These are actually from our Senior photos at age 17. We didn't actually meet until age 19... but I have no photos of that time that I can find (and I'm not going to dig through the attic right now). Here is what we looked like at 21, so somewhere between the cover photo and this photo is where we were when we met!
If you need a quick synopsis, let me just say this. Tonight we were driving home from the Open Mic night at the coffeehouse when I told Patrick that we each needed to write our own versions of our “how we met” story and he kind of laughed.
Then from the back my son (who is 22) says, “Well dad thought he was going to get some head and got you instead.”
Annnnnnd… well. Um. He’s not wrong. (and yes, our kids know this about our story now that they’re older.)
So, let me back up a tiny little bit, just in case you’re actually interested in what REALLY happened.
So the year was 1990. It was the summer that both Patrick and I turned 19 (our birthdays are 6 days apart, born in the same hospital, didn’t meet until this point because I lived just on the other side of the county line that divided our school districts).
I was in a bad place in life. A BAD place. Mentally, emotionally, physically… I was so close to the bottom of the barrel I couldn’t possibly describe it in a short story like this one. I'm sure that I will write more about that side of things in the future, because I think it might be helpful to someone else gong through it/or who has been through it to have someone to relate to... BUT, let's just continue with the kindest version I can think of:
I was dealing with the effects of some serious childhood trauma and abuse that I still hadn’t told anyone at all about. I was suffering from dissociative identity disorder that I was completely unaware of and engaging in horribly self-destructive behavior that other women with similar pasts will recognize. I was at the end of my rope. I was living half in my car, half at some guy’s house who wanted to be more than roommates. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, making the worst possible choices every single waking moment and falling into bed, usually ‘self medicated’ enough to forget where I was.
Well this night was one of those nights of horrible choices. It was a weekend night (I think it was a Friday night) and these three guys that my friends and I had met were in from out of town. They were police officers in another town, but were back visiting ‘home’ because of who knows what. Regardless of their careers at the time, they were holding a party and supplying a lot of alcohol to a bunch of underage girls (including me and a couple of my friends).
Looking at this picture, and looking back, I certainly would have laughed in your face if you’d said that this was the night I’d meet the love of my life. Either that or I would have assumed you were on some hardcore drugs. I was on the short road to making some seriously horrible life choices that night and in hindsight, things were coming to a head for me in a very negative way.
All of that changed (unbeknownst to me) when halfway through the night, probably around 2:00 am, this guy drove up on his motorcycle.
I was sitting outside one of the motel rooms the party guys had rented with a couple of other girls that I had met that night. We were all pretty much at the end of the night after a lot of drinking, dancing and making fools of ourselves all evening, but this guy on the motorcycle seemed to wake us all up a bit.
Motorcycle guy said he was looking for some guy named Rocky who was supposed to be at the motel. No one standing around knew a Rocky and I thought it was strange, but oh well. Rocky’s loss was our gain (oh, how true that was… even if the story about “Rocky” quite the full truth!)
All three of us girls (or four, I don’t really remember) jumped up at his arrival and did that stupid girly thing that drunk girls do. I asked to see his butt, because that was my thing at the time. The other girls ooooohed and aaaaaahed over his motorcycle (which was probably the right tack for getting a guys’ attention, but what did I know? I wasn’t into motorcycles.)
I felt some sort of “click” with this guy who stood and talked to me for a bit, but I was really used to ignoring my feelings by then, especially with the liberal dose of alcohol that I had been hitting all night. Then he left to take one of the girls for a begged for ride and I thought that was all there was to it.
He came back in a little bit and asked me where I lived… and I didn’t know. Seriously. I wasn’t just that drunk, but I was literally living in my car most of the time and had just recently been spending a few nights on that guys couch at his house. The only thing I could remember was that the house was green and that the front door was pink. (I didn’t mention that it was recently pink because I had painted it myself on some wild whim.) He didn’t know what I was talking about, but I had no other information. I didn’t have a phone (this was 1990, I didn’t know anyone who had a cell phone and I didn’t have a home for a home phone.)
He eventually left, or I passed out. I’m not even sure at this point. Like I said, I was in a bad place and making really stupid decisions.
Fast forward to 2-3 days later. I’m pretty sure it was a Monday night, but I could be wrong. Anyway, a few days later I was sitting in the guys house with my best friend chatting about whatever. The guys who lived in the house had went to go get food or movies or something and my friend and I were just sitting there talking when someone knocked at the door. I was frustrated that someone was there when I was trying to spend time with my friend, but I answered the door in case it was important.
Standing there on the porch was the motorcycle guy from the party.
I was speechless. Okay, so knowing me, I probably wasn’t speechless, but I was SHOCKED. I never expected to see this guy again and yet he had searched town until he found the house with the pink door (I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been able to lead him to the pink door…)
I don’t remember anything specific about anything that night. Just that we talked. And walked. For hours. Maybe it wasn’t even that night, but the next night. I don’t know. He was just like home… and for someone like me who felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, like I had no home, no safe place and no one in my life… he was it.
It was too good to be true and I knew that, logically. I fell hard. Head and heels in love with this guy that was far too good to be true. He worked at his dad’s bar, so he would come over at 2 am and we would walk through town and talk.
Our first real date was when he took me home to his parents house (he was home for the summer from college) when they were out of town for the weekend and cooked me dinner (wayyyyy impressive) and we danced in the living room to Billy Joel and Elton John :)
I still vividly remember what it felt like to be in his house, eating dinner like a ‘real’ couple. I was so completely and utterly taken by this guy. I had never known anyone like him before. More importantly, I had never known anyone who made me feel like he did. I didn’t know it at the time, but those feelings of “home” and the silly girl’s fantasies of him being The One were right on the money.
We still had a major rollercoaster of a battle (or two or three) to get through before that point… but he had done something that I hadn’t thought was possible at that time in my life. Something that I literally didn’t realize until we had been married for YEARS when I was writing down our whole love story. He had given me hope. He had made me feel like I was valuable and worth loving. He changed the direction of my life in an incredibly significant way and honestly, I’m not sure I would even still BE here if not for meeting him that night. That is how bad of a path I had been on…
And that, my readers, is the beginning of my love story that has now spanned nearly 27 years, 23 years of marriage and the raising of 5 kids, living on a boat, living and traveling on a bus and countless other adventures that you can’t imagine…
***Oh YEAH, the “Rocky” story? Well, come to find out a few weeks later that he hadn’t actually been looking for a guy. He told me that he’d heard there was a party going on that he wanted to check out… but WAIT… Years later the real story came out when he told me that he had actually met some girl at the bar where he was working who promised him the best blowjob of his life or something… and THAT was why he was actually there at the motel the night he met me.
See kids? Romance isn’t dead. It’s just… ummm… sometimes wearing camouflage. In a BIG big way.
Here is Patrick's Perspective of our Love Story!
What Does Love At First Sight Look Like?
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