8 Isn’t Even Close to Enough

Today is my 8 year wedding anniversary. Now I know what you are going to say, “Oh Mahotma, you look far too young to have been married 8 whole years!”

To which I would reply, “Why thank you, but it’s easy to do when you married your husband when you were a fetus.”

It is true. When I got married I was young. Very very very young. Not so young that we had to get our marriage license in Kentucky (no offense Kentuckians). Or had to stand on step stools to reach the microphone under the chuppah. We were in fact just barely old enough to drink champagne at our own wedding.

It’s not that 21 is THAT young, but when my wonderful husband brought me breakfast in bed this morning at 4:30 (yay jet lag!) he brought up our wedding video too (yes, back then DVDs weren’t invented and things were done on “video tape”). And it was great and wondrous and fun, but by the time we saw him break the glass we both felt a little on the prune juice side of old.

Eight years is far from an eternity, but 21-29 can be big years in people’s lives. There were the apartment years, the business school years, the years when my husband still had hair. All these little chapters in our lives. And of course there were the child free years. We convinced our daughter (who had been up since 3:15) to come and watch Mommy and Daddy’s special movie (wow, that could sound dirty and wrong). She got to see the wonderful Baubie and Safta that she was name for. She got to see what Mahotma Zadie looked like without a beard. That was fun for like 10 minutes but she lost interest after she asked why she wasn’t there and we told her she wasn’t invented yet. Then she wanted to go watch Dora.

But yeah, a lot of growing up has been done. I guess when you get married at 30 some of the growing up to do has already happened.

Now I am sure you are sick of me blathering on about the wonders of my husband. No, no I won’t be insulted-I am sure we would gross out people when we would make out in Hillel, in the middle of services, in the front row…which is how we ended up moving over to Orthodox services. We still kiss each other in more inappropriate places than most teenagers. He’s just dreamy. I could make a whole blog site about how amazing he is but I couldn’t deal with the hate mail.

But as an anniversary gift to him I would like to declare in this public forum that I was wrong. I know, I know. Shocking.

A million years ago when we were just unfertilized cells dating our friends would want to know how to know whether the person they were dating was going to be “the one.” My standard answer would be “you have to find somebody it feels like you love 183% because every year you love them a little bit of that loving feeling will vanish and you want to be left with a good high loving feeling.”

Hey, it sounded good at the time and it kind of makes sense.

However, my husband-well boyfriend/ fiancé at the time would strongly disagree. He would say that when you love somebody, the love only grows. I thought he sounded trite and had been spending too much time reading all the Hallmark cards he would buy for me.

But I was wrong.

Perhaps the googly mooglies aren’t as spicy, or things aren’t as fresh but looking at that wedding video with our child and our future child I know-without a shadow of a doubt- that I love him MORE than I did 8 years ago. We might look a little more wrinkled, tired and bald but if I was at 183% when we started dating 12 years ago, well then heck, I must be at one billion percent by now. And I can't wait to see what 1 trillion percent feels like. So save your hate mail ‘til tomorrow. Today is my anniversary.