I’ve often wanted a glimpse of what my life would be like if I hadn’t made the choices I have. I know I’m not alone in this. It’s the great human dilemma: that every time we say yes to one thing it means we say no to something else. And so we comfort ourselves with phrases like “everything works out for the best” and “I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for those mistakes I made yesterday”—but I think it’s just what we say to protect ourselves from the much scarier truth: We don’t know. Who’s to say if we hadn’t gone to a different school or married someone else or not married at all or had more kids or had no kids or devoted our life to music or God or the stock market that we wouldn’t be happier than we are today?

Of course, it’s futile thinking. The fact is, my choices have made me who I am, and it’s better to learn how to live and love that reality than wonder “what if” about the million and one things I did or didn’t do. And I do that quite well, actually. “Happy” is an arbitrary word—one that I’m more comfortable attributing to a moment than an hour, much less a life—but still, if someone were to ask me, “Are you happy?” I would answer, “Yes,” and mean it.

But because I’m me that means I have to navel gaze and create these stories in my head about what my life would be like if I’d chosen a different path. I call it Sliding Doors Syndrome and hope you will, too, because I really think “coined an internationally recognized phrase” would be a cool thing to add to my resume.

Lucky for me, I have a couple people in my life who fulfill the “what if” role for me. One is my best friend, Natasha, who is single, childless, and a lobbyist. When she and I were in our early 20s, we moved to DC together. My career sights were set on being a lobbyist. Hers were less clear but she had no interest in lobbying and thought I was weird to want to do that. Back then, she was also more inclined to marriage and kids than I, who had just ended a two-year relationship that had lasted 23 months too long and had thus fully committed myself to singlehood for the next decade (three days after landing in DC, I met Dave).

If you had asked me then who, in 18 years, would be a writer, married and the mother of two, I would have guessed Natasha, and so would she. Yet our lives flip-flopped somewhere along the way. (We once went to a psychic in Sedona, Arizona, who told us that Natasha and I have been friends for hundreds of years and were even married at one point—she was the man, which brings me no end of joy to remind her.) She is living the life I had expected I would have; and I am living hers. Whenever we’ve doubted our decisions, we’ve often said how great it would be to swap lives for a couple months. But we can’t, so instead we listen to one another’s joys and disappointments and, depending on the day, are thankful for being where we are or filled with longing for the other’s   [fill in the blank] .

But in some ways, Natasha’s life is too far removed from mine to really give me an idea of what my life would be. We’re different in many ways and the things I love (animals, the outdoors, country life) hold little interest for her. Plus, I always thought I would be married. Kids might have been a question mark in my life, but marriage never was. So often when I look at Natasha’s life, I can’t really see mine, simply minus a husband and kids.

So I have Lori Dagley. Lori and I were best friends in Mrs. Tomlin’s third grade class. But the cruel lottery of class assignment separated us after that, and neither of us could handle the long-hallway-distance relationship. Although we graduated from the same high school, we have virtually no memories of one another after third grade. And even then, my memories are fuzzy. Lori remembers us playing with my model horses on the steps of our house and I remember her being in my childhood bedroom—but beyond that, nothing.

But then Facebook (glorious Facebook) reunited us. I’ve been reunited with a lot of old classmates through Facebook, most of whom I don’t remember. So reuniting with Lori shouldn’t really matter, except that I fell a little bit in love. I saw in Lori a childless and more interesting version of myself (and isn’t that always why we fall in love…because we see in the other the potential for whom we could be?). She lives in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, where she and her husband built their own house. She plays the cello. She loves dogs and the mountains and backpacking. She also loves horses, although she doesn’t own one. Instead, she and her husband own a plane and spend a lot of time flying to remote locales (they just logged 4,600 miles on a nearly two-month trip to Mexico). And she’s a really amazing photographer (check out her work here).

Now before I scare you and, more importantly, Lori (who’s likely Googling “restraining order” as she reads this), I’m not obsessed. I swear. And I realize that, like any virtual relationship, the person I’ve created in my mind is probably not who she really is. The fact is, I don’t know Lori. Not really. There’s a good chance she and I could meet for coffee someday and have nothing to talk about beyond our pixilated memories of third grade. But I can’t help but feel like I’ve found in her that sliding door that shows me a little bit what my life would have been like had Dave and I stayed in New Mexico and not had children—but without the plane or the cello or the photography and carpentry skills. We exchange occasional emails and I live vicariously through her adventures that seem so much more interesting than my own.

