Love Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry

Way back when, 1970 to be exact, a film called Love Story was released. The film was based on a novel by Erich Segal and featured Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal as Ivy League college students who fall hopelessly in love. I won't spoil it for you except to say it's a case of wrong side of the tracks, and quite possibly one of the saddest movies ever to hit the big screen.

I was 10 years old in 1970 so I didn't see the movie until it had been out a few years. Love Story was rated PG, and in 1970 most parents didn't allow allow their ten year old daughters to see movies with a PG rating, but I digress.

Back around Valentine's Day I heard some folks on the radio bantering about a line made popular in this film. It was voted by The American Film Institute as #13 in its list of most quoted movie lines, and the line is this-

'Love means never having to say you're sorry.'

Has that been your experience because I have to say it has not been mine?

Since we've hit letter L in the A-Z Blog Challenge today, I thought now would be a good time to weigh in on that big little word-

L is for Love

We don't have to wonder what love looks like. A picture perfect portrait of the word was painted by the apostle Paul centuries ago, and while these statements play out in all sorts of ways within individual marriages, they remain universally true. 

Love is patient.
Love is kind.
It doesn't envy or boast.
It's not arrogant or rude. 
It does not insist on its own way. 
It's not irritable or resentful. 
It keeps no record of wrongs. 

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

Does any other married person out there squirm just a little when they read those simple statements? Those verses were read on our wedding day back in 1984, and as I listed them here I did a quick mental inventory of my expertise as a wife-ha! It seems I fall short on a few of those on a pretty regular basis, maybe even every day.

Living out all the pieces of that picture every single day is hard. When you live with another person love is tested in a hundred ways a thousand times a day. It's easy to feel impatience with your spouse, easier to sometimes treat perfect strangers with more kindness than we treat the person we married. We look around and think we want more, better, different. We get mad.  Easily. Past hurts and the mistakes you or your spouse have made can spin like a film reel inside your head.

Love is many things, but it is for sure not 'never having to say you're sorry'.

Love is waking up every day purposing to be all those things you weren't the day before.
Love is letting some things go and making dinner instead.
Love is a million small acts of kindness sprinkled across a lifetime.

Love means always having to say you're sorry.

There's power in those words. Left unsaid, small annoyances turn into something much bigger than they ought to be. And without somebody saying those words, truly big issues will begin to take up all the space in the room until it feels like there's none left for the two of you. 

In marriage the words "I'm sorry" will be uttered hundreds, if not thousands of times, and that's a good thing. Those two little words are what help us live out the last part of that verse-

They allow trust to grow.
They offer hope.
They make you want to persevere.

Kids!

You knew I would get around to this one eventually.

K is for Kids

My theme for this year's A-Z Blog Challenge is loosely entitled-Married with Children. Mostly I'm trying to focus on the married piece of that three word phrase, but the 'with children' portion is worth mentioning here too.  

I think there are two or three make or break issues in determining if someone is right for you, and one of those issues would be children. As in, yes we both want children someday, or no we're both very certain we don't want children ever. People can and do change their minds of course, but I tell my daughters to assume the way he feels now will still be true ten years from now.

Can you live with that?

If you know going in you're on opposite ends of the spectrum in your feelings about having children, and you get married hoping and praying your spouse will change his mind, well you're setting yourself up for heartache, and potentially a break up down the road.

Marriages quite naturally change once kids are added to the mix. Children open up a well inside of you whose depths you were unsure of prior to those little creatures burrowing their way into your heart and home.  There  have been moments since having children where I thought my heart might literally burst from the joy I feel inside. Becoming parents adds a depth and richness to the relationship between husband and wife that is a remarkable thing.

It also adds conflict, stress, and layers of complexity and need, that didn't exist before you had children. Only someone who has never been awakened six times in a seven hour stretch of the dark dead of night would say they were going to have a baby to make an ailing marriage better.

