Honeymoon Story

Our new baby is kicking the crap out of me. I can't sleep.
So instead I'm sitting up thinking about that baby, how She's coming soon, how wonderful and yet how much work She's going to be, and it makes me think of our honeymoon. About honeymoons.
The tradition in our culture is that right after a couple gets married, they go on a honeymoon.
Typically someplace peaceful, romantic, probably tropical.  A place where the couple can experience a bit of bliss and paradise, and be totally wrapped up in each other.
I get it.  If that's your dream honeymoon, I say go for it! Because when you get home there will be unpacking. Thank you cards.  OMG-do-you-seriously-think-you-are-keeping-that-THING-in-our-house. I-had-no-idea-about-that-nasty-habit-of-yours.  How-the-heck-does-this-whole-thing-work-in-the-real-world?! There will be jobs and bills and arguments, and then someday.  It is likely, that you will have children.  GET PARADISE WHILE YOU CAN.
The bliss honeymoon is a last chance to believe in fairytales before you have to start the hard work of finding paradise and romance in things like a shared cup of tea at the crack of dawn, or a family chorus of "I love you a bushel and a peck" while stuck in traffic.
You can always take vacations after the honeymoon.  But it will never be the same, because even if you forcibly restrain yourselves from discussing it, you will both be wondering if, at that moment, while you gaze into each others eyes over absurdly brightly-colored drinks, anyone is pooping on the new hardwood floors. 
So like I said, I totally get it.  But only in theory, since J and I did not opt for the paradise/bliss honeymoon.  Instead of a fancy hotel on an island fat with tourist cash, we went to the inner city of one of the poorest nations in the world. And we took our innocent, fragile little baby-marriage and threw it like a lobster into a steaming, roiling pot of children at an orphanage.  What the H were we thinking?
Instead of bathing suits and lingerie, I wore the same jeans for I will not even tell you how long.  Instead of slathering on sunscreen on the beach, we got slimed in snotty noses and baby spit-up.  And instead of lovely vistas and pretty flowers, we witnessed poverty, grief, and suffering too profound to illustrate with words.
In fairness, there is a LOT of beauty in Ethiopia, some of which we were lucky enough to witness.  I hope that we will go back one day as tourists instead of volunteers so that we can see more of that gorgeous side of the country.  And even though it might not sound like the above paragraph is me trying to sell the idea, I do believe it was the best honeymoon ever.
Not just because it was "meaningful" or individually enriching.  But because against logic, it was a really, really great way to start a marriage.  It was trial by fire a little bit.  I mean, nothing will test the mettle of your romantic interest in each other like a good, solid case of food poisoning. But also, we were two naive people who had just signed up to be a team for life, knowing that we wanted a family someday, and frankly not knowing much else.  And there we were.  Doing what we would be doing for the rest of our lives; navigating foreign, overwhelming, sometimes fun, and sometimes scary or painfully sad terrain.  Rather than dressing ourselves up both literally and figuratively to appear perfect to each other, we had to show our true colors pretty well right away when it came to things like how we handle stress, fatigue, shock.  And about how see others and the world outside our own little bubbles.  And. About how we deal with kids.
If either of us lost our tempers easily, or if we had totally opposite ideas on how to handle major things like fighting, grief, uncomfortable questions, discipline, or illness, we would have found those things out not years down the road when we had brought people into the world to raise together, but right then, at Go.  We got to have almost a little trial run at parenting together long before we were ready to be parents.
I think about that a lot, as we get deeper into this married life and the real, full-on task of being parents every day.  I reflect on our time in the kids' home and how what we learned about each other there set a foundation for what we are now, for Little One.  One of the best benefits for Her, I think, is just that we knew from before She was born that thankfully, we were pretty much on the same page.  And we knew that we were capable of being responsible for small people without breaking them.  Even really, really, really small people. 
As the time gets closer to our having a newborn in this house again, I think often (as I did when Little One was soon to arrive) about the tiniest of these little angels who impacted our lives in so many beautiful ways.  His name was Baby Stevie.  Because that's what we called him.
Talk about trial by fire; a great way to test a couple who think they want kids one day is to hand them a newborn and say, "figure it out".  All the better challenge if that newborn is a preemie. And sick.  And you have NOTHING but yourselves to work with. 
Towards the end of our summer in Ethiopia, a hospital called about a baby who had just lost its mother coming into the world.  When the orphanage workers picked him up, they were surprised to find that he was not only brand new, but too new- less than 2 pounds. They brought him into the room where they kept all fragile babies- most of them sick- and he was soon sick himself.  He was also too weak to suck a bottle, and soon became dehydrated.  The home director was afraid they would lose him soon- and there were so many babies and only so many nannies.
So one very chilly night during the monsoon, the nannies and I wrapped this tiny skeleton in blankets and blankets and scarves until it became a little bundle the size of a watermelon. It looked like a wad of laundry, but I held onto it for dear life walking by moonlight through little rivers of mud to the volunteer house.  I was terrified I would slip and crush him.  But we made it, and when we did J and two other volunteers and I unwrapped the layers and looked with awe at this tiny little thing, small enough to hold in one hand, but somehow miraculously moving and yawning and intensely precious.

