In 2009, my life took a dramatic turn. It fell apart. Over the following year, I began to piece it back together, thinking I would have everything back together within a year. I didn’t realize at the time that I was actually building a stronger life. Now, generally speaking, I am happier with my life than I was before 2009. I am less stressed, and I am happier and more content than ever before in my adult life.

What I have discovered across this journey is what so many before me have recognized: Razing something to the ground is often required for properly rebuilding.

In this week’s video, I share the second chapter of the book I have been writing about that year. Over the next few weeks, I will continue to share my story in depth.

 

You can watch my YouTube video (link below) or read chapter 2 of the manuscript (provided below the video in this post). You are essentially my beta readers, my “test audience” for the manuscript, so please tell me what you think after you have listened/read.

 

2. Misha

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

            —Rumi

 

I met Mike online, through a dating service. He was new to my state, having moved here for grad school a few weeks before. We chatted a bit through the site, but nothing really took off until both of our free trials were running out and we exchanged contact information. Suddenly, we were chatting via IM nearly every evening. I couldn’t wait to get home from work at night to have our conversations.

One night while we were chatting, Mike invited me up for a visit—right then—while he was baking cookies. It was already dark, we were having tremendous thunderstorms rip through the area, he lived in a town I’d been to only twice before, and this invitation was from a man I’d never met in person before. Of course I went (with the full blessing of one of my best friends, whom I was also chatting with at the time, and her mother, and orders to call her as soon as I was home safe that night, no matter when it was). I left my apartment and hit the interstate, and a storm hit me. The rain was so heavy at times that I could barely see. I considered pulling off to the shoulder, but I realized that no one would be able to see me until it was too late, and besides, I couldn’t see the shoulder of the road to get to it. I reasoned that my chances were better moving than sitting still. A tornado warning came over the radio, and immediately, I began to wonder, with every gust of wind that rocked my SUV, if I was feeling the leading edge of one of nature’s freight trains. I was doing about 30 mph on the interstate, wondering what I’d gotten myself into and praying that this storm wasn’t a sign of things to come.

Finally, I arrived at Mike’s apartment. A drive that should have taken me 45 minutes had taken about 120 and some change. I spent the rest of the night smelling baking chocolate chip cookies and being shown clips of an Internet series called Red vs. Blue. I remembered two things: the bumper sticker thumbtacked to the wall that said, “Blondes may have more fun, but Redheads ARE more fun,” and his gorgeous eyes.

A few days later, I invited Mike to my place to watch a remake of the movie The Shining and to bake cookies or make smoothies. We found the movie boring that we started playing the “In My Pants” game that Mike suggested. To play, this game, after a line in the movie, you add the phrase “in my pants,” rather like adding “in bed” to the end of your fortune from a fortune cookie. This game was wildly entertaining with this version of The Shining. To this day, the only parts of the movie that I remember are the lines that worked best with “in my pants”—and a scene in which the main character stuck his hand in a hornet nest.

Mike had planned to go home that evening, but I talked him into joining me and a friend for lunch and a movie the next day. He could spend the night in my spare bedroom. It was late, the movie was one he wanted to see, and my cat—who had run and hid from everyone else but me since I’d adopted him a few weeks before—loved Mike and was being utterly cute, so Mike stayed. After the movie the next evening, Mike, my friend, and I stood chatting in the driveway for an hour or more. I distinctly remember my friend saying, “I’m happy for you guys; I really am,” because I thought it was odd. We weren’t even a couple yet. Finally, we left, and then Mike went home, and I saw this friend online and asked him what he had meant by his comment. He said Mike and I just lit up when we looked at each other.

I hadn’t been aware of my luminescence, but I had been aware that Mike and I got each other. He got those jokes and quirky comments that everyone else usually missed or gave me strange looks for. Hell, he even took them one step further, and we volleyed the jokes back and forth. This was the first person I’d ever been able to fully unleash this side of my personality on without fear of completely alienating the other person.

After he got home that night, Mike got online and we started chatting. Sure, we’d spent the weekend together and he’d had to go home, but we still had talking to do. This conversation lasted hours—as most of them did—but this one was more intense than any of the others. He really liked me, he said, but he just wasn’t physically attracted to me. Well, nothing new there, really, I thought. Honestly, I was a little upset, but not much, because I could tell that this could turn into a great friendship if nurtured properly. Besides, I wasn’t really physically attracted to him, either. Not that that mattered much to me, of course. Physical attractiveness has never been high on my list of priorities in a friend or lover—far more important is the person inside. Perhaps this was because of my history of being a fat person, but I had recognized even as a child that sometimes the people prettiest on the outside were ugly and mean to others.

