Beautiful Little Moments

Sometimes, all it takes to find a bit of happiness is to open your eyes

Growing up with pretty unhappily married parents who ended up divorcing each other not once but twice (long story) was exhausting. They could barely coexist in the same room for over an hour before one of them said something that rubbed the other the wrong way — behavior my sisters and I mimicked. The result was a household full of people distrustful of happy times because they knew someone would crack and there would be a fight. Once I started spending more time outside that environment, I learned how much better life could be if people sincerely communicated instead of always being on the hunt for some word or action they perceived as an insult. One thing I couldn’t shake was the idea that lavish outward demonstrations of love were necessary indicators of love itself. In my defense, my only references were my parents and television. The TV couples who devoted an entire episode to romantic events in their lives like anniversaries stayed together. My miserable parents never acted like any of that mattered to them, and they separated. To this day, I have no idea when their anniversary was, and I’m honestly not sure they knew either.

I brought that mindset into my marriage. I never wanted my husband, Walt, to think I didn’t care enough to show him how I felt. What better time to show him than our anniversary? I used to think we needed to do something extravagant to celebrate, and initially, we did just that. The last time we made an event out of our anniversary was a couple of years before my nine-year-old daughter, Amelia, was born. We went to a 1920s themed steakhouse for dinner, took a quiet stroll, and had an all-around great night. Once Amelia came along, we became this tightly-knit threesome that did everything as a unit, and the romance waned a bit. My nephew was kind enough to babysit Amelia a couple of times so we could go out for an anniversary lunch, but as much as I loved those occasions, they were pretty low-key. They were also a little rushed since we needed to pick up lunch for the kids. Of course, a quiet lunch was still better than two or three years ago, when Walt and I completely forgot about it. If his mom hadn’t sent us a card, the day would have sailed on past…

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