Mike and I are rapidly approaching our 7th wedding anniversary this Monday.
It feels like it's been soooooo much longer than that. And if we're being honest, it has.
In fact, Mike doesn't think it's "fair" to only celebrate seven years since in Spring, we'll have been together for twelve. How is that even possible??? Twelve years. I'm not even 30.
Mike's dad referred to us as "highschool sweethearts" this past weekend which seemed foreign to me... Mike and I never went to a dance together, never attended a football game as a couple, never held hands in the hallway (fine by me since it went against my strict No Boyfriend Will Ever Distract Me policy - that policy failed miserably right around the time we graduated from high school, by the way). At the time we met in January of '99, I had graduated early but was still hanging around the halls out of boredom and often in jogging pants. Superclassy fo sho.
And that's how we met. My friend said this is my other friend, Mike, and we were together almost every day since. End of story, I was sold.
But my God it has been the most up-and-down 12 years of my life.
We have been through so much together.
We started out with that crazy fun spark and Mike was my reason for disobeying my parents and ditching out on my college classes. Not good, but fun.
Then I started to grow up and realized we needed a place of our own and to get real jobs. Mike went to college and got his degree. I worked full-time (as a stipulation of our rental agreement, we could only have one student). We got our money situation under control. Or started to. At that point, I was still playing the "I'll pay this bill this month and the other utility bill next month" game when paychecks fell short.
It made for some fun "conversations."
We fought over money. We fought over drinking. We fought over jealousy. There were holes punched in doors and nights when Mike would disappear with friends and be hungover through the next morning. I became overly sensitive to everything and suspected him of cheating on me with any girl he talked about more than once. I had never been so scared of losing someone in my life, and I didn't like who I had turned into. We were still young - only just 21 - and had a lot of maturing to do... (I'm so thankful that's not who we are anymore).
But that was only a tiny explosive fraction of our lives. Most days, we snuggled on the couch and watched our free cable and ate Shells N Cheese with broccoli or watched Shawshank Redemption and ate pretzels and cheese dip. Or we spent weekends at my parents' house watching Packer Games with my family. Or we walked around the mall and held hands (my policy was shattered by that point).
By the time we were engaged in January of 2002 and had the wedding planned, things had gotten so much better between us. Even so, Mike was ready to postpone the wedding. I don't blame him. I was tired and he was worried that we were too young, not to mention we were both present and paying attention through the stress of the previous three years. I told him through sobbing tears, Fine, cancel the wedding. But YOU have to call my parents and tell them.
He quickly changed his mind, and I still laugh about how I "scared" him into marrying me.
Then Fall of 2003 came.
Mike finished college and got a new job.
And we were married.
Things were different... a little the same, too. Good and bad. We moved into a different place and started feeling like a family more than two kids living together.
It was around that time I knew we really loved each other and weren't just "playing house." (You would think most people would figure that out before getting married, but I liked to do things the hard way.) Things were really good.
And then someone made the brilliant decision in Summer of 2004 that we should try to have a baby. Because it might take a year or more and oh my we'd better hurry up and get on that.
Two weeks and a few margaritas later, I was pregnant.
Twenty-three years old and I was knocked up, and just before we had planned on moving in with my parents to save money for a house.
I also realized that baby would have to make its way OUT of my belly. I was so scared. One thing I can say about Mike was that he was worried about me more than I was worried about myself, but he always stayed strong and never freaked out.
Even when the ultrasound 12 weeks later showed three tiny heartbeats instead of one.
I have never seen him happier. Before leaving the OB office, Mike was already planning how to share the news with our family. Then he scanned our ultrasound pictures and headed to Target to show his ex-coworkers the good news (I headed instead to the jewelry store where I worked... a customer walked in and said That's so funny cuz there's a guy on the other side of town at Target showing off pictures of a triplet ultrasound to everyone. To which I laughed, Ummm... yeah, that's my husband.)
Mike talked to my stomach every night. He chatted mostly with Kristin - the littlest peanut. She was his favorite simply because he was scared that she was so little. He wanted to help her grow. (He also named her, I might add.)
The babies came, in the early hours of a cold, icy January night. They were way too early.
Mike followed them to the NICU and watched as the nurses resuscitated Kristin and intubated the two smallest babies, sticking wires and needles into their tiny bodies. He stood off to the side, helpless and nervous. I was down in recovery, so Mike took our camera up and snapped my first view of our babies.
He loved those girls so much from the first second we knew they existed.
The first couple years of having kids was beyond hard. I struggled to keep the house clean enough that it wouldn't be condemned, and Mike worked looooooong hours to support our family financially.
The noise level in the house was intolerable at times. We both were burnt out.
We started fighting again - mostly over the state of the house - and there were times I was sure I'd be better off walking out the door with the kids and never looking back. I didn't. Obviously. I knew that - logically - things would get better as the kids got older. If we could only make it a couple more years...
Things did get better. As the kids grew up, it was easier to keep the house clean. I actually scrubbed my kitchen floors at one point several times a week! Hallelujah! I started taking online courses when the girls were 18 months old. I encouraged Mike to go out with friends and golf. I thought it was important we had something to do and talk about besides work and the kids.
And things got easier for Mike. He was less stressed because it wasn't quite so overstimulating when he walked in the door. I was able to have supper cooked some nights without feeling like I could stab myself in the neck.
Instead of having the traditional "date night," we would buy DVDs and watch them once the kids were in bed. That might be how we ended up with about 700 movies...
We started paying attention to each other again. I found myself going out of my way to do nice things for Mike just because I wanted to see him smile.
And as I heard about parents of multiples getting divorced, I wasn't shocked one bit. This shit was hard. I'm not talking regular "Oh this job is so stressful, I wish I could get a new one" hard. I'm talking "If I had the choice between having one more day of this or death, I'd sit in the car and start it on fire" hard. I felt that we had somehow beaten the odds, either from luck or sheer stubbornness and massochism.
When we hit our limit, it was our shared sense of humor that got us through. I would look at a child with stinky, slimy shit all the way up her back and on the sheets, and we would look at each other and burst out laughing at the absolute horror and helplessness in the situation.
And as we approach seven or twelve years together, I can joke about our love and/or marriage.
Because it hasn't always been both, at least on the surface. When I look back now, I know I had faith that we loved each other and would see that on the other side, no matter how bad things got. And when things were good? I would nod to myself that it was worth it.
Over the last week, Mike has been off of work - it's just how his schedule works - and we've always been amazingly stressed by the end of it. The kids are loud and needy, and while I'm used to it from 5+ years of listening to whining, Mike would reach his limit. He would get owly and joke Are you ready for me to go back to work? about 4 days in. Of course I'd say Yes...
Things were different this week, and I can see a new phase of our lives coming. The girls are in school, and Mike and I had - for the first time in almost six years - the opportunity to spend hours and HOURS together by ourselves. We went to lunch. We snuggled and rolled around like teenagers. We watched movies in our pajamas, eating pretzels and cheese.
Just like old times.
Except better.
Seven years better.
Happy Anniversary, Mike... I wouldn't have had it any other way.
then unpacked at school and sat down in the pack of little people, I felt like I was spinning in circles and barely had the mental capacity to remember to say goodbye to my children before dashing off to freedom. 
