The Clueless but Hopeful Couple.

It's been 6 years since CG and I officially joined our lives together. We had no idea where our promise would take us and we still don't. So far it has brought us here: to a house we (I mean "the bank") owns, a dog asleep on my foot, a daughter asleep in the other room, a city we barely know right outside our windows. Then, I was a dancer and a massage therapist. Now I'm a Pilates instructor and a mom. Then, CG was a grad student with long curly hair. Now he's got some shorter curls, a PhD and a pilot's license. With each year, we get further away from those two kids we see in the wedding pictures.

(Why yes, that IS me getting my armpits blotted by my maid of honor.)
(Oh for F's sake. I can't get my photo to rotate and stay rotated once it's uploaded so just turn your head to the side to view wedding picture goodness, k?)

Sometimes I forget how far we've come until something happens to remind me, like on Friday watching a young man- a groom-to-be?- rush out of the tuxedo shop yelling into his cellphone "Chill the F OUT!" (perhaps to his bride-to-be?) or like today, getting an email from C, a college friend. The same exact college friend who is responsible for CG and me getting together. If it weren't for C telling CG to get in touch with me (merely a mutual college acquaintance of little importance) when he moved to the SF bay area, then we probably never would have fallen in love and gotten married.

Now C is a new father and a little... freaked. His email brought those first few months of parenthood crashing back for me. The strange and terrifying emotions that roiled inside me. The fear that breeding had been just a colossal mistake, that life as we knew it was over. The distance and tension and animosity between CG and me as we tried to navigate the tides of terror and exhaustion and confusion.

We rode them together, not knowing what we were doing, trying to love, support and forgive one another. We weathered it all, trusting that somehow we could do this together.

Every day we start anew. Every day we chose to be here. Every day we greet the little girl we made together and find yet another reason why we're here.

(Hang in there, C.)