That’s not to say I don’t think I have an interesting life. It’s just that it’s mine, so I know it. I’ve wandered its hallways and poked into its dark corners and memorized the wallpaper. I imagine even the most interesting life becomes mundane when you live it everyday. And when you add the domestic routine of life with children, “rote” is pretty much a given.

Although I would never give up my children for anything—and even in my darkest times as a mother, I know they’ve enriched my life in a way it never would have been had I chosen not to have kids—I have that longing deep within myself to see what could have been. So I turn to my third grade friend, with whom I played horses on the steps of my childhood home, and crane my neck to peer into her world. And as I do, I tell myself it’s okay, that everything works out for the best.

I almost never write about my marriage. That’s not because I don’t have a lot to say about it, I do. But mostly it’s because my marriage is not just mine—it is also my husband’s—and I feel like I should respect his privacy by not writing about it. (You can kiss this blog goodbye the day my kids are old enough and have enough awareness to say, “Mom, stop writing about me.”)

So I’m not going to write about my husband. I’m going to write about me in marriage. But mostly, I’m going to write about the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie (which I highly recommend) or read the book (which I would probably also recommend had I read it, but I haven’t), it’s about, you guessed it, Mr. Fox. At the beginning of the movie, he and his wife are stealing birds, because this is something Mr. Fox loves to do. But they get caught in a fox trap, at which time Mrs. Fox tells her husband she’s pregnant, and asks him to promise her that if they get out of the trap alive, he’ll never again steal birds. It’s too dangerous.

Flash forward a couple years and Mr. Fox is now writing a newspaper column that no one reads and saddled with a mortgage he can’t afford and has a teenage son he doesn’t understand. Soon he gets the itch to start stealing birds again—so he does, sneaking behind his wife’s back to do it. Eventually, of course, she finds out, gets really pissed, and says, “Twelve fox-years ago, you made a promise to me when we were caged inside that fox trap that, if we survived, you would never steal another chicken, goose, turkey, duck, or squab, whatever they are. I believed you. Why did you lie to me?”

And he replies, “Because I’m a wild animal.”

I was telling my friend about this a few days ago and how much I identified with Mr. Fox—which is bizarre because, well, he’s a cartoon animal in a kids’ movie, not to mention a man. But of course he’s a man, right? Because in books and movies, it’s almost always the man who has the innate desire to be free and it is the woman who has the innate desire to be tethered (and do the tethering).

But the thing is, I’m not too keen on being tethered. Neither is my friend. What neither of us understands is: why it is unacceptable for women to have that wild animal instinct that wants to dig out of the trap and go steal chickens?

Let me stop for a moment and clarify something: I love my husband and kids. And, for the most part, I love being married. As much as I like to rage against convention, I’m actually pretty traditional when it comes down to it. After all, I married at the age of 25 and had two kids by the age of 33. That’s about as traditional as it gets. Dave and I were talking the other day about why we married so young. We had met at the age of 22 and moved in together a year later. By all measures, we were already married. So why had we rushed to the altar so soon?

Part of our decision was financial. It might sound silly now, but when you’re young and have little money, the idea of saving a couple hundred bucks on car insurance is pretty alluring.

But more than that, we were both certain beyond a doubt that we’d met the person we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with. Dave and I both say now that we didn’t really have a concept of what “for the rest of our lives” meant when we were 25—when things were still new and aging seemed like something that happened to other people. But at the time it felt absolutely right.

Then there’s the other reason I got married when I did: I wanted to be tethered. My life in my early 20s was shadowed by so much uncertainty: What would my career be? Where would I live? Should I go to graduate school? Of course, looking back now, I want to tell myself, “It will all work out. Don’t worry so much.” But when you’re in the throes of upheaval, it’s hard to be all Zen about it. Rather, I wanted some stability in what felt like an otherwise very unstable life.

So the reality is, in those early years, I probably was like Mrs. Fox…wanting to feel permanently connected to something.

Flash forward 14 years and here we are. Those 14 years have been filled with a lot: births and deaths and cross-country moves and career changes. I remember when a friend of mine, whose husband died after nearly 30 years of marriage, described her relationship with her husband, whom she met when she was in graduate school. “We grew up together,” she told me. And so have Dave and I. Every bit of our adult lives has been experienced in lock-step with the other.

