Is it terrible that I remember nothing about my first Valentine’s Day with hubby? It was, after all, 15 years ago and we likely did something, I just don’t remember what that something was.
Back in the days before we had camera phones and digital cameras, an old-school selfie is the only indicator of what might have been that first Valentine’s Day (though, there’s no way to be sure!)
That day isn’t forgotten because it wasn’t special or it didn’t mean anything (that was, after all, before I learned of hubby’s disdain for “fake” holidays) but because in the bigger scheme of life, that day was just a blip on the calendar.
I remember other Valentine’s Day like the next year when I wrote out love quotes and spread them all over the floor before I went to class in the morning. Or Honeybun’s first Valentine’s Day when her parent/baby class did a big heart thing. Or all the years we were out of town for random reasons. And the year the girls and I spent all day making heart shape cookies which we surprised hubby with at the end of the day.
The thing about life is it’s made up of moments, memories that stick out in our minds. And those memories make up our life’s journey.
Dates get hazy or forgotten as moments blur together into a general timeline of life’s happenings. And all those memories can be summed up in a sort of life map: a record of roads taken, turns made, destinations reached and times when we were lost.
But we’re rarely on that journey alone. We start the journey with our parents and siblings. And while we may set out on our own for a short time, most of us eventually find a partner to travel through life with together.
Hand-in-hand, hubby and I set out to create a life together more than 15 years ago. We both made the choice to share our lives, through the good and bad times, no matter where the journey took us.
I’ll be honest that the journey through life and marriage hasn’t always been easy. We haven’t always agreed on life choices. We haven’t always had exactly the same long-term hopes and dreams.
We’ve spent a lot of years walking together but there have been times when we’ve taken separate paths. When we’ve forgotten where we going.
We’ve both made mistakes. Chosen paths and made turns that we desperately wish we could go back and do-over. There have been times when we’ve momentarily lost each other as we desperately tried to find ourselves.
But somehow this life journey has always taken us in the same direction and our divergent paths have always led back to each other. Because if I’ve learned nothing else over the past 15 years it’s simply that love it worth fighting for.
Love is rarely easy and pretty. It rarely looks and feels like what we imagined. But whenever I manage to trudge over the rocky places and get through the muck, the open arms waiting to wrap me up at my destination are always worth the treacherous journey I might have taken to get there.
I don’t expect this Valentine’s Day to be much different from the past 15. It’s going to be just another normal day. I’m going to do school with the girls. I’m going to argue with my strong-willed boys. I’ll take Sugarplum to gymnastics, drive home to have dinner as a family, then go back and pick her up before falling into bed exhausted at the end of the day.
But when I lay down tonight, it will be next to the man I chose 15 years ago, the man I made the deliberate choice to journey through life with. And when I wake up in the morning, he will be the first face I see.
Because I’ve learned throughout our journey together that no matter where life takes us, no matter what paths we choose, we’ll always end up back in that same place when the sun rises on a new day.
