(six, five, four, three, two, [and my personal favorite] one)
We've been married seven years today. Mike's out of town, I have a work dinner tonight, and it's Monday. Seven years ago today was a wee bit more magical than actual today. (And seven years ago today had an open bar, which today absolutely does not have. SIDE EYE TO TODAY.)
It's our copper anniversary and I had big plans of surprising Mike with fancy new copper kitchen pots, but then Molly got sick to the tune of multiple thousands of dollars (!!!) right after we got back from an international vacation, so yeah. Pots will have to wait. Instead I spent half an hour searching for pennies from each year we've been married so I could glue them into the shape of a seven. Here babe! I got you eight pennies that you can never actually spend!
I heard a line from a movie recently (About Time), and I teared up, like the ridiculous sap that I will always be, but this is precisely how I feel about Mike. I'm paraphrasing, but...
I am so uninterested in a life without him.
Mike and I have been to St. John and Belize and Puerto Rico and Canada and all over the U.S., but it was just the other night, sitting in a booth at Chili's five miles from our house when he made me laugh so hard I was reminded that he is just my favorite place. Traveling, not traveling, drinking cheap wine at Chili's or pina coladas in Belize, paying bills or holding hands. He's it. Life is life and love is him. (Even when I need a girl's night away from him. I'm still glad he's the one waving me out the door and into the arms of a margarita with friends.)
Last year was a hard year. A lot of unbloggable, stupid life stuff, but I struggled. Stressed out, snappy, emotional, yada yada. And Mike was just there. Just asking what he could do, telling me to go take a break when he sensed I was too tightly wound, wrapping me in a hug even when he wasn't quite sure why I was so badly in need of one. I want it all to make sense and to be fixable but it can't always be, such is life, and when it can't be, he says to me the same thing over and over, "It will all work out. It will all be okay."
And it will. With him, it will.
Our lives are not always easy or fun or romantic or any of those adjectives our wedding day made us hope our every day lives would be. Very few days have that open bar, for example.
But, damn, I'm just so uninterested in a life without him.
Happy copper anniversary, babe! Here are a handful of pennies you can never spend, but I bet you tell me you love them and I bet you mean it.