To my wife…

Today is the 26th July, 2019. That means that exactly 7 years ago, I was marrying (or getting very stressed about preparing to marry) my beautiful wife. 26th July 2012. A hot summer’s day. A very hot summer’s day. Really not the kind of day to be wearing a woollen 3-piece-suit. It was so hot that we had to move family members out of the congregation because it was dangerous for some of the more delicate family members to be sat in direct sunlight! (Just heat exhaustion, I’m not suggesting anyone in my family is a vampire… well…)

I remember that day so fondly. I suppose I’m lucky to have many fond memories to draw upon, but I can think of very few that match the sheer jubilation of that day: the first sight of my wife in her wedding dress (I didn’t cry, honestly… it was just very, very hot); the sight of my mother and new-mother-in-law taking control of the dance floor; the friend who fought back from surgery to perform at the wedding; the knowing looks from members of the congregation who recognised that we walked back down the aisle to the closing theme of Blackadder; the pleasure of rewarding my dad for working his socks off all day with a bottle of (one of) his favourite whiskeys – and watching that rapidly disappear!

I wince slightly at such self-congratulatory, picture-perfect supercuts.(Thanks, Lorde, for that cultural reference – don’t let anyone ever tell you that pop music isn’t educational, kids!) No-one wants to hear sycophantic wedding day reminiscing, much like no-one really wants to look at your holiday photos. It certainly wasn’t perfect; there are parts that didn’t go to plan: staying up stupidly late the night before trying to get a printer working; leaving too much to do in the run up to the ceremony on the day; performing some of the musical entertainment without monitor speakers so that I couldn’t actually hear what anyone else was playing; and forgetting to play the playlist of ‘approved’ music in the run up to the ceremony. But I can honestly say that the day did everything I wanted and more in marking the day with genuine celebration.

Much has changed in 7 years. I remember how much ‘planning a wedding’ seemed like a grown up thing to do (or should I say ‘helping to plan’, all the good ideas were my wife’s ). Now we have a mortgage, a son, and a blog (did I get that in the right order, I hope so). A son. A three-year-old son. A precocious, stubborn, head-strong, light-of-my-life son. I cannot believe how much I adore that little person. He might look like me, play guitar like me (badly), love mountain biking like me, love maths like me; but he is you. A smaller, blonde fussy version of you. And I love him all the more for it. He gets angry when he doesn’t understand something, just like you. He has an uncompromising virtue of right and wrong, just like you. He cries and gets angry when he’s hungry. Just. Like. You.

I cannot overstate the sacrifices you have made for our little piglet. I’m not sure I have ever seen a person stand up for what is right as stubbornly as you have done for him. Almost without fail I have agreed with the principled decisions you have made for him; it’s just taken me a few months to get up the curve in some cases! I love, so much, the boy that he has become and in many, many ways that is down to your vision and calm influence. Baby-led-weaning, for example, has been a wonderful, wonderful thing. No doubt, we could just be very lucky and have a naturally unfussy eater (in his choices, not his allergies – that’s a different matter); but I find it hard to believe it hasn’t at least had some positive influence on Piglet’s autonomy over what he eats. Sat in our favourite Thai restaurant the other lunchtime eating a selection of curries with rice between the three of us – it’s hard not feel grateful that he takes to it so well.

I have not been the perfect husband. Far from it. There have been tough times. There have been blissfully happy times. But at either extreme, I can say that I’m very proud of what we’ve built. And I want to make it better, constantly. I know you do too. If anything, it’s that striving for something more that makes it hard to relish the present; these small, current moments. It’s sometimes hard to keep in mind that me and you, as 30-something adults will be changing and developing as quickly as our 3-year-old Piglet will be doing. It just isn’t a world of firsts and primal development stages as it is in him. You are as new a mother as he is a person. We say (on a cringe-worthy daily basis) how much he’s grown and how much he’s not a baby any more; well the same goes for us. I mean, we are getting better at this, right?