I don't know about you but my level of snappiness and impatience (with everyone, but my husband in particular) rises in direct proportion to how much or how little sleep I'm getting. When Daughter2 was a newborn there were many days I felt like I'd been steamrolled. Literally run over with a steam roller. I remember once bursting into tears at a family dinner, and my sister (who didn't have children at the time) asking why I was crying.  I screeched back, 'Because I've gone 56 nights in a row without more than two consecutive hours of uninterrupted sleep, that's why!!'

I was a delight.
Hubs was tired too.

He had a job with a long brutal commute, and gobs of travel. I was on my own a lot with a baby who didn't sleep and a toddler who wanted my attention. Hubs loved his girls to the moon and back, but I'm sure he was secretly grateful for a business trip with a quiet hotel stay every now and then.

I mean it with every fiber of my being when I say those early days of parenthood were glorious days, kissed by the sun and full of magic. But there were hours amidst the golden that were just plain hard, and those hours could feel neverending at times. Stress and beauty go hand in hand in the world of raising children, and not just when they're babies either. Kids get bigger and so do the demands of raising them. I think those late teen into early adult years might just be the most challenging of them all, yet in many ways they're also the most rewarding.

Parenting is best played as a team sport, because sometimes it's survival of the fittest-ha! In the early years divide and conquer works since you're bigger than your offspring, but rest assured as they grow and mature you will too. You'll discover where your hubs strengths and weaknesses lie in the parenting department, and he'll come to know yours. You zig and zag in a lifelong dance that requires gentle strength, finesse, and humor.

More than 25 years after we first marveled at our newborn baby girl, I still like the boy I married. That may sound a little silly to say, but it matters. A lot. There is great value in remaining connected as husband and wife apart from the bond you share as parents.

Because in what feels like all of a sudden, it's just the two of you again.

I'm pretty sure you never stop caring, loving, forgiving, guiding, praying and listening to your children. What those actions might look like in practice changes, but that well they cracked open inside of you is still wide open. Your heart remains ever exposed and vulnerable to your child's hopes and dreams and hurts and heartaches, even when that 'child' is 20-something. Or fifty-something my mom would say.

Easter, 1992

Being a parent has been the greatest joy of my life.
Parenting alongside my hubs has only made it sweeter.

Jukebox Hero

A friend commented that my topic for this year's A-Z Blog Challenge is a little tricky to write about, and she's right. My brain is officially strained. Marriage is an institution, yet how that institution is lived out behind closed doors is deeply personal.

I don't want to sound preachy.
I don't want to sound like I'm lecturing.
I definitely don't want to sound cheesy.

A conundrum.

Pretty sure I'm not completely avoiding all the above, but no matter where my rambling thoughts take me, I always have my daughters in mind as I write those thoughts down.

Except today.
Today is more for the hubs.
He'll get this.

If I asked you for the soundtrack to your marriage what songs would you include? Mine would be too lengthy for a blog post (even I have my limits!), so I'm going to list just five here today.

Just five.
Can I list just five?
We'll see.

We listen to a lot of music in our house. We keep a running list of our all time top 100, periodically tweaking when we hear an oldie we'd forgotten, or run across a new song we love. Music has the power to change my mood, my focus, my day. I think its kind of amazing the way a particular song can carry you back to a place in time, or evoke a memory that's happy, sad, or most often a little bit of both.

Some of my song choices won't make a lot of sense to you reading here, but they make perfect sense to me and the hubs. These aren't necessarily songs whose lyrics apply to our life, but rather they're songs we associate with a particular season of life. They're songs that when we hear them play, we look for each other to share a smile. Or a sigh. Or hubs grabs my hand and we dance even if its in our own kitchen, because these songs mean something to us, and that something can't really be explained in words.

So much of married life is like that.

When I look back at a lifetime spent together I realize I almost always see the years in chunks of time. There were the college years. Dating. Falling in love. Marriage. Then came the little girl years. The Bay years. The England years. And now.

I tend to think of our music as belonging to those same chunks of time too. Somehow I've whittled my list down to just five, but wow that was hard. Just five songs out of so many I associate with more than three decades of him and me.

