08/05/2005

Wove, Mawage

Today is Ann's and my 10th Wedding Anniversary. I'm a very blessed man to be married to Ann. She is such a great wife and mother and puts up with a lot from her four boys and husband. These 10 years have been filled with so much that it is hard to believe sometimes. We began having children right away, our oldest arriving only a little over a year past our wedding date. He is the one who turned out to be autistic, but we didn't know that until much later and once he was diagnosed, the treatment started. We had therapists for him in our home for about 40 hours a week; Ann was really tied to the house as we had female therapists and wanted to be sure that we didn't provide any kind of ground for someone to be scandalized. Privacy just wasn't a big part of our lives for so long. Also, just the relentless nature of seeing to that situation, reading all we could get our hands on, etc. It is hard sometimes to even remember what #3 was like as a baby because we were simultaneously dealing with the treatment for #1. We've also been through college graduation together, then seminary (for me) and now almost finished with Ph.D. work in those 10 years. In our married life, we've only lived two places, however. In a farmhouse near our university when we were married (before our Senior year) and then in our current apartment here in St. Louis. When we moved to St. Louis, Ann was pregnant with #1, and now we have 4 children here! Hard to believe sometimes. When I think about Ann, I think about how I couldn't imagine being married to anyone else. She's really smart and follows all my odd conversational key changes like a virtuoso. She and I have a similar sense of humor and we both like to eat and listen to music. We have similar senses of propriety, and for the most part, we still behave around each other like we were on a second or third date. She also, and this has always been the case, seems pretty unimpressed with me all the time which is a good thing. She never blows sunshine up my skirt. A person can't really be married healthily to a fan, they have to be married to a peer. So even if she admires me a great deal, I either fail to pick up on that, or she is good at hiding it. But I'm pretty sure she'd take up for me if someone else was dissing me ;)

I wanted to write something about the nature of love, but it is difficult. You say "I love you" basically when you start going steady with someone. But there is no patina of experience on that love; it is shiny and untested. And yet 10 years later, there are often glints of that shiny new love mixed in with the deeper love that comes with having shared so many common experiences and navigating a relationship. For me, anyway, I wouldn't trade an average day of 2005 spent with Ann even for our wedding day. I'm just very happy that whoever those people were back in 1995 who got married did what they did. Because the people that we are today are really benefitting from their decision.

Since you'll probably read this before I'm even up, Happy Anniversary, Annie. I love you. Let's take the kids to breakfast at IHOP and watch the hostess scramble to accommodate a family of six.