Dear Daughter,

Last time I wrote to you about the colourful years – the bright, breezy beginning, the big decisions hidden inside the laughter. Now I want to write about what comes next.

The mundane years.

And before you frown at that word – mundane – let me tell you something. How these years feel depends almost entirely on the foundation you laid in the colourful ones. The groundwork you put in early is what either carries you through this season or quietly cracks under its weight.

Let me explain it the way I know best – through what your father and I actually did.

We divided our life into what I can only call departments, and then we trusted each other completely within them. When it came to financial decisions, I listened to your father. His instinct for money, for investment, for the longer view — I respected that and deferred to it. But when it came to managing the home, nurturing relationships on both sides of the family, planning what to gift at weddings, deciding which classes were right for you, the vacations, all of it – he happily trusted whatever I chose. Not reluctantly. Happily.

When it came to arguments – and there were arguments – we had established early on that we would always communicate. We would not go silent. We would not let things fester unsaid. This sounds simple. It is not. But we kept to it.

When it came to any big purchase or big decision – a home, a car, moving to a new city, anything significant – it was always an equal partnership. Not one person’s money or one person’s choice. Ours.

And when it came to having children, we had decided early – just one, regardless of gender. That clarity, made together before the world could weigh in, meant we never carried that particular pressure into our daily life.

This solid understanding – the respect, the trust, the genuine love for how the other thinks – is what makes a marriage not just survive but be ready to face any storm. And it is this early understanding that helped us navigate what I’m now calling the mundane years.

So why mundane?

Not because of the children – let me be clear about that. The children make life anything but mundane. They are chaos and laughter and wonder and worry, all at once. Every phase they go through becomes the most important thing in your world. That part is anything but flat.

What becomes routine is the marriage.

Because when children arrive, you and your partner stop being primarily each other’s people and become primarily someone’s parents. The conversations shift – from dreams and plans and late-night talks about everything, to school fees and doctor appointments and whose turn it is to pick up. The romance doesn’t disappear, but it moves to the back of the queue. Quietly. Without either of you quite deciding that it should.

And the practical reality of those years sets in fast. School schedules, homework hours, activity timings, parent-teacher meetings, health scares, milestones – all of it becomes the texture of your days. You are looking at twelve to fifteen years of this. The children become the centre of your universe, and everything – your career choices, where you live, whether you move cities, what you sacrifice and when – orbits around their need for stability. Many children don’t fully realise, until much later, how much their parents quietly gave up.

And this is what creates the tehraav – not in life, which is full and loud and consuming, but in the marriage, which can start to run on autopilot. You are co-managing a home, co-raising a child, doing it well, doing it together – and somewhere in all that doing, you forget to simply be with each other.

That is what I mean by mundane. Not the years. The marriage, if you stop tending to it.

It hasn’t broken. But couples sometimes misread the stillness as a sign that it has.

They see the absence of excitement and mistake it for the absence of love. They forget that what they are doing – building a life, raising a child, showing up every single day for each other – is the most quietly demanding thing two people can do together. The effort they are already putting in is the relationship. They just stop seeing it.

This is what I want you to hold close.

Finding time for each other – protecting it, prioritising it – is not optional during these years. It is the whole point.

A late-night movie when the child is asleep. A coffee date on a Sunday morning. Flowers brought home on an ordinary Tuesday, for no reason at all. A genuine compliment – not polite, not habitual, but real. Noticing what the other is carrying and saying so. These small things are not small. They are the thread that keeps the fabric from unravelling.

And at the same time – this is equally important – you must each keep something of your own. A hobby, a pursuit, a corner of life that belongs only to you. Giving each other space, real space, is not distance. It is respect. Two whole people make a better partnership than two people who have dissolved entirely into each other and into the role of parent.

The couples who come out of the mundane years still in love, still curious about each other, still genuinely happy to be in the same room – they are the ones who kept doing the small things. Who didn’t wait for a grand occasion to be kind, or attentive, or a little romantic. Who understood that a marriage in this season is not a highlight reel. It is a quiet, daily practice.

And then, just when this long routine has become your whole life, something shifts.

The children grow. They leave – for hostel, for college, for their own version of the colourful years. And suddenly the house is quieter, and you are looking at each other again, perhaps for the first time in a long while, and asking: who are we, now that it’s just us?

That is the third phase. The years alone together.

I’ll write to you about those next.

With all my heart,

Mumma

This is Letter 32, Part Two of a three-part series on marriage. Part One was about the colourful years. Part Three – the years alone together, is next.