Ten Years

"Just think," Greta said the other day. "If you and Dadda hadn't walked down that hallway at work and seen each other... I wouldn't be here today."

Steve and I have our ten year anniversary this week. It seems like a really long time in many ways, and yet it also went by in a blink of an eye.

We met at work, 16 years ago. I had been working there about a year, when a new cute 26 year old single guy started. Greta's right -he caught my eye right away. Although, truth be told, another co-worker was interested in him, and I was already involved with someone, so I graciously set them up. We were good friends for a couple of years, long enough for my relationship to end and for my prayers that his wouldn't work out to be answered.

Looking back on it, I'm grateful for the six years we dated before getting married. I know now that it helped us build a strong foundation we would need in later years. If you asked me at the time, though, I would have bounced up and down in frustration that we didn't get married right off the bat.

We married in 1999, were both working at terrific jobs, happy, mostly carefree, and ready to take on the world. We hung out with a huge group of friends, most of whom were still single or just settling down. It did, truly, seem that those freewheeling days would never end.

I had Greta two years after we were married, and we were living in a suburb west of the city. Steve had a great job in downtown Boston, and I was ready, I thought, to settle into being a full time stay-at-home Mom.

Welcome to Adulthood.

Three years later, we moved into the house we're in now, he started a new job, and I gave birth to Finn.

The real work of keeping a marriage and a family together began.

By this time I was slipping ever so slowly into the grip of addiction, and was overwhelmed by motherhood and holding down a job working from home. The daily grind of working, taking care of the kids and paying bills was in full swing.

We had to dig deep, figure out what we're made of. There were more than a few times when we both wondered if we'd make it.

When I hit Rock Bottom and went to treatment, we honestly didn't know if our marriage would survive. In the end, we drew on our deep friendship, our mutual respect for the people we had been, and the people we hoped to become.

And today? I have a deep, abiding respect for this amazingly strong man I married. We can go for days without really seeing each other, appreciating each other. But we work harder now to remember that small gestures of love and support mean a lot. We have gratitude.

The other day I was thinking that if someone had shown me, back at the tender age of 24 when we first met, a snapshot of our life today I would have thought: wow, really? Do I really get to have all that?