I woke up on the first day of school feeling pretty good – I’d organized everything by 8 a.m. when I realized I had missed that requisite first day of school picture. I chased them into some semblance of order but the first shot was ruined when my youngest started screaming at her big sister, trying to wrench something off of her, and my son got knocked over in the melee. Once I smoothed things over, I tried again.
*Click*. I look at the picture, and see the kids standing in an orderly fashion, smiling adorably. ‘That’s better,’ I think, before saving it.
But as I think about it, I’m not so sure my first thought was right. What makes my staged happy picture a ‘better’ one than a capture of our real-life chaos?
I had the same thought when I looked at a picture of myself and my husband that we recently took, right around our ninth wedding anniversary. We looked pretty happy, our eyes were open and there wasn’t anything stuck in our teeth, so as far as the not-photogenic pair of us was concerned, it was a good shot.
But what that picture doesn’t say is how hard, at times, real-life is on marriage. No one tells you that on your wedding day, but when you’re two young people at the beginning of courtship, putting each other first is easy. As time goes on, most of your energy goes into your work, your children, keeping up a home, etc., and there’s not much left over at the end of the night but to watch a show on Netflix together before one of you falls asleep on the couch, snoring away like a Husqavarna. (Two guesses as to which one that would be)! Little wonder then that the strain starts to show in little ways, in petty annoyances or complaints.
So imagine what a gift, what an absolute blessing it was when my parents took our three kids for a few days. After spending a quiet week at home, we unwound and just had a moment to breathe, to find out again that we are still the same two people at the core of it that we were on the day we got married.
On that day, one of my clearest memories was seeing my husband’s parents holding hands, smiling through the tears in their eyes as their son got married.
All those firsts they had already experienced and gotten through lay in front of us still – our first jobs, our first move together, our first home, our first child, our first real hardship and losses. But before I could fathom all those changes, all those things that lay ahead of us, I knew that if we could get through all of them and age together, still holding hands, everything else would fall into place.
Nine years down the road, we’ve been to the wall together a few times, and so far, each time, we made it through. When I look at the photo of my husband and I together, it’s just like seeing those two versions of the picture with my kids, and I know it’s not about what’s on the surface or how good or bad we look. It’s about what’s behind the picture, from the inside jokes to the eye-rolls, the frantic searches for lost keys and the arguments over who got the photo radar ticket(!), the low points of our failures to the high point of sharing our victories, to raising our children together. It’s about knowing that he’s got my back and I have his, and that someday, we will see our kids stand at the edge of a new beginning just as we once did, and we will still be holding hands through it all.
