Someone gave me a card on my tenth birthday that read, “Congratulations on hitting double digits!”
I remember being caught off guard by the phrase.
I knew, of course, which birthday it was. I was still looking forward to getting older at that point, to gaining more responsibility, to hitting a “real age.” I was ready for the progression from the odd to the even, the complicated to the comprehensive, the quirky, idiosyncratic nine to the well-rounded, straightforward ten.
And yet, there was something about the idea of adding a digit that struck me. I was leveling up, reaching a milestone, no longer able to be contained by just the ones column, Common Core be damned. My bar mitzvah was still three years away but I was moving steadily toward adulthood and the respect and admiration that I knew would come with it.
Ten was an accomplishment, just as the birthday card had said, and it warranted the acknowledgment. Ten years of emergency room visits, protecting my younger brother when we got lost at a museum, a school switch and countless pairs of glasses. It was worthy of congratulations, even if all I had really done was manage to stay alive that long.
(And, let’s be honest, it was my parents who deserved the congratulations. They’re the ones who did the actual work.)
Speaking of working to keep something alive…
T and I got married ten years ago today.
I was glancing through some photos of our wedding and remembering different parts of that day. The torrential downpours of which we were blissfully unaware until we watched the video of our guests arriving; the seemingly unending ceremony followed by an unending hora on the dance floor; the toasts, the hugs, the smiles and the laughter all came back quickly, as though they had been just below the surface of my consciousness, waiting to be summoned.
Happiness – true, genuine love and appreciation for each other – emanated from the couple dressed in white. They only looked back at the camera when they were asked to; in all of the other shots they were focused only on each other. We were young – officially in our mid-twenties but babies in the eyes of the world – and as oblivious to the responsibilities and challenges of our future together as we were to the rain pounding the outside of the synagogue walls.
The proverbial other shoe, more faithful than a Yellowstone geyser, dropped multiple times over the next decade in the forms of financial struggles, emotional arguments and sheer physical fatigue. T switched jobs and earned her masters degree – while pregnant, no less – and then stayed home for seven years to raise our two children. I pushed through late nights working in foster care and then in community mental health, with varying degrees of job satisfaction, in addition to teaching religious school and starting up a private social work practice. Our commitments to our professions were tested, to say nothing of our commitments to each other.
It would be impossible for me to write a list of the doubts that have crept in at different times regarding our relationship. It’s natural for people to analyze the choices they have made during the harder moments and we are certainly not exceptions to that rule. We’ve come to the brink of the D-word more times than I’d care to remember, usually driven there by miscommunication, misunderstandings and the weight of unmet expectations.
But, somewhere between the stressors of our respective jobs and the nights spent searching for sleep instead of actually sleeping, we’ve always managed to find each other again. We connect in a glance across the dinner table as as our daughter mangles another attempt at a joke or in my arm around her shoulder as we watch our son in the batting cage or in T passing out early in the evening as she uses my lap as a pillow. We meet in an embrace in the evening at the end of the week as we stand in the kitchen, right before we open the brand new container of ice cream.
We embody the familiar parenting refrain about the days crawling minute to minute but the years flying by. We laugh and we fight and we care, for our children and for each other, side by side. We face anxiety and joy and every emotion in between, searching for support and a pair of arms to catch us when we stumble. We persevere, we argue and we love, as actively as we are able on any given day.
We’re not perfect, by any means. But we find a way to make it work.
And we’ve hit double-digits.
