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| Happily Married! |
When I look at my husband, I find it hard to believe that I
am actually married to him. We met online (which is the part I really can't believe), met in person (stranger danger!), fell in love (woohoo!), he
proposed (I said, "yeah"), we planned a wedding, we are living a marriage. Pinch me, because I must be dreaming. Drew is brilliant and handsome and
hardworking and loving and adoring. I am the luckiest girl in the world!
Marriage is a wonderful vocation and I love my husband very
much. Amidst all of this love we are going through a lot of change - we moved
halfway across the country, we are combining all of our belongings and merging
our lifestyles, and we are having to manage our finances as we balance living
with what we have and looking forward to the future. It is blissful, but also
challenging. I was pondering all of this the other day when I said to him, “I
feel like I am in a fairytale . . . a very stressful fairytale.”
Drew’s response to my statement was perfect. He replied,
“Aren’t all fairytales stressful?” I had never thought of it that way before! I
always hear the phrases “happily ever after” and “fairytale ending,” but the
ending isn’t the entire story. For example, (SPOILER ALERT) in my personal
favorite, The Little Mermaid, Ariel
doesn’t see eye to eye with her father and when she falls in love with a human,
things get nasty. She risks swimming into the creepiest cave ever so that an
octopus named Ursula can transform her tail into legs in exchange for her
voice. So, when she finally gets on land and meets Prince Eric, she can’t
actually talk to him. She then has to watch him fall in love with Ursula
disguised as Vanessa and she is barely able to stop their marriage. Then Ursula
and Prince Eric try really hard to kill each other, Eric wins, and he is able
to marry Ariel who was made human by her father, who changed his mind about her
loving a human. She then leaves behind everything she is familiar with to be
with her husband. I would bet that had it been available to her, Ariel would
have spent a lot of time in therapy as a result of all the stress she
experienced.
I love that my husband reminded me that even though things
are a little bit stressful sometimes, this IS my fairytale. I would much rather
go through all of this with him than be all by my lonesome. Who cares about the
fairytale ending? Riding off into the sunset – that’s called a vacation; it
isn’t real life. We watch and read fairytale stories, following characters
through ups and downs and rooting for their success by the end of the story. We
wait for THE END. Remember, it’s the WHOLE journey that is important, and that is the fairytale come true.
