A Lifetime

Life has been so chaotic in these last few weeks leading up to the wedding, that I thought I should take a minute to remember what it is I am doing getting married in the first place. And why. I was never one of those girls who dreamed about her wedding since childhood or envisioned every last detail of the event. I am just so incredibly amazingly happy to have found my partner. My life partner. I can't tell you how lucky I feel and how grateful I am to love and to be loved in return by this man. And while I am excited about celebrating our life together and toasting to forever, our partnership, our marriage will be so much more than a wedding, so much more than flowers, table cloth colors, center pieces or veil lengths. Our marriage will be a lifetime.

A lifetime of joy and laughter and love. Yes, I know there will be hardship involved, and there will be plenty of tears along with many smiles, and there will be dark periods and low valleys to accompany the hills and blinding sunshine. There will be teenagers, and lots of them for years and years and years and there will be anxiety and fear, but there will also be loud family dinners and endless achievements to celebrate and new challenges to face, but they will be good challenges and we will all grow stronger because of them. And then someday there will be new loves to welcome into our family as our babies build their own partnerships and plan their own weddings. And then there will be grand kids, potentially lots and lots of them, and everything will shift, everything will be different once again. But through it all there will be this man and this woman who will work together like crazy to make sense of it all. This man and this woman, who will love each other along the way no matter what.

So, yes, I am excited for our wedding, but really I am ECSTATIC about our lifetime.