About 2 weeks old

We took shifts.  It was cold because of the rains, but there was no heat, so we wrapped him onto us,
skin-to-skin and became human incubators.  We boiled water and poured formula into his mouth with a spoon, and then an empty syringe, until he was strong enough to suck a bottle.  We bought lem-lem oral rehydration salts at the corner store and mixed them up for him, we guessed at how much liquid antibiotics to give him when the pharmacy asked his weight and then said they hadn't a clue. Because babies that small shouldn't exist. We fed him every hour.  We watched him every minute.  We rejoiced when he had his first teeny dirty diaper, and changed him fast to keep him out of the cold.
He wasn't particularly expected to make it, but he did.  He was a little fighter, and we fought with him.  It was exhausting, and we still had the other kids to be with, too.  But somehow we managed it, and it was incredibly wonderful every time he made a little progress, tipped the scales a bit more, made a new sound.  And for J and I, there was something more profoundly romantic about meeting each others' sleepy smile under the covers with a baby's soft breaths between us than we ever could have found in a jacuzzi tub full of rose petals.
I found out later that he grew to have fat cheeks, and was adopted. The Little Miss we are expecting weighs around 4 pounds now.  She's more than twice as big and strong as Baby Stevie was when we met him, and She's still growing. J and I think of that and shake our heads in wonder. We feel we've been a part of miracles.
He's in the back of our minds when we think of our babies. Like I was with Little One, I'll always have an expectant mother's excited anxiety that I will Do Things Right when She gets here.  But thanks to Baby Stevie, there is also the feeling that even if we don't do it perfectly, we will take care of Her.  We will instinctively know when She needs food or warmth or changing, and we will find a way to get it to Her.  If we could keep caring for Stevie when there was no doctor, no equipment, no back-up plan, we can probably handle the basics with this full-term, first-world newborn, too.  And we will be able to do it together, seamlessly, as a team. Because we've known since the very start of our marriage that somehow, even if we don't always do it perfectly, we instinctively know how to take care of each other, too. 

Baby Stevie and all the kids at the home gave us the penultimate wedding gift.  I treasure it, I carry it with me all the time, and take it out every now and then to admire or draw strength from it.  It was the gift of seeing each other in a sharply honest way, the gift of discovering both who we had really married and who we were as a newly forged, single entity.  Of knowing that our individual metals had melded in a way we liked, and that our new alloy only gets shinier when polished with boogers and spit-up.
I can never say that our honeymoon was sexy or relaxing or like a fairytale, exactly. I think we missed that boat.  But we passed it up for an experience that was romantic in maybe a less illusory way. 

We never face a hardship or a gritty real-life situation and say to each other, "well I guess the honeymoon's over!"  It's during those times that I'm reminded most of our honeymoon, and it's fortifying because it brings back that feeling of relief and assurance that We can do This.  It brings me back to the realization of a kind of love that has nothing to do with ambiance.
I think of J cradling Baby Stevie, I think of him with a 10 year old crying on his shoulder, I think of him squeezing my hand when the poverty made me cry.  I think of him spreading his arms in front of a group of children, shielding them from a car reeling around the corner, I think of him playing soccer in the dirt, laughing and muddy. 
And there we are.  In the midst of something hard or disgusting, and the honeymoon isn't over.  It's ongoing, it's a thread running through us.  And I fall in love with him even harder, and whatever it is we're going through in that moment- I find it again.  Bliss.  Paradise.