Tomorrow marks 25 years since Jason and I said, “I do.”  I was looking at some pictures of us from before we got married.

Staring at those two young, know-it-all kids, I couldn’t help the words from jumping into my mind… 

“Oh…what they didn’t know….” 

That’s true for everyone that starts out, right?  You naively think you somehow control the outcome, that your brains, professions or social circles will deliver a life of ease and comfort.  

Looking back, what we didn’t know was so, so, SO, much. 

We didn’t know that marriage requires you to learn so many things about each other. Like the fact that he wants the dishes in the dishwasher arranged “the right way” and that she really needs moments of quiet without noise or talking or she will get really, really cranky and sweet Jesus don’t let her get hungry because she will be super mean. 

We decided to build some businesses, and we didn’t know that building a business was such HARD work.  We didn’t know the stress would strain us and cause us to argue over the best way to do…well…everything. We didn’t realize that debt would rack up so quickly when building those businesses. Combined with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt from professional school…it was suffocating.  We didn’t know that there would be times we would panic and pray that we could make our employee’s payroll, all the while tucking our own paychecks away in drawers to be cashed when the bank accounts weren’t so bare.  

Then we decided to add some babies, another thing we somehow didn’t know was going to be so hard…as Jim Gaffigan says…

“You know what it’s like to have 5 kids?  Imagine you’re drowning, and someone hands you a baby.” 

We didn’t have 5, but sometimes it felt like it because we didn’t know that the businesses were our “babies” too.  And just like kids pull at you for attention, work pulled at us with almost as much tenacity as those babies of ours. Drowning indeed. 

Speaking of brand new babies… We didn’t know you could go through a day, unshowered and covered in spit-up, and when given the option to get clean or just go straight to bed, we would exhaustedly choose bed because the energy it would take to shower was too much to imagine.  We didn’t know that colic with our first child would send us to the brink of insanity, and we didn’t know what it would be like to spend New Year’s Eve in a hospital with our second newborn.  We didn’t know that we’d be praying that the pic line they finally placed after blowing 17 IV placements in her teeny tiny body would deliver the exact medications she needed to stop an infection.  We didn’t know the twisted feeling of relief that she was getting the meds could actually be paired with the worry that we had to sign a release stating that, yes, we understood deafness was a potential side effect. We didn’t know that a third baby would come long after we sold all the baby things and that you do forget all that messy stuff I talked about earlier in this paragraph until you once again, smell like spit up and this time you’re covered in it while dropping her off at daycare with parents who are so much younger than you that you could have given birth to them. 

We obviously knew that babies became toddlers but we had no clue that toddlers are tiny terrorists that somehow also come with exploding amounts of emotions AND toys. That boy who thought that a perfectly arranged dishwasher was his biggest concern would have to come to grips with large, plastic, ugly toys covering every corner of his home.

We didn’t know that sending each child to kindergarten would feel like a trust fall when we watched them put their tiny arms through the straps of the backpack that was as big as they were while we prayed the world would be kind to them. 

We didn’t know that three girls come with some really BIG emotions and we never imagined that the most often repeated question in our house would by… “wait, why are YOU crying NOW?” 

We didn’t know that sending those kids to elementary school would look like a walk in the park compared to sending them to college, and we never imagined how hard that drive home would be after you drop them off. 

We certainly never imagined that sadness that comes from hearing a word like miscarriage, and never in a million years did we know the terror that rips through a family when they hear the word cancer. 

We.Just.Didn’t.Know. 

But you know what else? 

We didn’t know that someday we would know each other so well that we could tease each other about the organized dishwasher as well as the other ones propensity for introversion, and we never knew that knowing each other for so long that you learn all the personality quirks becomes something you are prideful about. 

We didn’t know that those spit-up covered parents would laugh hysterically at how tired they were and that a baby sleeping through the night would feel like they won the dang lottery. We didn’t know that we would understand gratitude for healthy kids so well and we never imagined that being the “old parents” would allow us to parent with such a better understanding of what we were doing this time. 

We didn’t know that rocking a baby at 3am while you rub your face against a tiny head covered in baby soft hair, with the feel of them breathing on your chest, can somehow make you sob at the fleetingness of the moment. We didn’t know that hearing the first words and watching the first steps would be something we would cheer about like they were the first in the world to accomplish such great tasks.  

We had no idea that seeing your kids become adults and bloom into their own people, with their own dreams, is worth every second that we miss them being under our roof. 

We could never have expected that watching your child find the person that they get to “know nothing with”,  is one of life’s greatest joys. 

Not knowing those scary words I mentioned earlier can be coupled with the fact that we also never knew the joy of hearing a babies heartbeat on an ultrasound or the elation that comes with words like “cured” and “free of cancer.” 

We didn’t know that the tired, irritated, and stressful years behind building those businesses would yoke us together in ways nothing else could have.  We didn’t know how much building things together would be one of the things we were most proud of.  We never knew how much fun we were going to have doing it. 

AND…we never knew that “building stuff” would include a family that fiercely loves each other and knows how precious life is. A family that laughs all.the.time. A family rooted in its faith in Christ. It’s the most beautiful project we’ve ever created. 

So, I look at those pictures and instead of sighing with sadness at all the stuff those innocent faces didn’t know, I think I’ll choose to concentrate on…well… all the stuff they didn’t know. 

I love you more than I could ever express in one of my silly blogs, Jason Steven Lake. The best decision of my entire life was when I said “I do” 25 years ago.  Here’s to 40 more years of not knowing stuff with you. 

P.S.  I’m pretty damn good at loading the dishwasher now and I’m gonna need you to admit it. But first, I need a snack…I feel a little grouchy. 

Love, Suzy