And Then There Was You

I met you in August of 2009 at an open mic comedy night at a bar in Arlington, VA. You were there hanging out with your friend John, a standup comedian who MC’ed the show every Wednesday, and I was out celebrating that I had been accepted to the Peace Corps. I was working for a new home developer at the time, currently stationed in a community for those 55 and over in Fredericksburg, VA where I spent my days in a meticulously and unrealistically decorated model home and waited for potential customers to stop in so I could try to sell them a new house. It was the middle of a nationwide financial crisis brought on by the mortgage industry so really I spent my days finding the end of the internet and eating 75 werthers originals that we kept stocked in the entryway. I was one year out of college and in debt so when I discovered that joining the Peace Corps meant that I could flee the country, defer my student loan debt, and seemingly help people, I was in and started planning my escape. ..and then there was you.

The night that I met you started for me and my friends mid afternoon. Working in real estate meant that my “weekends” were in the middle of the week so myself and one of my co-workers and friends was treating this particular Wednesday like it was a Saturday. By the time we arrived at the comedy show, we were restless, slightly unaware, having a blast, and made our presence known in the quiet, packed room. Not long after we sat down at the table, the comedian started incorporating us into his jokes. Once I started engaging with him in return, he offered up the microphone and I took it. After a quick joke and a lot of boos from the audience I exited the stage and the comedy show along with my friends. Had I not been 23 at the time, I probably would have called it a night but instead we cozied up at the downstairs bar and continued our evening. When the comedy show ended, you walked over to the bar and handed me a free drink ticket that you had won at the end of the show during the scheduled joke contest. When we left the bar that night I walked up the street with my friends, you and John standing out front of the bar waiting for a ride. When I reached the corner at the end of the block, ready to cross the street, I turned and looked at my girlfriends and said “we just met two cute, seemingly normal guys and we have no way to contact them again.” I turned, ran back down the block and asked for you and John’s phone number.

The next week, determined to return to the comedy show and be a cordial participant in the audience, we all made plans to meet up again. When we walked into the show, we huddled in the back waiting to be seated, you were standing to my left and I looked up at you – taller than I remembered from the week before, blue eyes, slight sideways and endearing smile. A month later we went on our first solo date at Lolas on Capitol Hill. That’s when we talked about music and our families, I learned about your volunteer work with the Special Olympics. You made fun of my jacket because it had ¾ length sleeves and you jumped across the crosswalk like Buddy the Elf. I basically made you kiss me at the end of the night and I wrote my girlfriends once I got inside and told them I was going to marry you. A bold statement that luckily became reality. I rolled the dice and cancelled my plans to go to the Peace Corps, making you promise first that if it’s still something I felt called to do that we’d go together when we were older.

We got married on March 1, 2014. It was a big wedding with little homemade details, great music, loads of dancing, drinks, and donuts. We fled the country together the next day, flying to Amsterdam for a 24 hour layover before going to Kenya for our honeymoon. We’d return home and start making plans to build our family – selling the one bedroom condo that we shared together to rent a two bedroom apartment that had more green space available. We got our dog Maple and hoped and tried for a baby. After a year of trying on our own and no luck, we got doctors involved. We had options, all of them expensive and none of them felt like the clear choice or path.

We went to dinner one night, sometime in 2015, where we talked about our options – having kids of our own, adoption, or just putting the whole thing off. We pressed pause. We stopped making plans for babies and started making for plans for other things, knowing that we would have a deeper, clearer knowing of how we would grow our family one day. I had made the transition to teaching yoga full time and you had made the transition to practice elder law, estate, and special needs planning. When thinking of starting a family, I had already started thinking of what it would be like to move back to Richmond where I had spent most of my childhood, where two of my siblings were, and where my mom ultimately would end up.

The more I looked at what it would mean and how it would work to teach yoga full time in Richmond, I saw an opportunity to open and create my own space to practice and teach yoga. I had already formed a business, Humble Haven Yoga, in the northern Virginia area teaching in studios, gyms, and in-home, and I was ready to build an actual space in my hometown. You loved your job and you loved and supported me. We rolled the dice again and on October 31, 2015, we moved out of our two bedroom apartment in South Arlington and into two separate spaces – we moved a third of our things into a studio apartment in downtown Richmond around the corner from what would be my future yoga studio, a third of our things into our friends basement in Falls Church, VA where you would live for the next year, and a third our things into a storage unit.

On January 6, 2016 I opened our first yoga studio. On January 14, 2016 I called to tell you that I was pregnant. One of the first things you said to me was, “shit, we have to move again.” Over the course of almost two years of trying for a baby, people would often say, “it will happen when you least expect it,” well intentioned words, but for us not totally true. We got pregnant when it wasn’t conveniently planned and timed, but we never stopped trying for, believing in, or expecting that it could and would happen. You made different plans than those we had made before, quitting a job you love and finding a new one in Richmond.  We lived together in the studio apartment and one month before Holt was born we moved out of the studio, out of our friend’s basement, out of the storage unit, and into our first house together.  About six months later after Holt’s second brain surgery, I told you wanted to move out of our house, certain that the walls and ceilings would hold all of and remind of the pain that I had felt during Holt’s diagnosis and initial healing. We stayed.

Since August 2009 there have been trips out of the country cancelled and taken, jobs we have hated and  loved, homes shared, homes split, dreams written and burned to the ground, and at the end of the day there has always been you. In between Holt’s surgeries we were at the Pediatrician’s office and she pulled us aside, telling us that what we were going through breaks families apart and that if we feel like we need help and support in our marriage, seek it out. I was so focused on keeping Holt alive at the time that I couldn’t see or fathom the toll that life was taking on our relationship. We’ve spent full years at this point divesting from one another to invest fully in the well being of our children. Some days in the 15 minutes of alone time post kids going to bed and before our eyes demand to be shut, we see and connect with one another. Those 15 minutes are usually filled with what happened in June’s therapy appointment that day or what she’s doing now that’s new and how to support her, that email from Holt’s preschool, who’s picking up and dropping off, and some days it’s an honest check-in that goes something like “I love you and I don’t want to do this with anyone else.”

I joked that when we met you had already seen me at my “worst” and you were still intrigued, you still introduced yourself, donated your free drink ticket to my bruised ego. Twelve years later and I couldn’t have imagined the lows that I’ve been dropped into, but no matter how broken it all feels around us, you’re always there to build it back beautiful again whether you’re the one holding the plans or filling in the gaps in the foundation behind me.