All The Blessed Things We Didn't Know When We Got Married

My friend’s daughter is planning her wedding. The bride-to-be has visualized every detail of her big day. There will be fences draped in icicle lights and tiny bow-topped boxes filled with treats for their guests. They have tested several flavors of punch searching for the perfect color to match the already-purchased tangerine rock-candy swizzle sticks. The limousine-golf-cart has been rented for escorting guests from the off-site parking lot to the reception. Now all they need is 300 guests, lots of flash photography and a splashy getaway in a vintage car with tin cans tied tastefully to the bumper and they will be off on the really big adventure—marriage.


I remember being her. I remember nights when I couldn’t keep my eyes open but I didn’t want to hang up the phone because talking to my fiancé was my absolute favorite pastime. We dreamed of where we’d live and the adventures we would have. We talked about our perfect future family in the perfect house where we would cuddle every night and count our blessings that our lives had turned out so perfect. Like most young couples we were big on dreams and short on plans. And, in retrospect, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

As we drove home ridiculously late from another one of our children’s sporting events, I wondered if the me of today had handed the me of my youth an audio-tape of my children fighting in the backseat if it would have made any difference. Would I have believed that my children could behave like caged animals whenever they were placed in the cage known as the family car? And if I did believe, would the young me have had the presence of mind to run far-far away?

If God were to show me a trailer of my upcoming life, would I honestly go through with it? I’d see the great parts of my life, but I’d also see the excruciatingly hard parts that everyone, with enough years behind them to have wrinkles, has experienced. The struggles may look different, but they are life-changing challenges all the same. My bet is that I wouldn’t have willingly signed that marriage certificate had I known—which is the very reason why we shouldn’t know.

I recall a well-meaning aunt or two trying to talk me out of marrying. I was too young to saddle myself with a man, they’d say. Was I sure that this guy wouldn’t stomp on my heart in ten years when he ran off with his nubile secretary? Or what if he turned out to be a deadbeat who couldn’t hold down a job—what then? I remember smiling at them and wondering why my mother had insisted we put such sticks-in-the-mud on the guest list.

In the end, without having any concept of the reality of my future life, I stepped up and I said “I do.” And the next day we got started on all those dreams we’d spent hours discussing over the phone in the wee hours of the morning. A few dreams panned out, but most of them crashed and burned or became obsolete (I’m not raising my children in Africa no matter how much good I could accomplish with the native people.) And the in-betweens have been a roller-coaster ride that, for all the bumps and drops, I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Those experiences made me who I am, they made my husband who he is, and they made us into the family we are today, even if the best solution I’ve found to the backseat battles is to turn the radio up louder.

Thank goodness that we don’t know what we’re in for. If we did, then we’d never take the first step. I also firmly believe there’s a reason why that first step is toward husband in a beautiful white dress, with fantastic lighting and the smell of flowers floating in the air. The entire wedding day feels like a blessing of promise for the future. Tonight I’m lying in bed next to my husband wearing a ratty t-shirt and sweat pants and we’re discussing our son’s performance at his first football game, a sport his dad excelled at in high school.

“So, what’d you think of the game?” I ask.

“It was great,” he said with a big smile, “It was like nothing I’d ever imagined. I never would have dreamed that I’d love watching him play more than I liked playing myself.” And I find myself looking at my husband with more love than I felt the day I wore that beautiful white dress. Tonight, for this moment, it’s a perfect life.