30 Years by the Numbers

Our friends, Ned and Anne, celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary this week and sent us a photo of us--Seth resplendent in a tux as an usher, me in a dress I had made for being an attendant in my friend, Deborah’s, wedding.  We flew from Athens, Georgia to Athens, Greece for a spring break about as unlike our current pandemic as I can imagine.

Thirty years.  I remember my mother referring to people she had known for thirty years, and I couldn’t imagine sustaining friendships over so many decades.  Now, Seth and I have been married for thirty-four years, thirty-five in August, when Miranda will marry—if the pandemic terror has lifted.

In thirty years, we have had three children, 27, 25, 15. 

We have spent more than half that time in Shaker Heights.

I talk to Meg each weekend.  We do text and email, but we still speak each week.  She is the first friend I made my first year of teaching at NMH in 1984. 

When we moved to Ohio, we embraced a non-apartment Halloween, lavishly decorating our lovely school home with skeletons and scary lights and noises, only to have children shriek in delight when they realize the witch who answers the door is really their Head of School.

We said goodbye to one of Cordelia’s closest friends.

We have lost a dog and a cat, gained three new dogs and three new cats plus a Shark, our long-lived carnival goldfish.

We have said goodbye to both my parents and to Seth’s dad.

We have watched our daughters finish high school.

We have said goodbye to each of them when we dropped them off at college and felt the strange molecule shift that happened in our home without their daily presence.

We have watched both daughters graduate from college.

We have moved both daughters to Manhattan and welcomed their significant others into our family.

Seth has become a legendary lawn decorator at Christmas; families stop in front of our yard to gaze at his display.  How much is too much, he wonders?  Apparently, we have not yet reached too much.

All three children have worn braces.

We have eaten more take out than we should because, by day’s end, the work of headmistress-ing often renders me too tired to cook.

We have stopped running ETC, our summer theatre program.

We have bought a green barn that my mother loved in Eagles Mere and a small house that we have not yet renovated.

I have become a tennis mom for a son whose first high school season has now been cancelled.

I have started to write more seriously, more often.

I have spent time teaching other women to be heads, to dream big, and to think about how best to interview.

I have launched five heads from Laurel.

We have tried to keep in touch with old friends in whirlwind visits to NYC.

I have started to go gray in a streak and at my temples. Seth, who has dark hair in my mind’s eye, is silver-haired now.

There is more of me to love than there once was.  My feet object to Size 6 shoes and prefer a 6 ½.

What else?  Number of chicken nuggets consumed?  Dishes washed?  Trips taken?  Children with nightmares put back to sleep?  Temperatures taken?  Booboos kissed?  Cups of coffee made and left abandoned on the counter, tears, laughs, moments of wonder?

Number of pandemics we are in the midst of enduring:  one.