I could list five hundred, but ain't nobody got time for that!

J is for Just Five

1980-1987

I Just Wanna Stop by Gino Vannelli



1988-1997

Baby I Need Your Lovin' by The Four Tops



1998-2003

How Forever Feels by Kenny Chesney



2003-2009

White Flag by Dido



2009-2104

Everything by Michael Buble



I like that last song especially. After 30 years as man and wife it's good to still be someone's everything. Good to have someone be yours too.

If you're inclined to leave a comment today, I'd love to know a song or two that would be featured on your soundtrack. Have a great weekend everyone!

Imagine That

I'm using my Thursday A-Z Challenge posts as an excuse to post some throwback photos. Today I'm throwing it all the way back to 1984.

I is for Insurance. Improvise. Innocent. Un-Imaginable.

Yes you are seeing that correctly, and you might be wondering why in the world we'd ever have taken a picture like this one. The reason is simple-insurance.

We were newlyweds and we bought something called Renter's Insurance because we were renters, and grown ups told us we should get some. We certainly wouldn't have wanted anything to happen to valuables like this one now, would we?

Actually no we wouldn't, because to a couple of kids starting out on their own, replacing a television  would have cost money we didn't have. I think the VCR was free. Or rather hubs earned it in some sort of incentive challenge at work. Yay hubs! So we took this picture, and more like it, of everything we owned. We signed up at the bank for our first safety deposit box, and we tucked those photos carefully inside in case we ever had to file an insurance claim. We didn't.

The TV is sitting on a wooden box, which I'm pretty sure no insurance company could replace-ha! I'm not sure where that box came from, but it might have been on someones curb prior to being in our living room. When I looked at this picture I noted it was crooked, but try as I might I couldn't get it straightened. Pretty sure its not the picture that's crooked. I think it's more likely the box wasn't 100% square, and consequently the TV sat a little off center.

Hey kids! In 1984 TVs had antennae! And dials! In 1984 you spent a lot of time standing in front of your TV wiggling the antenna this way and that to make the picture better. And turning the channel dial until you landed on something to watch. Don't feel sorry for us though. It's not like there were 300 to choose from. Back in 1984 you had the three major networks, PBS, and if you were lucky, UHF which gave you a couple of extra stations. Good times!

They were good times. They were innocent in the sense that your life together was out there for the making. They were the beginnings of your happily ever after.

Do you see the plant off to the side? In 1984 plants were 'furniture'. When you don't have a lot of furniture you learn to improvise, and great big plants were ideal space fillers. This one belonged to hubs brother's girlfriend. I'm not precisely sure how we ended up with it but we did, and that plant moved with us to six different homes in five different states. We had to give it away when we moved overseas, but if they'd let me put it on the shipment I would have.

In 1984 most newly marrieds didn't go to Pottery Barn and completely furnish houses they owned. Most couples we knew were living very much like us-in rented apartments filled with hand me down furniture and big houseplants to fill in the gaps. It was grand. I mean that.

It makes me smile when I think about our first home and the kids who lived there. It may have been an unremarkable two bedroom apartment, but it felt warm and cozy to us. What it lacked in the way of  elegant furnishings was more than made up for in rooms filled with love and possibility and big dreams just waiting to come true.

This December marks thirty years since I first sat as a Mrs. in front of our Christmas tree. That tree, like our apartment, was a little light on decoration. Like it knew to leave room for the little girl hand prints and the fragile Big Ben ornament and all the life lived that hangs there now.

I'm glad we started small. I'm glad we figured it out as we went along. I'm glad for the memory of our slightly under dressed first home, and the soft place from which a couple of kids were launched into a future that was all they imagined.

Plus a whole lot more.

Hijinks and Hilarity in the A-Z

We think we're funny.
And we are.
At least to us we are-ha!

To people outside these four walls maybe not so much, but it's what happens inside these four walls that's important. I knew in writing about the topic of marriage I would want to say something about humor, but what?

