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Twenty-four years and the train is still chuggin'

"Mom, I am so proud of you and Dad for staying together and loving each other the way you do" said our oldest daughter Megan. At nineteen, she is beginning to understand the magnitude of having both parents who have stayed together. My husband and I will be married twenty-four years this July, but the years didn't come easy and for a long time, our daughters didn't believe that living with us was such a blessing.

I was eighteen when a handsome young man from Illinois passed through town. And even though I lived in a mountain town where all the men wore Levi 501 jeans and there wasn't a guy for a hundred miles with long hair, this young man who strutted in low-waisted bell-bottom blue jeans and a ponytail caught my eye. Obviously, I caught his eye too because three months later when he came back through our little town it didn't take long to re-connect. A year later, hair cut short and hard working, that twenty year old young man married the eighteen year old girl. Looking at my nineteen and twenty year old daughters now, I internalize for myself my parents feelings of concern when it comes to my own daughter's maturity and the possibility of marriage. They were right you know, my parents, when they cried out that we were too young to get married. However, we beat all the odds as well as all the local bets that we wouldn't make it a year. In fact, we've out-married just about all of the older people who originally doubted our union.
Let me explain though that our marriage has been far from gentle, instead, it has been extremely turbulent. The first twenty years were constant roller coaster rides through good times and bad with a combination of years of wealth and utter poverty, journeys finding religion to falling victim to addictions, moments of love making and moments filled with fear and violence. Perhaps the three moments of newness and birth were the deciding factors. The birth of our three children made all the rest of life worth working through. I often hear the expression, "You should never stay together just for the children. The children will be worse off in an unhappy marriage." I don't argue that children are miserable in an unhappy marriage, as they fall victim to all that comes with dissolving relationships, but it seems to me that saying they are better off without both parents together is simply a way to justify divorce. I am not writing in order to judge those who

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