Our 35th wedding anniversary will be May 22nd. Last month I described how I met and fell in love with Gary. I promised to describe our life after our “happily ever after” wedding.

This is not a fairytale. Like all romances that end at the beginning, it seems like a happily-ever-after story. In fact our wedding was only one day in our lives. It was the start of real life with all its mundane problems and some more inordinate ones.

The summer after our wedding our schedule was packed with work and study. I have often told the story about Gary going to class in the morning, driving from Lawrence to Kansas City in the afternoon for work and returning in the evening to write a papers and study for exams. I thought this was an extraordinary pace. However, I think that schedule set the pace for our lives for many years.

Our son Michael (you should call him Mike) said recently that we are less conservative than we used to be. That was hard for me to hear since I consider myself quite liberal in my social and political views. What I think he was saying is that we are less driven and less frantic about doing a good job and being seen as responsible. That is certainly true and it came about as a result of a major health crisis, but I am getting ahead of myself.

When Gary finished his Ph.D. in 1974 we immigrated to Canada. We came for an adventure. We imagined being here for two years. When we left Kansas the temperature was soaring above 100 degrees. When we arrived in Edmonton it began to rain and the temperature was more in the range of 50 degrees (These were the days before Imperial Measure was introduced). Gary went to work and I tried to manage two squirrelly little boys and look for a place to live.

Soon we were settled in an old house. Gary and I were anxious to do well in our jobs and to learn how to live in this new country. The pace was much like that first summer. We both worked very hard.

Initially we found it difficult to get to know Canadians because we both worked and socialized with so many Americans. We told ourselves that Canadians were standoffish. In retrospect I think we were the standoffish ones.

On our drive to Canada we had fantasized about how our lives would be. I remember Gary naively saying that perhaps we could buy a nice house for $10,000.00. In 1976 we bought our house. During the two years we had lived in Canada house prices had doubled. We were anxious about the debt we had incurred and Gary was determined to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible. Being debt free was important to him.

These themes of hard work, hyper-responsibility and anxiety continued. Gary and I were generally good partners. We worked well together and we were committed to our marriage, but we lacked the skills to develop our relationship. It was not until we were both diagnosed with cancer in less than two years that we began to reexamine our lives and to set new priorities.

It did not happen over night but Gary and I made a commitment to make our relationship the most important thing in our lives. We applied our skills of working hard and being responsible to our relationship. We discovered that each of us was more interesting than our idealized picture of what a spouse should be. We began to have more fun.

Recently we were chatting about our lives. We acknowledged a deep and abiding happiness in spite of the inevitable ups and downs. Our love is steady. We remain responsible, but we don’t work as hard as we once did.

We have built this life together. Of course this is not the end of the story. We hope to grow old together, just two ordinary people with an extraordinary love.

© C O P Y R I G H T   2 0 0 7.  Mary Sullivan Holdgrafer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.