Hanging On Together: What A Marriage Is Made Of

Alex and I have been dreaming about our 20th anniversary celebration for years. We decided we would take a real trip for once, one where airfare was required and there was no chance to return home early if a kid had a panic attack or couldn't sleep. We deserved a big celebration, we figured, after making it to this milestone in our marriage.

We were supposed to spend the week in Jamaica. Instead, we enjoyed the cheese curds and friendly dispositions of a small town in northern Wisconsin.

In September, we will celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, and August marks the 26th year since our first date. I mean seriously. The fact that we have made it through every twist and turn life has thrown at us over the last two decades is pretty shocking.

When our twins were born three months premature, I read a study that said over 50% of couples who have multiples get divorced. Add to that having premature multiples, and basically no marriage survives. That statistic was like a punch to my gut. I knew the odds were stacked against Alex and me. But what I have an over-abundance of is hope, faith, and optimism, so I never put too much stock in the fact that most marriages similar to ours ended in divorce.

Flash forward twenty years, and here we are. Alex and I, sitting at our new favorite coffee shop in a teensy town in Wisconsin, reading and writing. The past few days have been full of our favorites: resting, reading, sleeping, meandering through book stores, movies, kayaking, painting, walking in nature, talking…

The hot summer night of our first date in 1994, Alex and I talked until the early hours of the morning. We just talked and laughed all night. I thought, “This guy is the most fun person in the world to be around.” I used to wonder if we’d ever run out of things to talk about, but we haven’t. Thankfully, Alex has unending patience for my train-of-thought chatter and my larger-than-life dreams.

Twenty-six years later, my husband is still my favorite human. That's the one basic fact that has never wavered through all this time together. He's just fun to be around. I truly like him.

I've been thinking about what makes our marriage work, how we've gotten to this point. I realized that my one big goal in every relationship is safety. Whether you are my child, my friend, or my husband, I want you to feel like you can safely open your heart to me, be yourself, and know that I will accept you for who you are.

My marriage is no different. It is built around over-arching safety: emotional, physical, spiritual, mental. Alex and I are a safe place, a harbor, for each other in this ridiculously weird and difficult world.

When you’re in a relationship with someone, you know their buttons, their triggers, and their wounds. It is easy to hurt them if you want to.

I never want to hurt Alex. Because ultimately, he is my most favorite human and I care deeply about him. Even when I’m angry with him, I don’t want him to hurt. I still want him to feel safe. I want to live in a way that shows others that we can feel any big emotion and still express it in a way that doesn't wound anyone else. I try to approach life's tough moments without the low blows that jab and pierce the people I love most in the world. I want to walk through life, arm in arm with Alex, together in the challenging and the easy.

I'm not always good at being kind and patient. Sometimes the stress of our crazy life makes me short-tempered and frayed, and I take it out on those around me. But my goal is to always lift my husband up, for him to see himself through my eyes as the most amazing person in the world. I keep that in the front of my mind, and although the days aren't perfect, I aim for that. I'm a work in progress.

We’ve gotten through not only the extremely premature birth of our twins, but two more premature babies. Four kids with special needs. (Take that, dumb statistic from 17 years ago!) Surgeries and pain and illness. We’ve gotten through decades of advocating for the kids with all the blood, sweat and tears in us, and we’ve gotten them all the accommodations they need to thrive. We have navigated how to get a service dog, every therapy known to man, every intervention that could possibly help our family. We’re preparing to send our twins to college in a different state in a matter of weeks. This life of ours has been a very interesting, challenging learning experience. Through all the Crazy, Alex and I have also tried to hold on to our relationship.

In a moment of complete desperation a few years ago, I remember asking Alex to just hang on. Our marriage was not our first priority at the time; our kids who were suffering with debilitating chronic illness were. I needed Alex to hang on and not give up on us, because I trusted we’d figure out how to help the kids, get through that excruciating time, and we would enjoy each other again. During those darkest years I didn't know when or how it would happen, but I asked my husband to join me in believing that our marriage would blossom again in the future.

There have been years of desert in our marriage, where we clung to the promise that we were in this muck together and eventually we’d claw our way out of it to easier times. Marriage is not always easy and pretty. A lot of marriage is just hanging on. You have to both believe down to your bones that you are hanging on together, for each other.

During our kid-less week of anniversary celebration, we let the days lead us where they would. We love a good scavenger hunt, so we visited a quaint antique shop on the quiet main street in the town we stayed in. We spent a long time perusing the stuffed nooks and crannies, marveling at other people's aged treasures.

As I looked through the shelves and baskets, thick with precious clutter, my eyes were drawn to a piece of pottery that was perched unassumingly in the corner of a book shelf. It sat mostly alone on the shelf, practically screaming at me.

In bold letters, the word “Jamaica” was printed across the front of the vase.

I burst into laughter. I knew that vase was just waiting for me, waiting to give me a good laugh at how even our anniversary trip didn't go as planned in this wild marriage.

We had planned on celebrating our anniversary in Jamaica, so of course there was a global pandemic that changed the ENTIRE world. Of course flights were cancelled and resorts were shut down. Of course we would end up in Wisconsin for our anniversary trip. As much as I adore the Midwest, it’s not exactly the exotic week I’d planned, lying on a beach sipping on umbrella drinks and soaking up the sunshine.

Of course this is how our 20th anniversary celebration played out.

This is the story of our marriage. And of life in general. What’s that saying-- "We make plans and God laughs"? We can plan and dream about how we want life to turn out, but ultimately there are things we have no control over. My motto in life and marriage is to just roll with it. Roll with the Crazy. Roll with the ups and downs, and let it be. A lot of the time, there is nothing I can do to fundamentally change a situation, all I can control is my reaction to the situation.

I embraced our time in Wisconsin, and soaked up all the nature and beauty and rest and peace with the person I love most in the world. I'm sure Alex and I will travel through more challenging moments in the future, but that makes me cherish the blissful times with my favorite human even more. I know that whatever comes our way, we'll keep hanging on to each other.