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Tuesday, December 14, 2010

#18 Marriage



As of today, I have been married for 7 1/2 years! That is just a bit shy of 1/3 of my life at this point & already I can tell how it has morphed from the early days. It'll be interesting to see how much more it changes as I enter my next 30 years!
In the earliest days/years, I was often left wondering why people ever said "marriage is hard" & "marriage takes work" because those first few years were "easy" for the most part. I also scoffed at all of those people who said that "the first year of marriage is the hardest!" because ours was a "breeze."
In the middle years, I started realizing what "hard" felt like as we traveled the path of infertility & watched those around us whom we loved dearly getting that one thing that we were always left dreaming of/crying about the loss of. These were also the years where we really had to pull together as well because we could just have easily let it all fall apart and each gone our own way!
In these latest years, parenting has entered the mix & as the old cliche goes "children change everything." We don't go out as much as we used to...we think twice about doing something that will make us have to stay out late (because of an early wake up caller-unless he is spending the night somewhere!)...personally, I HATE having to be the one to line up a babysitter all of the time & am constantly left wishing that Scott would take on this task more often...I'm sure that he is not so happy about the fact that he can't & I can sleep through just about anything (yes, this means when Luke wakes up at night) because he is constantly left with this responsibility & probably wishes that I would wake up & take on this responsibility more often [for all of the "I just hear everything at night now that I am a mother & my husband sleeps like a log" mothers out there who might scoff at this, in my defense-I did hear everything when he was an infant/baby, but that changed for some reason around the 1-1 1/2 year mark!] Parenting=a million different little and major stressors & decisions that one has to endure 24 hours a day for many, many years probably the rest of one's lifetime. Add that into the mix with marriage & it can cause quite a bit of stress in a marriage, especially if anything gets "tough" in one or both of these areas at the same time. Lucky for us, even when we have become the most irritated with each other or when "tough" things have happened through the course of these past few years, we still know that there is no one else we would rather be irritated at or with than each other :)
No, there may not be as much of the ooey, gooey, mushy love/romance stuff anymore like the early days, but I wouldn't trade what our marriage has "grown" into for anything & I can't wait to see where it "grows" over the next 30 years! [I'll probably be left thinking just how naive I was at this time-just like I think now about the 'early' years ;) hehe]

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