One year and four days ago, I woke up quietly at seven in the morning, wide awake long before my alarm went off. The metal rungs of my bunk were cold against my feet as I climbed down. Energy was surging in me, a great and quiet pulsing. The house was quiet that last morning; all the girls were still asleep. The stairs creaked under my steps as I went to the first floor bathroom. I pulled aside the brown shower curtain, and reveled in the hot water. If it could be washed or shaved or scrubbed, I did it all twice. I came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam; it was cold outside, but the sun came warmly through the dining room window. I ate a bowl of cereal at the sunlit dinner table. The quiet throbbed with anticipation. After I had rinsed out my porcelain white cereal bowl, I laid down in the tan leather couch to edit my vows in green ink. Then the floors began to creak, doors slammed open, and the happy shrieking began. But for an hour, the morning before my wedding just belonged to me, full and peaceful.
It's quiet now, too. Memories have been coursing through my mind this week, about that day and the following 2 weeks in Florida. And I keep trying to reflect about the past year, because that's the kind of post this should be: summing up the past year of marriage. But for some reason that's been difficult. I keep sitting down to write this, and I just keep rewriting it, scrapping the last idea and continually trying a different one. With so much to say, it's difficult to sum up.
I'd like to tell you that I've got this marriage thing down now, but that's not true. We do have a much better handle on it than when we threw ourselves into this life a year ago, but this first year also served to reveal our problem icebergs and their true size below the surface. Marriage sonar has been pinging against such issues like my selfishness and it is titanic. You see, one thing I have learned is that since marriage is for the rest of your life, there are infinitely larger levels of patience and endurance required. Here, problems in character and sins of temperament are excavated with depth and precision never before possible because there simply wasn't the time. Who else are you going to see almost every day for the rest of your life? That first layer of dirt and debris has been chipped away, and the ugly bones are coming out now; we can see the mammoth skeletons of some problems, and we've got whole decades together to dig them out bone by bone. The thought of working shoulder to shoulder with Dave on this is thrilling.
Also, it really sucks to let down your spouse. You promised that this would be the person you would be most devoted to for the rest of your life; little did you know that this would also be the person you let down most in your life. With your lives so intertwined, you're too close to keep your failures to yourself; like it or not, you share them. If I think about it too long, it makes me want to file for divorce and run away to the smallest Galapagos island where I can't hurt Dave by my mere existence anymore. Unfortunately, hurting is an inseparable part of living and loving that must be accepted. Rather than crawling into a hermit crab's shell, it's better to be able to keep getting back up every time you fall down. You're both too broken to perfectly love each other, no one is surprised by that, so you have to learn that pattern of helping each other up. Life is full of falling, and marriage is designed for you to have a partner to pull you up when it happens. Marriage isn't perfect, but it is designed to deal with life's Imperfection.
God also seems to delight in balance in this world; he did not make a situation for repeated failure without also endowing it with one of the highest potentials for joy. This year has not been easy, but oh, it has been so good. When we ungrateful malfunctioning creatures do get some things right, it's a pretty big deal. And I think of the very long list of things that went right this past year with Dave. Like Dave buying that fake miniature poor-quality absolutely-perfect Christmas tree and decorating it with me. Teaching ourselves how to argue effectively with each other, with both compassion and reason. Spending late nights on campus doing homework together. Slowly but surely organizing our tiny over-stuffed apartment. Watching movies on a blanket and pillows laid out on the living room floor. Adventuring together this past July in Summersville, West Virginia. Buying our new hamster, Dave's anniversary gift to me, together and laughing at his tiny furry antics. All those things and more, profound and simple and silly, were joyous victories.
So, to my husband: thank you for your everlasting patience, for your loyalty and trustworthiness, for working hard next to me to make us good, for paying the bills every month, for saving Youtube videos that you think I'd like to watch, for double-checking to make sure I turned the stove off, for my lovely dwarf hamster Tychicus, and for loving me. I will never say "thank you" enough for all you are to me.
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