Welcome to Day 11 of a 31 day challenge to write 500 words or more. For more on that click here: goinswriter.com
Here’s a riddle . . . There once was a woman who was born in Mexico and left the United States for the first time when she was 19. How can that happen?
Today is my wife’s birthday. She has one every year about this time.
For six months out of every 12 she is officially older than me. Every September I catch up. I take full advantage of that. It’s a joke that will never get old to me (no matter how old we get) and a joke that has never not been old to her (even though we were much younger when I started telling it).
We’ve arrived at a weird age. That age where you start realizing you can remember vividly when your parents were the same . . . and it doesn’t seem like that long ago . . . and you can’t imagine them being that young.
Because we ARE still young.
We passed our 20th anniversary this year.
20 years.
It makes me feel older just saying it.
Twenty years.
Twenty trips around the sun together.
Twenty Christmases.
Twenty Valentine’s Days
Forty birthdays (not including the kids).
20 years of marriage is a surreal thing. It’s like some time space mash up of forever and barely getting started. I remember a life before her but it honestly seems like it happened in a different world. And I like to think that we’ve got another good 20 to 40 ahead of us.
Mark Twain (who is nearly as misquoted as Albert Einstein) is quoted as saying:
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
My first reaction to that quote is “yeah, that’s right” — but then I think about it for a bit and it’s actually NOT true for me. I am far more disappointed in the things I have done than I am in the things I haven’t done over the past twenty years. I’m disappointed in time wasted by every petty little fight and every selfish pursuit. I’m pretty proud of the opportunities that we have stepped up to the plate on and not backed down from. The ones that have led us around the world, to wild and wonderful places. The ones that have brought us two beautiful children and an amazing story.
If there is anything that I have learned over the past 20 years it is that I love doing life with this woman. Not just life in the same space. Not simply connected because we are legally bound to stay that way. Not chained together and trying to make the best of it. I want to DO LIFE with her. Every bit of it. This is OUR thing . . . together.
It’s hard sometimes because we are dramatically different people . . . but we are figuring it out — and we want to figure it out more now than ever.
She is the love of my life and no one has encouraged me more or made me angrier and she can absolutely say the same about me.
Here we come next 20 years — bound and determined to not be disappointed and not to miss a thing.
Happy Birthday to a far smarter, more creative, more wonderful, more beautiful traveling partner than I ever could have begged God for . . .
MY WIFE . . . Who was born in MEXICO . . .
MISSOURI.
And those are my 500 words.
