Enough Time

So our 3rd Anniversary came and went last month. We made valiant efforts to mark it, but Mother Nature had other ideas. In the end, I think it was her gift to us. The past month has changed us; we have realized what we truly value and how we might express these values through our choices and actions. This realization has allowed us to rediscover the deep tenderness we feel toward each other, a tenderness that is always in danger of being forgotten when you go about the daily business of being an old, married couple.

Today, we had our friends Marek, Susan, Emilia, and Daniel over for lunch. This meant that our Saturday was spent in a flurry of tag-team house cleaning. When we wiped the last surface clean yesterday afternoon, we were both exhausted. I put away the last pile of Ben’s T-shirts, and all three of us – Ben, Sully, and I collapsed on the bed. Shortly before this, I had put a mix CD that Nicole (the little sister I never had) made for us in my bedside CD player. Instead of turning it off as we all snuggled down for our impromptu nap, I decide to just turn it down a bit and leave it as background noise.

Eventually the Andy Gullahorn song “Enough Time” came on. Now, we know this song because Nicole had given us Gullahorn’s album, Reinventing the Wheel for Christmas. She wanted us to have the song “More of a Man” because it reminded her so much of the things Ben says and fears (and, yes, every time that song comes up Ben just shakes his head and says, “Poor guy”- actually he says something else, but in the interest of keeping this blog PG, we’ll just say "guy," and you can use your imagination); she also says that Gullahorn and his wife Jill Phillips remind her a lot of Ben and I, which, after listening to the CD, I can see. “Enough Time” was another song that I fell in love with on that CD and one that I put on a mix I made for Ben’s Valentine’s Day gift – a compilation of songs that I felt captured the way I feel about him and our marriage in these post-newlywed days. The chorus of this song is:

Yeah I could lie in these covers

Growing old with each other

For the rest of forever

But it still wouldn’t be enough time

It still wouldn’t be enough time

Which brings me back to our family nap. As these words played softly in the background, Ben’s hand was nested against the back of my head. I had one hand rested on Ben’s other arm and Sully’s paw was lying on that same arm. I could feel the weight of Sully’s head on the small of my back. Ben was singing along intermittently whenever the song reached the chorus. I was overcome at that moment with perfect peace and absolute contentment. I knew that our lives had been made for moments like these and that we were so, so blessed because we had so much love to offer each other. And I knew, “I could lie in these covers / Growing old with each other / For the rest of forever / But it still wouldn’t be enough time.”

I remembered a conversation I had with my friend Joanne just the day before. We were commenting that as we push on toward our thirties, we’ve noticed that many of our friends are having shorter courtship periods before the get engaged. We said it made perfect sense, since at this end of the twenties, we seem to have a better understanding of ourselves and what we need and desire in this crazy life. Both Joanne and I had started dating our husbands at an early age, and we both took our time getting to the altar. We were both saying wistfully that if we knew we could still end up with our respective husbands, it might have been nice to have some of that time in our early twenties to learn more about ourselves on our own. We thought that this plan might have, in the end, saved us some of the growing pains of our young relationships. But as I lied there with Ben, I knew I wouldn’t change a thing. Yes, we have faced many uphill battles, but we have faced them together. We were babies when we fell in love, but I could not have had a more fun and supportive partner to grow into adulthood with. Yes, we are complete opposites and we definitely know how to push each other’s buttons, but we, in some odd way, complement each other perfectly. And I know that there will never be enough time on this earth for the two of us to be everything we want and need to be for each other.

As the song drew to a close, I found myself praying that I would always remember this moment – the love, the peace, the understanding. To make sure that happens, I decided to write in down. I hope you don’t mind me sharing it with you.