Our Anniversary

Today is our 25th wedding anniversary. Wow, I can't believe it has been that long. I am more in love with him now than I was all those years ago. There is a lot to be said about living together through all the hard times as well as all the good times. It brings a relationship to a special place, of maturity and trust and gives it a warm glow.

We are different than most of the couples we know, we still love to goof around and have public showing of lots of affection. We haven't grown apart or away from each other, we have only grown closer. We still love to spend time dreaming of our future and setting goals. Our relationship, I feel, has been tested by fire and emerged on the other side more beautiful, refined. In our time together we have faced, like many other couples, birth, sickness, financial stress, joblessness, college tuition, rebelling teenagers, but by far the hardest, ongoing test has been the drunk driver that changed all of our lives forever. You see, in July 2000, a week before my daughters 24 birthday a drunk driver decided to try and pass a semitruck on a blind corner and hit my daughter, headon. That nano second would forever change the course of all of our lives.

It ended up having a far wider reaching effect than I ever could have imagined at first. I will go into that someday, but not now. For us, it has been learning to salvage our lives as a family, as a couple, and for me, as a caregiver, a mom, a wife and as an individual. I think it, in itself, redefined who we all are. When you experience this type of grief you either turn away from people and choose to grieve alone or you reach out. I often did both, but at night, after an incredibly stressful day, full of major medical decisions, not know if Jennifer would live or die, wondering if we had made the right decisions or not, I would fall into comforting arms ready to hold me and protect me from the world and he would tell me that we would make it through. How can it get any better than that. To know, deep in your heart that even when it seems your whole life has been pulled out from beneath you, that there is a safe place to fall. A refuge in all the trauma.

I am a Christian and I have a very strong faith, but we were at a place of feeling prayed out. Sometimes even feeling as though God didn't hear us. I faced everyday in the Lord's strength but I ended it curled up in my husbands arms where sometimes I could find sleep and other times I couldn't. It is truly during these times in our lives when "the rubber meets the road" that all the things that we believe in and know are challenged. Somethings never make it through, like friends, some family, parts of our lives, often our health. Statistically, most marriages, like 95%, never survive this type of traumatic event.

I feel blessed to have gotten this far and not like we just barely survived, we survived big, we are so good. Our youngest daughter said that she didn't know if she could ever find a husband when she compared them all to her dad and wanted her marriage to be as good as ours. For my husband the hardest part was the fact that we lost our freedom and us as a couple. When we married I had 3 kids under 5 that he took on and raised as his own, Jennifer was the baby at that time. We never had "couple time" and so in 2000, when our youngest child together, Melissa was in college full time and all the others had moved out, did we feel that we were at the beginning of our new life together as empty nesters. That all the years of sacrifice and being homebound were now going to open up for us to traveling etc. Instead, we are now learning how to try and be both a new family and make "couple time" when we don't have the luxury of leaving Jennifer by herself. But we are making it happen, its challenging but we will keep plugging away at it.

This morning, after church, we all went and had brunch together, tonight just Randy and I are going to get away and have dinner together. We will reminisce, as best friends do, about our last 25 years, the good and bad and plan for the next 25 years. We will sit and talk and hope and dream together, just like always.