30 years...

Beginnings...
Chomedey, Laval, QC
July 5, 1992
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The two kids you see here got married 30 years ago today.

And when I say “the two kids”, I really mean us.

It feels like a blink because it has indeed been a blink. Which, I guess, is what happens when you marry your best friend. It feels like it bends time. Makes it slip into history faster, even.

And while we’ve never been blinded to the fact that marriage, like life, isn’t supposed to be easy or guaranteed or automatic, and demands constant attention and care, we’re also keenly aware of just how lucky we are to have found what we’ve found.

The journey has had its crazy moments, times where we’ve stared at the ceiling and wondered what we’d do next. But it’s also had its magical moments, where I’d stare at her staring right back at me and I knew all was right with the world, that we’d somehow figure it out. I can’t imagine having gone through any of this without her.

We’ve always been communicators, and it started right from when we met as teenagers, sitting on the phone all night talking about everything and nothing, all at the same time. Or talking on the front porch, also well into the wee hours, about whatever we felt the future might bring.

Or sometimes not even talking at all, often for hours at a stretch, yet somehow sharing more in the silence than we ever could in words.

The communication thing has proved helpful as we’ve crafted a family and a universe of our own. Our kids are so much like her - empathetic, sensitive, creative, driven - and watching them come into their own has been the joy of our lives.

I get that some people search their lifetimes and don’t find it, whatever “it” is. I get that I was blessed enough to have found “it”, her, before I was old enough to fully appreciate what I had. I get that our story is the exception.

And I’ve had 30 years to learn, to figure it out, to pick my way through this life thing alongside someone who gets it, gets me, and finds new ways to get me to love her. I’ve often said I don’t deserve her, and she’s just as often admonished me for even thinking it. She’s right. I should listen to her more often. Working on it.

Soon after we first met, she visited me at the pool - I was a lifeguard, she was a camp counsellor - and we chatted while we were on break. I don’t recall what we spoke about, but to this day I can describe the look on her face, the tone in her voice, the feeling I had that this wasn’t just another idle chat with a teenaged colleague.

I watched her as she walked back down the hall, and I felt a flutter in my stomach. Not a day goes by when I don’t feel that same flutter, that same shoulder-tap from the universe that this - and she - is extraordinary, and I’m immeasurably lucky that she chose me.

30 years on, we’re not “there” yet, which is as it should be. No one knows what may or may not happen tomorrow, but with that telltale flutter in my tummy, I’ll get to figure it out alongside her.

Lucky me. Lucky all of us.

#ldnont #LiveLaughLevy #family #everything