The Beginning

Today is my anniversary. Troy and I have been married for six years now. While it doesn’t sound that long, we have managed to fit a lot into those years – a baby, a house, new jobs, another baby, family tragedies. But mile marker days like today make me think back to all my favorite memories from the beginning on. Truth be told, Troy was supposed to be a rebound fling. I had just gotten out of a relationship and was, as the Lady Antebellum song goes, looking for a good time. I told Troy’s best friend Derek that Troy was not the kind of guy who got serious. But I also told my friend Terri that I got butterflies every time I saw Troy; heck, every time I thought about him. She gave me some excellent advice, “You have to go with butterflies.” Obviously I did. Troy and I had a small family wedding ceremony and then a big pig roast in the park the next day for friends and extended family. After the long two days of events, we were finally settling in at our house and realized we were starving. It was one of the hottest summers ever and I had just thrown a big t-shirt on when we got home. We pulled out some of the leftover chicken from the pig roast and sat down on the floor to eat. As I was sitting there in a t-shirt, sweaty, tired, and eating chicken with my fingers, I looked at him and said, smiling, “I bet you’re really glad you married me right now, huh?” He smiled right back at me and simply said, “Yep!” As far as birth experiences go, Jack’s was pretty easy and standard. Troy was a trouper, stayed up all night with me, did everything the nurse told him to, and was ecstatic when he looked into Jack’s tiny face that looked exactly like his. Brett’s birth was not so easy. He got stuck, they had stopped my epidural, and I was scared and in pain. I sobbed and told him he had to make them get the baby out. He had to make it stop. He was far more of a trouper; he held my hand, wiped my tears, and told me everything he could think of to try to make it better, all while it was killing him that he couldn’t fix it for me. Troy and my marriage isn’t perfect. We fight. We take each other for granted. We are selfish at times. But I’ve come to realize that very few marriages are devoid of these things; they just come out in different ways for different people. But there is no one else I would rather be imperfect with. Troy is the only person I have ever been able to truly picture my future with. Not some grand, movie scene future; but I picture us together at high school baseball games, I picture us at our kids’ weddings, I picture us in an empty nest. And at the end of every day, it just feels right to be next to him. So today makes me think of the beginning of our relationship, but it also reminds me that our journey is still in the beginning. We have so many more roads to travel, sights to see, and memories to make. What an amazing journey it is…