And—what do you know?—sometimes I resent that. Sometimes I look at our marriage and say, “But I don’t want to live in lock-step with someone else for the rest of my life! I want to be free to make my own decisions! I want to do what I want and not have you tell me I can’t!” I want to look at Dave and say, “I’m a wild animal,” and demand that he set me free. Because the fact is, I can love him and my children and yet not love the confines of marriage and motherhood.

Some would argue that there are alternatives. There’s no shortage of nontraditional marriages out there—open marriages, spouses who live separately yet stay married and co-parent, polyamorous relationships (although frankly that kind of grosses me out), etc. I was reading an online review of the book Mating in Captivity by Ethel Perel, who (from what I can tell, but disclaimer: I haven’t read the book) prescribes distance between couples in order to keep the marriage alive. As one reviewer wrote: “To love is to merge. Wrong. Merging is what happens when you see the Other as your security. That’s death to sex. Good sex requires a spark. A spark requires a gap. Cross the gap, feel the sizzle. No gap? The best you can hope for is a cuddle.” While I get what they’re saying (as anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows, there aren’t many surprises in the bedroom after the two-year mark), reading this makes me want to ask, “Then what’s the point of being married?” Because to me, the best part of marriage is the comfort and security that comes along with knowing the other person completely—and that other person knowing me.

Yet as I write that, I know it’s not entirely true. I think all of us have a red velvet rope across our hearts and no one other than ourselves has an all-access pass. For some, that rope is far out at the curb; for others, it’s right at the door—so you can peak in, but not walk through and wander about.

My rope is probably midway between the curb and the door. I know that’s hard to believe given that I pour most of my life out on this blog each week, but in fact, I keep a safe distance from the core of things. Even writing this, I’m telling you very little. I won’t tell you what Dave’s thoughts are on all of this (about me or our marriage), and I won’t tell you any details about the issues we face. And even in my intimate relationships (with people I know beyond their IP addresses, as I know most of you) I tend to keep one arm out and another over my heart. So, in that sense, one could argue that I already do what Perel suggests; that we all do. Because no one can completely know another human being. Not really.

But I take comfort in knowing that Dave knows me better than anyone else, and still loves me. I take comfort in knowing that I don’t have to try with Dave. And I mean that in both the most superficial way possible (I don’t have to shave my legs every day) and the deepest (I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not to gain his love and approval). The idea of being in an open marriage or a marriage where I had to work to maintain some sort of mystery sounds, frankly, exhausting. I don’t want to be mysterious to my husband. I want him to see those dark corners of my heart and mind (and my stubbly legs), and love me in spite of—if not because of—them.

I came across the toast I wrote to Dave for our wedding the other day. As I read it (cringing at my really over-the-top writing…which is no doubt how I’ll someday feel when I read these blog posts), I found myself struck by this one part: “When I’m with Dave, I feel safe…With Dave, I don’t worry that I’m doing something wrong or saying something wrong or just being wrong…I don’t have to feign distance and indifference. I can love him with the intensity I feel and not worry that it will be received with punishing dismissal. With Dave, I feel loved.”

Dave and I have talked a lot recently about what first drew us together. And there it was, in black and white: the feelings of a 25-year-old me (in desperate need of a good editor) telling me why I wanted to get married: because Dave made me feel safe.

But there’s that other side of me that I didn’t write about in that toast—maybe because I didn’t fully understand it yet—the side of me that says, “I’m a wild animal,” and gnaws at the rope tethering me to the front porch.

The better part of my marriage I’ve found myself struggling to balance these two halves—sometimes successfully, sometimes miserably. And I imagine that struggle will continue forever. I doubt I’ll ever be able to claim victory—awaking one day to say, “Wow! I love being domesticated! Everything I want is right here in front of me!” But slowly I’m realizing that I can live peacefully with both parts. It might be an uneasy peace sometimes, but it’s a peace nonetheless. I’m learning that I can live in this state of tension and still be a good wife and mother. I can love my husband and kids even though I sometimes tug at the rope they hold. I’m learning that I can look skyward, see the moon, and howl to greet it, even if I can’t run away to find it.

My homesickness always hits in the spring—which is strange because spring is actually New Mexico’s worst season. The only season, in fact, that pales in comparison to the mid-Atlantic’s. Spring in New Mexico brings winds that whip sand into your eyes and ears and hair. It is sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes wet with snow or rain, sometimes impossibly dry—all in the space of 24 hours. Spring may be known as an unpredictable season the world over, but in New Mexico, spring is beyond unpredictable. It is schizophrenic.

