Celebrating an anniversary post-kids

Today is my eleventh anniversary. It sort of freaks me out that I’ve been married for 11 whole years — only because I don’t feel old enough to have been married for 11 years. I got married before I was even legal — I was 20 at my own wedding, toasting my marriage… illegally. My husband was 28. I know people didn’t think we’d last, only because I was so young.

But we knew. We built a life together. I think people assumed I wouldn’t finish college, wouldn’t go to grad school. He gave up a job he loved to move with me so I could attend law school in the city I wanted to live. We both toughed out my law school years and his grad school years.

We moved again. We bought a house. We adopted our kids when I was finally ready to be a mom. We moved states again, much to my chagrin. We made it through years of him traveling for work. We made it through the very difficult years of helping our kids acclimate to post-institutionalized life. He has supported me as I’ve developed a freelancing career. I’ve supported him as he pursues his career goals.

So many people say the best gift you can give your kids is a good marriage and I absolutely agree. So many people say that life changes forever after kids… and I absolutely agree.

Because I was so young when we got married and because I wanted to go to law school, I wasn’t ready for kids for many years. Unlike many people who get married later, we had a lot of time with just the two of us. We loved it. And while back then we didn’t have lots of expendable income to go on extravagant trips, we did have the ability to go places unconstrained by the need to secure a babysitter or consider schedules or budgets that included Montessori tuition.

Anniversary dinners used to involve a quick weekend trip or a fancy dinner out with a bottle or two of wine — hours of sitting at a romantic, secluded table, talking and sipping wine and reminiscing. For six years, we celebrated in style.

The first post-kids anniversary — our seventh — occurred 1.5 months after we returned home from Vietnam with our son. I’m pretty sure I was still jet lagged, and I know for certain I was beyond sleep deprived. And because our son didn’t sleep for more than half an hour at a time, I think I enjoyed one sip of our favorite wine before duty (a.k.a. a screaming baby) called.

One year later, we celebrated our second post-kids anniversary — our eighth –  just a few days after my husband was laid off from his job and less than two months before we traveled to Ethiopia to adopt our daughter. We pretended the life stress wasn’t so great that it was stifling and recognized that we could get through anything together.

And we did.

Here we are, celebrating eleven years. Life stress is once again great, but as always, we know we’ll make it, this time as a family of four.  And we’ll do what we’ve done annually for many years now: Put the kids to bed and uncork a bottle of our favorite special occasion wine, Sliver Oak.

Silver Oak became “our wine” when we toasted with it for the first time after we received travel approval to go to Vietnam to adopt our son. Nine long months of waiting after the first time we saw his picture, unsure of whether it would actually happen. And then when it did, we opened the special bottle we’d been saving for that occasion to celebrate. We did the same again when our case passed court in Ethiopia to adopt our daughter.

We saved the bottles and placed the flags from our kids’ countries of birth in them. (I had my husband take a photograph, which is at the top of this post.) They sit on our buffet, reminders of very significant times. And each year, on our anniversary, we do the same thing (although we don’t save the bottles — that would be a lot because we plan to stay married for a long time!).

Yes, our anniversary celebrations have changed — we share our bottle of wine at home, after our kids are in bed — but they’re better. So much better. We have built an entire life together and have two incredible kids to thank for changing it. It’s hard to ask for more! Celebrating our anniversary post-kids might be a little more low key, but it couldn’t be better