Half of My Life = Our Life

Today is my 26th wedding anniversary. K and I have now been married for over half my life.

When we first met, it was on vacation. I was in Virginia Beach with my college roommate L, and K was visiting his cousin who was in the navy at that time.

It was absolute fate that we met. L and I were in a souvenir shop, looking at hoodies and such, and K walks in. We spent the next 20 minutes making excuses to stay in the shop. I ended up buying a pair of plaid boxer shorts with embroidered “Virginia Beach” on the leg, and finally walked out.

About 10 seconds later, K hurried out the door and caught up to us, inviting us to a corner outdoor restaurant for lunch. Although we had just eaten, I elbowed L not-so-discreetly and a little too enthusiastically said “sure!”.

In front of us was a cute outdoor pub called “Abbey Road” and we grabbed a table for three.

It was the beginning of a conversation during which we discovered a lot of coincidences.

* The fact that both of us were there in VA Beach by accident.

* The fact that we both originally were supposed to be in DC.

* When K offered to order drinks, he asked for Long Island Iced Teas, which at the time was my favorite cocktail.

…And so many more little things that collectively should have otherwise been a giant neon sign with arrows pointing to our table.

I can’t tell you how long we were sitting there. Long enough to have a few drinks and pretend to eat the nachos we ordered. It was March, and the sun was still setting earlier than later.

As dusk approached, L and I finally decided to take our leave. K asked for our hotel phone number. I gave it to him, and we met up with him and his friends the following couple of nights to hit up a comedy club and various social establishments.

From a Different World

K was so different from anyone I had ever met before. First, he was from the south. He had an accent, and was a true southern gentleman.

I was from southern New England, and had only dated people from pretty much the CT/NY/NJ tri-state area. K’s family lived in Arkansas, and at the time, he attended school in Missouri. He grew up moving frequently before he graduated high school, whereas I had never lived out of my home state.

The day we met

The Next Steps

After saying goodbye a few days after meeting and hanging out, my roommate and I drove the back up the coast to CT. Imagine my surprise when my phone rang that evening and K was calling from the plane.

“I just had to talk to you” he said.

That phone call was the first of nightly calls for the next 6 weeks. This was back when long distance calls cost extra, but you got a discount after 9 or 10 pm. We typically spent a good 3-4 hours on the phone nightly.

After the first month, we tried to cut back because we both got hit with massive phone bills, but we couldn’t stay away. In the meantime, K had sent me a care package with some fun stuff from Arkansas and also a special gift.

Though it didn’t seem logical, we were falling in love over the phone and letters. Oh, the letters! I’d write them during class, in between my school newspaper assignments, homework, etc. Practically every day, my mailbox would contain an envelope from Missouri.

Fast forward from the day we met to sometime in May – K was moving to CT. He had already been looking to transfer to a school with a good program for his major, and my school happened to be on the short list, amazingly.

Life Was Moving Quickly

That summer, K moved, transferred his credits, and found a job and apartment. With school, work, and dealingg with a major abdominal surgery (for me), life was busy.

K proposed to me on Christmas eve, almost exactly 9 months after the day we met. he had driving in a blizzard to meet up with my dad to get his permission first.

My prince and I on our wedding day

We got married on a crisp autumn day in mid-October. The changing leaves were still on the trees and cascaded over our day like cherry blossoms in the spring.

K knew about my Cystic Fibrosis, and yet he still pursued our relationship. Contrary to my lifelong fear that I’d share with my mom that “nobody would want me because of my illness”, here was an incredible man with talent, ambition, and above all, love, standing in front of me, pledging his devotion.

Half of My Life

I have now been married half my life to the living embodiment of my perfect half. We have been through a lot, and we always manage to find the joys behind even the toughest moments. Love like that is more than I could have ever expected, and I am truly humbled to be called his wife.

I love you!

I am so thankful for the love we share, and for every moment that has led to today.

I thought about making my Chicken Soup today

Dear Mom,

It’s 60 degrees out right now, and I have opened all of the windows. This is the type of day you’d spend airing out the house and putting fresh sheets on the bed.

