Every Thanksgiving my side of the family spends the holiday at my parents’ lake house in Wisconsin. We all live within five miles of each other, and yet each year we drive eight hours round-trip to spend some time together. The house is in a relatively rural area, so we spend the weekend cooking, eating, reading, playing board games, and watching old movies. We even go out and cut down our own Christmas trees. It’s good old-fashioned family fun. Kinda corny, but its tradition and we love it.

Unfortunately this year our kids came down with coughs while we were up north. Everything was fine all day long: other than the occasional cough or drippy nose you wouldn’t know they were sick. On our second night there both kids went down to sleep without incident, but halfway through the night they both woke up screaming.

It’s never fun to have sick children, and it’s far less fun when you’re all in one bedroom, sharing walls with several other families who are trying to sleep. We gave Juliet juice and Dean a bottle. We gave both kids a natural cough medicine. One would quiet down and the other would get louder. Then they would switch roles. We tried lying down; we tried pacing the small bedroom. We tried what seemed like everything and anything for several hours.

Although Dean wouldn’t let me set him down, he finally did allow me to lie in bed with him cradled in my arms. It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but at least I could get a few minutes of sleep here and there. And I’m not quite sure how this happened, but Mike and Juliet ended up lying on the very narrow section of hardwood floor between the bed and the dresser.

We “slept” like this for a couple of hours and then Dean woke up again. This time I was able to nurse him back to sleep pretty quickly and actually lie him down in the portable crib where he stayed asleep!!! I climbed back in bed, and Mike joined me. As the sun crept over the horizon and the sky lightened just outside our window, we held hands. I whispered “There’s no one I’d rather be miserable with then you.” He squeezed my hand and we drifted off to sleep.

That’s marriage, folks. And a happy one at that. Life isn’t some magical fairytale where you ride off into the sunset and… I don’t even know how to finish that sentence… swim in the ocean by day and feast on fine seafood by night day after day after day for the rest of your bliss-filled life? Whatever it is that supposedly happens after that ride into the sunset – it isn’t real life. Real life is messy and sometimes miserable. But your spouse is the person you’ve chosen to endure this journey with. So if you want to be happy then you must continue to choose this person, moment after wretched moment. Of course they’re not all terrible moments. But the truth is that a lot of them are. So you might as well like the person you’re with.