A dozen years already…

It would appear that there is light at the end of the sickness tunnel, I am feeling normal and girl child is more or less back to herself. To say the last few days were rough would be an understatement, battling your own illness when your kid is sick, is a special type of hell. In my sick and confused state, I even let the child watch Hannah Montana…Yikes, as I told her only because you are sick.

Well now that the sun is shining and the girl was well enough to go to preschool this morning, I have a spare few minutes. The Spousal Unit and I are celebrating 12 years of marriage today. I am not writing this to get congrats messages though they are appreciated. No, I am sharing this because I am reminded that in our world, as soon as couples get engaged they spend an awful lot of time planning for the big party known as the wedding but in many cases little time planning for the day-to-day shit.

When you are standing up before your loved ones, pledging to love one another in sickness and health, for richer and poorer, who is really thinking about all that shit? Yeah, I thought so. Yet looking back on 12 years of marriage with the spousal Unit, we have had few peaceful years. In fact considering all we have endured, there are times I wonder how the hell it is that we stay married?

Let’s see, not even 2 months after we married, I became engaged in the nastiest custody battle I have ever known anyone to have. It lasted for years and at the risk of scarring my kid for life, I ended up letting him live with his Dad which of course is the whole reason, I am Black Girl in Maine. A year into our marriage, the Spousal Unit lost his beloved Mama. Looking back at pictures from our wedding day and members of the bridal party, we lost his Mom, my Mom, my Granny and my Maid of Honor. Yeah, it’s a sick joke but if you were a women in our bridal party, your chances of living long weren’t too high…gallows humor, sorry.

Of course add in financial woes that have increased over the years and the fact that neither of us ever would have thought the child we waited so long to have would be the source of some of the most intense fights. Truthfully girl child’s arrival created many tensions because her arrival in our lives happened when I was still deeply grieving the loss of my mother and compounded by the fact that my beloved grandmother died 6 weeks after her birth…yeah, its been a rough ride for us.

Yet at the end of the day, I wouldn’t change a thing…ok, maybe I would make the man still have hair. He lost that in year 6 or 7 of our marriage. No, despite the fact that our life together has not been anything that I  was envisioning 12 years ago when I was getting ready to walk down the aisle, I am still glad I made the walk and even happier that the Spousal Unit is my partner in crime in this life.

That said, when folks are getting married, I say you owe it to yourselves to think about what if your fortunes change? Are you in it for the long run? Are you thinking about that and if not, maybe you should.

To the Spousal Unit, I say publicly I love you and while I give you a lot of grief, thank you for putting up with me. After all it cannot be easy being married to someone whose list of quirks grows longer with each passing year.

8 thoughts on “A dozen years already…”

  1. This is such a wise and true post.

    Congratulations for maintaining an intimate relationship for twelve years. It takes love and an astonishing degree of sheer fortitude to pull that off.

  2. 32B, I am pretty open, honest and blunt. You know my sibling, its a family trait except I have always been known since I was a teenager as a straight shooter. Need a asshole, call me…that’s the family joke. 😉

    Rev Lisa, it sounds like you are honest enough with yourself to know what you can deal with and there is nothing wrong with that. I have read your blog and I know you have a certain criteria if you were to marry. Funny thing in marriage though is that what you start with may not be what you end up with…as I hoped my post conveyed, life happens. Marriage is a huge gamble because anything can happen. Yet ideally you marry someone you can face the challenges with and end up on the other side of the challenges still loving each other.

  3. Hi Shay,

    Wow. This is so amazing.

    The more that married people share the “real deal” about marriage, the more I am convinced that it would be a-okay if I never married.

    I know that marriage is deeply rewarding and all…but I think that successful marriages require a lot of hard, hard work and if a person is ambivalent about the whole thing then perhaps it’s not a path to take.

    That’s where I am right now … I think…

    I have so much respect for your commitment to the journey of marriage.

    Peace, blessings and DUNAMIS!
    Lisa

  4. LOL. My love, before I got to your last paragraph, I was planning to post an “I love you” with an addendum about putting up with ME.

    Plenty of my own quirks. But for better AND worse, I’m happy to be with you and I think we fit well. Even if we argue about childrearing more than I’d like.

    P.S. I miss my hair too. And my ass.

  5. Really sweet. I swear your honesty shocks me sometimes that I’m scared to know how brutally honest you are in real life 🙂 You paint a very realistic picture about marriage and, although you could care less about congrats, it’s great you two made it this far thru everything. How do you know if your partner is tough enough to stick around? That should be a test given while dating…as soon as someone formulates it.

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