mawwiage
Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togethew today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam. And wove, twue wove, wiww fowwow you fowevah and evah… So tweasuwe youw wove.
November 20 marks the anniversary of both of our parents. Yes, both sets of parents were married on the same date. Not the same year though.
I have long found it humorous and one of those interesting coincidences of dates that seems to mean something, but may not mean anything at all. For those of you that don’t know, I am obsessed with dates, times, price per ounce, measurements, anything to do with numbers (except differentials – I never understood what we were doing with all that calculus jazz), but especially dates, I love dates.
But today I have been filled with gratitude that these four people made the choice to get married. Two of them are still married and will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary next year. Two of them have been divorced for almost thirty years. Regardless of the state of their marriages now, they birthed, loved, and raised the two of us and I think we turned out pretty fabulous. Now we get our turn at birthing, loving, and raising their grandchildren.
My heart is filled to bursting with love for these four people. I am so grateful to be alive – to have been given the opportunity to have two parents who love me and did the best they could to provide me with opportunities to learn and succeed. I am deeply grateful for the wonderful man my husband is and that his parents raised him to be kind, honest, hard-working, faithful, patient, capable, and most of all, loving. They created a man who is full of love and whose love has transformed my life.
I have been heartbroken about my parents’ divorce for a long, long time. The depths of my soul have ached with longing for the family of my childhood to be returned to me. I have only seen my father eight times since he left our family back in 1986. Eight times in 27 years. It is simply not enough.
But I still have life. I still have heritage. I still have a father and a mother and a father-in-law and a mother-in-law. And today I am going to savor the beauty of my life and the love I am surrounded with.
Thank you four for getting married. Thank you for risking your hearts and giving it your best and letting us be born. Thank you for trying.
I'm Tracy, a mama with big dreams, crazy ideas, loads of laughter, an insatiable desire to learn, and enormous piles of laundry.
Beautiful post. It sounds like you have been through a similar process I have. Divorce is a hard, hard thing and I, too have spent years longing for what was lost. But you are doing such a beautiful job of picking all the pieces up and building your own family. I admire your loyalty and love and forgiveness.
Sally, I love you! Thank you for the encouragement. Every day isn’t spent in that place of gratitude, but more and more of them are all the time. And I often wish I could wave my magic wand and put my family back together again, but I wouldn’t want to lose any of me that has come about because of the lessons of those hard times and I definitely wouldn’t want to lose the other people who I have in my family because my parents didn’t choose to stay married. My siblings mean the world to me!