the simply tuesday of anniversaries

One of my favorite things of late has been the celebration of the ordinary Tuesday. Emily Freeman talks about Tuesdays as the smallest day of the week. And every week, there's a little party on Instagram where a bunch of people snap pictures of the ordinary beautiful and we all enjoy each other's small moments. (Here's #itssimplytuesday. At the moment, the feed isn't entirely representative of normal, because Emily has a book coming out soon-hooray!- and her launch team got it this week, so there are a lot of shots of that. It's still lovely and wonderful and good for a smile.)

Today, Andrew and I celebrate eleven years of marriage.

Oh, how I love that man.

Before "selfie" was a word. This a little bit past our first anniversary. I had to scan the thing in, because we're old and the first several years of our marriage were photographed on film.

And these later, not-divisible-by-five anniversaries feel a little like Tuesday to me. There's no newness and no big round numbers. Last year, we celebrated ten with a four-day trip out of town. This year, it's a simple night away in town. (Somewhere. He's not told me where yet. The magic still lives.)

Please hear me clearly: I'm not complaining. 

Just like Tuesdays have become a favorite because of their ordinariness, I love the smallness of an eleventh anniversary. I love the fact that we've had enough years for there to be ordinary anniversaries.

Ordinary is where we live anyhow. 

It's the little things that make life and the little things that make a marriage.

Quiet not-quite-awake workday mornings.

Not-at-all quiet Saturday mornings, when the kids are up before we want them to be, and asking for Daddyday breakfast. (This man makes hash browns that have ruined me for any other hash browns, period.) Better get them fed before somebody gets hangry.

Holding hands in the dark while we try to stay awake long enough to pray together.

All those times I get thirsty right after I settle in to nurse a baby and he gets up to get me my water bottle. (Usually without snarkiness.)

More than half a lifetime's worth of inside jokes. (We were friends long, LONG before we got married.)

Talking in code or spelling to sneak stuff past our kids. "I was thinking we could go for I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M tonight after dinner. What do you think?" This is rapidly losing effectiveness. 

Companionable silence. 

Doing dishes. Lots and lots of dishes. Sometimes he, sometimes I, sometimes we. 

Brief back scratches in passing. 

The way he works around my BIG FEELINGS and I work around his sometimes-crazy schedule.

Reading each other's faces and tones.

Apologizing for misreading each other's faces and tones. 

Arguments about nothing. Or the same something eleventy billion times.

Lots of grace to cover (and frequently avoid!) arguments about nothing.

Choosing to be on the same side, over and over and over again.

Learning to give the benefit of the doubt.

Diapers. Thousands of them.

Rubbing off each other's rough edges.

Growing up together.


For better and for worse. Until death do us part.

This marriage thing. It's a good, good gift. By God's grace, we're getting better at it. We're living the dream, Andrew. I love our very ordinary life.

Mostly mundane.

ten years.

So... ten years ago, my husband and I got married.

Not gonna lie, I feel a little old. Somehow this marker was reserved in my head for a crowd older than I thought I was. Definitely 30's. (Wait...)

The cousins who were the ring bearers and flower girl? High school and college. College.

My baby brother, then twelve, who wouldn't usher because, in his words, "I don't want girls holding my arm!"... He's apparently gotten over that phobia, we watched him marry a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. (Ryan and Amanda- sorry for the repeat here, there's a lot coming that was in your card.) (Also? I just considered the fact that when they celebrate 10 years, we'll be ready to celebrate 20. Because math. And I'm good at math. But still, framing it that way freaks me out.)

A lot happens in 10 years. 

There's a lot of learning and growing. 

I've been thinking about this, specifically, for about a month now... we are really, really happily married. It's good. Really good. Marriage? Well designed by a master Designer for our good and His glory and I couldn't possibly be more grateful. (Well, actually, I've said that before. And I was wrong. And I'm sure I'll be even more grateful, I don't know... tomorrow. But today, I'm as grateful as I can imagine for this amazing gift.) Also, as Andrew and I grow together toward holiness, we've learned a few things. And I need to write at least a few of them down so I don't forget and maybe, just maybe, to remind and encourage you.

Really quickly, here's why I'm not writing this.

I'm not writing it because we're perfect.