Yet without fail, since leaving New Mexico six-plus years ago, spring is when I begin to feel the dull ache deep in my chest, a longing for home so much it hurts. I suspect my friends are beginning to avoid me this time of year because they know where the conversation will inevitably turn. I’m convinced that if I explain it right—if I just tell one more story just so—they’ll understand why I will never feel at home here in suburban Washington. Home will always be 1,902 miles away in Chimayó, a remote village in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a population of 2,000, where Dave and I lived for five-and-a-half years.

Like other rural communities, springtime in Chimayó means the resurrection of everything dormant. It is when fields that have lain fallow during the winter are tilled;  when apple blossoms begin to peak through their cocoons; when the thin reeds of grass paint the desert floor sage. But, more than all this, it is when the acequias are cleaned.

The acequias are an elaborate system of ditches that pull water off tributaries of the Rio Grande to irrigate the farmland. First dug by Spaniards who settled the area in the 1600s, the acequias make farming in an otherwise arid landscape possible. But in order for them to work effectively, the sediment and rocks and tree branches that gather in them over the winter must be cleared.

So each spring, every able-bodied man who lives on property with water rights is expected to take part in the ditch cleaning, or pay someone else to do it. It is a full day of back-breaking labor—literally digging ditches beginning at eight in the morning and ending no earlier than five. It’s a hell of a way to spend a Saturday. Sadly, employment opportunities in Chimayó are limited, so it’s easy enough to find someone to do the work for you…at a cost of just $30—less than $5 per hour. Every white person we knew in Chimayó paid someone to do it.

So imagine my surprise our first spring in Chimayó, when Dave told me he was going to do the ditch cleaning himself.

“Are you insane?” I asked.

I didn’t doubt Dave’s physical ability to dig ditches for eight to nine hours. He’s always been very athletic and strong and I knew his body could handle it. But I was less confident his body could handle the pummeling I felt certain he would get from his fellow ditch diggers. The fact is, Chimayó has a very rough element. It holds the title of the city (for lack of a better word) with the highest number of drug overdoses per capita in the nation. Not surprisingly, crime is a real issue. Murder is a too frequent headline in a newspaper that boasts a readership of just hundreds. I imagined Dave, in all his whiteness (and Dave is very white…white-blond hair, fair skin) showing up at the ditch digging with a bunch of ex-cons psyched for the opportunity to earn $30 to buy their next hit of heroin.

Now I realize I’m stereotyping. Many people who participate in the ditch cleaning are surely fine, upstanding citizens who are upholding a centuries-old family tradition of participating in the community event. But I knew plenty of the scarier part of the population would be there, too. At the very least, Dave would be an outsider, and I worried what that would mean for him.

The morning of the ditch cleaning, he readied himself. He put on his well-worn Carhart overalls and work boots, which, thank God, at least made clear that he was used to working outside. Then he filled his Camelbak (a backpack with a bladder in it and tube that runs over the shoulder) with water and ice cubes. Next came the sunscreen, which he applied like spackle. Finally, he found his Epi-Pen and inhaler (bad allergies) and put them in the pocket of his Gortex raincoat.

I watched this the way a wife watches her husband packing his rucksack before he ships off to war.

Dave smiled and said, “I’m sure every man in Chimayó is doing the exact same thing right now.”

***

We drove towards the place where the ditch cleaning would start. I say “towards the place” because we actually had no idea where it started. The only communication we’d seen was a hand-written flyer posted on the bulletin board of the post office that said (in Spanish): “Ditch cleaning. Rincon de los Trujillos” and the date. Dave asked our neighbor Seferino where he should go. He told Dave it started in Cordova—a village about five miles up the highway from Chimayó—but he couldn’t tell him where exactly. “Just drive up the road and you’ll find it,” he said.

So I drove Dave “up the road” that leads through Cordova. Sure enough, after a few miles, we saw two men and a boy whom I guessed was about nine years old walking with shovels in their hands.

We pulled over and asked if they were headed to the ditch cleaning. When they told us yes, we offered them a ride if they’d show us where it was.

“I won’t say no to that!” said the man I assumed was the grandfather.

