It’s a Wonderful World

It’s a Wonderful World

After supper, the five of us sat on the couch and watched YouTube videos of famous songs like “It’s a Wonderful World,” “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” and “Annie’s Song” by John Denver, which was the song my husband and I danced to ten years ago.

I explained this to the girls, and they looked between me and my husband with such wide-eyed curiosity, as if the two of us had never been anything other than Mom and Dad. So, I went back the hallway to our bedroom and found the CD in the bottom drawer of the nightstand.

The Miller/Petersheim Wedding, it read. September 27, 2008.

I popped the CD into my husband’s laptop, and we watched us saying our vows while standing beneath a magnolia-wreathed gazebo on a horse ranch in middle Tennessee. My parents were there, and my husband’s parents; my sisters-in-law, my best friend, my brothers, my aunts and uncles, my husband’s now-deceased grandpa, whose unique story was the reason the two of us met.

I watched my husband and I kiss before sitting down at the reception’s wedding party table. Even my mannerisms were young.

I said to my husband as the five of us sat on that couch, “We didn’t even know each other back then!” He just looked at me and grinned.

We had no idea we’d live in a warehouse adjacent to our grocery store for three years, build a house, have a baby, sell the business, have a miscarriage, have another baby, move from that house to homestead in Wisconsin, discover my husband had a brain tumor, move back to Tennessee, build a warehouse on our land, have another baby. . . .

The list—both good and bad—was endless. I am glad I did not know everything on it while standing beneath that gazebo on that Indian summer day.

I was so naïve, so immature, and a part of me wishes I would’ve grown up before I said, “I do” because I demanded a lot from my husband that no human can give, but getting married as young as I did—having babies as young as I did—forced me to grow up, too.

I reached across the couch and touched my husband’s hair. I looked at the lineage of our children, spread out around us in all their dramatic glory. I thought of sitting on the twin bed with my girls clustered around as I read, “It’s a Wonderful World,” a children’s book based on the song, and how they rooted against me like baby bunnies in a hutch.

I thought of my husband coming out to the kitchen on Valentine’s Day after getting these children of ours to bed. He said, “Well, we did it. Another day down.” But then he paused, and his relieved smile turned bittersweet. “The funny thing is we work and work to make them independent, but then we’re going to be so sad when they’re gone.”

I could picture additions to that list: my eldest graduating from high school, my middle child getting engaged, my youngest losing her front tooth, which hasn’t even come in yet. . . . My heart filled with emotion as I thought back over the past ten years of my life’s journey, and the journey that has yet to take place. Though a heart full of love often coexists with an ache, I do truly believe it’s a wonderful world.

What makes your world wonderful? Share a happy memory with me today.