It has been another year indeed. A long, trying year. Harder than the first and second put together, for sure. Hopefully the hardest we will ever have.
Yet, it has been such a confirmation of our love and and validation of our choice to do life together.. This year, while most certainly hard, has been a blessing. Is that okay to say? It's true, the hard moments have blessed my marriage.
And we can't have an anniversary without adding a post to my marriage blog. The truth is, I have about 29384 things I learned this year. But I couldn't bring it down to twelve like my traditional anniversary post. So Ryan helped, and said we could sum all of them up in just three. And then we decided together what we learned in three short lessons:
Family is "relative". (Pun Intended)
My favorite lesson of the past year is that you can choose your people. Family has so much less to do with biology and marriage than it has to do with the people who love you in your crap.
Ryan and I walked the crap this year. Not just loosing Eden but carrying her after diagnosis, burying her, moving to a dreary climate, spending time apart, and being so far from "home" on top of all the normal difficult marriage things.
It was a scary hard year. And some of the people that we thought would be on the other side of all this crap... well, they aren't. And some even consider themselves to be and still aren't. Those relationships became secondary losses, and we were surprised to find that even strangers can become more like family in the crap. People we never even knew came into our lives and loved on us so deeply and intentionally that it is undeniable that they are our family. Some family relationships and friendships have become strained, but then most have become equally strengthened. The bottom line is, we can decide who we want to call family. Anyone can. You're not stuck with what you start with. You can choose. We choose the people who share in our joys and our heartaches and everything in between, and we choose to share with them in all of theirs. Ryan, Eden, and I are family. We have blood family. We have family friends. And we have stranger family members too. Meaningful, soulful connections make family. We are thankful.
Marriage isn't about love.
Well, it is... but it also isn't. Because sometimes, the truth is that love is not always enough. Ryan and I could have loved each other all day long and it wouldn't have maintained our marriage.
Marriage is about commitment. Marriage is about the vows made to be kept. Marriage is renewing the vows every morning even when things suck. When Ryan wouldn't say more than 6 words a day, when I wouldn't get off the couch for weeks, when it was just plain hard to love each other... we still had a marriage to take care of. That's where intention comes in.
Say the kind thing, do the thoughtful gesture, be as present as possible. Meet each other in the middle. Communicate exactly what you mean. And get some damn help. I found myself struggling with postpartum depression a few months after Eden's birth (and I still am) but it really took us both saying that I needed some help outside of our house. That's important. Go to the therapy. Be open. Be flexible. Commit. Give grace.
And then, love. It cannot hold a marriage together, but it can tie up all the loose ends and fill all the cracks.
You don't lose until you quit.
This is where I begin to cry as I write. At the end of our quiet weekend, these are the words Ryan spoke as his most important lesson from the past year of marriage and they were so loud because they apply to it all.
We lost a lot this year. That's undeniable. We lost our daughter and an early pregnancy and innocence, and friends and family and our otherwise easy relationship. We lost a lot.
But we aren't losers because we have not quit. We didn't give up when things got tough, though statistics would have had another way with us.
We don't want to take this for granted. There will be more hard days in the many years of marriage to come. There will be another season of strife down the line. Prayerfully, not the same season as this, but it would be ignorant to believe there won't be another hard moment in our marriage. And we will not deny that it will be difficult and that we will walk through more crap... instead we will be able to say that as long as we don't give up, we will come out together on the other side. And that's all I could really ask of my marriage. That it doesn't downplay the crap, but keeps on trying.
Another thing we will not give up on is our love for our children. Eden and Baby Errol are so loved and cared for in Heaven. We will get to hold them again there. It will be so joyous. We also love our other children, the ones that have yet to come. Fear would tell us that this is an unfruitful journey- as I've been pregnant twice now with no living children. But faith tells us that we don't quit yet. And that brings me to the announcement that we are expecting our third child.
We are so thrilled. Things feel different this time. Things feel hopeful. While it is still very early, we believe a life is a life and I have been bursting at the seams to share. We personally don't call children that come after loss "rainbow babies", but we are finding so much joy in this pregnancy already. Thank you all for walking this year with us and being our village.
I am ready for another beautiful year with this precious man, being a family and building one together.
