8 years ago tonight, I married this guy.  This crazy awesome guy (let’s go 30/70 on the crazy/awesome split).  I have to laugh at at our cheesy grins, looking back.  What the hell did we know, really?  The day you say “I Do”, LIFE, as a concept, is little more than an idealistic construct.  For better or worse?  SURE!  Let’s go to Mexico tomorrow and drink to lots of “for better”!  But what do you KNOW?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  You know that you love each other and you hope to God you aren’t a total flake of a human.  Because guess what….life is going to hand you “for worse” now and then.  I’m just going to say it like it is: in marriage, this shit gets real.

When you are lovingly gazing through your first dance, you aren’t thinking about career and geography changes and income decisions and losing your health.  You aren’t wondering if your kids will be challenging, or if you’ll need so much help raising them, your head might crack from the strain.  You never think, starting out, there might be months, nay years, the budget will have more red areas than black.  You just assume you can both handle parenting, and maybe even fantasize you’ll be SO GREAT AT IT, THE WORLD WON’T BE ABLE TO HANDLE THIS LEVEL OF MASTERY!  You might be right.  But then again, you might just be so full of yourself that the Universe is feeling prime to hand you a super sized smack down.  I might know a thing or two about ego smack downs, now that it has come up in conversation.

There might be times when the only thing you 2 have in common are a mutual desire to collapse on Friday night with a beer and popcorn and share a few TiVo shows before passing out from total exhaustion.  But through it all, there is an undercurrent of mutual kindness.  It’s a rhythm of the feeling which brought you together.  The heart has quite a memory, doesn’t it?  Even through the endless conversations of what if? And, how do we?  And, um…you think we should what?!…there is a sneaking suspicion you were meant to be on this journey together.  For better, and quite actually, for worse.  Maybe, on the less than insane days, you know, a team simply isn’t a team if it never joins a race.  Never risks its significance, never risks defeat.  Life really isn’t living unless you’ve truly fallen on your ass a few times.

And here’s the super cool thing about marriage, and there’s no getting around it: you get to fall in love, again and again and again.  You get to build something unmatched anywhere on earth; something uniquely yours.  At Year 8, looking back, seated next to the man I love more than life itself, I can say, I’m glad I didn’t know then what I know now.  I’m glad I’ve gotten to live it like one, huge, wonderful, scary, hard, sometimes terribly gross, fantastic surprise.  I’m glad I was right 8 years ago about this 1 thing: Greg is a man like none other.  He is indescribably great at being a husband and father.  My Mother-In-Law was right when she said to me today, “8 is Great”.  It certainly is.  Happy 8th Anniversary Greg, you are the answers to all of my prayers, every single day.  I love you.