As you know from my past entry about Chris and my beginnings, he had a child before we even got back together. Well, there goes the infamous "first comes love" bit. Once love did come, though, boy did it come. For me to say I knew he was "the one" in the first week we got back together is an understatement. Even my own mom saw us back together for the first time and knew. We glowed. Literally, glowed. And we were going to need that kind of whimsical, blind insanity that was our love to get through the first few months of what was nothing short of a nightmare.
I failed to mention what a whirlwind of risk taking that went on in the first weeks of our relationship. It started with my apartment. It was the first "on my own" apartment I'd ever lived in and it wasn't exactly in the greatest of locales. I loved it, but I would have to admit when Chris reminded me of how much he worried about me alone in a neighborhood like that, I started to see what he meant. Our "love is blind" insanity's first rule of business: move in together.
Love is also patient, as the psalm goes, and we needed a lot of it during those few months. We were going entirely on gut and heart; what made sense rationally was a buzz kill for our punch-drunk love. Looking around me now at everything we've accomplished, we did pretty damn good. Looking back, however, gives me hives just thinking about it.
I grew up real quick in those months. In one day, I'd chosen a life that now included a child, a divorce, a mother of said child, and an overwhelming responsibility to someone I loved so dearly that all the other difficult things didn't and wouldn't matter.
We made the decision to move in together right out of the gate. It was perfect timing in our minds. Granted, our minds were clouded with all those fuzzy love feelings, but perfect timing nonetheless. We bounced from place to place as reality stepped in and evicted us from cloud nine. We were trying to build a life with each other and all the while it felt like life was fighting back. Some people say that making rash decisions without thinking "big picture" will be a mistake. I believe that. But in our case, every time we trusted our heart and went blindly into a decision, we inadvertently loved each other more for it. And when that said thing blew up in our face, well, we were immune. Keep in mind, "Love bears all things", too.
So let me catch you up. We'd moved in together (albeit place to place) and after about a year and a half, we were settled in somewhere we loved and finally began to function normally. (I know, just a year and half is all it took. Yikes.) The idea of getting married had been there since the beginning. When I said I knew he was "the one", I didn't mean "the one... boyfriend". I meant hands down THE one. THE one I would spend the rest of my life with. THE one I would brush my teeth next to each morning. THE one I would fight with about dirty dishes for the rest of our lives. THE. ONE. And luckily, he seconded that notion.
So, just like our random relationship, we decided on a random Wednesday on a random date (August 19th) to take the random opportunity that we both had the day off and... we got hitched. We didn't even tell anyone. We just told my mom. I wore red trouser pants, a white top, and the cutest short-sleeved jacket. He wore a blue top and dress pants. That was it. No tie, no dress... just... us. We decided not to tell anyone we were actually married because later down the road we wanted to have a real wedding. We thought it would just be a fun secret between us and there would be no reason for anyone to think otherwise. We'd just "be engaged" and later when money and the stars aligned, we'd have an actual wedding. We should have known then that we are always trying to skip ahead and forget that with us, life always catches up and snaps us back to reality. By the end of October, the jig was up. Planning a wedding was so not our style that we decided to stop kidding ourselves and 'fess up. We got mixed reviews at first, but in the end, everything evened out. Just like it always does with us. And you know what? That random, abnormal Wednesday was the happiest day of both of our lives.
Alfred Adler once said "The only normal people are the one's you don't know very well". Now that you've had a peek at how not-so-normal Chris and I are... maybe we aren't as different from everyone else as we think. No matter ups and downs, lefts or rights, one thing is for sure for everyone: At the end of the day, you don't just want everything to go right...
...you want to make it right with the person who is everything.
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