On Our 16th Anniversary

When we married in 2000, my husband whisked me off on a surprise honeymoon to Paris. Everyone always wants to know if I was really surprised. As proof, I produce photos of me in front of every Parisian landmark wearing the hiking shorts and T-shirts I had packed for the week I thought we were spending in the Smoky Mountains. But let’s face it – I would have stood out as a tourist regardless. Planning the surprise also involved my soon-to-be-spouse contacting my brand new boss ahead of time to ask for a few extra days off, which I had no knowledge of until afterwards. The grins on all of my coworkers’ faces when I returned were something! For all practical purposes, I had never left the country before. Exploring all of the sights, tastes, and smells of France with my new husband made for a fairy tale start to our marriage.

As an encore, in 2001 my husband surprised me with a weekend trip to Washington, D.C. for our first anniversary. We trekked all over the town in 80+ degree weather and sweltering humidity (did I mention we were married in August?), not wanting to miss a single sight. This time my boss was surprised when I called on a Monday morning to tell her the flight that I hadn’t known about the week before had been delayed, and therefore I would miss a day of work. Luckily I had a very understanding boss; she didn’t begrudge me the memories we made.

On our fifth anniversary we loaded up our four-month-old daughter and took off on one of our first trips as a threesome to see friends a few hours away. We had dinner in the family-friendly Spaghetti Factory on the way up, enjoying the rare dinner out together while still constantly cautious and attentive to our new baby’s every need.

For our tenth anniversary we dropped our five- and three-year-old children with my parents and spent the weekend at the coast with our still-nursing baby. We were less overly-concerned about finding just the right spot to change a diaper with our third child. It was almost romantic.

For our thirteenth anniversary we did the same, this time dropping three older kids and taking along another baby for a weekend away. This particular baby didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time at night for his first seven months, so the whole weekend was spent in a big of a haze. I still have pictures of us smiling to prove we at least attempted to enjoy each other’s company.

Last year was our fifteenth anniversary. Quite the milestone, really. 15 years, seven (?) jobs between us (not counting various titles tried on as my husband worked out the fits and starts of starting a business), four children, three cats, and three addresses later. To be honest we didn’t really do anything to mark the occasion last year. We talked about planning something big, but as it turned out we already had a year filled with wonderful and surprising travel opportunities that simply didn’t leave room for a trip of our own. And that was okay. We were quite happy to have our adventures handed to us, even if we had to take on some of them separately.

Today marks our sixteenth wedding anniversary. Like most summer days, I am spending it at home with all four children. It’s supposed to be 97 degrees today, so we headed out early to pick blackberries around the neighborhood. After about 5 minutes we had to quickly dash home, as the littlest guy developed what I will politely refer to as “digestive issues.” This led to a rather fun morning of urgent bathroom trips and outfit changes. It also made the older children mad at me for cutting the blackberry picking short. My daughter is getting braces next week, and is adjusting to the discomfort of the spacers that are preparing her teeth. (Let’s just say she is not one to embrace discomfort.) My oldest son contributed to the day by falling out of a tree (don’t worry – low branch,) and shortly after tripped over his own feet, resulting in multiple scrapes and bruises today. (Can we say “growth spurt”?) The children resorted to arts and crafts, and now my middle son is mad at me for letting his little brother use too much tape. (All of this may have led me to hide out and start typing. You can’t pick what prompts the creative process.)

Tonight my husband and I will feed the kids something terribly uninspired for dinner, like chicken nuggets or mac and cheese. After we get them tucked into bed we will order take out and eat it on the couch. (The dining room table that we used to share candlelight meals over is now associated with the tiring dance of getting everyone to sit together and eat neatly and interact politely day in and day out). Then perhaps we will watch a movie, or maybe sit out on the porch swing and listen to the hum of our surroundings as evening sets. Perhaps we will talk about our day. Perhaps not. There is never a way to do so without discussing other people’s bodily functions, but we are used to that.