I'm not a perfect wife. Not by a long shot. He's not a perfect husband (though, in all honesty, I think he's a lot better at being married than I am... Most of the stuff I've learned, I've learned largely because he does it pretty well.) 

We still have our stuff. We fight. We have communication differences that have been issues for ten years. (Actually, we probably have some dating back a lot longer than that. Maybe 17 or 18 years? That's how long ago we met. And when I developed a crush on him. But that's a whole other story.) Sometimes it comes down to the simple and obvious: I am a woman. He is a man. Language differences make us crazy now and again. 

We don't have it figured out. (Which is why marriage is supposed to last more than ten years.)

But.

But God is good and his grace is more than plenty for all our stuff. 

So here's some stuff that I've learned in ten years of loving and living with this man.

We have to be friends.

We were friends for a loooong time before we got married. We're good at it. But it's not something that happens on its own.  The first couple of years, it was simple enough. We had school and work and stuff, but a lot of time was basically our own. We played. We talked. We worked together at things. We served together. We did all the friend things we'd already been doing for years. It was fun. And we got used to living together while still doing the friend thing, and life got hectic and being friends took a little more intention. Then kids came. Finding the time to connect and play (and prioritizing that over sleep sometimes) takes a little more effort now. 

But it's so, so worth it. 

(Post-bedtime is currently our favorite- sometimes we talk watch a movie or just sit and read our separate things together or play a game of Dominion or Sequence.) 

I have to work on me.

If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

Duh.

A healthy marriage is ideally made of a pair of healthy people.

It's really easy to go all martyr these days... My job is kind of round-the-clock and based on other people's needs. But when I just "selflessly" chug through, getting stuff done and people fed and bottoms wiped and laundry and All The Things... I do a pretty crappy job. (Honestly, this is something Andrew's probably been encouraging forever, but I'm only learning in the last year that he's right. That EVERYBODY'S right on this point: self care is not optional.) 

It's easy to scroll facebook during a nap and call it a break. But I've learned it's not actually that restorative. 

It takes a little bit more to discern what is actually a useful rest. For me, "useful" is writing, reading, running, talking with friends. Sometimes (um, last weekend), it's scrapping all of those things in favor of sleep. Despite everything in me yelling that I needed to go out and be alone or, at the least, check some stuff off of my list. Not sleep through my only window of "me time."

Anyway, my point... it takes effort and intention to figure out what is restorative and how to make it happen. And if I don't do that, my kids get dregs and my husband gets nothing. Well, he doesn't get nothing, he gets yelled at. Poor guy.

And it's not just me. Andrew needs time to process and be, too. And I'm not as good at encouraging and enabling this as I want to be, not as good as he is, but that's something I'm working toward.

Respect is a big deal.

We were fortunate to have been a part of a great small group from the start of our marriage, and one of the early studies was Emmerson Eggerichs's Love and Respect. It's not a secret that love is essential to marriage and that it must be unconditional. But in my early-20's head, respect was definitely on a lower tier in some hierarchy of needs. And totally NOT unconditional.

Glad to have learned otherwise, and early. It's not a small thing. I'm not always good at being respectful (especially when we're having *ahem* a "discussion") but I've gotten much faster at apologizing for being (or sounding) disrespectful! 

It's still hard to find things that are specifically respectful. It's easier to figure out what comes off as disrespectful. But I'm learning. 

We have to be generous.

This covers... kind of everything. I stumbled across a blog a few years ago that's all about this, and I've been kicking it around since.

When I'm generous in 

• loving and blessing my husband
• forgiving him
• giving him the benefit of the doubt (when I could otherwise assign him poor motives for something)

... everything goes much, much better. 

So there we have it.

Looking over the list, it feels like it should be longer and, I don't know... more earth-shattering. If I'd read this blog post 10 years ago (which I wouldn't have, because blogging wasn't really a thing then), Little Me would have nodded along. Yep. That's true. Check. Sounds good, I agree. But somehow actually implementing that list of things that I am sure I never would have especially disagreed with has taken ten years (and counting.) 

I'm hoping in another 10 years, my list of things that work for us will be a touch longer and I'll be a little better at the things on it. For now, I'm glad to have gotten it down in words. It'd be a shame to forget. 

Anything you'd add to it? What have you learned?