{"id":5767,"date":"2020-06-01T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=5767"},"modified":"2020-05-30T23:51:33","modified_gmt":"2020-05-31T06:51:33","slug":"paper-strong-victoria-bc-06-01-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=5767","title":{"rendered":"Paper Strong \u2013 Victoria, BC \u2013 [06\/01\/2020]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Westley and I are joined by the bonds of love
\nAnd you cannot track that, even with a thousand bloodhounds
\nAnd you cannot break it, even with a thousand swords..<\/em><\/p>\n

~ The Princess Bride<\/p>\n

A year ago Saturday, I was picking up friends from the airport, arranging photographers and ramping up to what felt like the biggest moment of my life.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t believe\u2026that it has already been a year.<\/p>\n

No one ever said that marriage would be easy, but Amras and I have had one rollercoaster of a first year. Four months of immigration required separation, a Christmas spent jumping the border and back again for immigration exams, \u00a0two family emergencies, one job change, three contracts, a pandemic that left us imprisoned on the fleet that once employed us for a month and a half and has spiraled into an industry wide freeze that sent us from gainfully employed to gleefully scraping by at home.<\/p>\n

Scars upon scares, rollercoasters upon mountains.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026?<\/p>\n

Even at the worst of times, even when we were breaking down on that bloody ship and at our moments of driving each other absolutely insane\u2026I know, deep down, I couldn\u2019t have gotten through any<\/em> of it without this man at my side.<\/p>\n

If we can survive all<\/em> of the insanity of the past twelve months and still come out of it pretty much whole (and, at the very least, kindly acknowledging each others cracks), I have to say I\u2019m pretty sure we\u2019ll be able to get through whatever else the world has to throw at us.<\/p>\n

Amras and I my have only reached our paper year\u2026but we, like so many others, have been forged in fire.<\/p>\n

Because we never know do we? We just never know.<\/p>\n

A year ago today I stood cowering among the peony trees in Abkhazi Gardens, practically propped up by my bridesmaids, with my mother\u2019s assurances still in my ears from that morning: \u201cif you have any<\/em> doubts, no one, no one<\/em> will judge you for deciding you\u2019re not ready. This is a choice. This is your<\/em> choice. And it\u2019s a big one.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was more nervous than I had ever been for any show, or any audition, ever. Because this part mattered<\/em>, this was my whole<\/em> life. But I never actually<\/em> had cold feet. I never actually had real doubt. I just had\u2026terror that I wouldn\u2019t be able to do it right. When one is a (very pampered, very lucky) only child brought up on Disney and movie musicals, whose closest friends in her formative years were various forms of fictional characters \u2013 who never truly thought she would<\/em> get married? Well, you find out very quickly just how much you don\u2019t<\/em> know. The movies, the fairy tales\u2026they don\u2019t tell you what happens after the \u2018happy ever after\u2019. A year ago I couldn\u2019t cook (I\u2019m improving), I could barely balance a budget (that<\/em> changed), and the only experience I had cohabitating with another human who wasn\u2019t related to me was when I shared a flat with three equally melodramatic British theatre geeks during my time in London. Those are not particularly great qualifications for \u201cCanadian Housewife of the Year\u201d.<\/p>\n

But a lot can shift in a year. Amras and I have known each other for a very long time, but there is a difference between being best friends and being married. It takes time to get used to the little things, to having someone else in \u201cyour\u201d space, to learning when to bend and compromise and when to stand up for what\u2019s personally important to you. It takes time to learn needs and \u2013 yes \u2013 expectations. Every day, always, we learn. We communicate, we do our best to listen.<\/p>\n

I’m still not going to be nominated for Housewife of the Year anytime soon. I still panic when I go to the grocery store and I still have a tendency to burn the bottom of our best saucepans. But all in all, I’ve ended up realizing that I had far stronger role models than I realized.<\/p>\n

The world is a very different place now than it was when I walked down that flower-scented aisle on my father\u2019s arm a year ago. We have all lost a lot of our wide-eyed innocence, for those of us that had any left, and we approach the world with a lot more caution. When Amras and I exchanged vows, we were both employed as world travelers, with a semi-solid plan for shifting that path in the mid-range future. Now, I\u2019m a 9-5 retail worker who comes home every evening to a husband who\u2019s worried about me going to work in the first place, because it feels like every time I step out that door I\u2019m potentially exposed to the insanity. I come home tired and wired and worn, but I come home<\/em>. And I come home to him.<\/p>\n

To someone who listens when I tell them that I\u2019m a little broken and can\u2019t always find my glue, who realizes that sometimes it\u2019s something as small as \u2018by the way the laundry\u2019s done\u2019 that makes all the difference in the world. Someone who shares my nerd-driven interests (\u201cyou totally<\/em> need to get that Civ 6 expansion\u201d) and who gleefully babbles to me about his (\u201cso, I\u2019m playing this new challenge!\u201d), who encourages me and worries for me and sits with me in the mornings to drink tea and plan the day no matter how tired we both are and even if the plan ends up being no plan at all\u2026<\/p>\n

Someone who is \u2026there. Who is actively present in my life.<\/p>\n

And I only hope, that he knows just how much that means.<\/p>\n

And that it will always always<\/em>, be mutual.<\/p>\n

Because that\u2019s what partners do\u2026<\/p>\n

Because we may only be on the \u2018paper\u2019 anniversary. But we are parchment over steel\u2026tempered by trauma. And we will not let the world break us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Westley and I are joined by the bonds of love And you cannot track that, even with a thousand bloodhounds And you cannot break it, even with a thousand swords.. ~ The Princess Bride A year ago Saturday, I was … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-1v1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5767"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5772,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions\/5772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}