself.
We are our own story, and just because our parents only made it fourteen years doesn’t mean our love has the same expiration date or that it holds an ending at all.
Our love story is full of its own twists and turns and whole years of unexpected, but it is ours to make and choose.
And so today, eight days from marking thirteen years of love and work, I remember that I would choose it all over again, this love that is hard and wild and strong and brave, this love that burns away all the pieces of two lives that don’t belong to the one, this love that walks us steady toward the top of forever.
I choose him still. Now. Always.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy: Essays, which does not yet have a release date. For more of my essays, visit Wing Chair Musings.
