Whirlwind Revisited

The boys expect a fresh story every night before bed and Brian has been sharing stories from his childhood, dubbing these tales "The Adventures of Brian and Heather". Brian has his very own version of "George Washington and the Cherry Tree" (except for forgetting to mimic the "could not tell a lie" portion), and some of the sticky situations he and his sister found themselves in? Hilarity ensued.


While these adventures have kept the boys in stitches over the last few months, Brian admitted to me that he was just about out of stories. "What should I tell them now?"


I thought about traditional fairy tales, you know- Goldilocks and the Three Bears and those type of things, but that didn't seem right. Hero tales? Not those either. By coincidence a new story was due the next night
and Brian was out of town leaving me with the storytelling for the evening.


I ended up going with "Let me tell you how Daddy and I met..." which isn't terribly romantic, but then again, little boys don't really care about romantic. The fact that I found their daddy at Wal-mart was apparently a riot.

They did care about the beginning. "Why did you like him?" Ender asked.

"Because he was so kind to me."

And he really was. And he IS.

"And then you got married?"

Yes. But in between the liking and the marrying was the whirlwind that felt so long in that moment and now seems like a vapor.


How long has it been since I revisited our beginning and the reasons why we became we? Why we chose to come together to build our lives, to build a family, to build hope?

I can't recall the last time.

The man asked me to marry him before we even went on a real date, and after that first date came around he was even more certain that this was the real deal. A short seven months later (almost to the day) we were married, and well... almost ten years later finds us here.

It was kind of crazy.

And the mother in me is a little appalled that my mother thought it was perfectly fine.

I'm sure she worried way more than she told me about.

I certainly would have.

But in that young marriage was born this marriage, almost ten years old now. We have messed up and messed up big, but if there is only one thing we have learned in the time we've spent together it is that love isn't in the whirlwind, it's in the time it takes to build true things.

*****

Ann Voskamp invites us to write about the practice of marriage this week. You can read more at A Holy Experience.