Twelve Years Later

Twelve years ago today, I became a new person.  I became a wife.  I moved out of my parents home into a one bedroom apartment with my husband.  Twelve years ago....I was so young.  Just a young lady.  A naive young lady who was so in love with the idea of being married.  And so in love with this guy who stole my heart with his first handshake as he was was wearing his Carhart jacket, in the church where we would be married.

Twelve years can change a person so immensely.  Oh we have had some horrible times.   But we have had amazing times.  There have been times where we would cling to each other and times where we would run from each other.  In twelve years we have had three children born.  Three wonderful miracles.  We also have four babies in heaven, four babies I carried in my womb, held in my heart,  but never in my arms.  The pain of loss doesn't go away, it just decreases as life moves on.  It becomes a part of who you are.  But, right by my side was my husband.  Holding me.  Hugging me.  Kissing away my tears.  When others were getting pregnant so easily, it seems just by rubbing elbows, and my husband and I were trying to get pregnant, calculating peak ovulation times, checking dates, temperatures, and doing crazy acrobats to try to get pregnant, we waited three years  - 36 months.  We went through so many pregnancy tests.  Our second born child took two years to conceive.  And our third born child took about a year to conceive.  It is amazing that each month as the test came back negative, my husband would just hold me and we would mourn the loss of a dream together.  Oh those were the times that were heart breaking and joy bearing.  Those child-bearing years.

Here we are in a new season.  We are no longer bearing children together.  We have ended that season.  We are now raising our children.  We are in the years of adolescence and pre-pubescence.  We are in the season of sports and various extracurriculars.  We are in the season of guiding and slowly letting out that rope and pulling it in when needed.  We are navigating the strange waters of crushes, acceptance, rejection, and self-esteem.  We are in the season of setting values, when "everyone" else is doing something, seeing something, listening to something that we don't  they know that it is something that we don't do.  The phrase "That's not what the Ritcheys do" will be engraved into our children in little time.  My husband and I both pull from our childhoods, things that made us that we incorporate into our parenting.  The things that broke us, we steer from.  We are in a season of lots of feedback from each other, lots of reading of parenting books and blogs.  We are in a season of knowing that our days of having little ones in the house will all too soon be coming to an end and we will soon have older children and then it will be just the two of us under our roof again.

We look forward to spending at least another sixty years together, raising our children, celebrating occasions with our grandchildren, and making memories with our great-grandchildren.  We look forward to traveling the world together, to create memories we didn't when we were first married.  We look forward to ministering to others in whatever way God sees fit.  I am so thankful for the past twelve years, they have by far been the most rewarding years of my life!