It was nearly twenty-one years ago that we made those promises before God, the pastor, and the whole company there gathered. The words were “to love, honor, and cherish … in sickness and health … for richer, for poorer, and in all life’s realities … until death parts us.” These words have been the anchor that has held us through these years. They’ve proven, these promises, to be our security, trust, source of perseverance, the foundation and definition of our love through the many trials that have been “all life’s realities.”
We started out as a couple of kids. My grad school cost a fortune at that time. Our first rent was $75 a month, chicken cost 22 cents a pound, my wife’s full-time salary was $325 a month, and we fed ourselves on $29 a week. We were broke, married, in love, and, for the greatest amount of time, happy.
We’ve had to make our own way, create our own marriage out of the dreams and images of what we want our lives to be. We didn’t have much of a blueprint to follow. We were both born into families steeped in alcoholism and our parents’ marriages were less than enviable. We’ve been tossed between relief at being far from their continuing problems and insecurity about being on our own. The traits we both inherited have been some of the greatest obstacles we’ve had to overcome. We’ve struggled with being depressed and withdrawing into guarded feelings and loneliness. There were confusing times when we were tempted to pack the car and head back to the insanity we knew because it seemed less frightening than the future we were carving out for ourselves.
We fought, we cried, we made up, and we made it from day to day. We were determined that our family would be different, our children would avoid our experiences. So we set out together on a wing and a prayer.
One of my greatest regrets is that marriage and children don’t come with books of instruction. Ah, yes, children. Our first arrived with a fanfare. After two years of marriage, using multiple means of birth control, the stork arrived with a little girl. She took thirty-two hours to come into the world and made her grand entrance butt first. We went from childhood to parenthood in one fell swoop. I didn’t know what panic was until we walked the floors those sleepless nights before figuring out the colic was due to a milk allergy. We learned how to cry between bouts of pleading with God to let us switch places with our poor little girl.
Our second arrived four years later, this one planned, another little girl. She came with a lot less effort. Life has a funny twist about it. The child who came with such difficulty grew strong. The one who came so easily has now at fourteen faced her own mortality at least twenty times as we’ve rushed her to the emergency room during asthma attacks. We’ve learned again what fear is while waiting in pediatric intensive care to find out if she’ll make it.
The “how to’s” and “don’ts” have unfolded with every day of experience as together we’ve stopped, made decisions, and refined and shaped the lives we’ve wanted. After twenty-one years together, our work still isn’t finished, though much of its beauty has come to the surface. We’ve hit the midlife time of our lives. Our rent is $600 a month, chicken costs $1.39 a pound, and my wife earns considerably more than the $325 she was paid when we started out. I’ve been working for thirteen years. Now forty, my wife has graduated from college, buried her mother, who died suddenly, and is about to dance in her first recital. We have one daughter in college, one about to enter high school. There’s a pattern to our lives that will help our children as they form and shape their own lives. We’re still broke, still married, still in love, and much happier than we’ve ever been.
We come back to the beginning, to those promises.
Those words are where we began, before the altar. There was no magic in the words, no hocus pocus, there were no great secrets to be found but this one: We believed in what we were doing. We believed in a God who made promises to us about his love and faithfulness. We believed that we and our hopes and dreams were worth every effort. We believed, and still believe, that what we have is worth having.
Our love has changed many times in these years.
Love has meant, and still means, butterflies in the stomach and silly grins and giggles and playful caresses, little secrets whispered in each other’s ears. Love has meant time spent listening to pain left over from the years of growing up, words that hurt when they lead to uncomfortable self-perceptions. There were times when love has meant having to say “I’m sorry” many times over because problems took years to fix. It has meant taking next steps not knowing the outcome, allowing time and space for one of us to heal before we could go on to something new.
Our love has hacked many faces: joyous, meek, playful, some with uncertain tears. Our love has had the face of youthful romance and the maturity of willful persistence to endure the pain of rock bottom. We’ve endured because we’ve always come back to the foundation that brought us together in the first place-our love. We’ve been able to allow our love to grow and change into what it needed to be for the time. Our promises have stood inviolate, giving us strength during the worst times and pleasure during the best.