Join Seth, Joy, Scott, and me today as we disclose our fantasies of the future state of our marriages.

Dear Seth,

We aren’t what we expected we would be. I married a youth minister that became a lawyer, for starters. I always imagined having two girls, and then we had 4 boys. I never really thought we would struggle, but we have. We do.

So I know to say that I have a fantasy of what we’ll be when we’ve grown older together, I know that fantasy is a pale shadow compared to what will be, and yet, I imagine any way …

We are on the bayou. The sun rises and sets against the water. The wood ducks live at the edge. I forget a lot. Your rear-end has completely gone and disappeared. I grab for it, often. Surely I’ll find it one day, I wink.

The boys come home and are no less loud than they were when small. In fact they’re louder, have married bold women, had boisterous kids. I watch you with your granddaughter. She has no idea how long we’ve loved her. She has no idea that when I was 8, I wrote in my Hello Kitty journal for her, or that your heart stayed filled with heavy anchors, until the day she was born. She came to be, and you let go of the world, finally.

We have books on birds that we don’t read, and we grow beets, and you have mastered, finally, pad thai. Our children drink wine with us, and we like them, will never tell them how we count the seconds till they get back home, and how we count the seconds until they leave again. They come, and we put chocolate on their pillows.

When you tickle the inside of my hand, I feel twenty. You read out loud to me. I still cry all the time, still stuck a little in the 90’s. Your brown eyes have found the deep. My eyes blur, and behind both of us are kids, kids who’ve grown to love a paradox, and were it not for the weather and pictures, we’d put down technology.

We fill journals again, paper.

We’ve travelled around the world, but we never make it to Paris or even to San Francisco. We’ve made our own secrets of Africa, India, and Tibet. We take photos and label them and make visitors listen, and we’ll know we’re boring them, but we won’t care. We’ll tell the story again and again – how things have fallen apart, how we’ve walked on water, seen the bread multiply. We’ll never stop telling our story. You’ll get the details wrong, and I’ll let it be. Things have a way of settling.

See the baby ducks on the water, the squirrel in the cypress tree. We have a sissy dog, and we call her some terribly cliche name.

Children together, again.

Amber

photo credit

Have you written on marriage lately? Leave us a link in the comments. Tell us, too, what do you imagine for your marriage.

We believe in the power of telling your story. Want to join us next Monday? Fight hard to preserve marriage with us, and next week write with us about your Nightly Rituals. Doesn’t that sound interesting?