The rhythm of life is different these days. It’s different from when we were on our own, young and carefree to too immature to know that we were either. It’s different from when we had our first baby, elated and exhausted and concentrated on learning the ropes of our new reality. It’s different from when we had a house full of preschoolers, toddlers, and babies, an intensely loud, crazy, and all-encompassing world with survival as the only goal. Now we have a preschooler and a preteen and everything in-between. It’s a world I never imagined, where I bounce back and forth between addressing small child frustrations and big kid emotions, unsure if I’ve really mastered either myself. It’s a world where big kids’ activities have infringed on the autonomy of our own schedules, once again revealing the loss of a freedom I never truly recognized we had. For every gain in a child’s abilities that moves him closer to independence, there appears to be a new crossroad that arises, one that I know requires my full attention to navigate but that I feel ill-equipped to address while still chasing a 3-year-old across a parking lot. In a word, it’s complicated.

And so sharing a pizza laden with grown-up toppings (please let it be anything but pepperoni or Hawaiian!) on the couch at 8pm on our anniversary doesn’t feel like a cop-out or a letdown in this phase of life. It feels like a comfort, a constant, something that is still within our control as nearly everything else spirals out of it. It’s not a big trip or a feeling of young romance. But while the daily rhythms change, the undercurrent stays the same. The joy (and relief) I feel when my husband walks in at the end of the day, once again mine to share life with for the next few hours. Once again mine. A theme that repeats itself through the years, but never becomes any less. The excitement I still feel looking forward to the moment when all of the children are settled upstairs and we can rest in each other’s company alone, uninterrupted aside from the vague sounds of thunking above. The peace of sharing a meal with someone who demands nothing from you in that moment except quiet companionship. The understanding that 16 years of marriage has built between us.

        If to some of you this seems like I have given up on having adventures as a couple, don’t worry, I haven’t. Even as I embrace pizza on the couch, I continue to dream and plan for the future. The places we will go, the things we will do. Some of them are years off, some decades even, but some of them will just require a little planning. 

I took this picture while we were camping last year. As I looked back through the photos, I wondered why I had taken it. It’s not a particularly spectacular picture for sure. To some it might seem lonely, two empty chairs. When I took it I was passing by with a toddler in the child seat on the back of my bike, three other children biking behind me as we circled the lake. Back in our tent my husband slept, sick. That is our life now, and it has its own exhausting beauty. But when I see this scene, the little table for two, I picture us sitting there. And I think, as I do nearly every time I see a little café table for two, “Someday we will be somewhere like this, just the two of us. I can’t wait to sit at a table like this together, looking across a lake, soaking in this beauty.” This is what I celebrate today. Seeing two chairs on a lake and picturing the two of us in them, and having that fill my heart with joy. Knowing how much we will appreciate that moment when it comes. Sharing a life that fills me with joyful anticipation. This is how I know we are doing okay.  

Random Thoughts on Pokémon

When my oldest son was three, the Disney Cars movie had recently come out and the die-cast Cars characters were all the rage.  Ben had only recently potty trained, in his case entirely motivated by the reward of a new Hot Wheel every time he completed a line on his potty sticker chart.  He had loved cars and trucks and all things wheeled for quite a while.  We already had an extensive collection of little metal vehicles, and I was hesitant at first to jump on the Disney Cars bandwagon.  He was only my second child, and I still clung to some new-parent ideals of avoiding commercialization of toys.  But as any parent knows, your children will manage to collect those little commercialized toys whether you buy them or not. 

To my surprise, as his collection grew I found myself getting into the excitement of it as well.  I found joy in watching Ben spend hours carefully lining all of his cars up in perfect order.  Our family room rug became a race track.  He called them “Eye Cars” (since unlike Hot Wheels, they have eyes on their windshields).  He knew them all by name, and soon I did, too.  The months before Christmas that year found me delighting every time I found a Car we didn’t have hanging on a store shelf or featured on an Amazon page.  Soon there was a small but deliberate stash of Cars waiting to make his collection more complete on a near December morning.   I was invested.  The Cars had become family.

