Milestones in May

The month of May seems to always be busy.  In addition to nature pulling out all of the stops to send everything into bloom, and send us out to mow our yard potentially more than once a week, May is full of holidays and events.  On top of Mother's day, we have my mother's birthday (often falling on the same day as Mother's Day), my birthday, and our anniversary all within a week or so of each other.  This year Jason and celebrated 8 years of marriage.  I'm not sure it really feels like a big celebration after 8 years.  Mostly it just feels like a day where we are still married, but we manage to escape the house and go out to dinner alone.  We're not big on extravagant celebrations.  I think both of us try to appreciate the every day stuff, so the huge celebrations don't tend to be a necessity.  Sometimes it's nice to just have some time alone.  As strange as it seems, we don't get a lot of that.  Even if we're alone in a room, we're almost never alone in the house, so being able to get out and spend time together is nice.  Sometimes little things mean a lot.

In reality, Jason and I will have been together for 15 years this November, and what I've discovered in that time is that things will almost always change.  Jobs, priorities, housing situations, family, friends, ideals, pretty much everything.  Chances are you will go through periods where you make each other crazy, you will go through periods where you question whether you're drifting apart, you will go through periods where you think life cannot possibly get any more challenging, and periods where you think that every choice or move you are making is wrong.  Then there will be periods where you feel like everything is going so well that you can't possibly get any better.  The thing is, even in those dark periods, which may have nothing to do with your relationship at all, if you can find yourself still wanting to go home to your spouse at the end of the day and tell them everything, you're succeeding.  I find that even after 15 years, and even after an awful fight the night before, all I want in the morning is to wake up next to Jason and start again.  Even if the day brings more arguments because I'm a cranky bitch and he's about as stubborn as they come, he's still the person I'd want to be arguing with.  Even the struggle, as annoying as it is, is worth having if you want to move forward.  All I know is that at the end of every day, the thing I want most is to talk to Jason.  I want to go to bed next to him, and I want to talk about the day.  I want him to talk to me.  In the end, that's probably all that matters.  I just hope that as the years go, we can hold onto that, even if everything else around us changes.  I hope that some day, when he's totally gray, and I'm beginning to shrink and look more like a man than he does, we are happily walking around, hand in hand like those old people up there in the photo.  I hope that in another 15 years, all we want at the end of the day is to come home to each other.  That's all that will matter.