eleven

Eleven isn’t my favorite number.  2011 has proven to be a bit of a tough year.  The eleventh hour.  9-11.  Ten’s a nice round number, a milestone, but eleven just kind of dangles out there, beyond a milestone but nothing particularly special.  I remember my eleventh year of life being a bit of a rough one – a transition from a little kid to a middle schooler.  I anticipate we’ll enjoy that transition time again with both girls in the near future.  We do have a gift certificate for a great restaurant near us named – appropriately so – Eleven Eleven.  But of course we can’t seem to find the time to get there to celebrate.  Time is not always our friend, and eleven o’clock each night rolls around much too quickly and the evening to-do list never seems to get done.

For we do celebrate the number eleven this year, today.  Eleven years of marriage.  A respectable number.  A number with some girth and some history.  We’ve been at this for more than a decade, and with each passing year the challenges and the joys shift.  They lean more to one side in some years, and ricochet back in other years.  We try for balance between the two extremes, and when we achieve it – for months on end, or sometimes days, or even minutes, it is so, so good.  For balancing is what it is mostly about.  Remembering who we are as individuals, who we are as a team, who we want to be as a family.  

What a fun day that was, eleven years ago.  What a dress, what a cake, what a band, what a place – bursting at the seams with hundreds of friends and family and pieces of each of our past lives and our life to come.  We danced through the late hours and awoke in the wee hours to honeymoon and relax and become who we are today.