It Is Good To Remember AKA How I Met My Hubby

As  promised in my last post, here is the blog about how I met my husband.

 

I was the ripe old age of 22, on the verge of turning 23 and felt like an old maid.  I was the girl who wanted to meet and marry my high school sweetheart, but no sweetheart ever materialized during high school and here I was five years out of high school with still no sweetheart.  Not only no sweetheart, but my last few tries at love had failed miserably.

I decided to give up on love, romance, and the hopes of a long term relationship and just have fun dating, so with that notion in my head I searched online and found a personal ads website.  PersonalAds2000 to be exact.  Very Y2K in 1998. 

I uploaded a blurry low res picture of me in baggy sweats, a ponytail, and holding up the teensiest little fish that one could catch on a fishing pole unless they had been fishing out of a goldfish bowl.  Although to be honest, my Aunt's gold fish were bigger than that sad little fish that I had caught. 

*I cannot find that particular picture.  Bummer.*

Along with the picture I added this poem:



Touch me - NOT with your hands, but with your soul.

 Hear me - NOT with your ears, but with your heart.

See me - NOT with your eyes, but with your emotions.

 Search for me - NOT because I am lost, but because without me, a part of you is.

Find me - NOT alone in a park, but within a crowd of people.

2/10/98

 

 

And that was all I put....oh I did also break the rules and write my homepage address on there.

*a homepage was sort of like a blog/scrapbook that was around before blogging was actually a thing.* 

That webpage has been lost to time and sadly you will never know how charming I must have been on it.  It was called Terabinthia's World (Terabinthia was my handle for the internet chat rooms I chatted in....wow I really feel as though I am dating myself here.....).  And the only thing that I can for sure remember what it said were the words, "there you have it, the jiffy lube of me"  or something along those lines and it also talked about my goals for the future and where I wanted to be later on in life. Literary GOLD was written there, I promise you!  Shame that it is gone. 

That little ad brought in over 200 emails.  Some I responded to and some were just your typical gross responses to a personals ad.  Out of those 200 hundred I met 2 in person.  I also met up with a guy who had his own personals ad that I responded to. 

 

You have to love the hair.  Notice that difference
between his fireman hair here and his Navy hair
in the wedding cake pics.  =)

The first person I met with I have blogged about before, but I fear I sound a bit shallow in that post so I won't link up to it on here. Let's just say that it was the most uncomfortable date that I have ever been on and could be a PSA on why you need to choose the people you meet and the locations you meet at wisely when it comes to internet dating.

 

Steve, my now husband, was the other guy that I met off of there.  I was also corresponding with some others, but those didn't last after meeting Steve.

 

Steve and I emailed each other back and forth for about two weeks before actually meeting.  I lived in Federal Way at the time and he lived in Bremerton.  They are about an hour apart from each other. 

 

Our reception at my parents house after our Justice of the
 Peace wedding. I had yet to hone my scrapbooking
skills here.
 

Our first date was on July 3, 1998.  He wanted me to feel safe, so we decided to meet at my Aunt's house in Gig Harbor, which was half way between the two places.  He came in met my Aunt, Uncle, Cousins, and my Grandma who was visiting.  Then we took my car and I drove, because again he wanted all of us to feel safe.  I think he even left his car keys and drivers license with my Aunt. 

 

I remember walking out of my Aunt's house when he got there and thinking, "WOW, he is really cute!  He will never go for me." 

 

We went and saw the X files movie, ate at Burger King, and then we went back to my Aunt's and laid in her yard talking for a long time.

 

The next day was the Fourth of July and my Aunt always had a big party, so I invited him to come.  He came and met the whole family and extended Micronesian family on my Uncle's side.  After that we were pretty much inseparable. Every free moment that he wasn't at the fire station he was at my house, or I was at his. 

 

Our baby pictures.  No one thought that Katie looked
like me then.  Now everyone says she is my mini me.

We were married in March of 99 and had our oldest, Katie, that May.  Whirlwind.  It was a whirlwind everything. 





My plan of staying out of a relationship made God laugh I think.  I do remember at one point having a choice to make, because I knew that Steve wanted commitment and I wanted fun.  I can remember hearing very clearly God telling me to "choose Steve". 

 

There have been times when I have questioned that voice and my decision, because let's face it marriage can be hard.  HARD with all caps.  The kind of hard where all your breath comes out in the saying it and the D at the end is loud and harsh:

 

HHHHHHAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRD! 

