What does 30 years of marriage look like?

A love letter.

From the outside looking in, what your friends, co-workers and acquaintances see is an accomplishment worthy of congratulations — maybe with a few jokes about getting old or a lovingly intended jab at your spouse about marrying up, right?

But what about what YOU see, what you both see, right here in the trenches, without the filters, when the polished version you let the world see falls away? What is that really all about?

How do you describe or take stock of just shy of 11,000 days spent with one other person — trying to just get by, to make it all work, keep everyone alive and find a bit of joy in it? When that joy can be hard won, since life is filled with unanticipated gut punches and just plain shitty disasters?

The inside scoop on this 30 years is not romantic (well, ok occasionally it is) or a foundation in great communication (still working on that) or a pact to never go to bed angry (we’re well acquainted with anger sputtered from a couch on plenty of nights).

There’s no secret. No philosophy. Nope, not even decent planning. Come to think of it, how are we still here doing this thing? Every single thing is stacked against it if we think about it.

Maybe that’s the secret: don’t think!! Maybe we’re at the 30 year mark because we’re too stupid to know any better!

Seriously, though, there isn’t a way to describe choosing a partner when you are still a child yourself with no idea what you really want and somehow looking back 30 years later with a neat, simple description of it all that will make sense to anyone else. What binds us without breaking will only make sense to two people I guess. I thought that for us, 30 years on the inside looks like something like this (happy anniversary, my love):

That time we put the baby in bed with us and she filled our bed with liquid poo at 3 am and you changed the bed, I bathed the baby and we ended up taking videos of her at 4 am because the whole thing was funny after all.

When you moved away for a campaign and I spent part of my visits with you scrubbing that OH HELL NO filthy bathroom you were sharing with 3 other man children.

The basement flooded (was it the 2nd or third time?) and we filled garbage bags together and traded foul cursing and that somehow made it better.

Being together long enough to have bought 3 new dishwashers for the same house.

You made me stop nursing the twins because I was exhausted and crying and they were always awake and insatiable and I was turning into a shell of a human. You were right, they still grew up to be “normal” humans on formula.

The day I called to tell you the double stroller wasn’t going to cut it anymore and you didn’t buy a 1 way plane ticket to Aruba.

You used to hate my goofy nerdy t-shirts and openly tried to get me to dress better, (you bought me pastel, I hated pastels.) Then you gave up and didn’t even blink when I bought myself the Chewbacca pajamas.

In laws. We both have ‘em.

All the times I DIDN’T complain about your crappy driving/tailgating. I know you think I never held back, but oh honey, I did.

All the times you talked me off the ledge when I got myself lost in the car, was panicked and cursing and you helped me navigate over the phone (pre GPS).

All the times you bought big ticket items without consulting me and I didn’t bury you in the yard.

When you took one toddler to the hospital in Florida while I waited at the hotel with the other littles.

You mostly take on navigating the emergency room trips because you know it stresses me out.

47,000 arguments about where to go to eat or which show to watch.

So many parties/events/fundraisers where we split up and never saw each other all night and then spent the drive home filling each other in on everybody we talked to.

So many campaigns. All nighters. Miles of door to door and 2 am lit drops. Maps. Endless maps. Hotels that would not get good Yelp reviews if there had been internet. Convention fights. Recounts. The Old Shillelagh. The Pink Pony. Those bloody pagers. Being apart so much in different cities. Making the best of it all and being together for both victories and defeats.

How I don’t lose my fricken mind whenever we are throwing a big party and you decide that fixing the lawnmower or cleaning a barn no one will see or trimming trees is a high priority.

How if we are throwing a big party for my family you cook so I can sit on my ass and visit.

I said let’s have a 5th kid, let’s go to Ethiopia to find him and you asked what color I wanted you to paint his bedroom.

You said I hate my job and I’m quitting and I was scared and upset and also mad but I went with it because you were obviously miserable.

I woke up after 6 different surgeries and you were there every time. You even texted me cartoons of angry gallbladders dropping f’bombs. Nice touch.

When our Christmas tree fell over in our first house and all those ornaments smashed and I sobbed and you now always attach our treetop to the wall with screw hooks and fishing line to reassure me.

All the “quests” for impossible to find items on the kids’ Christmas lists — when you drove to Ohio for an action figure I knew I married a total nut.

Remember all those times you wanted to sell the children for medical experiments and I talked you out of it?

Lots of door slamming.

Having a sleepover on the floor at the Macomb County Courthouse — how many married couples get a romantic night like that?

(Mostly) not fighting in front of the kids — even driving around in the car fighting to avoid including them.

5 kids. All wonderful and perfect and, you know, all stressful little Aholes who can suck the life right out of you. We failed them sometimes. We love them always. Maybe when they go to therapy they won’t only talk about us?

Singing a duet on stage at the Playhouse in the variety show and it not being bad at all. Not even cringy.

Recent actual threats/horrible criticism over the election and us mostly laughing about it together even though it was a tad unsettling.

