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