My husband, Adam, and I recently celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. Well. We didn’t so much celebrate as co-exist and co-parent as usual, with our anniversary in mind. About a week earlier, I admitted to him that I hadn’t bought a gift or even thought about dinner reservations or a babysitter. “Thank god,” he said. “Me either.”
We were both ragged from over-stuffed schedules, late nights finishing what didn’t get done during the day. So we ended up agreeing to just spend time together, in whatever form the day allowed. That amounted to us picking up our daughter from school together, then the three of us getting smoothies and browning the craft store by our house.
Adam and I kept catching each other’s gaze to joke about our “hot date” and laugh about how much has changed in the almost-three years since we had a kid. Three years ago, we would’ve had dinner reservations a month in advance, someplace over-the-top we’d wanted to try or likely would have already tried once or twice. There would be champagne, not smoothies. My black suede clutch instead of the diaper bag. His freshly-steamed slacks instead of gym shorts.
But things have changed. Things Have Changed™. One of several early-parenting through-lines that invites us to binge on nostalgia, to remember the past in a sensual neon glow while shining the harsh, white light of day on the un-glamourous realities of parenting a young child.
And underneath the nostalgia, more insidious questions about ourselves, our marriage: will I recognize myself as we move from this intense, life-altering stage into the next, will we recognize each other, the people we fell in love with? Will we make it?
Ironically, it’s days like our anniversary, when we’re steeped in the mundane but still determined to enjoy it, to be together, that I have the most certainty about our marriage. They remind me that intimacy comes in many forms. It doesn’t have to look like face-to-face conversations over the soft glow of restaurant votives or long weekend mornings in bed together (though, my god, I’d be willing to hire a small team to achieve one or both of those things right now).
In many ways, the mundane realities of early parenthood offer a deeper intimacy than we had before, one that challenges us to accept and care for each other in new ways. Like the way Adam would sit next to me while I nursed Olivia, wiping the sweat from the back of my neck and between the crook of my elbow and the baby’s cheek with a damp cloth. Or how we each hold one of my daughter’s hands in the parking lot, both of us keeping her body safe with ours, together. This intimacy is more interdependent, instinctual, corporeal.
In our marriage vows, we promised to weave our lives together, to walk side-by-side into the future. Back then, I don’t think either of us realized how intertwined two people could possibly get. How the enormous work of raising a child sometimes requires our bodies to become extensions of each other’s. How much we’ve traded our individual consciousness for a partnered one, how that has shifted our goals, our worldview. How much we’ve each course corrected from our individual paths to a shared one.
So I wrote new marriage vows, more reflective of this new intimacy, of the life we share right now. They’re a littler saucier than my original vows. Actually, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t use these at our actual wedding. But maybe a vow renewal…
Let me love you so hard that I say goodbye each morning with a grip that defies time. Let me pour the depths of my heart into your ear in hot-breathed whispers. Let me tell you just how much I want from this life I’ve bound to yours, how much I want for me and you. Let me give you a taste of my burning hunger, the one I’ve hidden from every other soul for fear they’ll think I want too much, too recklessly. Let me feast on your tenderness as it falls off the bone. Let me bottle up your sureness and drink it like tonic. Meanwhile, let me smooth the rough patches and stitch the details together with invisible thread. Together, let us drive into the glittering horizon of the unknown with nothing but desire and lead feet and the warmth of our elbows brushing against one another, for as long as we can.
