Tag: anniversary

Dear Husband,

This weekend we had an anniversary. Our 11th. To be fair, we got married so young that we should be having our 5th, but we did what we did and we had our 11th. We’ll be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary before we’re fifty. We’ll likely be too young, too close to paying for an enormous college bill, to afford that GIANT new diamond ring I totally deserve, but it’s fine. Since we’ll be so damn young at our 50th, I’ll just ask for an obscene one then. And I’ll still have strength enough to hold my hand up and make people feel uncomfortable by it’s sheer size.

Or I’ll just ask for a new toaster. Your needs become relative as you get older. You know what I mean?

We didn’t really do much of anything for our anniversary. We didn’t go on a trip or buy something huge. We went to dinner. You rolled your eyes while I took photos of our glorious looking cocktails, and I urged you to buy the Snap On hat with the logo of the restaurant. Which, in the end, you didn’t buy because the really unattractive and obnoxious girl across the bar from us bought it and it changed the way you thought about the whole thing. It wasn’t cool to own a hat from a bar you went to on your anniversary. It was dumb and touristy. Fair. I mean, it was a good hat, but I can understand the reasoning. (Besides, we can always drive back to Woburn and get one if you feel like you really can’t live without it.)

I haven’t been blogging a whole lot this last year. I’ve reasoned that it’s because I don’t have much to say, but something about this anniversary, this weekend with you (because the child was in Maine — woot!) made it abundantly clear that the reason I haven’t blogged isn’t because I don’t have anything to say: it’s because I have too much to say. I have so many things weighing, clinging, considering, and wondering in and on my brain at any given moment these days that I feel like I can’t say anything. I can’t do anything. My brain is like a sunburn, a blister, a wet tissue in that game Don’t Break the Ice. Anything — the smallest thing — can feel enormous. Happiness feels like it gives way to immeasurable sadness. The triumphs of our life and our marriage — and that goddamned adorable kid — are constantly juxtaposed by the tragedy of what feels like the entire world. Our bubble of seeming perfection is silly, trivial even, when compared to the enormous WTF of everything going on around us. Sometimes I feel like when I go to talk about joy, I end up speaking about sorrow. When I want to explain my pain, I can’t get past my anxiety. I feel a permanent lump in my throat. My swallowing is labored by the very weight of existence in our world. It’s so damn hard to focus here, on us, when so much is happening there. And there. And there.

I don’t mean to ramble. What I mean to do is keep you moving with my mental narrative. Once we were talking to someone in an airport in Bermuda. It was a woman who was there alone, celebrating her divorce. She said that they “just ran out of things to say to one another.” At the time we were so young and we talked so much and I remember thinking, “Jesus Christ, we will never run out of things to say to each other.” And the good news is that it’s true. You and me, kid, we’ll never run out of things to say to one another. That won’t do us in. But I never foresaw (how could I at 26?) that we’d have a different battle, rooted in the same silly thing: words. Sometimes you don’t stop communicating because you’ve run out of things to say. You stop communicating because you have too many things to say. Where do you start? How do you lean in to the vulnerability of communication and give everything you’ve got to make sure that you don’t end up some woman at an airport in Bermuda, telling young married couples that you ran out of things to say, when what you really mean is that you had too many things to say and you didn’t know how to say them? Because anger isn’t born of nothing, right? Divorces aren’t born of empty silences. They’re born of huge, deafening, full-to-bursting silences.

Well not us. I have some things to say.

I love you. Goddamn do I love you. I love how you’ve changed as we’ve aged. How you’ve gotten more confident, but also crankier. I love that you are constantly trying to be more than you were the day before. You’re a constant gardner. You learn, absorb, adapt (slowly), and change. Not all at once, and not without pain and suffering (mine), but you do. You stand your ground, but you’re not blind to the affects of your stubbornness. And you soften. (You did, after all, dress all six plus feet of your body in a giant blue dinosaur costume last Halloween. You were a dick about it, right up to the end, but you did it. Because WE were gonna be a family of fucking dinosaurs. And we were.)

