The First 9

I’ve had snippets of thought run through my head on what I could possibly say to really get across what I’m thinking and feeling.  But nothing seems to come close.

I’ve been married for 9 years.  That’s almost 1/3 of my entire life.  Really, mostly all of my adult life.

9 years.

There are people who can’t even make it a year.  Or a month.  Or a week.

Pat and I, as messed up as we are individually and even at times, many times, together, have outlasted couples far more stable than us.  Perhaps the glue that holds us together is the understanding that no one else would put up with the shit we put up with?

Or maybe it’s a mutual understanding that no one, NO ONE, can get me like my husband does, and I’d like to think I do a pretty damn good job of getting him too.

9 years.

9 years and he still loves me.  It isn’t just what he says.  It’s what he does.

Like doing his damnedest to make my poor, decrepit desk chair usable.  I didn’t ask.  He just figured out a way to “fix” it and did it.

The way he encourages me to start watching Dr. Who knowing full well he’ll lose his wife to the telly for a month (at least) but also knows I’ll love it and it’s worth it.  Plus, it’s something we can share.  After he loses me to the telly for a month (at least) while I catch up.

Plunging the toilet almost every time I use it even if nothing more than just pee is being flushed.  I’m fairly sure our toilet downstairs hates me, but thank god my husband loves me.  And can use a plunger.  It’s basically a requirement for being married to me, really.

The fact I’ve carried and birthed 3 babies now and things, uh, don’t exactly work the proper fashion anymore.  But he’s patient, understanding, and willing to accept the fact he’s partially to blame anyway because he is the one who knocked me up, after all.

He’s seen me through 2 mental health hospitalizations and was able to keep me laughing the one time with the Ativan that made me out-of-it.  You had to have been there.  You weren’t.  It was just me and Pat.  And the lesbian nurse who had the hots for me that Pat swears up and down wasn’t a figment of his imagination, leaving me to question just which one of us was on the Ativan.

Hell, Pat literally saved my life that one time I was carrying furniture up a flight of stairs, hit the wall at the top, got pushed back down the stairs with the furniture riding me the whole way down.  Only a few more steps and my neck would have snapped like a twig, but he caught me.

He humors my love of my final course at Mongolian BBQ being a plate of nothing but pineapple and Teriyaki sauce.  Then started to make it for me at home because it’s so much cheaper than going to BD’s for just pineapple and Teriyaki sauce.  (I always have a couple of plates of real food to get my money’s worth, but I’m not going to lie about my real reason for wanting to go.)

He laughs at my biggest fear (of being locked in the vault at work overnight) because really if he doesn’t laugh, that’s because he thinks it’s plausible and the only way I’ll be able to enter said vault is if I don’t think my fear is rational.  Even though it totally is.  Clearly.

9 years of putting up with my shit.  Literally.  And I will never stop being thankful.

9 years.

No really!  I’ve been married for 9 years!

Not that long ago I was asked on twitter how my husband copes with my destructive behavior.  My husband pointed out that he’d let me/them know when he figured out how.

And yet?  9 years.

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