A decade together,
seven years married.
Two pregnancies,
one child,
a home,
a dog,
laughs,
kisses,
fights,
grief,
bills,
love,
sex,
US.


After all of it we remain, but not as the same people we were before. I look back at wedding pictures and see our fresh faces--hopeful, naïve, unsure of what lay ahead. I look at our faces now and at first glance think "good Lord, what happened to us?!" But I know the answer to that: LIFE happened, in all its glorious ups and downs.

I see laugh lines from the joy,
creases from the pain,
and tired eyes from the journey.

A few years back I was going through a box of old photos and came across some pictures of my college sweetheart. They weren't photos of us--they were photos of him as a young boy with his mom. We were together for a good while in my early 20's, so I guess at some point a few of his things had gotten mixed up with mine. Looking at them fifteen years later, having a young son of my own now, I saw them differently than I would’ve back then—I saw them through the eyes of a mother. I recognized the look his mom was giving him in the picture of them on an amusement park ride together, his toddler hair blowing in the wind and his mouth gaped open with joy. That look on his mom's face is one I'm all too familiar with now--it's the look of a kind of happiness that doesn't come from your own joy but of witnessing your child's: the deepest kind of happiness.

With social media, It seems that we're living in a time when great deeds--and not so great deeds--get noticed. EVERYTHING gets noticed. When a person or group is treated unfairly it's called to the world's attention and it seems the whole online world is "on it" (at least until the next thing...). And when someone goes out of his or her way to do something above and beyond, or even heroic, they get ten minutes of Twitter fame. I'm not arguing whether this is good or bad--I think it can go both ways. I'm simply making the observation that little goes unnoticed these days.

Except for you, my love.
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Many, many years ago in my early twenties, I did something that NO woman in her early twenties EVER does: I fell for the wrong guy.

Shocking, I know.

The problem with falling for the wrong guy in your twenties is that you don't realize he's the wrong guy until after the fact and you need LOTS and LOTS of proof before you realize it. You're like the world's worst juror--overwhelming evidence, no conviction. Or you convict, acquit...convict, acquit...

Oh, the drama. Here’s just a few of the ways I figured out that he was the wrong guy.
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