And so it felt far too soon when he went off to kindergarten and came home with the pronouncement that he now loved Star Wars.  Star Wars?  I consider myself a fan too, but then I have actually seen the movies.  But Ben?  He has no Star Wars books or movies.  He’s never even seen a Star Wars cartoon.  How could he suddenly “love” Star Wars?  And yet he did.  Almost as though a latent gene had been activated upon him turning 5-and-a-half, there it was.  And it didn’t matter what he lacked in knowledge.  He came home from school with drawing after drawing of characters whose names he had learned from his friends.  They fought each other with slingshots, because he had not yet discovered light sabers.  And the Cars began to be cast aside, replaced by Star Wars LEGOs and action figures.   And while I had enjoyed the original trilogy and suffered through the second trilogy, I was never one who could name every planet or more than the handful of main characters.  The parts of my brain that had expanded to welcome the entire Radiator Springs community into memory somehow could not grasp the difference between a clone trooper and a storm trooper.  I couldn’t share in this world.  And my heart broke a little. 

However, we added two more boys to the family, and I had hopes of reliving the little boy years all over again.  That’s what I thought would happen.  But it turns out that once you have gone through those years the first time, they don’t quite repeat with the younger children.  Those transitions are commandeered by their older mentors.  When Ben was into Star Wars, Andrew was two years old, and then turning three.  With big brother as his hero, he barely glanced at the Cars that were collecting dust in the corners.  His Star Wars collection grew along with Ben’s.  They turned everything they could find into light sabers to battle with.  Andrew’s drawings never mistakenly featured slingshots.  At three, Andrew was already turning six.

Cars gave way to Star Wars.  Star Wars turned to Mario and Mario became  Ninjago.  And then one day Ben was invited to a Pokémon-themed birthday party.  While I at least get the main points of Star Wars, Pokémon has never been part of my knowledge base.   I have now seen multiple episodes of Pokémon cartoons, and still I am unable to make even the slightest sense of this world.  After asking the boys for explanations over and over, I have finally memorized the following phrase:  “Pokémon are mythical creatures with elemental powers who battle each other.”  And I probably have that phrase wrong, too.  The only one I can name is Pikachu, since he loudly graces my son’s T-shirt.  Ben and Andrew live in this reality without me now.  And I refrain from pointing out that their entire Pokémon collections that they spend every dime they have on are, in fact, just pieces of paper with drawings of pretend animals on them.  It wouldn’t help.  They would just roll their eyes at my inability to distinguish been a DX and an EX, which to me are the names of models of the Honda Civic we own.  So I stay out of those discussions and instead play spaceships and rockets with Will, my current three-year-old who is obsessed with vehicles of all kinds.  He doesn’t know any of the Cars names, but I could still hold out hope that he might soon.

That hope did not last long.  The other day while I was making dinner, Ben gave Will three of his apparently unimportant Pokémon cards.  He told his brother to take good care of them, and that if he does he will get more cards.  Will came running over holding the cards with such delight!  “Look Mom, Ben gave me Pokémons!”  My insides wrenched a little as I congratulated him and attempted to share in his joy.  He is only three, and the odds that he will take care of these paper cards for long are not good.  And this held true over the next few days, as they were left in various parts of the house and he only occasionally thought to look for them.  I nearly breathed a sigh of relief.  Until this morning, when he came running out holding his still well-kept cards and rattling off the names of each Pokémon character that they represented.  Even I can see now that the battle has been lost. 

The truth is my days of enjoying a preschool boy were left behind with Ben.  It turns out that there really are no do-overs in parenting, even if you add more children.  Whatever age the oldest turns, that is effectively the age that all of my boys will be.  Never again will I have a three-year-old, but this year I will have three 9-year-olds.  And it’s a little sad to me, that I will never share in their little preschool world again.  But instead I look to the new joys.  The joy of watching Ben share his latest love with his littlest brother, and even attempting to throw in a lesson on responsibility in the process.  The joy of watching Andrew work to catch up with or even bypass Ben in all of the interests they share.  The joy of watching Will, eyes wide with wonder that Ben has entrusted him with something so precious.  Nowhere in those joys does it matter whether the subject is Lightning McQueen or Pikachu.  In that small fact, hope remains.