anniversary thoughts

Keith and I celebrated our ninth anniversary this week!

I'd like to say that somehow Keith and I have always managed to set aside our anniversary as a special holiday in our home and family life. Well, we've never worked on May 8th, so at least that much is true. And in the first two years, we took a week-long "staycation"  at our home in Canada to celebrate our anniversaries. We went camping in southern Utah's national parks for our third anniversary, and spent our fourth anniversary on an extended weekend stay at a bed-and-breakfast place in western Montana.

But then our fifth anniversary rolled around. We had a little baby girl who we brought with us on our anniversary date. It was not a complete failure of a romantic date... but it was pretty close. She flung herself backwards and hit her head on the table... first and only time she did this... while we were in the restaurant. She cried and cried and was absolutely inconsolable.

On our sixth anniversary, we had a brand-new, one-day-old baby boy to celebrate, and quite a lot of family members came over to meet him. So it was a special day... but not exactly the kind of romantic anniversary celebration that I might have secretly hoped for. Although I thanked the Lord profusely that he was at least born seven hours before our anniversary!

Our seventh anniversary fell on Mother's Day, and we had plans to get away for a whole day together, but Abraham was terribly sick and needed us, so we stayed home. That one might have been the hardest... I was wishing so much for a nice anniversary date without little ones.

Our eighth anniversary was last year, and Keith's parents took our older two children for a day and night so that we could have some time together, but we had two-month-old Ezekiel still with us, and that was his crying-all-the-time-because-his-neck-hurt-so-much-before-I-finally-took-him-to-the-chiropractor stage. So we really just spent our time focusing on Ezekiel.

Enter anniversary number nine. Our kids have been sick for the last two weeks, and we had to cancel Abe's birthday party on Saturday, then again cancel the rescheduled party for Tuesday. (We haven't been miserably sick, exactly, but sick enough to get other people sick and not really get much done around here.) So what could we do on our anniversary? I had been temporarily entertaining hopes last week that maybe we could all go over to the coast for three days... take the kids to the Seattle Aquarium (something I've been wanting to do, and I thought doing it before moving to the Midwest was a great idea)... ride the ferry... be there for Abe's birthday and our anniversary, then come home. (I am really good at imagining fantastic, expensive, spur-of-the-moment vacations like this, by the way.) But of course, we are sick and that is most definitely not an idea that fits into our budget.

So, we stayed home on our anniversary. Cuddled sick kids. Did a lot of reading. And in the evening, we dragged them all out to a nice little local restaurant, then went and played t-ball in Manito Park. Rilla picked about a hundred dandelions for me, Abraham insisted on whacking the plastic baseball with the handle rather than the fat part of his little blue bat, and Ezekiel practiced his standing skills in the soft grass.

I feel like there is a lesson in all of this, if only I could find it. Maybe it is just that this is how things go when you have little kids and they need you. Or maybe it's that even though God has given Keith and I this great love for each other, it really, really, really isn't meant to be about us. God doesn't give His great salvation to people so that they can hoard it for themselves and not share His grace with others. And He doesn't give beautiful love to a husband and wife so that they can spend their days simply enjoying one another. That is good, but that is not the end goal. The end goal is to raise up children who love the Lord and serve Him.

"Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are His. And why one? Because He was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth." Malachi 2:15

So. Going forward into our tenth year of marriage. Keeping these things in mind. Learning to make time for one another while also guiding our children is sort of a delicate balance, maybe even a dance. There are a hundred things, or maybe a thousand, constantly vying for our attention. The children do need us; but we also need time alone together; but they can also see us make time for each other even while they are near us; and we can also make time to spend time together all as a family. It still feels like a struggle to fit everything together, especially when I feel like the house and errands and chores and homeschooling alone could take all of our time and leave none for focused Keith-and-Jamie time, or focused family time, or focused kids time. There really is no formula for it, is there? It's each day as it comes, always learning new levels of flexibility and creativity.

What is it that they say at the very end of the Narnia books, when they are in the true Narnia that is heaven? Further up and further in? It seems like that in marriage sometimes. Keith and I aren't stagnant people. We keep growing, changing, sinning even, constantly being transformed and stumbling along the way too. And our children are not who they were a year ago, or even last week; they are always changing and growing and developing too, and so our family life is always new. Like a perennial flower garden that has familiar fragrances but continues to mature and deepen and have new shoots and more mature plants year after year, and as you hoe and weed and plant there are always new developments, new improvements, new delights, even the occasional weed that you thought you'd gotten rid of the previous year, only to have to deal with it again. Yet the beauty of the mature garden is so much richer than that of one which has only had a year or two to grow and develop.

I'm surprised, honestly, by the shapes that some of these past years have taken. We have been looking at old pictures recently and even some of our prom pictures. I'm surprised to look at them and realize how disconnected I feel from that time. I remember it, of course, but... wow! It has been a long time! And we are such different people, in some ways, than we were then.

Anyway, I am rambling now. Probably not expressing myself very well. But I haven't sat down to write, really, in quite a while and so I just needed to explore these thoughts a bit.