Marriage Moats-When I Was Little

Published: Wed, 01/09/13

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

Today I was making birthday cakes out of sand. My fellow bakers had on snow pants and bright hats, and found chubby sticks to use for candles. One generous preschooler offered me three large slices of sand/chocolate cake. On the fourth I politely declined. She started to reminisce about birthdays.

"When I was little I had a cupcake with yellow frosting." When she was little? What did she call herself now, middle aged? She could not yet tie her shoes or spell her last name, which was a difficult one I concede.

I suppose when you are four, a two year old is practically a fetus. So last year. Half a lifetime ago. But to someone over the mid century mark, like me, a two year age gap feels like splitting hairs.

My aunt once made a book about longevity, as a tool for showing teenagers that they have only begun their life's journey. There was a graphic illustrating how a sixteen year old girl has progressed one fifth of the way to her life expectancy of eighty. It can perhaps slow down the impatience a notch, for a daughter who thinks her existence is practically wasted if she does not get cowboy boots by the time she turns seventeen.

I savored the face of each precious child in the sandbox. They were so unaware of their own beauty. Curls framed one girl's cheeks, lavishly long lashes draped over another girl's amber eyes. A raucous blonde boy galloped across the grass on a hobby horse, and another player tromped behind in his slightly large hand me down coat.

It is effortless to love them. The greatest wrongs they are yet capable of involve snatching train tracks, or whining about carrots. They are fresh from the oven, still warm from the love of their Creator.

I wondered why it can be much harder to love grown ups. John is adorable too, except when he is annoying.

A new perspective tried to strong arm its way into my thinking. If I believe that marriage lasts into the next ten millennia, which I do, I wondered what the ratio of life spent vs life yet to come looks like for our particular duo. I played with a calculator for awhile, dividing 10,000 by 9,968, subtracting our ages, adding the number of children we have and multiplying that by the year we got hitched... 1980.

I never really solved it, except to get an inkling that we are as newbie as those kids in the sand.

Photo by Kristin Kinsey

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