Buying a house at Mode’s Bum Steer during the ‘92 recounts. and remembering it every time we drive by that place. We liked the wedge salads and also the new house.

We generally agree on who is annoying and we collectively avoid those people.

We both have anxiety but conveniently it’s about different stuff, so that seems to work out.

You sucking air on the floor of the delivery room after seeing more of the innards of your wife than you ever wanted to. Me being more worried about what happened to you when they’d just surgically removed 2 humans from me.

How I said I wanted to go see Laura Ingalls Wilder’s house and it was hours off our route and you would rather had chewed off your own arm than go there but you took me anyway.

So many diapers, barf buckets and so so much crying. And snot.

Our first night in Addis Ababa, giving up hope of sleeping and standing at the open slider door listening to the call to prayer over the city (and that damn rooster).

Herding our pile of toddlers into places where chaos wasn’t preferred and managing to put a good face on it.

Finding ways to be alone, and laughing silently when “interrupted” by a kid at the locked door or the horrifying hilarious time the door wasn’t locked and the kid who barged in (fortunately too small to understand) exclaimed “It looks like fun in here!”

When our kid ate rocks at the Easter egg hunt and we took video of him crying because we are awful people.

How you know what I mean when I look at you across the room at family gatherings.

The Chinese buffet Thanksgiving dinner in Tampa when I thought i’d never felt quite so perfectly thankful in all my life.

A good playlist is always in order.

I ate at more stodgy old man steakhouses than I can count when what I really wanted instead was that Asian/Mexican/Bulgarian fusion place where you eat blindfolded while learning ethnic dancing.

You sometimes settled for Applebee’s without much whining.

When everybody left that wedding that was in the middle of nowhere and we realized we were both too drunk to drive so we slept in the car in the parking lot.

Watching tv, seeing the bat fly by in almost silent slow motion across the screen before the screaming started. You were the first one screaming.

You talk over whatever show I’m watching when you walk into the room as if I wasn’t watching it and I haven’t killed you after 30 years of this.

You stopped golfing because it took you away from your family too much and joined theater because it was taking us away from you too much. You made a sexy ship’s captain, btw. Hot.

You weren’t disgusted when I craved filet o fish from McD’s and honeydew melon(s). You just bought them. Late. On demand.

You can’t dance. Like super can’t. So when you do it’s truly cute to me.

Witnessing you join the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil was a tearful moment.

The two babies we lost, how badly that wrecked me and you stayed close when I made that difficult.

How you can’t watch tv with me without expecting your back scratched. That’s fricken weird, dude, but I do it.

146,000 hours on bleachers, freezing or sweltering or wet, in gyms, in camp chairs, under the lights, driving before the sun was up. Crock pot food. Cooler food. Concession popcorn dinner.

Dinner out of a bag brought to the theater back door by usually you, but sometimes me.

That time you broke my foot.

How I got into Twitter so I could stop being mad about how you were way too into Twitter.

All those times I said, “Could you go get my Mom?” and you started the car.

Stupid shit the kids did. Fixing said shit. Repeat.

You starting my car to warm it up before my icy drives to work these last few years.

Texting each other in the same room to keep thoughts private has been a positive technological development.

When you got stranded and missed part of the Twins’ 1st Communion and told us you considered driving the lawnmower to church. Everybody else laughed and I was sitting there knowing you were dead serious.

That time we were actually flat broke and I was looking at how long I could make dinners with what was already in the freezers.

You tolerate my noxious feet more politely than the children do.

I know your 14 jokes. I know the set ups. I know when you are going to tell them maybe before you do. I still laugh. I know all your favorite movie lines, too.

Me folding your shirts the way you prefer and organizing them in your drawer for you x 1300.

Me fixing your cherry cheese pie every birthday and my always well-intended but failed attempts to give you a little birthday attention during Annibirthmas.

Me making sure the school uniforms, basketball uniforms, track shorts or soccer jerseys were clean the night before so you never had to.

Same with teacher gifts.

I accept that you are slowly replacing me with a growing number of pillows.

I hate how you need so much more sleep than me to function but you hate waiting for me to be ready to go anywhere, so it’s a wash.

You tolerate my endless accumulation of unfinished projects and creative thinking about useless objects I should have trashed long ago.

My mom got sick and got well. Your mom got sick and didn’t. We got through both together. We still do the hard stuff. Their hard stuff. Our hard stuff. We don’t like it. Sometimes we don’t do it well. But we do it.

We are both funny. That’s been useful over time, especially when a lot of things just weren’t funny.

Even when life is drastically serious, you refuse to take it seriously. Sometimes it makes me want to strangle you, but then I don’t because you can’t strangle the only person who understands what’s funny.

You can’t describe 30 years in a neat package. Nothing about this is neat, except how you like your bourbon. I know that because I was paying attention. And despite how messy this life is, you were paying attention, too. So thanks for that. If the last 30 years were instructive at all, it taught us that tomorrow is uncertain. As long as you are uncertain somewhere near me so I don’t feel stupid alone, I’ll be good.

I love you. Happy Darkest Day of the Year.