I would like to find time to acknowledge those moments in ourselves as we do in him. Sometimes it’s easy. For example, tonight I held our son in my arms as we watched you on stage. Watching you dazzle the crowd with your singing, your confidence, your character. We were both so proud of you and in awe of your performance. Every single person that Piglet spoke to after the show was shown your picture in the programme accompanied by the words, “that’s my mummy!”. In these moments it’s easy to celebrate you. But I want to find ways to do this whatever the occasion. At the end of a busy week when you’re exhausted from giving 101% to your teaching and we’re at our wits end; I want us to celebrate that too. Because we’ve made it to the end of another week, lived by the principles we hold. Granted we might have to get up at 6am on the weekend to take Piglet swimming; granted we might only have eaten at 9pm because Piglet didn’t want to be left on his own and we’ve refused to sleep train him; granted the house might look like a bomb has hit it because we don’t use TV to distract Piglet while we get on with the chores while he’s awake. To have made it to the end of the week in that situation is worth celebrating.

We will never know whether these decisions/principles (or whatever you want to call them) have worked or were worth it. You don’t get a second go – and even if we get a second child, each person is different. I also don’t disapprove of people who don’t follow these practices. You do what is right for you and your family, whatever that is. It’s just that for us – these feel like the right things to do while we have the scope to do them. Life is full of compromises and I am often jealous of people who set their priorities up differently to give themselves other opportunities. I am in no position to make a judgement as to whether anyone is doing better or worse.

I will hold my hands up: there are moments in the last few years when I have forgotten the points that I am trying to make here. Moments when I have cursed at our ‘inflexibility’ or just longed to be more selfish. It can be hard to keep a sense of perspective on 2 hours sleep when you’re being bitten and told off for doing things differently from the way mommy (correctly, obviously) does things. But these moments have come and gone. And I sit here, illuminated by the glare of the laptop screen while I sit in dark with our son snoring next door, with a renewed sense of the bigger picture. An appreciation of what we are building, or trying to build. An appreciation that, for you, it is so necessary that it is not even deserving of congratulation or thanks – something I may have only recently come to see as selfish behaviour on my part.

[I wondered whether to take this last sentence out. I suspect it will split my audience… Some will see it as ungratefulness and a lack of recognition while I suspect many others will see it as the beginnings of misogyny and double standards. I don’t want to be considered complicit in the second interpretation at all – and if it makes anyone think, even just for a second, then it’s probably worth leaving in.]

I am a difficult person to live with, and I forget that at times. I fill your life with doses of excitement, enthusiasm and determination. But it’s interspersed with bouts of deflation, of apathy, of restlessness. You give me stability, context and purpose. I said it in my groom’s speech on my wedding day and I’ll say it again: You are my rock. You make me a better version of myself. We all behave differently around different people: it’s not insincerity; it’s just human nature. We all tailor our behaviour to make rapport with people and mimic their principles, if we like them. Me with you is a better version of myself than without.

We have built a world together that is far bigger than either of our visions in isolation. And I should thank you for that. Every day. But I don’t – and for that I’m sorry. At times I feel suppressed by our house. By the jobs that need doing to stop it falling down around us and the chores that need doing to keep it maintained. I can, in those gaps between doses of excitement, feel like today is just the same as yesterday. But yesterday was good. And tomorrow will be better. For every time that I have grumped at you because I’ve forgotten that: I beg your forgiveness. This blog, so much born to fruition because of you, has done wonders for me in helping to realise that. There is so much to celebrate!

Your mum read this exert from (the wonderfully named) Rainer Maria Rilke at our wedding. It is so much more relevant than I had ever appreciated at the time:

Marriage is in many ways a simplification of life, and it naturally combines the strengths and wills of two young people so that together, they seem to reach farther into the future than they did before. Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness – a new demand on the strength and generosity of each partner, and a great new danger for both.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

But once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous living side-by-side can grow for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a Young Poet

I hope you don’t mind that I concentrated on this reading rather than The Owl and Pussycat. I feel it is more poignant at this point in our lives. I reappoint myself the guardian of your solitude – if you can remember what that is?

Happy Anniversary. I love you, always. Time is nothing.

Louis x