I cried the first two weeks after my wedding.
To be fair, I was young, idealistic and had never lived with a male prior to our marriage. Did all men strip in the living room with the windows open as soon as they got home from work? Did all men leave water around the bathroom basin? How did this adorable man I love miss the laundry basket by mere inches but perfectly time his appearances to breakfast and dinner? This wasn’t at all the “happily ever after” I had envisioned.
And as much as I disagreed, my mother assured me: this was being married.
My “forever” was supposed to look like coming home to a clean house everyday where the dishes were magically done, meals somehow prepared themselves, laundry folded itself, our kids were perfectly behaved and my husband found me irresistible even with my bed head and less-than-minty breath in the morning.
But that wasn’t my forever.
It wasn’t reality – not even close! I felt like I had been lied to by everyone. It was a conspiracy! As a tween and teen, I had come home from school and watched re-runs of The Brady Bunch. Problems were solved in 30 minutes! In high school, Beverly Hills 90210 tackled real problems, right? No. They tackled scripted problems with ideal solutions. As the daughter of divorced parents, I grew up with movies and mainstream media molding what I would base my forever on – not understanding that movies and TV shows take years to write, develop, rehearse and edit!
And now I’m a mom.
Showing my children what “happily ever after” and “forever” really look like is something I can’t allow media to shape. Real love and true commitment take a lot of work, and there’s very little glitz and glamour involved. Our family’s “forever” looks more like this:
- Using the back door to strip down when coming home from work.
- Adding an extra hand towel by our bathroom sink.
- My husband charging my cell phone almost every night because I fell asleep before it made it to the charger.
- Coffee perking with no work on my part because my husband always wakes up first.
Forever is early bedtimes. Forever is using random Batman stamps for my professional and personal correspondence letters because I asked my husband to pick up some on his way home from work.
Forever is coordinating a scavenger hunt to find the book I misplace. Forever looks like getting two drinks when we road trip because he knows I’m going to drink his, too. It’s frozen meal planning and meals at a loud table. It’s home improvement projects and date nights at Lowe’s. Forever is refusing an extra bed in the hospital because cuddling cures everything.
Forever is waking up to do it all over again, and not wanting to change a thing.