I don’t know what the future holds and it scares me. And sometimes I take that out on you. I confused uncertainty about the world, about work, life, Author, my parents, for uncertainty about us. I know who we are. I know who we are almost more than I know who I am. Maybe because, after all these years, there isn’t really a me without you. We’ve been an us for so long that separating us would cause me physical pain. I’ve joked that real estate prices keep us together sometimes, but that’s only partially true. What keeps us together is knowing that the very beating of my heart is tied to the beating of yours. Sure, I’d go on living if something tragic and Kickstarter-worthy happened to you, but my heart would be heavier, quieter. It wouldn’t be a heart worth listening to. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves are all blended together in this homogenous unit. Like Bennifer, only neither of the Bennifers worked out. And Coreline was some creepy animated film. But same thing. We’re a Coreline. Part Corey, part Caroline. But neither either. Even when it seems that I am blatantly ignoring you, I’m not. (On a macro level. On a micro level I absolutely am. I’m ignoring you a lot.) Every decision I make in a day, from when to wake up to when to sleep factors you in. For starters, what would my living room look like in a world without you? I want to pretend it would be thoughtful and warm and meticulous, but it wouldn’t be. Because our living room is only thoughtful and warm and meticulous because we are, not because either one of us, singularly is. (And frankly, I think I’d just get drunk and order things at West Elm that I would later regret.)

I hate how we fight. Mostly because we don’t fight. We wait until we are sad about something else, something that has nothing to do with US and we put a mask on that thing. And we assign it to us. And then we fight about it. And we think we’re fighting about US, but we aren’t. We’re fighting about the world. And our anxiety. And the mental weight of being born frustrated 1st world liberals. And that shit is for real.

You know how I know? Because when it comes down to it, we have a plan. We are on a train. And we picked the car, the destination, the schedule. We are thoughtful together. Way more thoughtful than either of us could ever claim to be individually. Together we have a sense of self that is so much bigger than our individual senses of self. (Which is saying something. Because my sense of self is, admittedly, pretty big.) We don’t know What We Want. But we do know what we want. And that’s something. In this crazy, upside down world, any sense of direction, any semblance of a True North is a gift. It’s something to hold on to when everything feels like it’s going belly up. We have that, you and me. And when we lose sight of it, we know how to use a compass. We know how to ask the right questions, talk, and figure out where that damn star is again. That’s not an accident. We’ve worked at that. We worked through round one of our friends’ divorces. We have street cred.

We also have a kid who is great. And he’s not an accident either. He was born all eyes and heart, but we’ve helped cultivate in him a sensibility about the world that reflects what we want for him. What we want him to want for himself.

In 7 years, which isn’t so far away, I’ll have lived my life with you longer than my life without you. All my formative, young adult (and medium adult) years will be by your side. And I’m better for it. You don’t make me a better person, you encourage me to make me a better person. You encourage and discourage me in equal measure, but you also let me be me. You give me roots that enabled me to grow and branch out. I don’t need wings. I’m not trying to take flight. I can reach the sky without them.

I have so much to say to you, Mr. Beaulieu. One day, maybe I’ll run out of things to say, but only because my mind is gone, my words no longer summoned by the moving of my lips. And by then we will speak with our eyes. And my eyes will say to you, “I love you. This was totally worth it.”

But not today. Today, I’m still talking. I still have so much to say.

Love, Caroline

We got this.

Ten years ago today, we got married. I was twenty-two.

Here’s the thing about being twenty-two: you don’t know anything. For all the pain you may have suffered (real and imagined), life experiences you’ve had, foods you’ve eaten, problems you’ve solved, fundamentally you don’t know anything. You may have theories, but you don’t have knowledge. Because you simply haven’t been here long enough. (And before we gather our pitch forks and start being mean to me, let’s take a step back. I value twenty-two year olds and think they offer a lot of enthusiasm and perspective. After all, I was one once.)

Truth be told, I don’t know what I thought about marriage back then. I know I wasn’t afraid of it. I didn’t feel anxiety about my choice. And that could have been because I was absolutely making the right choice, but it also could have been because I didn’t really understand the choice at all. I thought this guy was great. Sure, the rest of our lives sounded amazing. Kind of the same way eating ice cream for the rest of your life sounds amazing when you’ve had 3-4 bites. You’re completely incapable of really thinking about what it might mean to eat that for the rest of your life. It just sounds like a really great idea at the time.

Fortunately for me, it was the former. But there are many, many times it could have been the latter. Because marriage is the most natural unnatural thing in the world. Marriage is your greatest ally and your most cunning enemy. It lifts you up, carries you forward, but it also challenges you to grow and change and adapt. It challenges you to own up to your choices and your behavior. Marriage is a mirror reflecting back the image of what two people have done to one another, for better or worse.