They piled into the car and soon I heard the unmistakable hiss of a can popping open, followed by the smell of beer. It wasn’t even eight in the morning.

“Breakfast of champions, bro!” one of the men exclaimed as he knocked back a Budweiser in a matter of seconds. “Want one?” he asked Dave.

“No, that’s okay, I had oatmeal,” Dave said.

They all laughed.

These guys didn’t worry me. They seemed harmless. So, they were drinkers? Drinking was the past-time of choice in Chimayó and, although it was certainly the cause of a number of social ills, it didn’t bother me much. I guess when you live in a place where the community health center hosts a mobile needle exchange at the bottom of your street every week, a little drinking doesn’t seem so bad.

I drove them as far as I could, until the road started getting too narrow and too rough for our 1984 Nissan Sentra. I stopped and they disembarked. Dave closed the door and leaned in the window. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you at some point, I guess.”

“Okay,” I said tentatively. “Don’t get killed.”

***

Dave survived. And he survived the following three years, as well. I have no doubt his willingness to participate in the ditch cleaning instead of paying someone with dark skin to do it earned him a respect in the community we otherwise never would have had.

But our final year in Chimayó, he didn’t go. Noah had just been born and we were too frazzled and sleep deprived to imagine it: I couldn’t imagine surviving a full nine hours alone with a baby, and Dave couldn’t imagine mustering enough energy to make it through a day of hard labor. So he paid someone $30 to do it for him. I’m not sure Dave has ever felt so ashamed to pay someone for a service in his life.

The ditch cleaning always ended right in front of our property. That afternoon, our last spring in New Mexico, we could hear the rhythmic ping of metal shovels hitting rocks drawing closer and closer. Eventually, we looked out the window and saw the group of more than 30 men standing waist-high in the ditch that bordered our property; their arms and shoulders rising and falling in time.

We didn’t know then that it was the last time we’d see it. We didn’t know that in a few days, Dave would get a call offering him a job in Washington, and that, in less than six months, we would be selling our house and property and moving to northern Virginia. We didn’t know that we would leave behind a rural life that bows to the will of the seasons for an urban life that, thanks to concrete and gutters and asphalt, gamely ignores them. Water now comes from a hose or faucet—not a ditch that has seen the turn of a thousand shovels. And whenever I think of that, I wonder why a life that has been made so much easier and more comfortable by modernization feels so much harder and more difficult?

[Note: Some of you may have already read a version of this when it was posted briefly last week. I took it down and made some changes.]

Last night a friend was telling me about a job her husband might take that would result in him living away from the family during the week and commuting home on weekends for the next two to three years. It’s a really, really great job opportunity for him but, understandably, my friend doesn’t relish the idea of essentially becoming a single mom until 2012.

“Have you ever really wanted something for Dave, but simultaneously not at all wanted it for yourself?” she asked.

The answer, of course, is yes. And I doubt there’s anyone who’s been married for more than a year who wouldn’t say the same thing. Because that is, in fact, the essence of marriage. The second you stand before your mate at your wedding and say, “I do” (or whatever vows you wrote yourself based on a haiku by Masaoka Shiki), you give up the right to make decisions based solely on your own dreams and desires. It’s the hardest thing about being married. Because the moment one spouse asks the other to give up something, anger, bitterness, and resentment lurk around the corner, growling lowly and threatening to pounce.

I would love to say that this isn’t an issue in my marriage. That I realize resentment only poisons relationships. That whenever I’ve had to give up something for Dave, I’ve done so happily and without a trace of bitterness.

Uh, yeah. Have I mentioned before that six years ago Dave’s job required that we leave our beautiful little farm in northern New Mexico to move here, to the suburbs of Washington, DC?  Have I mentioned that our property abutted public land with endless hiking trails and that we kept our horses there and that we awoke every morning to this view?

(okay, the rainbow wasn’t there every morning, but you get the idea)

Have I mentioned that what was supposed to be a two-year assignment is moving into its seventh year? Have I mentioned how many things I don’t like about living here? If not, here’s a quick list:

1. too many people
2. too much traffic
3. too much crappy weather
4. too many rules (don’t get me started on the leash laws)
5. too many really angry people (Dave and I were talking about this the other day—wondering if there really are a higher percentage of assholes on the east coast, or if it’s just the sheer number of people gives us a larger representative sample? But that’s another blog post.)
6. too few opportunities to be outdoors
7. too little open space
8. too many mosquitoes
9. too many parents who tell their kids, “Excellent fine motor skills!”
10. oh, and it’s the suburbs

Now I worry that I sound like a really miserable pain in the ass. So let me counter this with a list of things I do like about living here:

1. great friends
2. great horsey world
3. great schools for the kids
4. great newspaper

That’s about it.

