On Friday, my beloved and I celebrated our five-year wedding anniversary. Five years ago, we frantically packed ourselves up and flew to St. Pete Beach, Florida, to stand toe-to-toe in white sand and promise to hold each other up long after we've ceased to be hot or intelligent.
Although we intend to celebrate more in July when my parents come down to watch the little angel for a night so we can stay in a local hotel and pretend like we don't really live three miles south of it, we did manage to slip away from my beloved's work summer regional conference (read: Drink the Kool-Aid and Play Nice With the Others) and hit a restaurant in the Ozarks that served crab legs on paper towels that you smashed to bits with little wooden hammers. Though the little angel had chicken strips instead of crabs, she thought smashing things with a hammer was great fun. I told her it is even more fun when you can drink wine while you're doing it, but like many, many other fun things (like paying a mortgage and holding down a day job), you have to be An Adult to do it. She smiled and dipped her chicken strip in ketchup, preferring to think about all that on another day.
There might have been better, more glamorous ways to celebrate five years, but the crab shack seemed okay. We weren't looking out on an ocean, but the Lake of the Ozarks is at least wet. It was also both fun and not fun to have the little angel along on an attempted-romantic trip down memory lane. It's surreal to me that three years ago she did not exist except as an unfertilized egg, down there in my body with all the other unfertilized eggs, this glorious little human being who has taken over my life. It's sort of surreal to me sometimes that I'm married at all.
In my head, I'm still 23, fresh out of college and wondering what to be when I grow up. Somewhere along the line, I managed to meet and marry a kind, witty, intelligent guy with broad shoulders and good fathering skills, a man who believes in doing the laundry and equal effort in childcare, a man who had roses waiting for me when I got home from my three-day, last-minute business trip to the coast. How did the 23-year-old Dater of Idiots managed to snare this one? I ask myself that a lot, especially when I'm listening to people complain about their husbands or reading essays by women whose husbands refer to watching their own children as "babysitting."
I also managed to make the right decision to throw my many, many concerns to the wind and get pregnant. And now I have this amazing daughter who is so sweet and kind and cute. When I had a headache yesterday, she reached over and touched my brow with one pointer finger. "Are you okay, Mommy?" she asked, and I almost cried.
So things are pretty good. It's been a completely odd five years, and mostly that is because I'm realizing that I don't have to wonder what the rest of my life is going to be like. There are some variables, sure - I have writing goals and career goals I want to achieve. There are trips I'd like to take and adventures I'd like to have. But I know with whom I'll be sharing those adventures, and that is a really great feeling. I should realize that more often.
So, even though he doesn't read this, happy Father's Day and anniversary to my beloved, who has been the foundation on which I daily build and tear down my houses. Thanks for being you, and for choosing me.
