18 Years later…

Eighteen years ago today, I walked down the aisle with a very clear picture of what our life would look like.

Not an actual plan… of course!

We were young. We had love, optimism, and absolutely no idea what we were doing — which, as it turns out, is apparently all you need to legally begin a family.

I pictured a nice house, a couple of kids, family dinners, vacations, soccer games, school programs, and enough sweet holiday traditions to fill a Hallmark movie.

There would be challenges, obviously. I wasn’t completely delusional.

But in my imagination, the challenges were manageable things. A broken dishwasher. A kid who refused to eat vegetables. Maybe an occasional disagreement over whose family we would visit for Christmas.

Adorable little challenges.

What I did not fully appreciate at the time was that I had been heavily influenced by my mother.

Because my mother made motherhood look like a walk in the park.

Not a metaphorical walk. An actual, leisurely stroll—despite the fact that she was doing it with five children.

Five.

Look – we were fed, dressed, on time(ish), and appeared in public like a functioning unit. I genuinely believed this was the baseline experience of parenting. That it was simply… manageable. Busy, chaotic – yes. But organized chaos. Contained. Almost elegant in its chaosness.

I now understand that what I was witnessing was not ease.

It was mastery at showing up and keeping the behind-the-scenes action behind-the-scenes!

And possibly caffeine!!

What I did not picture — what I could not have pictured — was how quickly the reality of my own life would diverge from that illusion.

I did not picture diagnoses, therapies, medications, school meetings, or learning an entirely new vocabulary just to advocate for my child.

I did not picture parenting two boys who would need such completely different things from me that I would sometimes feel like I was switching languages mid-sentence.

I did not picture how much of motherhood would be spent researching, preparing, anticipating, rearranging, and wondering whether I was getting any of it right.

And I definitely did not picture how much work marriage itself would require.

At twenty-four, I think I believed that finding the right person was the hard part.

Then you got married, built a life, and lived happily ever after.

Roll credits.

It turns out that happily ever after includes stress, exhaustion, resentment, forgiveness, disappointment, inside jokes, hard conversations, forgotten conversations, and occasionally wondering how the person you married can still load the dishwasher like they have never seen a dish before.

Marriage is loving someone through change.

It is trying to grow in the same direction when life keeps pulling you toward opposite sides of the room.

It is realizing that love doesn’t excuse you from doing the work. It is the reason you keep working.

The life we built does not look much like the one I pictured eighteen years ago.

Our priorities shifted.

Success stopped looking like a perfectly behaved family arriving somewhere on time in coordinating outfits.

Sometimes success looks like everyone making it through the event.  Sometimes it looks like recognizing that one of us has hit his limit and leaving early.  Sometimes it looks like changing the plan, ordering pizza, and trying again tomorrow.

We learned to pivot.

Then we pivoted again.

And somewhere along the way, all those pivots became our normal.

Not the normal I expected, but it is ours.

There is grief in letting go of the family you once imagined. I think we are allowed to admit that.

But there is also something extraordinary beautiful about looking around at the family that God actually gifted you.

Two boys who are nothing alike and have each taught me more than I ever wanted to know about parenting, patience, fear, joy, and unconditional love.

A marriage that has been tested in ways neither of us could have anticipated.

A life that is messier, harder, louder, and far less predictable than the one I dreamed about when I put on that white dress.

But it is real.

Eighteen years ago, I thought marriage was about building the life we had planned.

Now I think it is about looking at the life in front of you and choosing, again and again, that you are going to live it together.

You adjust.

You forgive.

You speak up.

You try harder.

You lower some expectations and raise others.

You let go of what no longer fits.

You make a new normal.

And then, because life has a sense of humor, you get comfortable just in time for everything to change again.

Eighteen years later, we are not the same two people who stood at that altar.

Thank GOOD-ness!

Those two were adorable—but they had no clue what was coming!! 

Susan

Nickel for the jar: Marriage isn’t building the life you planned. It’s learning how to live the life that comes. Sometimes the best parts of your life are the ones you never knew to picture.