I met my husband when I was 18 years old, on the second day of my very first job. He was the hot older IT guy at work. I thought he was completely out of my league. I had a huge crush on him for months before finally deciding I needed to be wildly brave and ask him out. We had our first date on the beach, and moved in together a month later.

We were together for 9 years before we had babies. We had a whole world of coupledom on our own. Nine years of reading books and talking about books and making art and talking for hours and going on little adventures together and playing with our dogs.

And then we had kids, and life changed, as it does. And we spent ten years in the thick of it: tending to babies and toddlers and slightly bigger kids, and homeschooling. Apart from a couple of months of having a babysitter in the afternoons while we worked a few metres away, we’ve been at the coalface of parenting. That was our choice, and that was what we wanted, and we’re glad we did it.

And now, ten years on, for the first time, we have both kids in school. And we have… time together on our own again. Suddenly, for hours each day, we have our own world of coupledom again. We get to talk, uninterrupted. We get to have little adventures again. We get to be together, and feel the ebb and flow of us again – just us.

I feel like we’ve been asleep for a decade, and suddenly have woken up beside each other again. A kind of parenting coma. Falling back in love with your own right arm.

We laugh a lot more now. We’ve kept laughing, all these years of course. But these are different kinds of laughs. Longer ones. Those kinds of delicious laughs we did before kids. The ones where I’m doubled over, gasping for air, and he has tears streaming down his face. We don’t need to stop to feed hungry kids, or tell them why we’re laughing, or explain why we’re laughing, or remind them that it’s ok if we are laughing too loud and it is hurting their ears. We can just laugh. And so we do.

It’s a blessing to come back together and remember why we fell in love, and stayed together: because we like each other. We are friends who just happen to find each other wildly attractive.

Here’s to hot IT guys from work, 19 years on.

IMPREGNATE ME ALREADY.

Just kidding. You can’t. I’m spayed.

And I really rather like getting to know you again.

xo
L