I know you loved this kind of weather. I remember the clothes line that stretched across the yard when we lived in the apartment so long ago. I’d catch glimpses of you, pulling clothespins from your pockets, between the sheets billowing in the breezes that sometimes faintly smelled of the sea air. We lived only about 1.5 miles from Long Island Sound, after all.

Days like this also make me want to make chicken soup. Although you called mine “chicken stew”, and with a twinge of pride and funnily feigned insult, you’d say that mine surpassed yours and that you’d never make yours again.

This morning, I absent-mindedly surveyed my pantry, making sure I had all of the ingredients to make my soup (I don’t!!), and started calculating how much to make, becausek I was going to call to see if you wanted to come over and partake.

It was thanks to all of those hours spent in the kitchen with you that I love to cook. At first, time spent was by default, because whenever I was sick, you wanted me in your eyeline no matter you were doing.

I admit that at times, it was agonizingly hard as a kid to sit there and not ask too many questions and not to disturb your kitchen flow.

So I quickly learned ways to combat boredom, the biggest of which was to ask if I could help. I learned how to taste something and figure out what was missing. Was the sauce thick enough? The gravy lump-free? The potatoes peeled the right way?

Yes, there was your way, and the wrong way.

Even as recently as a few months ago, when none of us were able to match the speed and accuracy of your potato peeling, you ended up redoing it yourself (while we all giggled at our less-than-stellar potato peeling skills).

One other thing I never mastered, thanks to you, was the ability to cook a meal for less than 10 people. I guess it’s not in our DNA as my sisters have this problem, too.

So as I enjoy the cooler weather, and obsess about the hurricane that is just barely missing us, I smile although it’s been only 3 weeks since you left us.

We will continue the tradition of loving others through feeding them. And when I do make chicken soup next, I will “have some for you”.

Creating Magic

The holidays are supposed to be a time of joy and celebration, if we are to follow the messages bombarding us from television commercials, festive songs, and colorful decorations.

But for many people, the holidays bring out a lot of things that are not right in our lives.

It could be the recent loss of a loved one, or the lack of finances to buy gifts that you want to get for people, or struggles with your personal belief systems, conditions such as depression or anxiety, and in my case, chronic illness.

As I’ve been pretty sick and spend a lot of time doing my respiratory Vest treatments, I end up watching a lot of television because the shaking from my vest machine makes it difficult to read or write or do anything else that requires a steady hand or steady eyes.

And I kept thinking that I still hadn’t found a gift for my husband that would give him that “WOW! this is amazing” moment that we see happen in commercials and movies and television and advertising. It’s a pretty seductive desire, the feeling of making someone so happy by simply opening a brightly wrapped box.

But that almost never happens in real life, does it?
And before allowing myself to feel like a failure, I realized how much commercialism has conditioned me to think that in order to be a good wife or sister or aunt or daughter, I have to create these moments.

But the magic doesn’t come in a box. The magic comes from our hearts’ desires to make someone happy. How many times have you made someone’s day just because they called you or texted you? How something as simple as someone opening a door for you, can make you feel that there are good people in this world who care about others with no expectation of getting anything in return?

As I have been sick constantly since August, I had to tame down any of those conditioned expectations that I was going to make someone’s world with a simple gift that I had wrapped in pretty paper and a colored bow. 

I realized that the magic that I can provide is to be able to participate in our family Christmas celebration. There have been some holidays I spent in the hospital. There’ve been some holidays when I was too sick to travel. And more lately, there are holidays when I have to save up all my energy for a week to just go “out” for two hours.

But in those two hours, I soak up every smile, every laugh, every moment that I can. Because even if I can’t last more than a few hours, the magic is in connecting with those we love. 

So whatever you have to celebrate during this time of year, remember that the biggest gift that you could give someone is a piece of your heart.

These are the people who keep me going. These are the reasons I continue to fight. And these are the pieces of my heart.

My Gifts to my Self

Birthdays. Holidays. They seem to highlight both what is great in our lives and what isn’t so great.

My birthday is always right around Thanksgiving. This year, it was 2 days later.

My Cystic Fibrosis Journey: 1997-2001

I’ve combined these years because although a lot happened, they are part of a distinct time in my life.

My First Real Job

I began a new job in Massachusetts at the end of May, 1997. Ken and I moved up to the Boston area, and we settled down into a new life.