10 years & 1 baby

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

Anne LaMott ... Bird by Bird

Jonathan and I have had a pretty consistent tradition of doing something to celebrate our anniversary every year, be it dinner out or breakfast in, toasting with fizzy water on a picnic or bubbly on the patio, staying in town or exploring on the road.  I almost always write a card for him.  Two years ago I wrote a little piece on the occasion of our 8th wedding anniversary and shared it here.  This year we did something completely different.

Yesterday, Saturday, was our 10th anniversary.  It's the first time we've had an anniversary on a Saturday and we started celebrating Friday night with a bottle of bubbly, both of us hoping for an easy end to a rough day....baby boy received 5 vaccinations on Friday morning and was so out of sorts we skipped going to a dinner group of friends I'd been really looking forward to seeing.  So bubbles hit the glass and we smiled and kissed and toasted.  And before I got two sips in baby boy woke up.  A few hours later I woke up around 3 am to feed him and had a sore throat and stuffy nose, a full-on cold in the brew.  In the morning Jonathan made pancakes and I made oatmeal (I'm doing gluten & dairy free for the little guy...) and it was almost 1 pm by the time we got out of the house.  We stopped at Whole Foods for picnic food & took off for a park we'd never been to for a walk we'd never been on.  The clouds turned dark as we drove north and it started sprinkling just after we turned off the main road.  Ten minutes we later discovered that the bird sanctuary stroll we'd been looking forward to started a couple thousand feet down a gravel road past a water treatment facility, complete with treatment pools and the sheriff making an arrest.  We ended up eating our picnic on a table not far from the parking lot, camouflage fishing boats on the launch nearby, then strolled down the river for a little bit before coming home, where I crashed at 4 pm for an hour with a major headache and Jonathan kept the entering-evening-fussiness baby relatively happy.  I was back in bed by 9 pm with the finally-asleep baby boy while Jonathan babysat a book on data warehousing.  I even forgot to have someone take a picture of the 3 of us.  We plan to reschedule our 10th anniversary.

But in the meantime, I have this to say:

When we brought the little guy home, Jonathan carried him into the house and my sister got our bags out of the car and we set up shop.  And a couple days later all hell broke loose as exhaustion and hormones kicked in and breastfeeding appeared to be an utter failure and my body began to process having been through an unmedicated 12 hours of labor plus 4 hours of pushing out an 8 lb 11 oz baby with a 15 inch noggin.  I honestly never felt like it was more than I could handle, but giving birth to him was hard work.  Really hard.  And my body needed to say so.  On top of that I was super tired and completely overwhelmed.  So the tears started and they lasted for about five weeks.  I'm almost not kidding.

I'll share more of that story eventually, but I give those details simply to tell you that my husband is amazing.  Every morning I would eat the five-star breakfast my sister whipped up, feed the baby, hand him off to her, and then crawl, sobbing, back into bed, where Jonathan would simply hold me until I cried myself into sleep.  Jonathan was so tuned into me and himself, processing through his own experience of everything around our little boy's birth and listening as I processed through mine.  Our little roommate is entirely disruptive.  And entirely good.

I've heard women say they fell madly in love with their baby upon the moment of birth, but honestly I felt that more toward Jonathan than my baby.  I adore my baby, but my sense of need for and connection to Jonathan was primal.  We're both pretty independent and the downside of this is that it's too easy to live more parallel to each other than we'd like.  That took a monumental shift in the first few weeks after our son arrived.

As much as I love celebrating in a festive way, I feel like the real celebration of what Jonathan and I are (which I wrote about here) spoke its most powerful voice in those days when we were both simply trying to keep our heads above water and generally not being able to do so, but were instead able to simply be moved along the drift and tumbled through the waves to a better place.  I don't think there's any great honor in seeking out hard stuff for its own sake, but I do think that the most pivotal experiences in life are usually the most difficult.  At least, that's been the case for me.  And like our own personal development, relationships develop new bonds through those times too.