Hi Girls-

Marry men who have a sense of humor.

Love,
Mom

There. Done.

Okay, not really but pretty much. I mean if you have a sense of humor you understand this sentiment, and if you don't, well then it's likely you're scratching your head in bewilderment at this entire post.

As you live out the years of a marriage, you'll discover that some days are pure magic, and others are something less than that. The boy you adored on your wedding day? Well he's going to irritate you every once in a while. The good news is, if he's able to interject some humor into moments where the air is thick, then it's likely your irritation won't last. You might wish it would, but it's awfully hard to stay angry when laughter is bubbling to the surface.

Humor helps you remember why you loved him in the first place. 

In life there are situations that come up where we all take ourselves just a little bit too seriously. Having a spouse who helps you laugh at your own ridiculousness is a good thing. That isn't the same thing as one who laughs at you, which I don't believe is ever a good thing. But one who makes you laugh when you're overly tired, stressed, put upon, or hormonal? Yes that is a good thing.

Humor helps you regain perspective when it feels like the world is against you.  

It's safe to say that nobody leaves planet Earth without feeling hurt or disappointment from time to time. Humor can lift a road-weary spirit, make you smile when you feel like crying, remind you that even in the middle of something hard it still feels good to laugh.

Humor helps soothe life's sharp corners and rough edges. 

Then there are your children. Little beings you love more than life itself who occasionally do something requiring your super serious-I mean business-mom face when you confront them, but whose words and antics you and your spouse will laugh out loud over once they've gone to bed.

Words and antics you'll tell and re-tell through the years, around the dinner table, at assorted family gatherings. Where you'll say 'remember that time...' and everyone will nod and laugh at the memory of a shared experience.

Humor is bonding. 

Who else in this world can love and appreciate the funny little people who grow big under your roof besides the co-contributor to their DNA?

H is for Sense of Humor

Don't get married without one! 

Showers of Hodgepodge

Welcome to this week's edition of the Wednesday Hodgepodge.  If you're here visiting from the A-Z Blog Challenge, please know my post for the letter H will be up here shortly. Or longly? Sometime Wednesday, how's that?

A note to Hodgepodgers-remember next week is Spring Break in the Hodgepodge, so no link on April 16th. The Hodgepodge will be back to its regularly scheduled programming the week of April 23rd. Thank you for understanding!

Okay, here we go...my answers to this week's questions-

1. April showers bring May flowers or so the saying goes. When did you last 'shower attention on someone or have attention 'showered' on you? Did you love it or did all that attention make you squirm?

I think it was back in December when we celebrated my sister's BIG birthday the day after Christmas.  My whole family was here for the holidays, and Daughter2 made the most amazing pig cake for her aunt who collects pigs, and I bought a tiara for the birthday girl and personalized M & M's for everyone.  So fun! 

Hubs grilled steaks and we all enjoyed making a fuss over one of the absolute sweetest girls I know. I think my sister loved being the center of attention, which is as it should be on your birthday!  

2. Share a favorite 'spring break' memory.  Not talking about just the college 'spring break' thing, but any favorite spring break memory you'd like to share. Keep it family friendly please!

College was fun, but I'm not going to say college. And when our girls were young we typically didn't travel over spring break. As they entered their teens we took some trips, because we lived in Europe then, and the school gave them a two week term break.  Plenty of time for exploring somewhere. 

I think as far as favorites go, its a toss up between a trip around the Normandy region of France- 

or a hiking holiday in Dartmoor with the hubs-

Both locations were fabulous and memorable in their own way. 

3. It's National Pecan Month...are you a fan? If so, what's your favorite dish that calls for pecans?

I do like pecans, and have several recipes I could mention here. One favorite would be a sour cream coffee cake I make that has a brown sugar and pecan filling/topping. So scrumptious!

4. 'Put all your eggs in one basket', 'egg on your face', rotten egg', 'walk on eggshells' or 'a good egg'...which eggs-pression could most recently be applied to your own life?

