Ten years ago tonight, I cried on the way to the church. Ten years ago tonight, TJ sat in a steakhouse with all of our closest friends and family and cried as he thanked them for coming. He gave me a gold heart locket and tickets to a Dixie Chicks concert. I gave him a certificate for a star named after us. I’m not sure our feet ever really touched the ground.
I went to bed that night, alone for the last time, as a single woman, and I woke up ready to become a wife.
It was ten years ago tomorrow, March 8th, that TJ and I took our vows to be husband and wife.
“For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others…”
At the time, I’m not sure we really understood that for every better there would be a worse and for every health, sickness. I know we were praying there would be richer for the poorer we were living in as students, but neither of us could have possibly imagined the ramifications of the “forsaking all others” required of clinging only unto each other.
We went into marriage with a good idea of what a healthy marriage looks like, yet not really knowing all it would entail for us. We had hopes and we had dreams and we spread them under our feet as Yeats so eloquently said in the poem we took for our own.
We stood on the altar and giggled during the Irish Wedding song when they sang, “May their children be happy each day. Oh God bless this family that started today.” We almost ran down the aisle on the way out because we desperately wanted to be able to talk and relish in what had just happened. I cried during my vows and during our first dance. Never in my life had I felt as blessed or as lucky.
I remember leaving the reception hall with my new husband. How weird it was to go back to our place even if our place that night was a hotel room and not our soon to be new apartment.
Each night for months, I would lie in bed thinking how lucky I was to have someone to spend the rest of my life with. I didn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t cuddle to sleep every single night. I looked forward to those moments – the moments when we would close the front door and leave the world behind.
For the longest time, I couldn’t wait until our five year anniversary because at the time, it felt like we were playing house. We weren’t really married. We weren’t an old married couple, comfortable in our ways. Everything was new and fresh, and a part of me longed for routine and monotony as if that would prove this was all very real.
And I sit now, ten years later, across the living room from the same man who held my hand that day. We are now in our house with our dog and our cat. Two of our daughters are asleep in their beds upstairs, and one is asleep in her bouncy chair on the floor. We have a mortgage and a minivan, Catholic school tuition and a retirement plan.
I think it’s safe to say that we are officially married now.
We are a family.
There have been so many blessings that have come to me because of that man sitting over there on the floor. Because of him, I know true security. I look into his eyes and I know the love behind them will stand by me through anything. I feel his arm around me, and I know that arm will keep me safe and protected from the storms of life, and I know the heart inside his chest will keep me safe from the storms that are more emotional and less physical. And I know that the hand that I hold is the hand I want holding mine during my last breaths on this Earth.
He has given me love and security, excitement and joy.
And together we have taken what we have and we have created a family. What started out as two wide eyed innocents standing on an altar before God turned into a family, moving into the future at sometimes frightening speeds.
And I guess after ten years of ups and downs, ins and outs, the best compliment I could ever pay to the man who has given me so much is that without a doubt, in a blink of an eye, and with my whole heart, I would gladly do it all over again. I wouldn’t change a thing.