 



And this marriage has been that at times, for both of us.  Trust has been mishandled, misplaced, and abandoned on both sides in various ways and to varying degrees.  But we are still here, working through those hard spaces.  Sometimes it can feel like a belly crawl army style through the mud kind of working at it, but even that slow crawl has moved us forward to today.



It is good to remember how we came together, because that gets lost in the hard and the hurts much too easily.  It is good to remember how his early emails made my stomach butterfly and how he would drive me back home on the freeway going 45 miles an hour just to make the time last longer and it still felt too fast.  It is good to remember, because honestly I fear that I forget too easily.

the whole family 14 years and 2 months after that first date.
taken 9/12

Thank you Karmen for suggesting that I do this and for helping me to remember.



Getting kicked out of youth group

I figured I would tell you the whole back story on why I was kicked out of youth group.  I think it was a series of things that kind of added up.  We got a new youth pastor.  He was the kind of guy who didn't like to be questioned. I am the kind of girl to ask a lot of questions.  I don't blindly accept things, so I would often question what he was saying.  It wasn't ever intended to question his authority, but more to get at the truth and to find out how and why what he was saying was true.

I also questioned myself a lot.  I questioned my faith, whether or not I was really a Christian or not.  Not from a lack of faith in God or in the Bible, but more so because I felt dirty inside and as if I wasn't lovable enough for God to really love me.  I said once that I wasn't sure I was a Christian.  This statement was repeated to my Youth Pastor. He never came to me about it, but I think it skewed his opinion of me.

One night, he was teaching us about sex and that we should stay away from it.  He said that sex was like a bomb and that you should never get close to a bomb.  Me, being me, wanted a more decisive answer than that.  A bomb was too vague.  I asked him what the line was, what was too far?  When did physical activity change from innocent to sinful?  Kissing, past kissing, what?  All he could say was to stay as far away from the bomb as possible.  I believe I just rolled my eyes at him and he assumed that I was much more "active" than what was anywhere near the truth. 

None of this was why I was kicked out of youth group though.  All of the youth sat in a certain pew together during church hour.  I would sit and listen to the sermons and take notes, most of the time.  Other of the youth would act up, pass notes, and be disruptive.  Instead of just talking to us about it, the Church's great plan was to make it so that those pews we sat in were no longer open for use.  They said that it was supposed to be left for the late comers.  Interestingly, that was only the case during the service that the youth attended.  I found the rule to be ridiculous.  I sat and listened, that is where I was comfortable sitting, and I figured that they should be more concerned with the fact that I was sitting in a pew at all instead of worrying about what pew I sat in.

One Sunday I moved the rope and sat down.  My friends came and joined me.  We were told that we had to move.  It was not a request.  I grabbed my things and walked out and went back to my house.  I began attending church with my parents who had left that church about a year before.  I continued to go to youth group though.  One night the Youth Pastor called me into his office and told me that I was not allowed to come to youth group anymore since I no longer went to church there on Sundays.  Interestingly there were about 4 or 5 other people who didn't go to that church on Sundays either, but they were still allowed to go to youth group.

A couple of months later a couple of my friends stopped at my house and said that I should come back.  When I told them that the Youth Pastor had said I couldn't they told me that it would be okay, that he would let me now.  I figured that since one of them was the pastor's son that it would be okay.  I was wrong.  As soon as the Youth Pastor came in and saw me he told me to leave.  He said that I wasn't welcome to come back to Youth Group.  He had a meeting with me later and told me that if I wanted to go back to that Youth Group that I would have to apologize to the church for walking out of service and I would have to start going to church there on Sundays.  Suffice it to say, I don't hold a lot of love in my heart for this man.  Oh, this is the funniest part of our discussion that I remember, he told me that I was the kind of person to be easily led astray.  The kind that would blindly follow someone.  I never have understood his logic or reasoning in saying this to me.  People who question, don't typically follow easily, thus his main issue with me, but I digress.

I went home and told my parents what had happened.  My Mom asked if I told him to F off.  If you knew my Mom at all, you would realize how funny this is and how angry his behavior made her since my Mother NEVER swears and especially not that word.  I told her I didn't, but that I had wanted to throw a little paper weight at his head as I sat there and listened to him.  I also told her that it was a good thing that I had a strong sense of who God was and that I didn't see the Youth Pastor's behavior as a reflection of who God is, because otherwise I might not ever go back to church again.  I never did go back to that youth group, or that church.

 So, that is the story of how I got kicked out of youth group.  Wasn't I just such the wild rebel?!  LOL....I still have to shake my head at the whole experience.  So, when I say that I don't follow rules that are ridiculous and put into place just to control someone, that is an example of what I mean.