Seven Years

In a week, I will be celebrating my seven-year wedding anniversary with Keith. It is so crazy that it has been seven years. On the one hand, the time has gone by so fast it feels like we just met yesterday. On the other hand I think, “Good Lord we have been together forever! How have we not killed each other?” I often say that Keith should be sainted just for putting up with me at all nevermind for vowing to spend the rest of his life with me.

Like with every other annual event that takes place in my life, my upcoming anniversary has me reflecting on the past 8-9 years. I am a little awestruck with how each experience – good, bad, and indifferent – allowed me to arrive here. Whether a person believes in fate or God or something else all together the fact is when you go back and connect the dots forward, from who you were to who you are now, it is hard to believe that there wasn’t some otherworldly force guiding you (or in my case shoving me) on this very specific path.

If someone had asked me nine years ago where I would be today I would have never said here. Here as in NC and here as in married with two children. I never dreamed of getting married. Having kids was something I just figured I would eventually do. I wanted to get out of NY and go back to school and that was about as far as my plan went. Then Keith came into my life. Our story is certainly not a love-at-first-sight-sweep-you-off-your-feet kind of romance. It is also not some drama-filled saga with an epic ending. We were just two people with different backgrounds but the same basic upbringing heading in the same direction just on different paths. I guess you can kind of say we were looking for each other but we didn’t know it. Well at least I didn’t know. For him to tell it he knew from when he met me. How we wound up together is something I still marvel at. I have been asked so many times how I knew I wanted to marry Keith and I get somewhat strange looks when I answer. The truth (and what I always answer) is that I started figuring out all the things that annoyed me about him and they didn’t matter. I knew my life would go on if we weren’t together I just didn’t want to be without him. Not really an answer that brings to mind scenes from “The Notebook,” but our history, in it’s own right, is very touching. Not because it has the makings of the next greatest love story but because it’s ours. And seven years later I can still say the same things…well sort of. The things that annoy me about him matter a little more at times and I go through periods when I think that maybe my life wouldn’t go on without him in it. But the basis of my love is still the same just way more enriched.