Meet the Parents

Tomorrow is our 19th wedding anniversary and it seems like it was just last week that we stood in front of the stone fireplace of our favorite restaurant and made our marriage vows. We were an unlikely pair - Tony a quiet intense Brit, and me a noisy, Irish-French, raised too close to the American border to be a real Canadian wild woman.

We had communication problems early on as he had a thicker English accent then and half of the time I had no idea what he was saying..... so I defaulted to saying "yes" to anything he asked...and found myself married. The real reason I married him of course is that he was and is the best man I've ever known but don't let that get out.

We've always worked as a team, at home and in our practice and we've never stuck to traditional roles...he is more likely to be doing the laundry and me the yardwork than the other way around. We've also renovated each home we've lived in - together...and except for his difficulties in measuring wallpaper and my heating and plumbing accident, we've usually been pretty happy with the outcome.

I have adapted to being married to someone who regularly gets other women pregnant. (I bet you don't see that in print very often). One day while I was grocery shopping an exuberant woman with three kids packed into a grocery cart approached me and said loudly, "these are the kids your husband got me pregnant with!". Time stood still in that grocery store as people froze to watch my reaction...a silent grocery store is kind of spooky...anyway, her husband rounded the corner and gave me a big hug, and we all cooed over the kids...and people in the store wandered off in a confused state. I didn't think much of it at the time, but people in that store still look at me like I belong to some cult.

Tony and I have also made a pact that we don't talk about sperm and eggs anymore when we are having dinner in restaurants. We were have a lively debate about the genetic implications of intracytoplasmic sperm injection in a Joey's Seafood one night and realized once again, that the restaurant was silent. Now we save those discussions for the office, dinner table and reproductive endocrinology parties.

Our life together is frantic busy sometimes, but we always feel lucky that we get to do what we love, and we get to do it with the person we love most. Having that bond has seen us through some fresh hell and we've grown closer and adapted as we overcame the hurdles. So while our cholesterol is a little higher, and he is a bit greyer (I just get blonder), we are still basically the same Brit and Brat we were 19 years ago, and my boy it has been a fun ride. 19 down, 81 to go.