1+1=11

Monkey Business

Some days the only way I can make dinner is to put K in his chair with snacks. But Friday evening it was so hot, I couldn't imagine him wanting to sit in the stuffy confines of a high chair for more than a minute, so instead I fell back on an old trick--the bathtub. He loves his porcelain play pen. Cool water, toys, and no diaper. What more could a little boy want? After settling him in, I ran back to the kitchen for a big cutting board, a knife, and the onions I wanted to slice. I sat myself on the toilet, laid the board across my lap and started chopping. This is probably really gross, I thought. But it's totally brilliant. Boy contained, washed, and ready for bed before supper. Onions simmering in olive oil and Sam Adams. Mama sipping the rest of the beer from the frosty bottle. No tantrums from mother or son. Voila! Dinner with a side of sanity.

Mark and I have lots of moments where we look at one another across the room eye brows raised in a silent question mark of solidarity, Really?Is this happening? We had one of those moments this morning when E decided to stage a drama. She and little sister got themselves up and dressed this morning. Wow! We were so impressed. And then when A crawled into bed with us, E refused, citing an infraction against us we couldn't decipher. We were teasing her, she claimed, but we didn't remember when or how. She stomped off declaring she wanted to be by herself. OK, I thought. Give her space. Fifteen minutes later I was dragging myself out of bed, still sleepy from late night movie watching, planning a breakfast Miss E would enjoy, hoping to shake her mood.  I let one foot fall to the floor and was about to drop the other when, "No! Not fair! I wanted to come snuggle too, and now no one will let me! I'm mad! Leave me alone!" Slam. Huh? I looked at Mark; he looked at me. Eyebrows.

These girls? Cause trouble? Never!

From a tangle of covers beside me, A decided it was the perfect time to request carrot cake. And did I allow reason to rule on a Sunday morning? Of course not. I made cake and Mark ran to the store to get the missing ingredients and we all ate bowls of Cheerios with honey and scrambled around to get out the door. But there was cake.

"Cake was maybe a bad idea," I admitted in the bathroom mirror as Mark zipped past me in the hallway, diaper and baby in hand.

"Mmmm," he agreed. "Why's that?"

"It's hot. My makeup is melting off my face. Why did I think it was a good idea to turn the oven on when it's already 90 degrees?"

"I tried to tell you."

He did. And then he still went to the store.


And that's how after eleven years of marriage, three kids, and a few life crises, we're still toughing it out together.

We celebrated our eleventh anniversary yesterday. After making a hasty dinner for the kids, we zipped off for a few hours of alone time. Dinner at a local restaurant, conversation with pockets of exhausted silence, and a challenge over our meal to come up with one significant memory (good or bad) for every year we've been married. I won't bore you with the list, but the sum of it seemed to be that life is complicated and sometimes we muddle it up and sometimes we hit a home run, but the privilege in all of that has been doing it together. Failing. Succeeding. And all the in between times when we're just living these ordinary, everyday lives--making supper in the bathroom, deciphering six-year-old outbursts, and tearing up the kitchen an hour before church.

Ordinary. Every day. He saved me the last bite of brownie from dessert; he went to the store this morning to get ingredients for cake; he took the girls to the beach so I could stay home and write.

It's in the smallest of details that a life lived together unfolds. We dole out and store up these kindnesses and sacrifices, which turn out to be fuel for the heart, so the Really? We signed up for this? moments don't feel so hard or at least not hard for very long. So at the end of the day we still get to say how much we love each other, this life together. How much we love those kids.

At the end of our date last night, we tried to think of a few things that have surprised us about one another, things we hadn't expected when we got married.

"I didn't think you'd throw yourself into motherhood as much as you have," he said.
"I thought your daring athletic feats were a sign you'd be daring in life decisions, too," I said.
"I thought that when you made plans and goals for the future, they'd eventually lead us to a resting point. But every time we accomplish something, you're already planning the next thing we have to do," he sighed.
"I thought you'd have less hair by now," I laughed.

It was fun. This exercise in revision. The chance to remember our twenty-something impressions and choices and to see how they'd morphed into our thirty-something lives. The miracle of miracles? I'm good with chopping onions in the bathroom on a Friday night while my little guy splashes my legs from the tub. And I'm mostly good with the chaos that three littles leave in their wake. (Although Mark would tell you that lately I am NOT good with it. It's a fair assessment. This too shall pass.)

And though I'm a little anxious about what the future holds or how we'll make the most of this one life we've been given or how badly we might screw up our kids, I know that all these things tend to work themselves out when love lives at the center. Eleven years of loving--the hard parts, the easy parts, and everything in between. I'll raise a glass to that.