five years, times 3

today, we have been married for fifteen years. 
unbelievable to me.    
fifteen years of  marriage
was like how long your parents were married;
not how long regular people are married. 
but now that we have achieved the fifteen-year mark,
it really doesn’t seem that long.  

when we got married, my mom gave us a little framed saying that said, “the hardest year of marriage is the one you’re in.”  which i thought was funny at first, but now i know how true that is.  i don’t know if marriage can be defined in any other way:  it’s hard.  but so worth it. 

the first five years of our marriage

were hard.  but so fun and exciting.  it was lovely to be newlyweds.  having damon as my roommate was a welcome change from selfish, catty female roommates.  but there were adjustments.  it was much harder for damon to adjust to living with me than it was for me to adjust to living with him.  he was a dream roommate.  he picked up after himself.  he was courteous and respectful.  he kept his dirty clothes neatly folded in a pile inside the closet.  he didn’t use all the hot water right before i got in the shower.  he didn’t eat all the good food in the fridge.   he cooked for me.  he did the dishes.  
what wasn’t there to love about the adjustment to suddenly living with someone you loved?  {apparently lots of things, from damon’s perspective}

but those years were hard, too.  damon was still finishing up his bachelor’s degree at byu.  i was working 2 jobs.  and then i was{ecstatically} pregnant and sick all the time.  we moved from a tiny 275 square foot apartment to a luxurious 800-square-foot apartment.  we had our first baby (on my lunch break from my job at SOS Staffing).  and, all of a sudden, i was a stay-at-home mom.  there was adjustment after adjustment to our marriage and our relationship.  damon graduated from byu and we moved to washington state to work for microsoft.  and just as we were learning to adapt to these new changes in our marriage, we added another baby to our family.  a lot of change in those first five years.  boy, were we looking forward to the next five years, though. 

the next five years

were even harder.  we got out of debt.  and then got into more debt with the purchase of our first home.  i experienced the incredible pain of an ectopic pregnancy.  and the joy of becoming pregnant again after wondering if i would ever be able to conceive again.  close friends’ and siblings’ marriages ended in divorce.  we saw how little it took to have a marriage fall apart, and we made changes to our own relationship.  we treated each other a little more kindly and were a little less selfish.  my dad died unexpectedly.  and with that came a lot of doubts and fears and sadness.  and then we had our fourth child, named after my dad.  a lot of learning and growth occurred in these five years.

and then the next five years came. 

and they have been the hardest.  when ray was 9 months old, savannah (almost 22 months) joined our family very unexpectedly.  and life was, quite suddenly, hard.  i never knew hard like this before.  our relationship changed once again.  savannah brought out weaknesses in me that i didn’t realize were there; damon dealt head-on with personal struggles of his own.  we hung on.  we adapted once again.  we moved out of our home for 8 months and attempted a major remodel/addition to our first home, which never fully got completed because we ran over-budget.  we decided to get pregnant again.  we were stunned to discover that getting pregnant wasn’t completely up to us.  we waited.  we went on with our lives.  elli turned a reasonable age to babysit (10 1/2?), and we started to faithfully date each other again- the best thing that’s ever happened to us.   i started my blog.  we sought infertility help.  we finally got pregnant.  calvin died.  it was like starting over in our relationship, in a way.  only we had 6 six kids now.  and nearly fifteen years of life experience together.  things we’d struggled with in our relationship for years had suddenly been fixed.  we had the perfect family vacation of our marriage:  disneyland without any strollers.  and our perfect couple vacation of our marriage:  hawaii without any strollers or kids.  these last five years have been the best and the worst.  the hardest and the most rewarding. 

i’ve started several different blogposts about this milestone in our marriage this week and haven’t been able to quite get out what i want to say.  when we were first married, i was pretty convinced that damon loved me way more than i loved him.  i thought he was whipped.  fifteen years later, i’m in awe of how whipped i am. i can’t possibly express how much i have grown to love the man that i was lucky enough to marry.  my eyes are tearing up just thinking about my feelings for him.

he is my best friend.  he is someone i look up to.  he is someone i trust.  he is the perfect balance for me.  he is someone that makes me laugh.  he is the one that i want to spend all of my time with.  he is the one that makes every hurt and trial and bad day seem like no big deal.  he teaches me.  he is an example to me.  he is the one who gives my life perspective. he is the one i love. 

and he is my husband
of fifteen years. 
and that makes me so happy.

here’s to another fives years, times eternity.