Fitting, I wrote this as a draft one year ago today. I never got back to it for one reason or another. Here it is …
I read thousands of words a day – on my computer, phone, in books, on paper and from a million other venues. Words are every where, I’m always reading them. So I don’t know where it was that I read this lately (maybe you can help?) about the change in rhythm when you no longer have infants in the house.
I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, and it’s definitely something we’ve felt the last year. This weird twilight space of realizing once again that we had individual hopes and dreams, that our existence inside of our home was no longer getting through the night or passing the diaper duty off to the other person for a much needed break. We’ve been in a rhythm changing method of life this past year and it’s been hard.
But I think we found something. That when the dust settles from diapers and finger feeding, when independence isn’t the end goal but the reality of life, we still really like each other. I can’t wait to spend time alone with Aaron after the kids are in bed, I even plan things for just the two of us, at home, that we can do together. We enjoy inside jokes together and text’s back and forth through out the day. There’s a new ease to the way we communicate and although it’ll change over and over again in the course of our marriage, this season is a welcome change to the salt block of the past few years.
Licking our wounds through bleary night bed changes and months-long sicknesses, surgeries, travel and huge life changes. When the rarity of a blissful evening, uninterrupted by life’s big questions, was not the norm.
Giddy to sit in our PJ’s and watch reruns of our favorite shows or just read a book, together. We dream about vacations to take and second honeymoon destinations and mostly, right now, about a house. A slide off the deck! A Viking range in the kitchen! Amazing closets and our bedroom on the opposite side of the house from the kids. A playroom, laundry room and offices. Trees, an outbuilding … a deck. A garden. Obviously we’re comfortable dreaming large here and knowing notta thing about where we’ll actually land. It has it’s moments.
On the outside we’re the couple we always thought we’d dread to be, you know … boring? There will come a day when we can sneak away for a weekend without weeks of planning and we’ll be able to grab a pre-show drink or see a hockey game because we have the time. I forgot about all the fun ahead of us in the middle of the storm.
(A year later and this new rhythm … in a HOUSE! … is even better than I thought. I love this life, I am so inlove with Aaron and I love being boring, together.)