Golden Hour #021: too hot to think
but taking stock anyway
This heatwave has coincided with an ill-fated trip to London. We were supposed to be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary here, but it’s rapidly descended into a sticky, sweaty mess of a weekend. Following a trip to Norma1 on Friday I was awoken at 2am with the ominous signs of food poisoning, and spent the next two hours in child’s pose on my best friend’s bathroom mat. It turns out that I’d also managed to snap one of the poles on my daughter’s travel cot, so the remaining hours of that morning were spent with her pressed against my chest in limpit mode, rivulets of sweat dripping between us, as I tried not to throw up over the clean bedding.
Yesterday we decided to cut our losses and retreat to my parent’s house, only for Owen to admit that he thinks he has covid. I’m writing this down as a reminder not to visit London with a one-year-old ever again.
That said, navigating this heatwave has shown me just how much progress my mental health has made over the past twelve months. This time last year I was still refusing to leave the house if the temperature exceeded 28 degrees, fearing that some sort of cataclysmic event would unfold if I stepped out into a world which had breached that arbitrary threshold. In the past two days I’ve (mostly) functioned as a human being in temperatures above thirty degrees, and lived to tell the tale. I imagine this seems small fry to the rest of you, but to me it’s a big deal and something to celebrate.
Other things worth celebrating? Well, I suppose seven years is a long time to be married to someone, even if it feels slightly odd to be stating that as a thirty year old. I’m now fast approaching the age where I will have known Owen for over half my life. What a gift to have known a person I love so deeply for that long.
It’s not something I take for granted; I know many people don’t meet ‘their person2’ until much later on in life. The effect of marrying my teenage boyfriend is that we’ve quite literally grown up together. We were there for each other’s 18th, 21st and 30th birthdays, and I hope to God there will be many more to come. We are also fortunate to have been parented by our in-laws, who know us both as well as they know their own children. Marriages are not just about the coming together of two people, but are also about the relationships that form between families, as a consequence of their child’s union.
Most days I love the people that we have grown into, our weird idiosyncrasies and even the profoundly irritating things we do to annoy each other. I am not of the view that marriage is all sunshine and daisys, it takes work and a commitment to keep working through the hard stuff of life together. It’s a good idea to marry someone who sees you at your worst and loves you regardless; learning to embrace wholeheartedly the flawed and faltering people you both are is what most of marriage is about.
We had this passage by Desmond Tutu read during our wedding service, and I think it still stands:
We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family.
Our wedding day was on a very wet September 10th, and it was great. We had the people we loved with us, we ate pigs head pie and got sticky and sweaty dancing to Jessie Ware on the dancefloor. If you were there, this one’s for you:
Yes, I’m naming and shaming. I’d avoid the crab linguine if I were you.
I’m also not obsessed with the notion that we only have ‘one person’, or even have to have a special person to be happy. Singledom is the right thing for some people.