well, at least some of you…like Rae, and Angella, and Maria…you wanted to know how the husband and i got together….

 (this is the only picture i can find online of us before we got married. we are BABIES. mmmm…Oreo O’s…)

high school for me was about many things. my friends. yearbook. getting my license. getting into college. mostly, though, it was about boys. there were boys that mattered. boys that didn’t matter. boys that didn’t know i was alive. and boys that i didn’t know were alive. I was awkward-looking to say the least, but i had big boobs and a jeep, which, it seems, is what worked back then. When i graduated high school, i had plans to spend a year abroad finding myself partying in Israel before going on to college in Boston. At the end of the year, I ended things with someone that i had an on-again off-again relationship with. it was complicated to say the least. But i was going to Israel unattached, and i was glad.

unattached, of course, until i went to camp that summer. All my friends were going to be counselors, but i was stuck with the shit-job of Spare Counselor. to me, this meant “not good enough to be an actual counselor” but really, it was AMAZING. same money as an actual counselor, but you only had to work about 14 days for the entire summer. i filled in when each female counselor took her day off, and if someone was sick. on other days, the only thing i needed to work on was my tan.

With a lot of free time on my hands, i met many new people. one of these was my future husband. He was not my type….but he was a guy who could sing “she talks to angels” better than anyone i’d ever heard. and it sparked my interest. it also sparked my interest that he was nice. most guys i liked in high school were not nice. he listened when i talked. he cared about what i had to say. and his family ate dinner together every night. this was something i couldn’t fathom. my sister and i ate defrosted eggo waffles standing up at the kitchen counter for dinner while my parents were at work.

I had plans to enjoy the summer with him, but of course, break things off before i left the country. BUT, the future husband had a best friend. a friend who was sick. a friend who was dying. Two things happened that summer before i left for Israel. The future husband lost his best friend. and the future husband told me he was going to marry me. I was 18. and young. and emotional. and stupid. and stubborn. and headstrong. and we stayed together. and we got married five days before i turned 20. It was a quick rollercoaster ride. and i shocked the hell out of my family and friends who told me i was making a mistake and that maybe i shouldn’t marry someone just because his dying best friend told him that he should marry me.

at the time, though, i was hearing none of it. i was a stubborn girl. and i was going to prove them all wrong. i was in love, and why did anything else matter? it would work itself out. in hindsight…should we have waited? maybe. was it silly of me to get married so young? possibly. do i wish that i had gone to Boston and had a ‘conventional’ college experience? definitely. no question. do i wish we’d both been more financially stable before we got married? of course.

but the husband and i? we work. we made it work. we’ll be celebrating our TEN YEAR anniversary in May. Sure, we’ve been through shitty times and we’ve been through good times. we’ve made three beautiful children. we’ve bought a house. we’ve been through job losses and job advancements. We are best friends. and we have lots of sex. We share a lovely little life together. We are each individual people, but we are also a team.

(and Cristan? He is three years older than i am, and he’s is a director at a company that makes software for tv stations. i have no clue what that means. all i know is that he’s busy and he works in computers. i guess that’s all i really need to know, right?)