I haven’t written anything about my wife yet, so I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about her.

I have a theory about marriage (though I don’t actually thing there’s anything theoretical at all about it; I think it’s fairly dead on). If you go into a marriage expecting that you will be able to change the other person in order to correct the things you don’t like about them, or to get them to like the same things that you like, either your marriage, or your expectation is doomed. One of them has got to go. Hopefully you realize that in time that the expectation is the thing to go, instead of the marriage. Instead, if you go into your marriage willing to take the person as they are, and you work on a consistent basis to love them as they are, what happens is that you actually start (subconsciously or consciously) changing yourself to be what they want you to be. When both people do that, everything just seems to work out.

Heather and I have managed to be like that for the most part. I try (perhaps not on a daily basis, but pretty often) to find significant ways to make her happy. Most often, that involves “doing” something for her (cooking a meal, or occasionally doing a chore :-). But occasionally it actually means something a bit deeper or more important. I’ve certainly changed in several ways since I married her.

Heather is a stay-at-home mom, which is the best thing in the world. When I was dating, one of the things I really wanted was someone who would want to do that when and if we had children. I find it sad that so many people have children, and then, almost from the start, hire other people to raise those children for a significant part of the day. Fortunately, Heather felt the exact same way, and from the day we got married, we made sure that we were living such that we could get by without her salary (as a matter of fact, I always paid all the bills, groceries, etc., so that we could lose her salary any time without causing a financial strain). When she got pregnant with Elizabeth, she had figured out her last day at work by the time she was a couple months along. Of course, something that we knew from a theoretical standpoint was that being a stay-at-home mom was still going to be hard work. But the reality is that it’s REALLY hard work. Heather’s good at it though. Elizabeth is growing up in a wonderful environment. Now, Heather is expecting again, so Elizabeth will soon be joined by a brother or sister, and both of them are going to have a full-time mother.

Another place that Heather excels at is being my friend. It seems like life is so busy now. There are so many things that need to be done that we often spend several evenings a week apart (in addition to the days when I’m gone to work). It never seems like I am able to spend as much time with her as I want. The only time I get to be with her as much as I want is when we’re on vacation. For us, vacation is a family affair. When we went to Yellowstone, we were never apart for more than a couple minutes at a time. I wish it could be like that more of the time.

Anyway, I’ll be writing more about Heather later.