20 years of marriage!

Yesterday DH and I celebrated our China Wedding Anniversary. Twenty years of marriage six kids of eight pregnancies and a lifetime of memories and things to laugh about.

At work one of his colleagues said, "Twenty years! Gosh! That's quite an achievement!"

It's been hard work at times...for both of us LOL! But I think despite some difficulties and sometimes because of them, we have had a great twenty years and hopefully will have another great twenty years.

Our marriage has been very much a 'public' affair. I am not sure how else to word it. DH says we have been given the charism of hospitality, and I guess by the number of people I seem to feed every week he might have a point.

We had a weeks honeymoon in Applecross at the north west end of Scotland. We had applied for two weeks but the hospital wouldn't give me two weeks leave. Shame eh? Anyway as it turned out it was a good job because as soon as we got back my friend called. She was in dire straights and moved in with us that week. She was going to stay a couple of weeks, but stayed a couple of years. We had fun!

Over the years there has been a lot of extras around the dinner table needing hot food and TLC.

Sometimes I just didn't want to do it, but dh was always supportive and helped me remain 'Christian' when I really wanted to be Me oriented.

We worked together for some time at a CAMHS clinic. At the beginning there were some concerns and doubts about a married couple working together on the unit, especially as he was to be my boss. But it worked very well. Hardly any of the children admitted to the unit had anything like a good stable family life and they were often openly fascinated in seeing a couple who could be together all day without screaming and shouting at each other or being violent with each other. One child begged us to adopt him. I went home that night and cried.

We've struggled together through some pretty difficult pregnancies and then me becoming disabled. We've had some pretty scary money problems sometimes-especially when I had to give up work. But we've seen it through for richer for poorer, sickness and health and with God's grace ('cuz that's what makes a marriage work) we'll keep on.