How about 'a good egg'. That's my hubs. Last week I wrote a blog post listing some of my do's and don'ts for married life. I mentioned doing the little things, and in passing said that something as small as hubs buying me a PayDay candy bar just because he knows I like them makes me love him more.

On Sunday afternoon when I got in my car, I saw this.

A PayDay on the dashboard. He's a good egg. I think I'll keep him.

5. In my experience__________________________________________.

...spring is never quite as warm and sunny as I'd like it to be in Northern New Jersey. 

6. What's a favorite song with the word rain in its title or lyrics?

Well I'm a CCR fan, so Have You Ever Seen The Rain was the first thing that came into my head. Fire and Rain by James Taylor ranks a close second. And in the Country Music genre I love Ronnie Millsaps Smokey Mountain Rain. 

7. What does the word hope mean to you?

My favorite word. 

I love the song In Christ Alone..."no power of hell, no scheme of man, can ever pluck me from His hand...'.  Those words ring true, and fill me with hope, which in my mind means expecting something in the future that is better than what we presently know. 

While I don't think hope is always rooted in the spiritual, I know that's how I most often think of, and use the term. My hope lies in the promise of a risen Savior, and with that promise comes not just expectation, but also certainty. What God has promised for eternity will come to be. 

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." Revelation 21:4 

8.  Insert your own random thought here.

Last weekend we finally got out for a walk in the woods with our pup.  It was cold and gusty, but Carpe Diem. Actually there are buds on the trees overhead, and ice on the pond underfoot. 

Spring in Northern NJ. 
A paradox.

G is for Go For the Gusto

If you're looking for the Hodgepodge questions, you'll find them here. 

So I'm something of a chicken. About a lot of things. This may surprise some of you reading here who take note of our international travels and our moving overseas with teenagers and our penchant for going-seeing-doing, but it's true. And you may wonder how a chicken copes.  

She marries a rooster, that's how.

And the rooster sometimes needs to grab his chicken by the arm (wing?) and say, 'You're going to love this!' 

And sometimes she does.  

Other times not so much, but at least she didn't miss it, right?

One of the things I've learned to appreciate about married life is the way hubs and I can approach new situations from opposite mindsets, and meet somewhere pretty close to the middle in a place that works for us. I think it's called compromise. Hubs no longer immediately leaps at all things new, and I resist immediately digging in my heels thereby forcing him to convince me xyz really will be a good thing.  

Hubs recognizes that sometimes my sense of caution is warranted.
I appreciate his spirit of adventure.

I would never have suggested we move overseas with children entering adolescence. I'm sure if I'd been given the offer, I would have allowed my initial reaction to rule the day.  My initial reaction went something like this-We can't do that. We've got teenagers. What about my job? What about high school? Driving? The Distance? The Metric System? The Adjusting? 

What about everything???

Without hubs encouragement, his confidence in our ability to work as a team, the way he says just what I need to hear in order to feel brave, well I would have missed the most fun adventure of my life so far.

I appreciate the way hubs not only participates in life, but embraces it wholeheartedly.

And he respects my need for a little more information, to see what something might look like before I commit.

As my daughters have become young adults I've realized that I want them to be more rooster than chicken. It took me until the age of 43 to truly understand that life is an adventure, and that adventure doesn't have to equal danger. When it does, then by all means be more chicken, but most opportunities that have come our way have not been physically dangerous. They've been mentally and emotionally challenging, experiences that have stretched and grown me in ways I'm glad I grew.

Sitting in suburbia its so easy for me to forget there's s a great big world out there. A world full of people and experiences and incredible beauty made by the One who holds it all in His hands. I want my daughters to know it's okay to put geography between us in order to follow God's path for their lives.  

That path may lead them to a house around the corner.

Or to a corner around the world.  

Somehow I think it will be more the latter, and while that is a little bit scary I'm honestly not afraid. I  know God has not only prepared my daughters for the lives they will live, He has also prepared me.

I'm thankful I married a rooster.
He helps me see there's an awful lot of living to be done outside the coop.