Tonight I attended a wedding. I love me a good wedding, but friends, this wasn’t a good wedding. This was an amazing wedding.

I told the groom on what was the second to last dance, that this wedding, his wedding, reminded me of how much I love my husband (leave it to me to find a way to make his wedding about me, I know). But it’s true. Being at that wedding reminded me of our wedding, of our love. And it didn’t hurt that we got to dance to Baby Got Back either.

I know you know that my life has been a bitch lately. Read any of the last ten (thousand) blog posts and it’s there. See the look on my face at the end of the day and it’s there. Things are a mess. I am, categorically, a mess.

But this life that has become mine has not just changed me. And I tend to forget that. Slappy’s life is different too, and though he’d never say it, it’s not fair. He hasn’t had a home cooked meal in literally weeks. He does the laundry, he does more than his share of the cleaning, and he has to pick up my pieces and put me back together almost daily.

On Monday afternoon, I came home from school and cried for a solid 2 hours. Big gulping snot-filled sobs. I wanted to quit school. And he let me cry, he held me, he rubbed my back. And then when I asked, he was honest with me. He told me what he really thought about it and ultimately, he told me what I needed to hear. He helped me calm down and find the right path again. I’ve fallen off of that path eleventy billion times since then, but he’s been there to guide me back each time.

He is not without his bad days and those are hard for both of us. He is human and he is suffering from this too and sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that. (And sometimes it’s easy for him to forget to ask his wife if his brother can “swing by for a beer” at 8:30 on a Tuesday night when the house is a sty. I mean, theoretically, of course.) But we work through those hard days together.

I’m certain that there are days where he wishes he wasn’t doing his own laundry. And days when he wishes that his wife wasn’t lying flat on the couch, doped up on pills and miserable with pain. I’m sure this wasn’t the life he imagined when we began dating, when we got engaged, when we got married. But it is our life, and he is here with me.

I don’t know what next month, next week or even tomorrow will bring. I don’t know how many more tests or surgeries lie in the future. But I know that he’ll be there, with a sometimes obnoxiously even keeled and unpanicked response to guide me to where I need to be.

The bottom line is that, no matter what is going on, or how broken I am, I know that he’ll be there. And I know that even though this isn’t the life we set out to live, it is one that we will live together.

And ultimately, that’s all that matters.

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