There is no one on earth I would rather be married with, creating life with, moving through reality with.  Happy 10th anniversary, my love!

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created,

so that together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…

If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not,

as many people think, a rejection of freedom;

rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom,

and the risk of love which is permanent;

into that love which is not possession, but participation…

It takes a lifetime to learn another person…

 

When love is not possession, but participation,

then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling,

and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

 

Madeline L'Engle ... The Irrational Season

Singing with Jamie

I remember the very first time I met my sister-in-law, Jamie.  She was sitting on the brick wall outside the north entrance to Seattle's University Presbyterian Church.  It was a chilly Saturday morning in early 2001 and she was helping out with a work day offered by college students preparing to go abroad for the summer.  I don't remember this, but I'm willing to bet she was holding a Starbucks Americano.  A few months later she, my brother Ned, and two others left for Turkey for the summer.  They came home with carpets and stories and Jamie's filled journals and Ned's newly pierced ears, dyed red hair, and Bono-style sunglasses, and both of them with stars in their eyes.  Shortly thereafter they started dating and I moved to Europe.  Ned called me a few months later when they were engaged in February.  Jamie and I talked on the phone a time or two and she sent me Crayola markers and cards she illustrated and a verse from Zephaniah:

 

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

 

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival,
so that you will no longer suffer reproach."

I get chills from the words and the song in my own heart is wet with tears.

Jamie and Ned were married the following August on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  They made promises and danced and shed tears and laughed and Ned spontaneously kissed the bride at the beginning of the ceremony, prompting a mock rebuke from their pastor that it wasn't time for that yet and charmed, delighted laughter from the gathered crowd.  Their lives continue to play like that.  Four children and eleven years later they are still singing, this time a song that mixes in sorrow but that rings clearly with their thick, abiding love for each other and echoes of profound living.  Here is her song this morning.  I love you, Jamie.

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-update-from-jamie.html?spref=fb

Reached

When my mom was diagnosed with melanoma I had no idea how important people I barely knew would become to me. I've always been one for rich, meaningful friendships and leaned toward having a small circle of close friends over a large gathering of more casual friends. It doesn't have to be one or the other, although for many reasons I found that I could enjoy a larger circle but felt more alive in a closer one. Mom's diagnosis came when I was about 21 years old and I turned to my family and a few close friends in that time. But when her disease progressed I discovered I was also leaning into the larger communities I'd become part of. They were rich, healthy communities, able to help carry the weight of reality in life...the joyous and the grave...for so many of us. It was a natural leaning for me because it was a relational one. I hold the memory of some dark days with the sweetness of those connections. I also saw how a bouyancy formed out of the hearts of people around the globe...people who simply heard a story and followed their hearts' responses.

Now I find myself in different but familiar circumstances with my brother Ned's cancer journey and see again how the comfort of established friendships and the rising of new ones form the love God meets me with. I usually have a lot of bandwidth for life's harder curves, but right now much of my capacity feels used up by the recent birth of my son and the play-out of some postpartum depression. At times I feel the ground in everything going on right now and at times I don't. In all of it I am grateful for friends and family who also live in light of love, shared love, love that embraces and accompanies. We don't usually know why new relationships enter our lives at certain times but I know that the advent of new circles in my life this past year is no accident. They widen my heart without diluting meaning...rather, enriching it. They carry part of my story, helping to remind me of what I know and marking pages for me to come back to. I am deeply grateful for friends old and new....in relating we can be for each other expressions of God's heart.

Ned's in surgery right this very moment and his post this morning shares a note he received from our sister Britt, a true illumination of the kind of love and living that most moves me....moves me toward desire for closeness with those I love and deeper appreciation for the massive host of humanity we are graced to be part of.

See the post here, click on his blog title for all of his posts:

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-consider-myself-luckiest-man-on-face.html?m=1