After much, much more chatting, it came out that Mike really was interested in me romantically but just didn’t know how to get past my weight. Fair enough, I thought, and I loved that he had the balls to admit it. Of course, my weight’s been a struggle for most of my life, and though I was comfortable in my own skin, I still tried often to lose weight, to find the way that would work for me. So Mike, with what I have come to realize is characteristic of his problem-solving personality, decided that we would set up a workout plan and stick to it, and we would be workout buddies, and I would lose weight and become a svelt, sexy, 125–150 pound woman. Once he had made up his mind that something would work, it must work.

Well, with the requirements of grad school and courses in a discipline he’d never studied before, and with me driving to see him every other day after work, the working out kind of fell by the wayside. But my visits didn’t. On our first scheduled workout night, a Tuesday, we put a weight bench together after he had finished his homework, and then it was time for bed. Instead of driving home, I stayed. I was going to sleep on the futon, but after we’d spent half an hour standing in the hallway talking, he led me to his bedroom.

Nothing happened that night except a lot more conversation and the two of us holding each other. I got almost no sleep, because I had spent half the night hanging off the edge of the bed—this man loved to snuggle in his sleep and got as close as he could to me. After about 3 hours of very light sleep, I had to get up so I could drive all the way to work. I spent the day sleepy as hell but smitten as a kitten.

About a week later, he had fall break. Because he had mentioned that he missed the country, I took him on a visit to my parents’ house. We stayed at their place for a long weekend.

On our first morning there, Mike woke up just after my dad had got home from working the night shift. Mike strolled out of my bedroom in nothing but his boxers and introduced himself to my dad, a very large and sometimes gruff-looking man. Most people who know my dad, of course, love him, but those meeting him for the first time are often somewhat apprehensive, given his stature and his deep voice. But there was Mike, cool as a cucumber, introducing himself on the way to the bathroom. (Mike loves telling that story, so I thought I’d share it, too.) I’ve never confirmed with my dad, but I have a feeling that that little “stunt” probably earned Mike a few points in his book.

A couple of weeks later, Mike met several of my friends at a birthday party. Most of them seemed to like him, but some weren’t quite sure what to make of him. But that was okay by me—after all, they hadn’t seen much of that side of me, either. Within a couple more weeks, people were already marrying us off, asking us when the wedding was, when we were going to have kids, etc. We hadn’t even said those three little words to each other yet.

Mike spent the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with me and my parents. This was that same small-community atmosphere I’d grown up in, so everyone knew about him, and several people he’d never met before started talking to him at the dinner following the Christmas Eve program at church. They knew who he was, of course, because my mom would have told anyone and everyone that I was seeing a smart, cute boy from Oregon. Everyone knew me, everyone had seen him with me, so everyone knew him. I think this was a concept he wasn’t really familiar with…and he wasn’t entirely certain how to act. Not that I can blame him—I grew up in this situation, and I wasn’t always sure how to act in it.

A few weeks after meeting Mike in person, I had known I was in love. Over the Christmas holiday, I told him so for the first time.

A few months later, in the spring of 2004, that small company I was working for decided to call it quits. I was closer to the end of my apartment’s lease, but I couldn’t pay to keep the lease going and for all the utilities, so one night while I was at Mike’s apartment and we were talking about the problem, he told me I should move in with him. I was floored. This couldn’t be right, I was thinking…a man was asking a woman to move in with him. Of course, it was the logical thing to do, given my economic situation and the fact that I had been accepted into a master’s program at his university and would be moving up in the summer anyway. But since when has logic played a role in a man’s decision-making abilities when it comes to moving in with someone? I wondered.

Well, we set a plan and put in into motion—we’d move my things slowly from my apartment to storage, and we’d apply for a larger apartment in his complex. In the meantime, I’d live with Mike in his one-bedroom apartment and look for another job, for the summer only. I’d keep paying the lease on my own apartment but stop using all the utilities, so that would save us money. We’d save money on groceries by sharing meals, and Mike would support me if I couldn’t find a job or couldn’t make enough despite the job. Besides, Mike told me, this would be the test—we already knew we could get along well enough, and we basically lived with each other, anyway, seeing as how we usually spent 4 or 5 nights a week together. This would save us tons of gas money. Plus, if we could live together, we’d know it would work out. Everyone he knew who had gotten along really well while dating, if they had broken up, well, they had broken up after moving in together.

He could use all the justifications he needed, I thought, but it was the night he suggested I move in when I realized that Mike loved me…he was already protecting me, doing whatever he could to take care of me, “logical” or not. It would be nearly another year before he’d finally tell me he loved me, but that didn’t matter, because he showed it, and that was what was important.

So, everything I ever needed to know about my future husband, I learned in the first six months I knew him. As I write this book, I realize that everything else we dealt with over the following years aggravated us, challenged us, pleased us, made us stronger, but really did nothing so much as reinforce what I learned in that first year with Mike: We loved each other, and he would take care of me always. That’s what kept me “in the game” and so utterly committed to him when things got tough over the next three years.

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Please let me know via comments here or on YouTube what you think so far and if you want to hear/read more of my story.

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