Needless to say, I’m not one to suffer in silence. So, yes, Dave is keenly aware of my list of grievances. That’s not to say that I harp on it daily. And even when we do talk about it, I recognize that I wasn’t dragged here by the hair, kicking and screaming the whole way. I agreed to the move. And even though the list of things I like about living here is short, the first three are weighted pretty heavily. So it’s not like I’ve been mired in a deep depression the last six years, cursing my unlucky fate.

But…the fact remains that I left a place I loved to move to a place I don’t. And when we moved, we didn’t give up just a home and a different landscape. We gave up a way of life—days that were spent almost entirely outdoors, either working on the property or riding our horses or hiking in the mountains that were only a forty-minute drive away. Part of this was because we didn’t have kids at the time—or barely had kids (Noah was five months old when we left)—but part of it was because of the reality of where we lived.

I’m most struck by how different my life is now from how it was then when I take out the garbage. In New Mexico, the night before garbage day, I would haul the cans out to our truck and load them in the bed, and then drive to the top of our long, windy driveway, where I would unload them for the garbage trucks to empty in the morning. Packs of roving dogs routinely toppled our cans and tore the garbage to shreds (one of the things that would be on my “don’t like” list about living in northern New Mexico) so I would secure the lids with bungee cords and walk back to the truck.

But before I climbed in, I would always stop for a minute and just stand there. The air would be cool, because the high desert air is always cool at night, and smell alternately like juniper in the summer, piñon in the fall, snow in the winter, and apple blossoms in the spring. Dogs barked in the distance or coyotes sent up their yapping calls. The acequia (an irrigation ditch that lined our property) would be running with water, babbling along in its best imitation of a mountain stream, reflecting the moonlight if there was one. If there wasn’t, I would turn my head to the sky and see stars so thick I could barely find the gaps between them.

And as I took all of this in, I marveled at how seamless it all was. There were no margins or borders. The air and the water and the coyotes and the apple blossoms were all inextricably intertwined. They couldn’t untangle themselves even if they tried. I think at this point I could feel my heart actually swell in gratitude for the privilege of living in this beautiful place, of being able to consume this visual poetry on a daily basis.

Here, taking out the garbage involves simply rolling our cans to the end of our driveway. I almost never stop. I almost never look up. And when I do, I rarely see more than a handful of stars, their light straining through the atmosphere. There’s no babbling acequia. No cool desert air. No smells beyond the ubiquitous dampness of the mid-Atlantic. No sounds beyond the hum of the freeway that ferries its burdensome load a mile from our house.

And I know my inability to see the beauty in this is not because there is none, but because I lack the creativity to. I know that if I just stopped comparing life here to New Mexico and lived in the moment, that I would appreciate more what’s in front of me. Maybe I would notice the way the streetlight reflects off the asphalt is its own kind of poetry? Or the way a cat skulks across the street and under a bush? Or maybe I would hear a bird make its final call of the night? But I can’t. When I look at life in the suburbs, I see only gridlines and rules and a sky devoid of stars. I see a life hastily plucked from the natural world and told, “This is how you should behave.” I see edges, stark and razor sharp.

So I grumble. And I moan. And, sometimes—okay, more often than I should—I outright bitch about it.

I’m working on it. Honest, I am. I’m trying to remember that life takes us in all sorts of directions for all sorts of reasons, and we’re happiest when we accept the unexpected shifts and roll with them. I remind myself that there are no borders in any life—including life in the suburbs of Washington, DC.  That the only margins that exist are the ones I draw myself. And the sooner I erase them, the more content I’ll be.

And, most importantly, I remind myself that just as I have given up so much for Dave, he has given up so much for me. Once, during one of our many conversations about this, Dave correctly observed, “Marriage is not a spreadsheet.” And it’s not. We can’t put all of our sacrifices and indulgences into separate columns, tally them up, and claim victory or defeat. All we can do is promise that we’ll try our best to balance our own happiness with that of the person we love. To see the things we give up not as deficits, but deposits. To say, “I do,” year after year, long after the wedding is over.