Twenty Years

I stumbled across this Facebook meme a couple months ago and sorta fell in love with it.   I want to put it in a frame next to my girls’ beds so they can fall asleep every night seeing it.   I don’t want them to graduate from high school and get married and start having babies right away.   I don’t want them worrying about what kind of person to marry right now-they’re 12 and 15, for mercy’s sake.   I do want them thinking about what kind of person they want to become, about what they want to be when they grow up.  

All this is quite ironic since this is precisely what I did not do.   You see, today is my twentieth wedding anniversary.   Yep, twenty years ago today, Brent and I got married in Dallas, Texas.   And yes, I am 39 years old.   Go ahead:   you can do the math.   I was 19 years old.   Brent was 23.   I shake my head when I think about it now.   That’s 3.5 years away from where Kennedy is right now.  Unthinkable!   We were just babies.   My parents were (rightly) unhappy.   They worried that I would do what all too many Mormon girls do:   quit school and get an unskilled job that would help pay the bills while Brent finished school.   Looking back on it, Brent and I are both shocked that I was willing to defy my parents’ wishes and go through with the wedding despite their misgivings.   [Major props to my parents, however.   After expressing initial, umm, reluctance, shall we say, they got on board and put on happy faces-at least for me.]   We were so young and dumb and foolish.

And yet, here we are, twenty years later.   We’ve done a lot of stuff.   We’ve completed five degrees between us; we’ve bought and sold 5-6 houses; we’ve survived building and operating and eventually selling 7 Subway restaurants, two wildly unpopular taco joints, one JaniKing franchise, one ebay business through which we sold magnetic-toys-imported-from Italy, one home construction business, and several other businesses that I can’t remember right now; we’ve had three kids together.  

I’ve now been married to Brent longer than not married to Brent.   That’s a weird idea.   I missed the whole be-an-adult-before-getting-married-life-phase.   I entirely skipped growing up-turning into an adult-independently of Brent.   (He mostly did as well.)   Objectively, this is a terrible idea.   I hope our kids don’t follow in our footsteps. They remind us regularly what a bad idea it was.   We openly mock ourselves, as do they.   When they were younger, one of them asked how old we were when we got married.   When I told them, they gasped: “You were what?   Is that even . . . legal?”   Yes, legal, and yes, a bad idea.   Kennedy recently came home and announced:   “You and dad were super lucky.”   When I pressed her for an explanation, she said she had just read an article that stated that people who get married at our age are 8,915 (okay, I can’t remember the number) times more likely to get divorced.   So yeah, we have been lucky.

We spend every night sitting across from each other at our partner desk-each working independently (yet also sorta together?) on a blog post, cruising Facebook, taking in a Jon Stewart clip or two, responding to work emails, discussing politics or current events, or doing some late night grading. And laughing.   A lot of laughing.

I used to think our marriage was bulletproof.   We got along swimmingly, rarely fought, and genuinely enjoyed each other’s company more than anyone else’s! Three kids and one major mid-life crisis (I’m hoping to skip mine altogether) later, that idea now seems laughable.   Nothing is bulletproof.  

And yet, here we are.  

So yeah, we were dumb and foolish.   So while I’d like our kids to follow the meme above-meaning, grow up first and then get married, I don’t at all regret our foolish decision.   How could I?

If I think about our kids being able to spend twenty years (plus hopefully many more) the way we have-even if we did things in the wrong order-it’s hard to fault ourselves too much.   I’d do it all over again, in a heartbeat.   And hope you’d do the same, B.