The Wonderful Husband and I just celebrated (as much as anything can be celebrated at any rate) our 15th wedding anniversary. It was on a Thursday, and after the week we had, I’m pretty sure it was the third or fourth Thursday of that week. Every week seems to have about four Thursdays in it these days.

In the past, we’ve done some fun things, like breaking out our wedding video and pictures, which brought back many happy memories for us, and had the kids laughing about how skinny we used to be, how much hair the WH had, and how my hair was all one color and it “wasn’t that silvery color you have now, Mom!”

We’ve also gone out to dinner at a fancier place than usual or at least got some really good takeout. But again, the celebratory options for a Thursday during COVID times were not nearly as exciting as staying home, helping the kids with homework, and heating up leftovers. Maybe exciting is the wrong word. Maybe “true to our nature” is a better description.

We had attempted to make a valiant effort. This summer, we had planned to take the family on a cruise to Bermuda, a place that I’ve always wanted to visit. The WH and I had taken a cruise together in our single days, and really wanted to go again, as it afforded us both the time to relax and kick back and also the time to do some sightseeing and learn something about the world. As we all know, that ship didn’t sail.

If being married for 15 years has taught me anything, it is that Liz plans, and God laughs. However, there is also a line from one of my favorite poems, Desiderata, “and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” So, as all our carefully laid plans have failed to pan out in one way or the other, I’ve learned to let go of the disappointment and instead, embrace the unknown. Of course, it’s easier said that done, but we’ve been down this road enough times that it’s finally starting to get easier.

Certainly, one of the most trying moments of our marriage was finding out that A was going to be born with a congenital heart defect that would require several surgical procedures and would be a condition that he would have to live with forever. I think having this challenge hit us when we were still so new to figuring out married life probably helped us more than we realized.

I don’t know that another crisis could have come up that could have been so critical to both of us. Just about any other scenario I play in my mind has one of us caring more about it than the other, and I wonder sometimes if we would have been willing to fight together as hard as we were for A.

The WH was my absolute rock through that whole ordeal, and sadly, having met many families who have been through similar situations, I know that couples don’t always survive that kind of stress. Having survived that and knowing that we were capable of slaying that giant together has made a lot of other battles that could have tested our marriage insignificant.

Over the years, the house has flooded, twice. No big deal. We handled it. A mischievous new puppy who is finding new limits to test every day? Piece of cake. Each of us has faced challenges in our careers, and we’ve always been able to say to the other one, “do what you need to do,” knowing that we’ll work it out one way or the other.

The year and a half that the WH worked night shift, which was also the first year and a half of E’s life, was certainly a challenge, but we knew it was temporary, and that the WH working in that position would benefit our family in the long run. We both did without a lot of sleep with him being up all night working and me being up all night with the baby. We made it work.

The next biggest challenge that we overcame was losing my dad. We got that dreaded phone call while we were on a weeklong beach vacation with friends. To this day, I have no idea how the WH got our entire entourage and all their gear packed up and into our car and got us on the road in less than a half-hour from the time we got the call.

Over the course of the next two weeks of making arrangements and dealing with the details, he again had my back, picking up the slack, running the kids, trying to keep their lives as normal as possible, as I navigated through life in a fog.

But for every one of those big overshadowing events, there have been hundreds more lighthearted moments, silly jokes that only we get, the many, many ways that we collaborate to embarrass our children in public, all the other little things that make 15 years seem to have gone by in mere minutes. This last year has certainly been a memorable one. Spending several months at home, together, working, teaching the kids, entertaining each other, working on projects, training a puppy, etc., etc., etc., has certainly tested our relationship in ways I hadn’t even considered. I’m willing to bet we’ve lost our patience with each other, and the kids, more in the last six months that we have in the last six years, but through it all, we’ve always managed to find something to laugh about.

Not willing to let our anniversary slide without at least a small celebration, E made us a batch of cupcakes from scratch, including homemade icing, which she artfully applied to each cupcake. Being gifted with a homemade gift by our sweet little girl who has really developed her talents in the kitchen in the past few months was just about the perfect way to celebrate our anniversary. We may not have been toasting on the beaches of Bermuda, but there is no doubt our anniversary, like our marriage, unfolded just the way it should.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.