Ten years! TEN years! Ten! Years!!

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Today’s my 10th wedding anniversary day! It’s gone a little sideways from what we planned, because my daughter and I both have coughs and sore throats (so far the COVID Rapid Tests are saying it’s not that, thank goodness). We’re getting good food delivered. I made a photo montage of the worst / most awkward photos I could find of us. It’s a good day.

I got a little reflective this morning, thinking about our wedding photos and the phrase that often comes to mind– “look at those kids,” we tell each other. “They didn’t know anything.”

2012 – The day after our wedding, waiting for a flight.

But of course, ten years from now I’m going to look at 2022-us and say the same thing. But my focus now is to look at the past version of myself with kindness and humility, rather than derision or an air of superiority. That guy had to go through what he went through so I could be me, now, looking back.

A tradition we have is to write letters to each other that we open a year later. We started shortly after we were married, reading them on our first anniversary, and so on. The format is usually:

  • The specific moment in time that we’re writing from (the day and time, where we are while writing, etc.)
  • What’s been going on lately
  • Questions / speculation about the year to come
  • Some sappy, lovey-dovey stuff, as expected
On a West Coast adventure in 2018.

Some of the things we write about, when read a year later, make you say “Hoo boy, you’re in for a ride there, buddy.” Most recently: Me in 2020 hoping the pandemic has died down in 2021. Some of the things we write about make us want to gently pat our past selves and say “it’s going to be okay, you’re going to get through it.”

And what’s really interesting is that there are some challenges that we’ve completely forgotten about in less than a year! So many times we’ve read our letters out loud and said “Oh yeah, that was a thing back then!”

We’re often reminded to extend grace and kindness to other humans because we don’t know their struggles. And that’s where I’m coming from today, only it’s not to other humans, it’s to myself. When I look at that young punk from a decade ago — see, there’s that judgmental language already! Let me rephrase that. When I look at myself from ten years ago, I want to remember to be kind to that guy, because I don’t know everything he’s going through, and…he’s me!

Taken this last Christmas.

Anyway, I’ll see you in ten more years, when I reverse course on everything I’ve just said and describe in detail how much of a dingus I really am.

Thing I Saw: Areas in Final Fantasy III that I haven’t seen in over 25 years. I’m playing it again, and this might actually be the year I finish it. I got really far in junior high before I had to give it back to my friend Steve, and though I’ve made lots of attempts, this one’s really sticking! It’s a good game!

Thing I Learned: Cuckoo birds are “brooding parasites” because they leave their eggs in other birds’ nests, for them to raise. This from one of Cassidy’s cartoons, which is neat and colourful and 80s-tinged in a way she may never fully understand.

I’m Grateful For: Ten years of marriage to the woman I love <3 and the kickass Lego set she got me for our anniversary (this one)

Rediscovered this tune recently!