W
e dropped my mother-in-law off at the airport today. She'd been staying with us for almost two months after John's birth, helping take care of him, organizing the house, cooking our meals, and just generally being an angel. Now, I've a teary goodbye, the training wheels are off. Elena, John, and I are an independent family now, and our problems are our own to solve in our own lives.
Obviously, that isn't strictly speaking true. We have an incredible support network of friends and family, and we'll be leaning on them for a long time to come. But the things that are happening in our house now, which I won't pretend are easy or trivial, are the things that make up a life -- the unavoidable things that you simply have no choice but to surmount, in good ways or bad. What Elena and I deal with are officially now the substance of a marriage, the real stuff. When we're old and gray, we'll be talking about what the first weeks of John's life were like.
The small part of you wants to push life away, and slip back into death, into the comfort of choice and personal satisfaction. But you only grow when things are thrust upon you -- when you take up mantles that you cannot take off, and let responsibility change you in ways you will never expect.