These Ordinary Days

Thirteen years ago today, I stood in a wheat field and married my husband. Today, Darren is at work and I’m home with our kids. I’ve spent the day putting away laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning up an unreal amount of glue from a rogue craft project. It’s just an ordinary day.

Out of the Ordinary

But I’ve learned one extraordinary thing over the last year of marriage: You should never stop dreaming together. For most of our marriage, dreaming together was easy. We wanted to work and buy a house. We wanted to travel. We wanted to start a family. Check, check, check.

All Good Things

These are all good things, but even good things require a lot of time and energy. And before we knew it, we stopped dreaming together. We put one foot in front of the other, one ordinary day after the other. But our paths were diverging.

Darren had his work and life, and I had my work and life. And of course, we often collided in the middle to iron out details and practicalities. But we weren’t dreaming together.

A Shared Path

I didn’t think too much about it. It was just the season of life we were in with little kids and such. But crazy 2020 showed me something: If you’re not dreaming forward together, you’re likely not moving forward together. A once mildly divergent path can lead to wildly different places if you don’t course correct.

Thankfully, we realized our error and are working on that course correction. We’re finding our way back to a shared path.

Last night, we sat up after the kids were in bed talking about the future. Darren showed me pictures and ideas on his phone which led me to research a few things as well.

As I fell asleep, I thought: we want the same thing. We have the same dream for our future and family. Maybe that sounds small, but it feels like the biggest thing in the world to me right now.

Going Forward

I woke up this morning, on this thirteenth anniversary, not only thankful for my husband, but excited about our future together. Excited to be planning, scheming, and dreaming in the same direction again. And that is the most extraordinary thing in the middle of this very ordinary day.