The mirror

My husband and I are a good team, and we're lucky in this. We work hard together and share the parenting challenges equally, and I think we still manage--most of the time--somehow, through the thick and thin of life's daily challenges, not to grow apart--not to let who we are as a couple become buried under who we are as parents. But it's hard, really hard, isn't it? Sometimes it's a work in progress. We're not good at setting up date nights, mainly because we're often busy in the evenings, working and catching up. We also spend so much time creating anxiety-free situations for L. that we just aren't willing to rock the boat (or capsize it, as the case may be). Babysitting money is usually spent covering work meetings, and we often can't justify the extra expense of going out to dinner, or a movie. I know we need to work harder at this side of things, but the plain truth is we are often just too tired to think about going out, and we truly enjoy being home; renting a DVD together is often enough to tide us over. I guess we're easy that way. But on Wednesday night Scott and I pushed all the work we had to do to the back burner and we went to a concert--a real, live concert. I bought the tickets months ago for Scott's birthday, and the gift included free babysitting services from my mother-in-law, who generously came into town to watch the kids. Even so, I worried about the timing all day on Wednesday--I had too much grading, too many errands to run--it was Wednesday, after all. And a concert? We hadn't been to a concert together in thirteen years. It seemed a slightly crazy, out-of-character thing for us to do, and the vision of the both of us there seemed dusty and strange. We are parents, after all, and the week wasn't going so great--the kids were tired, we were tired. I had to work hard to get myself out of that cycle of worrying and foot-dragging, something I'm learning to do little by little. And as always happens when Scott and I do go out by ourselves--when we do something a little out of the ordinary--I quickly realized that we really needed it, after all. Not only did it turn out to be the best concert ever (did I say the BEST) but as we stood there (fourth row back!), the stage close enough almost to reach out and touch, the years fell away from us and we caught sight of ourselves as we had been years and years ago--eons, it seems--in the days when we did those kinds of things. We haven't stopped being who we are, but when you're a parent--and a parent who deals with a special needs child, you put so much time and strength into this precious, all-important job that you need to force yourselves to step out of context from time-to-time. You need to catch sight of yourselves in some gigantic mirror and see that there, under the You you've become--the wonderful, strong You, is still the couple you were before you moved mountains, and crossed wild rivers and gave birth to more love than you had ever imagined you could. So go out there and do something out of context, something different, even if it's just to eat ice cream on the porch after the kids have gone to bed. My vow from here on out is to look in that mirror more often, because I liked what we saw, and I've missed it.
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