even more changes...

my anniversary is Monday.  We'll have been married two years.
I have to say, looking back, I'm glad we did it the way we did. We were married in my parents living room. I wore a tea-length lace dress, and he wore a pair of black pants he found somewhere and a red button down shirt.  I think he even wore a tie, if memory serves.  Our best man came from work wearing his ambulance uniform, and my matron of honor wore black pants and carried a single rose. There was no decorating, no guest list, no music.  Just us, and our simple vows, and our rings.  Afterward we had a simple meal of meatballs and sandwiches and brownies and cheesecake.  We wanted our focus, all along, to be on our marriage, and not on our wedding.  We spent our 3 month engagement planning for marriage, and not a wedding.  There was no honeymoon; we just got down to the business of being a married couple and working on life together.

I can't say it's hurt us at all, untraditional though it was.

Two years, a house, a dog, a cat and a baby later, we're standing on the edge of another major change.  Change is good, but there have been so many these last few years.  Rob is leaving his job, taking a paramedic position at a much larger and busier company, where he'll be working 57 hours a week plus whatever more overtime he wants to pick up.  The pay is better overall, they pay 100% of our health insurance plus most of our copay, plus 401k and other benefits.   Mostly, though, this is a stable and professional place to work.

But it forces us to make more hard decisions.  The pay and overtime is enough that I don't have to continue working full time hours.  I can work four days a week if I want to.  Or go officially full time where I'm currently working.  I can stay home, I can go back to school and finish my RN.  I think right now I plan to just hold at the status quo, to keep working twice a week, and see how things develop. 

Sometimes I think it would be easy.  If I didn't have choices.  If I was Mennonite, or held strong convictions about women working outside the home--then my choice would be simple.  Or if I financially had to work full time.  Or if I was in a career where I could take a few years or more off without being penalized.  Or if my husband had a strong preference either way, or we couldn't afford childcare, or, conversely, if we could afford a live in nanny.  Or if my husband wanted to be a stay-at-home dad.(I've suggested it, and he just looks at me like I've grown two heads)  Or if my husband had a different sort of career, one that didn't involve 90 hour workweeks(I know him too well and know the allure of unlimited overtime).

But I do have choices.  And I am so thankful to live in a time and place a situation where I can choose to pursue a career outside of wife-and-motherhood.  For most of time, women were either in situations where they had to work outside the home(and in my family, both my grandmother and great-grandmother held jobs) or they were in a religious or cultural/social situation where pursuing a career was simply unacceptable.  I don't have any of this, so I have the whole world opened up to me.

So here we are again, changing course, finding a new equilibrium. A new balance.
There have been many, many changes these 2 years of marriage.  Each time it takes us a little while to find our balance again, but we do, and life goes on.  But for the next two weeks, while Rob takes his unused vacation time before starting a new job, we're just enjoying being a family--him and me and the baby and the dog and the cat, all just trying to figure out this thing called life.