Twenty-Two Years. Twelve Official.

We couldn't wait for permission. So we built our own.

When Rheo was born, we opened an email address for him. The idea was simple: send him letters, pictures, things worth keeping. Give him something when he’s older that he couldn’t get any other way: a record of who we were when he was too young to remember.

I’ve used it a handful of times in the almost two years since. Our 12-year wedding anniversary is this week. I wrote him one. I wanted to share it here.

Rheo, let me tell you what an anniversary is.

The simple version: two people decide to get married. Every year on that date they acknowledge they’re still in it. They call it their anniversary.

That’s the version most people grow up with. The one that doesn’t require explanation.

Here’s the longer one.

Your dad and I have been together for over 22 years. For more than a decade of that, we couldn’t get married. Not because we didn’t want to. Because the law didn’t let us. So we counted our years together without a date to anchor them to. Without the ceremony, without the official record, without the thing most people take for granted when they start counting.

We had talked about waiting. We wanted it to be legal everywhere, not just in certain states. Not contingent on where you happened to live. It felt like the right thing, holding out for the version that didn’t come with conditions.

Then Prop 8 passed here in California.

Something settled into place after that. When your life keeps getting handed to courts and ballot measures, you learn what a lot of people before us already knew: you can’t wait for others to tell you your existence is valid. You just have to go exist.

When California let us, we got married.

April 19th, 2014. That’s the day we walked down a wooden pier in Tomales Bay, in the cold air and low lying clouds off the Pacific, with our closest friends and family around us. The officiant looked like Ronald Reagan and still couldn’t figure out why we wouldn’t just use one of his standard scripts. Our guests laughed when they realized we were passing our vows back and forth instead of reading them aloud. One of the young servers told us afterward, through tears, that we had given him hope that he too might marry who he loved someday.

It would be another year and two months before the Supreme Court ruled that states had to recognize marriages like ours. Every morning that June, I got up earlier than normal to walk the dogs and refresh the coverage on SCOTUS blog as opinions were announced. The Court doesn’t tell you which day a specific case will be decided. You just keep checking. I was checking to find out if our marriage was still legally recognized in the country we lived in. That’s what I was doing those mornings.

That ruling is just over ten years old and some are already working to undo it.

I keep thinking about a video I’ve had on my mind for almost a year.

A mom pulls her car over to explain the concept of coming out to her kids. They’re five and eight. She’s walking them through why some people have to formally announce who they love to the people they love, and her kids just cannot locate the concept. Not hostile. Genuinely baffled. “But why do they have to tell them?”

You’re going to be like those kids someday. The whole thing will seem like a very old problem. An anniversary, a ceremony, a Supreme Court ruling. All of it will feel like history you had to look up, not something your family lived through.

That’s what I want for you. That confusion is the point.

But here’s what I want you to understand about April 19th.

The day is not just the day. It’s everything that made the day possible. Everyone who came before us who fought to be seen, to be protected, to have a voice when the world wanted to look away. People who loved each other and couldn’t stand on a pier and say so. People who counted years that the law refused to recognize. People who built the door that we walked through, sometimes knowing they wouldn’t be there when it opened.

An anniversary, for us, has never just been math. It’s a quiet insistence that this is real, that it matters, that it gets counted.

We don’t take it for granted. Not the date. Not the years. Not each other.

We’re building our own thread now. Our own traditions, our own meaning, things that will one day just be the way things are for you. Ordinary, assumed, yours. Not requiring an announcement. Not requiring a ruling.

Until then, we mark the day.

Love, Dad