Clearly I missed day two of of {31 for 21} but I think it was for a good reason and actually the subject of today’s post.
October 2nd is our wedding anniversary and while Jess has been sick for a couple of weeks and totally not up to a night of celebrating, it was the perfect night to just spend some quality time together. I won’t point out that I fully conked out on the couch at 10pm – is anyone else finding this fall incredibly exhausting?) because that takes away the romance of this post, but it’s fully true. However, I will say that when I woke up, Lily’s pump was cleaned and plugged in, the dishwasher was running and the living room was tidy and, for me, that’s the perfect example, of romance, and the perfect example of Jess.
I’m finding this post very hard to write. There are so many things that I would love to be able to focus on: how much I love that Jess has been home with Lily for the past 3 years and has helped her grow and develop in such incredible ways; how loving her is like breathing – it’s as natural to me as waking up in the morning; how my happiest moments happen when she’s right beside me, and the moments that I’m most ashamed of are when I have hurt or disappointed her. I want to be able to tell you about how it fills my heart with such joy when I think about how lucky I am that she choose me, when she agreed to marry me, when we became Lily’s parents. How can I possible put the way I feel about her into words? It’s so layered and complex and yet so incredibly simple at the same time. I think about our wedding day and all of the details that she put into place that made it so unique, so perfectly us – what other wedding had shotguns on the invitations, jello shots and a popcorn cart when you walked in the door, an elaborate high-five before the kiss, and a photo booth with monkey and elephant costumes? I think of the nights spent folding a thousand paper cranes, which she then strung together, to line the edges of the tent and the cake that tricked people with it’s burst of rainbow once it was cut open. That wedding, that was the exact opposite of my first one, was put together by the woman who turned my whole life upside-down, and yet understood me better than anyone I had ever known, and it was perfect – nothing that I ever expected and yet, everything I didn’t know I wanted.
How do I articulate how that wedding has just been a metaphor for our entire life together? I had never expected to be the mother of a child with so many special needs, but being Lily’s mom has fulfilled me in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible. I didn’t know that what I wanted out of life was to live it a little off the expected path. I didn’t know that by loving Jess, a door opened up to an entire life that I would never have known without her. I mean that in far more than the literal sense – of course when you choose another path the course of your life is going to change – but loving Jess changed the person that I am. 10 years ago I loved pink and sparkly jewellery and indulging in whatever my brain thought it wanted at the time. Loving Jess changed the way I look at life; it has changed my priorities, my goals, my voice. Without Jess there would be no Lily, but also no introduction to the world of special needs. I’m not trying to romanticize anything, but I also think of the person I was 10 years ago and how uncomfortable I was dealing with disabilities. Watching Jess, on our first visit to some of her clients, changed everything about how I thought and interacted with people with special needs. I watched and noticed that nothing about her changed: her voice, her actions, her expectations, they were all the same as when she was talking to a group of her friends; with that, something clicked into place. Instead of focusing on how we were different, I truly saw how we are all the same. With the literal opening of that door, my entire life changed.
So that is what I was celebrating last night instead of writing a blog post. On a night that ended up being similar to our most routine nights, I was watching my wife laugh with our daughter in the house that we bought together when we decided we wanted a bigger family. I was celebrating the life I never expected, but the one that is everything that I didn’t know that I wanted.
