The summer has whisked by.
One day it was May 31st and our middle was finishing what had been their eleventh grade year–they were a high school junior–and two days later we were listening to a message left by the school photographer stating that senior pictures would be made the following week and leaving the date and time our child was to be photographed in their cap and gown.
The previous week our eldest, a graduate student, had left for Brussels, Belgium three days after turning in spring semester papers.
They would be interning 8 weeks at the European Parliament as an assistant to a Member of Parliament from a former Eastern Block country.
Three weeks to the afternoon I stood watching the photographer snap senior pictures of our middle, I boarded a flight to Brussels with out youngest.
The previous school year had been crazy to say the least. I had not spent enough time with the baby of our family. I needed to get re-acquainted with our pre-adoloescent, soon to be teenager.
Time flies when you’re working for those you love.
Through all of this, I longed to run away with my husband.
Parenting takes a fair amount of money, patience, skill and nerves. It also takes an enormous amount of time. We do not usually borrow that time from work, but instead from ourselves and our spouses.
For certain, I do not regret having children.
And while I have often wished to have accomplished more in the way of my passions–writing and abstract painting–I will never truly regret marrying.
My husband and I celebrated our 28th anniversary of marriage in this summer. I had arrived in Belgium five days earlier.
On the afternoon we left for Brussels the card I had purchased for my husband lay in the bag from the store where I had purchased it.
As our plane lifted from the runway I thought of it, unsigned, my plans for inscribing it with a note and placing it under his pillow, forgotten in the rush of leaving.
I wasn’t a horrible wife, only a harried one trying to be a good mother and at times feeling like I had failed at both.
On arriving at our hotel in Brussels 17 hours later and very tired, I slept while our eldest took my over tired and wired youngest out for dinner.
Upon awakening I settled myself, ate breakfast, read The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times’ version for those abroad and only able to decipher English.
And then I had an idea.
I then returned to my room. Our youngest was still sleep.
As she lay beside me, I turned on my trusty computer, and in a ms document, wrote all I had intended to say to my husband in the anniversary card.
Searching through Flickr I found a flower with petals that actually lilted. I pasted the flower on the document, wound my words around it and forwarded it to my husband in an e-mail.
On instructing him how to open the new e-mail account I had set up for him, he was pleasantly surprised to see I had not forgotten the day we tied the knot.
“Wow, this is nice. How’d you do it?” he said from over 10,000 miles away.
I explained. And he expressed further awe.
This is marriage–a string of hopes not always fulfilled in ways that we would like, but chocked full of attempts that sometimes achieve more than our initial plans had hoped.