If and when you become a parent, its so easy to see how your actions shape another. You see how your anger makes a child cower or become angry himself. You see how your joy and lightheartedness opens them up, makes them feel safe and happy. But as grown ups, I think we forget that the same is true of our spouses. Who we are affects them. Our belief in them becomes their belief in themselves. Our words have weight and meaning.

For my part, I know I’m a challenge to be married to. I’m fiercely independent. I struggle with compromise and collaboration. I can be selfish. A lot of my life is in words that live in very public places (welcome). I process quickly and act even quicker. I favor efficiency over thoroughness. I don’t like to be touched. (IT’S SO CONFINING!)

And then there’s the husband. He’s got his own list of weaknesses, but he is also the naturally more pensive of the two of us. He is metered and thoughtful. He takes time to consider options, outcomes, and possibilities. He wants there to be an “us” rather than two “mes” living in our house. He pushes me to slow down, quiet down, sit down, and be present.

And sometimes I want to kill him for it.

In theory, a marriage is a celebration of differences and how they can compliment two people. But differences are often misunderstood, vilified, and blamed for our inabilities to communicate. Ten years ago, I didn’t know what marriage was. I only knew what getting married was. I knew the logistics– one house, one life, do stuff together, maybe have kids, get old, the end. At twenty-two I was incapable of unpacking what that meant. I didn’t understand the responsibility of promising to stay with someone always. I didn’t realize I would change, or he would change, or our relationship would change. We couldn’t see the future. That’s the gamble of marriage. You bet on who you are at that moment with a necessary blindness for who you will become. That’s some risky shit.

Ten years from now I expect to laugh at my naivety today, but for now, there are some things I think I finally know. Maybe.

  1. You match each other annoying habit for annoying habit. If you want to start throwing stones at that glass house, be prepared the open the 7th seal and have ALL your annoying habits listed for you during a drunk argument. You’re both annoying.
  2. If you don’t get a cleaning lady, you’ll likely get a divorce. They are exceptions, but not many.
  3. There are things that you can’t take back. And while they may be forgiven, even forgotten, you will remember you said them. In some ways that’s worse.
  4. There are days that the logistics of divorce are the only thing keeping you together. And that’s okay. Sometimes we need the reality of real estate prices to buy us the time we need to calm the fuck down.
  5. People change from the day they are born until the day they die. Everyone. Your choice is to fall in love with the heart, adapt to the mind, and accept the body. Otherwise, your marriage will fail.
  6. Marriage is hard. So, so hard.
  7. Never let a week go by without looking your spouse in the eye and asking them honestly how they are doing. Like legitimately. Like, how is your journey on this earth?
  8. If you stop making out, it will eventually get weird and then when your spouse does eventually stick their tongue in your mouth again you will have a reaction that scars them for life.
  9. Acknowledge the difficult stuff. Say it out loud. Many marriages end because of the assumption that people can read minds.
  10. Stop comparing. Everything. Anything. Yes, someone does have a better marriage than you. And your kid is cuter. SO THE FUCK WHAT.
  11. Try to have sex. More of it than you want to or feel is necessary.
  12. Find a good babysitter <if applicable>. You stay a parent even if your child hates you for leaving them on a Friday night. You don’t stay a spouse if you lose your connection by remaining consumed by the duties of life.
  13. Don’t drink too much on weeknights. It starts a chain reaction of tiredness, misery, and agitation that leads to fights where people say things like, “WHY THE FUCK DO WE HAVE THESE GODDAMNED THROW PILLOWS?” and other meaningless, but vaguely hurtful, things.
  14. Be a good team. At home, in life, and at parties.
  15. Make sure you’re your spouses biggest fan. Because if you’re not, something has gone wrong. (And that foxy 21-year-old at his/her office is gonna be and then you’re gonna get dumped.)
  16. Laugh.
  17. Don’t start a blog. Definitely don’t start a blog where you talk about your life.
  18. Work really fucking hard to stay in love.
  19. Say I love you, but only if you actually mean it and not because you’re being a dick. Because I’ve done that and it’s received very poorly.

I’m a better person because I’m married. Personal growth is hard. Being reminded (lovingly) about your shortcomings is hard. But better to have it coming from someone you love than some anonymous asshole on the internet.

Corey Beaulieu, I love you. It has been a pleasure to spend these last ten years as your wife. You are half of all the good things about me and I hope you know that without you, I’d be a hot mess in a one bedroom with a lot of cats, eating Prego out of a jar with a spoon. That kid of ours is something else. We did so good. I hardly recognize the faces of those kids ten years ago, but I think I like our old mugs better anyway. You’re my favorite asset.