Ten Years After The Wedding

Tomorrow is my ten year wedding anniversary, and just as we were for most of the time we dated, Mike and I are living on different continents.

Following our decision late last year to relocate to Australia for the next little while, at least, I returned with the boys three weeks ago to prepare them to start the new school year here. Mike remains in Vanuatu to make sure there’s a good leadership transition for the World Vision team, and to wrap up our life there. Us being long distance for an extended period all feels very familiar, except that while we were dating I didn’t have little people running in every five minutes while I was writing to ask if their head was bleeding (it wasn’t), to request food (x5), or to tell me they’d found “a whole nest of lice” in their brother’s hair (I don’t think they actually did, but I’ll check later.)

In the last paragraphs of my memoir, Love At The Speed Of Email, I wrote about how I felt exactly ten years ago, on the day before the wedding.

I am going to put on a beautiful dress tomorrow and walk down a grassy aisle littered with frangipanis to the celestial sounds of Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission. And then I will make these promises.

I, Lisa McKay, choose you, Michael Wolfe, as my life partner, the one I commit to love. I pledge to cherish and honor you regardless of circumstances, in the pressures of the present and the uncertainties of the future, loving what I do know of you, trusting what I do not yet know.

I promise to grow in mind and spirit with you, and support you in fulfilling your hopes and dreams. I promise to remain with you, whatever afflictions may befall. I commit to sharing with you life’s joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains from this day forward until death do us part.

In the end I am not going to promise or demand that Mike will be home to me – after a certain point in life, perhaps home is more something you make than something you have, anyway. But I will, in essence, be promising to fashion a home with him.

I have no idea what places, people, and purposes that will come to mean.

This scares the part of me that longs for the white-picket-fence version of home, that wants to predict and control the future and that yearns for the grounding grace of routine. It thrills the part of me that longs for the sharp spur of purpose to drive me from my comfort zone, that craves the cold-shower shock of novelty and the adventures of dirt roads less traveled. I’m not sure that these paradoxical longings will ever be fully reconciled – I’m no longer sure that’s even the point. I am, however, certain that I want Mike to be beside me whatever form home might take for me in the future. I am convinced that a white picket fence with him would be better than bumping down a dirt road without him and that traveling a dirt road together would beat out a white picket fence that’s mine alone. That sort of peaceful surety is worth following down an aisle and across the world, don’t you think?

I do.

The first time Mike read this ending to the book (ending version #15034) he came into the kitchen in Laos and wrapped his arms around me

“Aw,” he said into the top of my head. “Do you really mean that? That a dirt road with me is better than a more comfortable, stable home without me?”

We were three years into marriage at that stage, living on a dirt road in Laos that had held plenty of frustrations adventures that week, and I remember laughing when he said this.

“Well, I meant it the day before our wedding, anyway,” I told him.

But now—in an eon and an hour—we are ten years past that day. What places, people, and purposes has it come to mean? Do I still mean it?

We’ve lived in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world together, and a tiny town tucked between the Mekong and Khan rivers. We bought a house and planted ourselves on a tropical island in the South Pacific. We’ve marveled at beaches in Thailand, ruins in Cambodia, mountain monasteries in Bhutan, and the majesties of Alaska. We have endured the inside of a cancer ward, the full force of a Category 5 cyclone, and long, painful, stints trapped in bed fighting off cellulitis.

We made two brand new little people. And those little people, in turn, made two brand-new versions of us. That’s been… a very complicated joy.

And what of purposes?

The poet Mary Oliver died last week, so her luminous words have been on my mind.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

What have we done this past decade with our wild and precious lives? What are we doing?

Purpose is all about reasons and intentions, interests and passions, priorities and choices.

In many ways I feel like we made some big, bold decisions to chase purpose during this decade. Those decisions put us in places—and Mike in roles—that lined up with many of our hopes and values related to professional purpose. Those decisions shaped the big picture of our years, where we were and what we were focused on doing.

But when I shift the focus from the years to the days, it all feels blurrier. We’ve had So. Many. Days. during this decade when one or both of us felt swamped by sandstorms of exhaustion, frustration, doubt or depression. Too often, on any given day during the last seven years, in particular, I’ve felt that my wild and precious life is not being spent well enough.

Paradoxically, though, right alongside this slithering sense of not measuring up to my own sense of should, and to what’s really important—and right alongside the swirls and waves of existential desperation and panic these thoughts can spark—I also feel I have lived my way, more and more, into Mary Oliver’s poem, Mindful.

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

In our decade of marriage there has not been an over-abundance of white pickets fences, or routine. It has completely demolished of any illusions I still clung to that I can predict and control the future (#fivemoves #cancer #cyclonepam #cyclonedominic). On the other hand, there has been plenty of novelty, adventure, dirt roads, soul-beautiful friends, and a whole set of brand new paradoxical longings to mull over more, someday, when I’m slightly less sleep-deprived (#alexisapackanimal #fourwakeupslastnight).

And, Mike, ten years on I can still say that I am certain I want you to be beside me (or, you know, living in another country but still married to me) whatever form home might take for me in the future. I am still convinced that a white picket fence with you would be better than bumping down a dirt road without you, and that traveling a dirt road together would beat out a white picket fence that’s mine alone.

I still choose you. I still commit to love you. I still pledge to cherish and honor you regardless of circumstances, in the pressures of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Sure, I’d like a little less pressure and a little more certainty in the next decade but, come what may, I have confidence we can tackle it together.

Happy ten years. Let’s celebrate properly when we’re living on the same continent again. And here’s to the next ten.