Today is our 7 year wedding anniversary and I’ll be honest, I struggled this morning with writing the typical “I love you more every day” Facebook status update. For starters, my husband is not even on Facebook so it always feels more like a PSA that all is well on the home front rather than a heartfelt moment between a husband and a wife. Second of all, It’s such a canned statement that when I really started to think about it, it didn’t ring true for me. I don’t love him more every day. I love him more some days than others, sure. I would even say I have a deeper love for him today than I did the day we got married because he’s no longer just my husband, he’s the father to my children. But let’s not pretend I love him MORE every day because those are impossible standards to live by and I don’t need the pressure of feeling like I’m not living up to one more thing in my life right now.

You get comfortable with each other over time, maybe even a little too comfortable. I had this vision of the kind of wife I thought I would be that I probably only lived up to for about 6 months. It all went out the window when I clogged the toilet in the basement bathroom and it started backing up into the drain in the adjacent shower causing it to flood. It was so bad we had to call my parents in for backup. There’s something about scooping your bride’s shit out of your shower with your in-laws that will bring an end to the honeymoon phase. Then when you get pregnant there are personal boundaries you will cross that will change the dynamics of your relationship from that point forward. Like when you are convinced your water broke, but you’ve already had one false alarm so you make him sniff your underwear to see if it smells like urine or amniotic fluid. It doesn’t have a strong urine smell, and you were just reaching for the yogurt in the dairy aisle of Costco, so you convince him it’s the real deal this time and you head to the hospital. He’s still skeptical and wants to leave the luggage in the car but you’ve already sent the “ready to be a grandma?” text so you make him haul it all in, only to haul it all back out an hour later when they’ve confirmed you did in fact just pee your pants. Again. Two false alarms and $2,000 in hospital bills later, he put an end to the sniffing of the underwear. There are also things in the labor and delivery room that you wish you could erase from your memory all together. Like when the Doctor asks if he wants to see the baby’s head crowning. We had talked about this many times throughout the pregnancy and both agreed we didn’t have the stomach for that kind of horror show. Curiosity got the best of him though and he peeked despite his better judgment. 10 minutes later he’s lying flat on his back on the delivery room floor. I tried to warn him…

Before you know it you have a 1 year old and a 3 year old and you spend the next year just trying to survive. We are in survival mode, ya’ll. Our marriage is strong enough to carry us through this stage in life and I am thankful for every year that he chooses to stay married to me, because I’ll admit I don’t make it easy some days. Okay fine, most days. Marriage takes energy that your kids and work have already sucked out of you so by the time you have a moment to yourselves you feel like you have nothing left to give. That’s when something as small as having 3 light bulbs out in your entryway, 2 in your bathroom, and 1 above the door to the garage that will send you on a 10 minute rant about how everything around you is falling apart and you can’t possibly be expected to keep it all together anymore. I love him. I do! And I’ll even admit I still really like him, too. That may sound harsh but let’s be real, some days I have to remind myself that I still really like my kids when they are both screaming for daddy and I’m the only one home, so same rules apply here. Until things aren’t quite as chaotic and we have more time for each other, let’s just say I am happy to be married to someone who loves ME more every day. Because, naturally.

Photo Credit: Troy Kivel at Pixel Posey Photography

Happy Anniversary, Babe!