What's LUCK got to do with it?

Today hubby Tom and I celebrate 30, that's right...THIRTY years of marriage. This feels like a major accomplishment in this time where upwards of 50% of marriages end in divorce.  We're lucky, huh?  I'm lucky, yes?  Well, luck has something to do with it.

I've been reflecting on this a lot for the last few days.  Tom is a wonderful, loving, funny, sensitive,caring, vulnerable, smart man.  Thoughtful.  He is an outstanding and fantastic father and a wonderful man with whom to co-parent. He comes from a big loving family who have always embraced me as one of their own.   He's genuinely  interested in others, curious about every/anything, and has a work ethic that is 2nd to none.  He's passionate about his profession and finds it 'relaxing' to spend weekend time dabbling in the work he does from home. And there's that delightful giggle when he's tickled about something (or just tickled).  He's also handsome, lean (I've outweighed him, even when I was thin, for 95% of our marriage), runs daily, though at age 63, he's slowing down a bit.  I could go on and on.

Sounds like the perfect man, huh?  That's what I thought until we'd been married for about, oh...a week or so!  He's also stubborn (his mother has always claimed his head is made of granite, and I concur), minimalist (think "Why do we need to redo the bathroom?  Everything in it works..."  Yeah - but it's the original 1954 stuff, and looks like sh*t...), hopelessly obtuse and sometimes just screwy in how he perceives things, born a century too late as this "newfangled world" really flummoxes him.  At times he's a master of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time because of the aforementioned obtusity.  I could go on and on.

So am I "lucky"?  Are we "lucky".  He doesn't have the opportunity to write 2 paragraphs about me in this venue.  If he did, he'd be genuine in his description of the positive attributes of the woman he married.  He'd be kind in the next paragraph about the less-than-perfect aspects of his bride (as I was!).

Well, luck certainly has played a role, but our marriage has been hard work.  There have been times where I honestly felt like I hated his guts.  Where I fantasized about packing it in.  Wondered what the hell I ever saw in him anyway.  I could go on and on.

Now you can imagine he hasn't felt the same way about me...his loving wife who turned into a shrew when she drank, has at times been critical of his every move, ran up his credit cards when he asked me not to...I could go on and on.  And on... for much longer and with a much longer laundry list of things he's had to endure with me, in my struggle to get sober, get better, and find out for the first time who I really am.  He had reasons to bail out a million times, yet he never considered it.  Neither did I.

Maybe that's where the luck has come in.  Somehow, despite the realities of everyday life with it's glorious gifts, serious problems, extreme busyness with 3 active kids, financial ups and downs, and everything that comprises a life lived in partnerhood,  familyhood and community, we just kept on keeping on.  The bad times, the good times - they all come and they all go.  As they say in AA - "this too shall pass", and it all does.  But the memories, the lessons learned, the graces bestowed... remain and inform and, if we let them, enrich and deepen the commitment made back those 30 years ago.  Love is messy and rich and wonderful and easy to forget in the heat of intense moments.  But it has sustained as the baseline of our relationship and strengthened us when we most needed.

An anniversary is just another day, but this one has offered me the emotional opportunity to reflect on just how much I love this man.  Happy Anniversary, Tom.

This pic taken this morning before face washing, hair combing, or other assorted freshening up!  Like you couldn't tell!