Thru good and thru bad, for better or worse

I've realized over time that marriage isn't a fairytale. They leave out that not only the ogre has smelly breath and stinky feet!
They leave out the part about the princess having hormonal rages 2 weeks out of the month....

They didn't mention that there wouldn't be a literal castle, dwarfs to paint the "castle" and animals that magically do the laundry (and we didn't consider their lack of opposable thumbs in our dream).

But despite all the misgivings, there are still some of us that desperately cling to those memories of the first few weeks when the butterflies in your stomach could've turned you into a hovercraft and the photographic blur around your love covered their imperfections like beer goggles.

We also learn to build on those memories of "the beginning". Some of the stones that we use are heavy, made painful blisters that eventually turned to calluses making it easier to endure the hard times, like your "love" contracting the screaming shits virus going around or the birth of a new baby, after the sleep deprivation and depression sets in.

Some of the stones are the light, joyful stones-equally sound in their composition and durability, the stones that represent the surreal experiences that were happy, life altering events like your wedding day, closing on your first home or the day your child was born.

Time and day-to-day routine can eat at the memories and try to drive a wedge into the stones to make you forget why you are where you are and why you at with your love to begin with. It's not always intentional....but if you're not building and revitalizing then it's breaking down.

Sometimes we need memory joggers, be it a scene in a movie that reminds us of finding love, a book that reminds us of the surreal moments, or a couple, going through diificult times, that you see and your heart goes out to because seeing them dug up memories of the whens and whys.

We need time to revitalize.... to build our castle of memories, of the lifetime that we planned, and other things we didn't plan but will endure.... We need times to remember how we got this far and why we started on this fairytale path to begin with without the pollen from the wildflowers clouding our senses.

So...here's to a Sunday kind of love and taking it back to where it all began. Here's to a castle built on a lifetime of memories to leave our children with a rich inheritance....knowing that we not only did it for them but out of love for one another.

May we never forget that.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]