This summer, my husband and I celebrated 10 years of marriage. Which really is ten (plus) years of love and growing complexity. When we got married, it was just us in a BIG apartment. Ten years later, it is us and two growing children in the same not-so-big apartment. We have grown older, our children have grown bigger, our mothers have grown more frail -- and seems like our lives have grown exponentially more complicated.

I pulled out our wedding liturgy for us to re-read on our anniversary day. In 2000, when we said our vows, I suspect that we had only had good intentions and an abstract idea of what we were actually promising.

I promise,
Before God and these witnesses,
To be your loving and faithful [spouse];
In plenty and in want;
In joy and in sorrow;
In health and in sickness,
As long as we both shall live.

At that time, there is no way that we could have predicted career transitions, September 11th, economic upheavals, vastly different children and the challenges of rearing them in New York City, health changes in our mothers, deaths of family and friends, and a million other "unexpecteds." Like every couple-of-faith, we made the promises and then continue to live into our commitments through the years. Sometimes it is a grind and sometimes it is shear joy. Oftentimes, I find myself simultaneously overwhelmed and grateful.

Poet Marge Piercy wrote a poem that offers a description of the experience of a decade of living into our marriage vows and life. It is a wide-eyed reality check on lives that are growing love. Below is an excerpt:

Learning to love differently is hard,
Love with the hands wide open, love
With the doors banging on their hinges,
The cupboard unlocked, the wind
Roaring and whimpering in the rooms
Rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
That thwack like rubber bands in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
Stretching the muscles that feel
As if they are made of wet plaster,
Then of blunt knives, then
Of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
Of grab, of clutch; to love and let
Go again and again. ~ Marge Piercy