Celtophilia

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Posted by Mike

While Bonnie and I generally try to let our personalities show in our writing, so far we have kept Celtophilia somewhat impersonal for a blog. We’re here, we’re the writers, you can email us if you want, but we’re not posting daily minutae of our lives. Mostly, I think that’s because we both realize that our daily lives are rather dull, and rarely worth sharing. I hope you will forgive me though, for writing about something deeply personal today. I promise, it won’t become a habit. As of today, I’ve been married to the most loving, charming, beautiful, and delightful woman I’ve ever known for ten years. In this, I am incredibly lucky.

Looking back, it’s obvious that neither of us really knew what we were getting into ten years ago. I was eighteen, Julie nineteen, both college drop-outs after one year and with no clear way to support ourselves. Now, I can look back objectively at the situation and forgive all the people who thought, whether they said it or not, that we were headed toward disaster. At the time, I used my anger at those people as the driving force for all my actions. Under normal circumstances, with two normal people our age, of course they would have been right. We’ve never been normal.

Things haven’t ever necessarily been easy. I got a job as a newspaper designer, working nights all week and both days on the weekends. Colin was born, and I’ve never been more scared in all my life. I threw myself into work, but it was soon obvious that small town newspaper work was never going to give us anything like a decent living. So we moved on. I got a better job after we moved back to the Atlanta area, and we had a crappy apartment for a year, but were still only scraping by, so we moved in with my dad, who was having troubles of his own. We didn’t live there for free, but the rent was manageable, though living with people is never easy. We were comfortable there for several years, and Eamon was born. There’s no reason for me to detail all the unnecessarily dramatic reasons for our leaving, . We were doing fairly well financially, because I had taken on some freelance design work that was paying off, so we bought our own house.

I was stressed beyond all imagining. I had recently lost a young cousin to drugs, there was the aforementioned dramatic leaving of dad’s house, and I was working 80-90 hours a week as my freelance business got out of control. I was depressed and suffering from all manner off health problems due to lack of sleep, and thhe weight of all the things that just sort of came together at once to create a stress hellstorm. It wasn’t pretty, but we got through it. Eventually, the work slowed down and we settled into a routine. A couple of years slipped by. At the moment, things are looking bleak again. I’ve lost those well-paying freelance contracts, and we’re not sure how things are going to work out. The one thing I do know, though, is that no matter what comes, we will face it together.

I’m making our lives sound terrible. They’re not. The reason they’re not is because through everything, Julie and I have loved one another. We’ve both dedicated ourselves to making sure that the person we promised to spend the rest of our lives with is happy. As a marriage strategy, I recommend this to anyone. I can’t tell you the number of fights most people have that we avoid simply by not letting our selfish wants get in the way of our desire to please one another. Even when everything else has gone to hell, and the whole world has gone insane, there is my constant, perfect wife to remind me that things will turn around. I couldn’t live without her.

So there you have it. I wrote all that to tell you that my ten year anniversary has really made me reflect on things. It’s been wild, there have been moments of pure, unadulterated joy and moments of the darkest despair. The last ten years have taken a creative, cynical, romantic, foolish boy and turned him into a man who is creative, cynical, romantic, and foolish. Some things don’t change, I guess. I love you, Julie. That won’t change either. For better or worse, you’re stuck with me.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.