It’s messy, and tough, and beautiful.

When we were first married, it was magical. Maybe not always easy, but we were buoyant. Life throws curveballs. You adapt. This is just one story of many, all those moments of growing and choosing. Love as a choice as much as love as a feeling.

As a culture, we don’t talk about what marriage looks like after so many years together. We post happy photos, we celebrate anniversaries, but we don’t let others in to the cracks and fissures where real life happens. Where we grow.

The mundane, the day to day. Love is built in the details. The moments you say, I will show up for you and remodel myself in the process.

Here we are at fifteen years. Still building, still tearing down. Still building again. Together.

I’m in Basque Country, Spain. We’ve been here for five days and my whole system has taken a much needed deep breath. I’ve slept late. I’ve taken slow mornings with coffee and my partner by my side. The kids run around chasing dogs and feeding geese. I smile.

My normal grind has been a push for me these last years. I came out of Covid deeply depleted and for years I tried to do all the things to get myself back. I went to acupuncture, practiced yoga, did breathwork, saw a nutritionist, then a naturepath, I tried to follow my joy…I could go on, but I don’t need to. I bet you’ve been there too. Even if your things are different.

It’s been two years since we’ve been to France to visit Micael’s family. There’s nothing about going there that necessitates me looking a certain way, but in that time I’ve been healing from years of stress and overwhelm, from insomnia, and I feel it in my body. I rarely feel like I look ‘good’ anymore. I’m just too tired to try.

I can see how much I’m circling this, the desire to ‘look better’. That somehow that will mean I’ve achieved something. That I’m happy, I’m successful, I’m powerful. Then it struck me today. I’m equating control with power. In a culture that has so stripped women of real power, the ability to control how we present ourselves - our bodies, our homes, our lifestyles - becomes a pitiful second choice.

It’s summer construction season in Seattle. I had children’s doctor appointments set up on opposite sides of the city, and somehow also had to get all the normal work done, meals made, house cleaned. We were more than 20 minutes late to our first appointment. I sat waiting to get through traffic lights that cycled with few getting through. The freeway was reduced by several lanes and there were orange construction cones everywhere I went. I lost my patience at one point and let out a guttural scream. It didn’t help that I was hobbling by on a few hours’ sleep.

This isn’t my experience every day but it could be. Modern life has so fractured our experience that we are moving, always, gathering up the pieces. Never resting. Never unhurried.

My daughter turned five today, in the still, quiet hours of the morning. I held her close last night as she fell asleep, feeling her wiggle and kick as she whispered to me all the questions that come to a child only when it is time for bed. I make sure now to take every opportunity to hold her while she is still eager for it, knowing that in a few years she’ll barely remember to ask. 

I’m writing this having just passed the zenith of a very full moon.  That’s not something I would have paid attention to just a few years ago. And a decade ago I don’t think I ever really thought about the moon having phases. I didn’t look at the moon. It didn’t factor into my daily life. I spent most of my twenties and thirties feeling like the protagonist in my own film. Full of power in my world, but lacking power in myself. Everything seemed to go ‘right’ because I willed it to, even if I felt unmoored within me. So much has rocked me to the core in the last half decade.