The beautiful, the hard & the hilarious parts nobody warned me about.
When I got married on August 31, 2025, I had a beautiful picture of marriage in my head. I imagined two people working their 9-to-5s, coming home to the kids, sharing the cooking and housework, taking turns when life got busy, going on date nights once a month, taking family vacations and communicating openly through it all.
It sounded lovely. It sounded organized. It sounded like a little fairytale I could actually live in.
And then real life showed up.
Marriage, I have learned, is not one big romantic moment. It is thousands of tiny moments stacked on top of each other: grocery shopping, cooking dinner, cleaning up, paying bills, figuring out schedules, raising children, laughing until your stomach hurts, and occasionally looking at your husband thinking, How are you this wonderful and this annoying at the same time?
It is beautiful. It is exhausting. It is funny. It is humbling. And sometimes it asks you to become a version of yourself you didn’t know you needed to become.
Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Wasn’t What I Expected
One of the biggest changes of this first year was becoming a stay-at-home wife and mom. I felt relief. I felt grateful. I thanked God for answering a prayer I had carried for a long time—the prayer of finally having help and being able to focus on my family.
But I also felt lost.
There is no clocking out. No clear finish line. No moment when somebody hands you a certificate and says, “Great job, you are officially done for today.”
My day can start at 5:45 in the morning. I cook breakfast, make lunch and dinner, clean the house, run errands, manage appointments, pay bills, plan trips, handle bedtime and take care of the kids if they wake up during the night. On a good day, Fernando steps in and helps with the girls.
People sometimes assume a stay-at-home mom does less. I have never worked this hard in my entire life.
There have been moments when I questioned whether I was contributing because I wasn’t bringing home a paycheck. Thankfully, a beautiful friend helped me see something I needed to hear: raising the kids, keeping our home together, cooking, planning and carrying all the things that keep our family moving are contributions.
The Marriage Nobody Else Sees
From the outside, marriage can look like the wedding pictures, the dressed-up moments and the vacations. But marriage is also the unglamorous stuff.
For example, Fernando apparently believes the toilet is optional when he wakes up in the middle of the night. 😂 I swear he pees with his eyes closed. I have no other explanation.
We also have differences around intimacy and how much time and energy we have for it. He would happily make it an everyday activity. I, on the other hand, have spent the day feeding people, cleaning things, solving problems and keeping an entire household moving. By bedtime, sometimes I am simply tired. 😂
Underneath the joke is something real. We are still learning each other. We are learning how to talk about needs, expectations, affection and intimacy without turning differences into distance.
Marriage Revealed More About Me Than I Expected
One of the hardest lessons has been realizing that sometimes I am the difficult one. I am not always easy to please. My kids and my husband can spend all day trying, and somehow my brain still finds the one thing they didn’t do.
I’m working on that.
I’m learning to let the small things go and pay attention to what actually matters. Fernando has taught me to loosen my grip a little. And I am teaching him that things do, in fact, need to be picked up. We are both learning. 😂
And Then There Is Fernando
If marriage has given me one thing I didn’t fully understand before we got married, it is a deeper understanding of how much Fernando loves me.
He loves me unconditionally. And I know I am a lot. I have flaws. I have opinions. I have my moments. Yet somehow, he keeps loving me through all of it.
He is also my live-in best friend. We don’t go on dates the way we used to. Somewhere along the way, boyfriend-and-girlfriend dates became staying home together, talking, laughing and doing life. I lost a little bit of the dating version of us, but I gained something deeper: friendship, partnership and a person who knows the everyday version of me.
The Part I Treasure Most
My favorite and most beautiful part of our marriage is something most people will never see.
Prayer.
Fernando prays over me while I sleep. He prays over our children while they sleep. There is something incredibly beautiful about knowing that the person beside you is taking your family to God when you aren’t even awake to hear it.
And we laugh. Every day. Sometimes all day. He is funny, I am funny, and our house can be a whole comedy show.
I Never Thought, “This Isn’t What I Wanted.”
There were definitely inconveniences. There were moments when I was tired, frustrated or overwhelmed. But I never looked at my marriage and thought, This isn’t what I wanted.
I knew marriage would have complications, especially in the beginning. Imagine putting two grown adults together who have completely different ways of living.
I like things a certain way. Fernando is much more relaxed about things. But we’re getting better. He has taught me to let go. I am teaching him to pick up.
What I Know Now
Marriage is about compromise and forgiveness.
Especially in that first year, you will discover things about each other that you absolutely love—and things that you absolutely hate. You will make mistakes. You will misunderstand each other. You will get tired. You will disappoint each other.
And then you have a choice.
You can keep score, or you can learn each other.
We apologize. We forgive. We learn. We move on.
Because the goal isn’t to build a perfect marriage. It’s to build a real one.
And somehow, in the middle of the grocery runs, the messy house, the exhaustion, the laughter, the disagreements, the prayers and all the ordinary days, I have realized something:
The life we’re building together is my new perfect.
So yes… this is marriage.
Not the fairytale I imagined.
Something real. Something imperfect. Something funny. Something blessed.
And I wouldn’t trade it.
REAL LIFE. SOFTLY.
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