About three and a half years ago, I had a daughter. Though my wife is not biologically related to my daughter, in Texas, provided you jump through some slightly shady hoops, same-sex partners can adopt. We got that process started as soon as my daughter was born. Our life became a flurry of lawyers and check writing and social workers and lots of documentation, in addition to the diapers and sleeplessness usually associated with an infant. On June 8 of 2007, we stood in front of a family law judge in San Antonio Texas and my wife became a mom and my daughter suddenly had two parents.

In the next few months, I fell in love with my new family all over again. I was so proud of my partner, who stayed home full time with my child, and of course I was completely enamored of our baby. Since up to that point we’d been kind-of in the background, I was happily shocked by all the love, support, and encouragement shown by my family, friends, neighbors, and strangers at the grocery store.

As so often happens, once our daughter was born, our priorities changed. Before I had her, I was a traveling machine.  I was on the GO, sometimes to two or three cities a week. After she was born, I tried – I really tried. We took her to New York for a work meeting two weeks after she was born, then my breastpump and I got back on the road. It was hard. I was failing at work and failing at home, or at least it felt that way. My wife was more than a little tired of being at home alone with our baby four nights a week, let alone all day every day.

We sat down, talked about what was most important, and agreed it was time to focus on our family. One way we knew to to that was to hit the reset button in all areas of our lives. So I quit a job I loved maybe too much and took a much less demanding job that allowed me to help out a lot more with our daughter.

We decided to celebrate our “reset” by surrounding ourselves with the friends and family who had been so supportive of us. We wanted to make a public commitment to take care of each other and ourselves a little better than we had been, and I wanted to tell my family and friends how excited I was to create my life together with my partner. We got married June 8 of 2008, surrounded by a small group of loving friends and family. My dad read 1st Corinthians, my mom read from The Velveteen Rabbit, my sister was the minister. There was cake. And tears. And gratitude, community, toasts, and some pretty big promises.

Being married takes work. Love is a verb. We create love every day, through our gratitude to one another, listening to each other, and being respectful of one another. By the time we got married, there were no endorphins chasing us to the altar. But we knew we wanted to create a family, and to recreate, support, and renew our family, for the rest of our lives. So we do! Family Day is a big deal around our house. We take cupcakes to school, thank our parents and in-laws for supporting our family both logistically and philosophically, and tell our story.  This is a work blog, and it feels a little risky for me to put my story out here, but we want everyone to know how happy we are, and how we work to create happiness, every day.  We think that’s what family is all about.