Eighteen years ago on this day, when Ren and I married in a small country church in rural Indiana, I am not sure we could have imagined the path we've taken to now. I mean, sure, he had to leave the hospital for the wedding, and our first stop once he and his entourage arrived from Japan was at the orthopedic shoulder surgeon, but I honestly just thought our marriage was being front loaded with challenges. Our tax day wedding anniversary serves as an ongoing reminder that I may have miscalculated.
The original "plan" was to get married in March on a Saturday closest to the date of our first date back in 1997. But, then Ren had a motorcycle accident on his way to work and pulverized the humeral head (the ball part of the ball and socket joint) of his right shoulder. He spent from late November until our new wedding date in mid-April undergoing and recovering from shoulder surgeries. The shoulder specialist we saw in Indiana days before our wedding confirmed that Ren would need a third surgery after our honeymoon. So, we got married, we went to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, and then returned to Japan, where I immediately found myself parenting a surly teenager who was no happier about the situation than I was.
The surgery happened in a hospital two hours from home. To get there, I had to drive my newly acquired tin can (kei car) along unfamiliar highways and through windy back roads. Once there, I navigated the unfamiliar hospital's system of surgery and recovery. Much like I have done for surgeries since, I did this all alone. Looking back on it, I'm amazed by my 28 year-old self's sheer determination.
If you've been reading this blog, you know that this was far from the last of our challenges (as I'd so naively assumed in the early days of our marriage). An international move with a teenager in year two would've stretched most marriages. But, it turns out that was nothing. Because, then we had emergency c-section baby #1 followed 10 months later by Ren's retinal detachment and surgery. And, as we were trying to figure out how to parent a very non-compliant baby turned toddler, we found ourselves pregnant with baby #2, another c-section that arrived just 2 weeks before we sold our house and 6 weeks before we packed up our bags and moved to Tokyo. Moving back and forth to Japan with two small children is hard. Doing it as a poor graduate student who is trying to write a dissertation while also figuring out how to feed the family is even harder. Add to that a baby with allergies and an undiagnosed 3 year-old, and I start to run out of words to describe it.
We moved back to the states in mid-2009 and Sky was diagnosed in late 2010. Five months later, Stow was born. Fives days after that Pink was hospitalized for asthma for the first time, and a few days later, me for a bad gall bladder. For the first two years of his life--during the same period that Ren was starting to require spine surgeries--Stow went from 90th percentile to failure-to-thrive twice. He got MRSA and C-diff and was in and out of doctors' offices pretty much non-stop. For our anniversary in 2013, Stow had a colonoscopy, cystoscopy, and endoscopy. He was 22 months old. He didn't roll over until 11 1/2 months. He didn't crawl until after he was 1. Meaningful speech didn't start until well into his third year. By then, he was on his way to an autism diagnosis (and Ren had already had three spine surgeries and would go on to have three more surgeries and some other stuff).
It's weird to spend an anniversary post talking about all the things that have gone wrong. When I spell it out this way, it can start to seem a bit like we're cursed. So, when I tell the story (if I tell it), I try to focus on our resilience, on the ways in which we have maintained our senses of humor, the way we have stayed together through it all. All of these things are true, but, this anniversary, 18 years after the first scary surgery and 9 months after the last one, I no longer imagine, like I did back in 2000, that somehow we are just going through a rough patch and that soon everything will be fine. We will most likely never be the kind of fine I expected when we got married.
But, I've learned a lot as a result. I've learned how strong we are. I've learned how weak we are. I've learned that sometimes you have to fight to stay together even when you don't want to anymore. Most of all, though, I've learned how important it is to not go through all of this alone. So, thank you to those of you who have supported us virtually through this blog and to those of you who have supported us in our real life. Here's to another 18 years!
