7.25

7.25.1992 – Mr. & Mrs. Corey W. Gerald

7.25.1993 – “Did you have fun this past year?  No?  Me either.  Let’s never do that again.”

7.25.1994 – It’s a girl! 8 lb. 1 oz, 21.5 inches, 2:02 pm.  Mother and baby are both doing well.

7.25. 2016 – She’s 22.

Arbitrarily a date was picked and a wedding was planned.  At twenty-two years old I became Mrs. Corey Gerald.  One year later we sat across from each other in a restaurant and vowed never to repeat that first year.  Learning to live together for your remaining days is no walk in the park.  Here’s an idea, let’s push a stroller through the park!  Four months after that dinner conversation a pregnancy test confirmed that we would definitely not repeat our first year.  Due on our anniversary, she was affectionately known as “the love baby” wink wink. July 25, 1994 we became parents, on my due date, forevermore sharing July 25.

In 1991 Kevin Costner took the theaters by storm as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.  Along with that was Bryan Adams’ ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It For You.  It made all the girls swoon and I was no exception.  We lit our unity candle while a friend sang the lyrics.

Yeah I would fight for you

I’d lie for you

Walk the wire for you

Yeah I’d die for you

That last line haunts me.  How romantic to measure your love to the ends of the earth or to the end of your life.  Let’s drive off into the sunset in the rumble seat of a kelly green Auburn car to the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum and celebrate life, love and chivalry.  In my loudest voice I tell you we have it all wrong.  Yeah I’d live for you.  LIVE for me.  LIVE with me and you’ll have my whole heart.  Let’s live this one life.  Don’t die for me.  That would only bury me in guilt.

My baby girl turns twenty-two on Monday.  The same age I was when I married her father.  We share the same last name, given to both of us on 7.25.  Is that irony?  Is it fate?  Was it destiny that a boy on bended knee asked a girl to breakfast all those years ago?  Maybe love isn’t about soulmates.  Maybe we just simply have to choose it.  Choose love again and again.