The Things We Do for Love

Today is our 30th wedding anniversary. And of course, we’re spending it by getting out the vote :-)

We did take a little time off over the weekend to celebrate (rooftop cocktail bar, dim sum, Hadestown). And we’ll get some time farther away from the fray this summer. Whatever happens on June 23rd, we’ve got an immense amount to be grateful for – including the fact that we still really like to hang out together.

Brad’s choices to run for office have hampered our anniversary celebrations before. Elections are on even-year cycles, of course, so theoretically they shouldn’t spoil both your 25th and 30th anniversaries – but Brad ran for Comptroller in the City’s odd-year election cycle in 2021, and he’s running now. So he did manage to do that.

Being married through decades of life in politics presents more significant challenges than a distracted husband on big anniversaries. We share a deep commitment to gender equality, but that doesn’t mean our marriage always reflects it. Too many times, Brad’s career came first, and the injustices and contradictions around gender in society have shown up in our own lives in ways that have real consequences.

Of course, those injustices and contradictions have affected other people’s marriages more harshly than ours. The brutality of family separations at 26 Federal Plaza is especially, painfully clear when you’re witnessing it with your spouse. When we got married, we weren’t that much older than a young couple from Ecuador we met inside an immigration courtroom a few months ago. They had traveled here together, crossed the border together, started to build a life, and were looking forward to becoming parents. They showed up together in court to do the right thing, and they exited the courtroom feeling relieved.

But moments later in the hallway, masked ICE agents lawlessly abducted him, and she fell sobbing into Meg’s arms. A habeas petition by Make the Road reunited them a few weeks later – but not until after their child was born.

Thankfully, there have also been so many joys together, over the past year, and the 29 before. We are so grateful to have raised Marek and Rosa in this community, and we’re thrilled by their “New York or nowhere” approach to starting out as adults. We never tire of finding new foods or cultural venues to try, or of the joys of watching young people discover the longstanding treasures of this crazy, magnificent city.

All of that is made possible by the extraordinary community of friends and neighbors we’re blessed to be surrounded by, and fighting alongside. In our most joyful moments, and our most challenging ones, we find hope and gratitude in faces of people rallying, marching, praying, singing, eating, rooting, culture-consuming, and straphanging.

In our ketubah (wedding contract), signed 30 years ago today, we wrote:

“Together, we will appreciate what is wondrous in the world, and work to see these things shared more equally: work and play, spirit and memory, laughter and song, endurance and rhythm, beauty and pleasure, sustenance and compassion, celebration and struggle, bread and roses.”

Three decades later, we feel blessed to still be helping each other appreciate what is wondrous in the world, and still working to see it shared more equally.

Since everything is a vertical video now (as much as Brad would prefer to share content-heavy, earnest emails that Meg consistently tries to get him to edit), we’re releasing a video of Meg canvassing for Brad last week. We hope you’ll check it out!

Meg chose background music which reflects her true feelings about canvassing. But really, when you come down to it, aren’t “The Things We Do for Love” pretty much the whole ballgame?

With appreciation for life’s ironies, but mostly with gratitude and with love,

Brad & Meg